XTC – Nonsuch

In a 2024 interview from Guitar World, when asked what amps he used on Nonsuch:

"I can tell you exactly what I used: a solid-state amp. I used to use big Marshall amps, but I got rid of them because when XTC came off the road, we had shockingly large freight bills from dragging all this heavy shit back from the States.

All my stuff was locked up until I’d paid the bill, and we didn’t have the money, so I got rid of two Les Pauls and my Marshalls. Instead I treated myself to a solid-state amp, the same that Eric Clapton used, called a Sessionnette 75, made by Session."

The Sessionette amp was a 2x12 combo version, and can be seen on Gus Dudgeon's studio videos from the Nonsuch sessions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T11vkHm2f8), most clearly at 3:30 where the back of the amp with the large "Sessionette 75" lettering can be seen)

I've recently brought it back from the dead, and I played it mostly on Nonsuch — plus my usual Squier Telecaster, my main guitar since 1983.”

Andy Partridge's approach to gear is as irreverent as his philosophy: “Most of my guitars have been phenomenally crap, like a Futurama guitar I had painted leopard skin. I had a Singapore guitar called a Sway Lee Goldentone — one of those really badly made guitars that as you go down the fretboard towards the nut end it gets wider! I had a homemade Flying V that was four times too thick. It was like a couple of railway slivers joined at the hip. I did White Music and Go 2 with a 1975 Ibanez Artist. I've recently brought it back from the dead, and I played it mostly on Nonsuch — plus my usual Squier Telecaster, my main guitar since 1983.”

Andy's amp is a Session 70 (“the cheapest thing in the shop”), although in the studio he covets Dave's 40-watt 1963 Fender Super Reverb. “I'm pretty much compression crazy,” he admits, “putting the compression before the amp. You can crank it up and get a smoother shape. On this record, I recorded a lot of echoes as part of the rhythm. There's some E-bow on ‘The Ugly Underneath’ — that high, spooky, dissonant orchestral stuff. My acoustic is a Martin D-35. I don't really have a head for gear. I mean, I've written albums on 5-string guitars because I was too lazy to put another string on! Dave is the real equipment guy. You and him can talk dirty about guitars.”

At the 0:03 mark in the video, you see him actually plugging the guitar in during the opening of the song. It cuts to the guitar throughout the song as well. In addition, there's the Chalkhills.org archived interview, "XTC: The Reluctent Gods of Smart Pop," from a Guitar Player magazine in 1992, which has this to say:

"For Nonsuch, Gregory played his trusty old gold-top as well as a '63 Epiphone Coronet Dwight, a '65, a '65 Fender Jaguar, a Vox Phantom and, on 'The Ballad Of Peter Pumpkinhead', a Gretsch Country Gentleman. On the 'That Wave' solo, he played a Stratocaster through a Roland JC-120 amp in admiration of Adrian Belew's tone on King Crimson's Beat."