XTC’s Colin Moulding to release ‘The Hardest Battle’

❉ XTC co-frontman Colin Moulding is back with new music, this time as a solo artist.

Colin Moulding – photo by Andrew Swainson.

“To be nobody but yourself – in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight”… I saw these lines in a book I picked up in a secondhand bookshop and thought…maybe there’s a song there …I think it’s by the poet ee cummings,” – Colin Moulding.

XTC co-frontman Colin Moulding is back with new music, this time as a solo artist, presenting his new single ‘The Hardest Battle’, which will be released as a CD single in 4-panel digisleeve via Burning Shed on July 2.

Containing two songs – ‘The Hardest Battle’, ‘Say It (original version)’, and an exploratory demo of the title track, ‘The Hardest Battle’ represents Moulding‘s first-ever fully solo release.

This release offers a tantalizing glimpse into the creative process of one of the UK’s finest songwriters, showcasing Colin’s English pop vision with XTC’s trademark qualities of melody, rhythm, variety, and idiosyncratic subject matter, mixed in with nostalgia fueled by a certain degree of pensiveness.

Colin Moulding – photo by Andrew Swainson

Following two releases with original XTC drummer Terry Chambers under the TC&I moniker – the ‘Great Aspirations’ EP and the album ‘Naked Flames: Live at Swindon Arts Centre‘, ‘The Hardest Battle’ is the first new material from Moulding in many years.

“To be nobody but yourself – in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight”… I saw these lines in a book I picked up in a secondhand bookshop and thought…maybe there’s a song there …I think it’s by the poet ee cummings,” says Colin Moulding.

“And there it was. All I had to do was come up with some music to marry to this notion. I do think most people aren’t themselves really, or become themselves eventually. And that struggle isn’t easy. I recorded this pretty much in isolation as most people have been this past year or so. One crazy year for all of us. Perhaps ‘The Hardest Battle’ we humans have faced externally,  as well as the one we fight internally every day.”

“About ‘Say It’, I just felt this track deserved a better fate than it got really. I wrote it for the XTC album that never was . But it ended up on a promo disk amongst  XTC’s ‘Last Days of Rome’ This version feels much more akin to my original song mindset compared to the expedient I agreed to at the time,” says Colin Moulding.

Regarding ‘The Hardest Battle (First Exploratory Demo)’, Moulding adds, “I think demos are much more of a demonstration to one’s self than for other people. You have to find out what works and what doesn’t. Therefore, you shoot from the hip and just fire it out, and see what sticks. Larkin always said that he didn’t know what his poems were about initially until he got some way into them ;- that’s what this is;- I’m just ‘Larkin’ around until it presents itself. Then the crossword puzzle can begin.”

Colin Moulding – The Hardest Battle (cover artwork)

Track List

1. The Hardest Battle
2. Say It (Original Version)
3. The Hardest Battle (First Exploratory Demo)

CREDITS:

Produced by Colin Moulding and Stuart Rowe
Mixed by Stuart Rowe
All instrumentation by Colin Moulding except on ‘Say It’, where Jon Buckett plays piano
All songs written by Colin Moulding
Mastered by Jason Mitchell at Loud Mastering
Manufactured by Noisebox Digital
Media Artwork by Andrew Swainson from a concept by Colin Moulding
Recorded within the Sound of Christ Church Bells

❉ Released by Burning Shed on July 2, ‘The Hardest Battle’ can be ordered on CD single exclusively via Burning Shed. Cat No: CMCD001. CLICK HERE TO ORDER 

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 ❉ We Are Cult is not responsible for the content of this news release.

 Image credits: Andrew Swainson. 

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2 Comments

  1. After the song “Comrades” where Moulding and Terry Chambers slagged off Andy Partridge, will give this a miss. The sheer cheek of him doing that when he was happy to sack long time XTC member Dave Gregory for being “negative”!

    Moulding likes to act like he was a bigger deal in XTC than he was given credit for – the dreadful tweeness of “Standing In For Joe” on the last XTC album summed up how much of a “loss” he was – someone who has well overplayed his hand.

    That said, XTC was always greater than the sum of its component parts, as time has proven.

    • In our interview with Colin, the bassist made it clear that the song was not about Andy. It’s about the “money men” in the industry.

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