XTC

Their next album, Mummer, was even more pastoral than English Settlement, and was deemed so uncommercial that their label, Virgin, rejected it. Andy quickly wrote Great Fire as a single and Virgin reluctantly released the album. Because of their refusal to tour, XTC and Virgin weren’t getting along particularly well, and Mummer didn’t help matters much. And, I must concur. Aside from a few shining moments – Great Fire, Wonderland, and the glorious Love on a Farm Boy’s Wages – there is little for me to hang on to on this disc. Many people felt the same way, and XTC seemed on the verge of collapsing.

They took a much different direction for The Big Express, a theatrical album full of sound and fury (and, well, you know the rest). Where Mummer was all muffled acoustics and lazy picnic soundtracks, The Big Express exploded with technology and energy, starting off with the bracing two-against-three guitar chugs of Moulding’s Wake Up. Side one flows together beautifully, and covers a great deal of ground and mood, and is probably my overall favorite side of an XTC album (if that even makes sense anymore in this digital age). It is unabashedly overproduced, and I love it all the more for it. Wake Up leads into the Gilbert and Sullivanesque sea shanty All You Pretty Girls, which is immediately countered by the wonderfully jerky Shake You Donkey Up. Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her is a heartbreaking song about one man’s inability to confess his love for the woman of his dreams as the perfect moment slips by and floats out to sea. The despondent mood is enhanced by the incessantly discordant keyboard clusters and, of all things, a euphonium solo (!). This is an especially poignant song for me, and its visual images of a wintry seaside flood me with bittersweet melancholy whenever I hear it. This leads right into the last song on the side, the unbearably sad and angry This World Over, which verbalized the terrible fear of nuclear annihilation we all lived under during the Cold War. An absolutely spellbinding series of songs. And side two doesn’t suck much, either. But The Big Express sold poorly, straining relations between the band and their label even further.

Andy Partridge (Partsy, to friends) loves many things. Sex, money, history, sex, British musical traditions, comic books and sex all figure prominently in his songs. His love of the British version of ‘60s psychedelia (more madcap, less heavy than the American version) prompted him to recruit the band to take on alter-egos and release an EP under the name The Dukes of Stratosphear – which was one of the names he was kicking around after he dumped his first band’s name (The Helium Boyz) and before he had settled on XTC. The EP – called 25 O’ Clock – turned out to be so much fun that they recorded an entire album’s worth of material – Psonic Psunspot – under their thin disguises. They initially denied any connection to the mysterious Dukes, but eventually copped to the conceit. Though ostensibly poking fun of the excesses of psychedelia, the japes are gentle and the band’s unmistakable affection for that music shines through. Plus, it gave them a chance to play music and try sounds that would never fit in their official band – no matter how wide reaching XTC was. Guitarist Dave Gregory, in particular, is a master musical mimic, and had great fun channeling The Byrds and Chocolate Watchband and that whole wacky crowd. The EP and LP were later combined onto one CD, called Chips from the Chocolate Fireball, which is an excellent collection of songs. And the more you know about psychedelia, the funnier it is.

Settling into their role as semi-obscure recording artists with a rabidly devoted, though somewhat modest, following, XTC began work on their next album. They were a well received band in England, but had never really broken through the American market in a significant way. So Virgin wanted to send them to America to record their next album with an American producer, hoping the alchemy would result in a crack in that formidable market. Todd Rundgren, the respected producer and cult favorite musician, was chosen, and the band sent demo tapes off to his Woodstock, NY studio. Todd sequenced the songs in a way that made the whole album sound like a song cycle – although it wasn’t – and the band was excited at the prospect of working with a producer who clearly had such a strong musical vision. Which turned out to be precisely the problem. Andy Partridge also has a strong musical vision and the recording sessions were notoriously tense and difficult. Rundgren took the role of producer very seriously and demanded the sessions and songs be done the way he wanted them to be done. After all, that’s why they hired him, isn’t it? Andy had gotten used to being the final word in the band and didn’t much appreciate being produced. He begrudgingly acknowledged that Rundgren was a musical genius and a wizard behind the mixing board, but hated the way he was treated and the sessions came close to falling apart a couple of times. As Andy later said, “two fuhrer’s, one bunker”.

Nevertheless, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the creative tensions, the sessions yielded XTC’s best overall album, the beautiful, pastoral, veddy English Skylarking, and, though it didn’t break the American market wide open, it quickly became a college radio favorite, largely on the strength of a song Partridge was disappointed with and had relegated to a B-side. The song, Dear God, was a bitterly beautiful rant against the hypocrisy of religion, and Andy thought it too ham-fisted and wanted it to just go away. But it would not be. DJ’s quickly discovered it languishing on the other side of Moulding’s Grass single and started playing it. The response was immediate. College students loved it and the song went into heavy rotation on campus stations. And, predictably, the Bible Belt reacted with death threats (what would Jesus do?), which only raised the song’s visibility. In one highly publicized case, a teenager held his principal hostage and wouldn’t release him until Dear God had been played over the school’s PA. The label quickly recalled the album and re-released it, putting Dear God onto the second side. My friend Geoff is still bitter about being punished for buying the album when it first came out and not getting the version with Dear God on it. I try to convince him that his version, with Mermaid Smiled, is a rarity, but he remains unimpressed.

Dear God is a great song, both lyrically and musically. The way the song starts off quietly and acoustically, only to give way to Andy’s vitriol and slashing electric guitars is a perfect musical metaphor for the faithful filling with angry doubt. The climax builds and builds as he spits out a list of grievances, and then he and the song collapse in frustrated exhaustion, a child’s voice unsteadily finishing the chorus while the acoustic opening is gently reprieved. An absolute knockout.

The rest of Skylarking is just as stunning. The music is uniformly excellent and the lyrics are sophisticated and tackle adult concerns, such as marriage and death. There’s a great weather-based mini song cycle a few tracks in, with a joyfully poetic appreciation of the rain (Ballet for a Rainy Day), giving way to a morose interpretation of the same precipitation and comparing it to being dumped by a girl. That song, 1000 Umbrellas, features a wonderfully swirling string quartet accompaniment, carefully worked out by Dave Gregory. And the cool James Bond-jazz The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul is a winning combination of music and metaphor, even if they are unable to maintain the 7/4 meter through the whole song. If you had to buy one XTC record, this would be the one to get. No other single release showcases their talents so completely, nor stays as focused all the way through.