But it is the shabby, badly made, naive, folk-art toy soldier that truly engages him. The French get romantic, the Italians cry about their mothers, the Germans sing, but what do the English do? They want to smash your face in.”Yet for one so vehemently anti-violence, Partridge has a craftsman’s passion and skill for toy soldiers. He loves military history but only as it is encapsulated in the tiny, controllable world of the miniature battlefield. “I must be a tender little Napoleon, a benevolent Mussolini,” muses the man who describes himself as “very optimistic, repulsively so”. I’m convinced that when wooing England, we’re the suitor, and she’s the unwilling bride.”This Maltese-born English eccentric describes himself as a man who loves sex and hates violence; he laments the English antipathy to the former and affection for the latter.

“We’re so closed up about a lot of things; that’s why the English get so violent when they drink. “I love the idea of people who work secretly, of authors writing books under other names, musicians making records under other names You can liberate yourself, you don’t have to be you You wipe the slate clean of any preconceptions Certainly in England people have preconceptions about us. Here, most people now would say `who?’ They probably just think we’re a couple of middle- aged gnomes – really rich gnomes. `Weren’t they smart-arsed art-rockers from the Seventies? Leave them in the quirky drawer’.”The man who is rivalled only by Ray Davies as the chronicler of a quintessential Englishness, sighs. “It would be nice for English people to say, `We love this!’ but I’m not holding my breath.

I just felt like a performing animal, I was the monkey on the barrel organ.” The reality of live performance holds no fascination But the idea of a fake reality, a secret history, does. It’s one of the reasons why Partridge loved the bubblegum idea, and why XTC has recorded under different guises, including the Dukes of Stratosphear, Johnny Japes and his Jesticles, and as Terry and the Lovemen, which featured on the XTC tribute album, A Testimonial Dinner. Comebacks always have such awful glittery-suit, Fablon, working-men’s clubs connotations.”XTC will not tour again, although Partridge has come to terms with stage fright “I feel more normal about it now I don’t feel such a freak But I’m too damn old for all of that. Partridge describes it as “alternately Victorian or from the Fifties or medieval, and it’s all smashed together It’s so not what you’re supposed to be doing in 1998. A lot of people think that our music is just too damn baroque and too detailed. But we do make much more rococo, actually that’s rock-cocoa, stuff.