18. XTC, Skylarking (1986)

XTC were handed an ultimatum from their record label. The trio had all the material needed to record a new studio album, which would be their eighth long-player under the XTC name (they’d also just released an album under the pseudonym the Dukes of Stratosphear). What the band didn’t have was the confidence of music executives whose patience had run out. XTC earned lavish critical praise, a select group of fervent fans, and lots of college radio airplay. On the other hand, there was a dearth of hits. It had been years since their one significant chart success at home in the U.K., when the English Settlement single “Senses Working Overtime” cracked the Top 10. In the U.S., they’d never made the Billboard Hot 100, though the 1980 single “Generals and Majors” is officially documented with a peak position of #104. Virgin Records bosses ordered XTC to work with an U.S. producer for the new album with the hope and expectation that a collaborator from across the Atlantic provided the band’s best hope of connecting with American audiences. If XTC refused, the threatened consequence was termination of their contract.

“We were very despondent about it,” Andy Partridge, the frontman of XTC, noted a couple years later. “I wrote thirty-five songs, thinking surely there’s something here someone will like. They handed us a long list of producers. I didn’t recognize any of the names except Todd Rundgren.”

If mere familiarity was the impetus for bringing Rundgren into XTC’s orbit, choosing him to produce the record seemed absolutely inspired for other reasons. Rundgren and XTC shared an affinity for lush, Beatlesque soundscapes and deliriously ornate and intricate pop song structures. Although Rundgren wasn’t a guaranteed hitmaker (his last significant commercial success as a producer, the Meat Loaf album Bat Out of Hell, came out nearly a decade earlier), the prospect of him putting his considerable studio acumen behind the soaring songcraft of XTC was tantalizing. Maybe the result wouldn’t top the charts, but it would surely be memorable.

As it turned out, the experience of making the album, which was dubbed Skylarking, stuck into the mind for all involved for less celebratory reasons. The process was fraught and downright traumatic. The animosity that sprung up almost immediately between Partridge and Rundgren and then festered into a purely toxic relationship became of the stuff of rock ‘n’ roll legend. There will ill omens from the very moment XTC alit in the U.S. When they arrived at Newark’s airport, there was no one to greet them and provide transport to Rundgren’s Utopia Sound Studios facility, located some two hours away in Woodstock, New York. Raging storms had delayed XTC’s escort, and those same weather patterns made for a foreboding welcome when the group were taken to the locale where they’d toil on the new record.

“As we finally left the freeway and ventured on to the dark country byroads approaching Woodstock, the rain falling with ever-increasing intensity, it felt as if we were part of some opening sequence from an old horror movie,” recalled XTC guitarist Dave Gregory. “Thunder-claps, forked lightning, the lot!”

The rain let up, but, in a different way, the storminess persisted. Accounts vary depending on who’s doing the telling, but there’s no disputing that Partridge and Rundgren were at odds from the jump. Both were domineering and accustomed to getting their way. Because of the edict from the label, Rundgren had the final authority in the making of Skylarking, and he knew it. In one version of events, Rundgren would regularly respond to creative differences by telling the band that he would leave them alone in the studio to pursue whatever ideas they had, essentially to get it out of their systems, and then when he’d return, they were going to do it his way. Partridge generally acquiesced to this procession of events, albeit caustically.

“Well, there was the moment Andy said he wanted to cleave my head in half with an axe,” Rundgren later said. “But there was never anything physical. Just verbal abuse.”

For the record, Partridge himself confirmed the accuracy of the threat to go Lizzy Borden on Rundgren. In the gloomy afterglow of recording Skylarking, Partridge’s inclination was to conflate his distaste for working under Rundgren’s guidance with his overall assessment of the album. Cantankerous in his cheeriest moments, Partridge occasionally disparaged the finished product in the press. After the wounds healed, he could concede that all the trouble led to a triumph.

“And let’s get it straight for the record: Todd Rundgren is a brilliant arranger, but he’s not a very good engineer and has a very difficult-to-handle bedside manner as a producer,” was Partridge’s assessment a few years ago. “You end up thinking, ‘Has he taken a personal dislike to me? Is it me being Mr. Difficult here?’ Then you talk to everyone else that he’s worked with and nine times out of ten they’ll say, ‘Fuckin’ hell, he was like that with us!’ But you have to swallow that if you want to work with Todd. He made a great album, but it was not easy to make.”

Skylarking is indeed a great album. In the formidable catalog of XTC, it’s arguably their finest work. It is heavily produced, but the studio sheen exhibits finesse rather than fuss. Album opener “Summer’s Cauldron” lays out the approach: It’s thick and grand, peppered with sound effects and burnished by Partridge investing maximum personality into cleverly twirling lyrics (“When Miss Moon lays down/ And Sir Sun stands up/ Me, I’m found floating ’round and ’round/ Like a bug in brandy”). It all comes across as properly rapturous, pop music elevated to orchestral vividness. It doesn’t come to an end so much as morph logically into the next cut, “Grass,” a composition of gentle psychedelia composed and sung by bassist Colin Moulding.

From that auspicious beginning, Skylarking delivers a string of luxuriant winners. “The Meeting Place” has a tingly, jingly energy, “1000 Umbrellas” moves with fervent urgency, and “Season Cycle” is an appealing jaunt that could have been lifted straight from the coolest late nineteen-sixties AM radio station. “The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul” starts as finger-snapping jazz only to evolve into the sort of modern Northern soul that was then the main playground of Joe Jackson. The album closes with two more Moulding songs, the relatively downbeat matching set “Dying” and “Sacrifical Bonfire.”

Characteristically, many of the lyrics are wickedly smart and bleakly funny, especially when the tone of a song turns cynical. Punchy guitar number “That’s Really Super, Supergirl” borrows Kryptonite and other metaphors associated with the red cape–adorned family of heroes to lament a lover who doesn’t return the singer’s needy affections: “I won’t call again/ Even in a jam/ Now I realize you could be on a mission/ Saving some other man.” “Another Satellite” flips that dynamic; its cavernous sound is akin to Peter Gabriel’s earlier solo albums, and the song is cut with scabrous lyrics rejecting a romantic pursuer: “My heart is taken it’s not lost in space/ And I don’t want to see your moony, moony face.” “Earn Enough for Us” is a chiming song about the strain of being the breadwinner for a household living paycheck to paycheck (“I can take humiliation/ And hurtful comments from the boss/ I’m just praying by the weekend/ I can earn enough for us”), and “Big Day,” another Moulding contribution, makes dour predictions about marriage persisting (“Big day come and big day go/ Life goes on after the show/ But will your love have the fire and glow/ Like on the big day?”).

By seguing the tracks together across the album, Rundgren achieves the desired effect of strengthening the sense that Skylarking is unified whole. When XTC brought him the set of new tunes they had in mind for the album, Rundgren, ever the nineteen-seventies rock soul, spied a loose concept album there. Assembled correctly, he felt the material offered a progression that mirrored the cycle of a day, maybe as much in feeling as the particulars of the lyrics. Ironically, Rundgren’s instincts ran against the label’s mandate to deliver XTC to radio marketplace success and instead retrenched the group in a construct Partridge had previously identified as an impediment to climbing the charts.

“I’ve always felt that our albums are potentially almost entirely made up of hit singles run together,” Partridge mused at around that time. “But if you take one off, it seems to be stuck out on a limb. The songs seem to miss the camaraderie of their chums on the album.”

Given that context, it’s maybe telling that the breakthrough single associated with Skylarking was a song originally excised from the album. “Dear God” opens with a lilting acoustic guitar line and eight-year-old Jasmine Veillette singing the opening lyrics, which are structured as correspondence with the Almighty: “Dear God, hope you get the letter, and/ I pray you can make it better down here.” When Partridge takes over the singing, the music become more forceful and the lyrics follow suit, rejecting faith altogether because the higher power’s apparent abandonment of humanity: “And all the people that you made in your own image/ See them fighting in the street/ ‘Cause they can’t make opinions meet about God/ I can’t believe in you.”

“Dear God” was recorded with the intention of including it on Skylarking. Late in the process of finalizing the track list, someone got cold feet about its catchy sacrilege. Exactly who first decided the song should be lopped off the album is a matter of mild dispute, though it seems clear that Partridge made the final call. (Partridge sometimes claims that he decided the song’s lyrics weren’t strong enough, but worries about stirring controversy seem the more probable motivation behind the decision.) Instead, “Dear God” was placed on the flip side of the album’s first single, “Grass.” More daring radio programmers in the U.S. found “Dear God” and started playing it instead of the officially sanctioned single. XTC’s U.S. label, Geffen Records, worked with the band in a scramble to get Skylarking reissued with “Dear God” included, knocking out the wispy diversion “Mermaid Smiled” to make room. When released as a single, Dear God” didn’t chart in the U.S., but it was a significant hit on college radio, and its music video was prominent enough on MTV to nab three nominations at the network’s annual Video Music Awards. Their video didn’t collect any Moonman trophies, losing out to clips by INXS, Pink Floyd, and George Michael.

Skylarking wound up being a modest performer by most measures. Its peak on the Billboard album chart was significant below those for earlier efforts Black Sea and English Settlement. For their next album, they needed no convincing to seek out an American producer. As far as XTC were concerned, the U.S. was now their most promising market.

To learn more about this gigantic endeavor, head over to the introduction. Other entries can be found at the CMJ Top 1000 tag. Most of the images in these posts come straight from the invaluable Discogs.