Late one morning in 1986, Todd Rundgren awoke at the Sunset Marquis hotel in West Hollywood to ominous news: A space shuttle had disintegrated in the stratosphere, killing the entire crew on live TV. The same morning, he received a message from the British wing of Virgin Records, concerning a wily pop band from rural England. In the label’s view, XTC were in dire need of a no-nonsense producer, arranger, and authority figure, preferably all in one—somebody with an American touch and a hint of the madcap and... well, how did his schedule look?
Rundgren’s appointment secured the savvy pairing of two brilliant and doomed minds. Between the anglophile producer and songsmith Andy Partridge were a thousand common interests and one great chasm that would subsume egos and tear up the studio floorboards. The rift did not concern taste or etiquette so much as—how else to put it—vibe: In one corner, the shaggy-haired, acid-frazzled Philadelphian whose passive-aggression belies a loose, honky-tonk approach to life; in the other, a three-piece reputed for 1) turning down their record label’s cocaine and 2) crafting technically brilliant pop. It was a match made in some 5-star hotel-lobby hell, and the calamity of it all enriches every second of Skylarking.
Rundgren was optimistic about working with XTC. A few years earlier, he had caught the Swindon group in their element, twisting from off-brand punk toward whip-smart new wave. Soon after, in 1982, Partridge suddenly quit touring, suffering from valium withdrawal and on-stage panic attacks. He announced XTC would join the ranks of Steely Dan and late-phase Beatles as a studio outfit—a commercial disaster, to nobody’s surprise. Singles flopped, fans lost faith, and before the year was up, the group shrank to a trio when drummer Terry Chambers stormed out for good during a rehearsal.
But by 1985, Partridge, at least, believed XTC were in the form of their lives. Though recent LPs Mummer and The Big Express lacked a hit to follow 1982’s “Senses Working Overtime,” the frontman’s studio indulgence (and bossiness) finally had free rein, even as the band entered free-fall. A parachute opened when the Dukes of Stratosphear, their cartoonish side project, released a period-psychedelia EP that briskly outsold the previous XTC record.
Virgin hoped an American producer would collar the firebrand and hammer the new album into the transatlantic mold of U2 and Simple Minds—a notion that, like almost everything involving the label, Partridge found laughable. Consider the demos: Back-garden symphonies like “Summer’s Cauldron” and “Season Cycle,” among his ripest compositions to date. Fellow songwriter Colin Moulding, inspired by his move to the ancient Celtic settlement of Marlborough Downs, was clomping down the same path, composing pastorals like “Grass” and “The Meeting Place” from sampled lathes and thrums of pagan folk. If anything, Partridge reasoned, the album would be their most English ever.
Caught between a quixotic artiste and a label tapping its watch, Rundgren was diplomatic. Who was he, a producer extraordinaire whose second home was a spacecraft-style recording bunker, to mock a studio fiend like Partridge? Hatching a plan, he accepted Virgin’s $150,000 fee and quickly discarded dozens of the band’s demos, assembling a tracklist around a concept of his own. The song cycle would plot a lifetime over the course of a day: daybreak in “Summer’s Cauldron,” then a suite of infatuation, heartbreak, marriage, temptation, and existential reckoning that concludes—on “Dying” and “Sacrificial Bonfire”—in the dead of night.
All this was news to the band. To Partridge, it was virtually treasonous. The 32-year-old was still on the mend from a 14-year addiction to valium prescribed for erratic school behavior, and had landed in an enlightenment phase, philosophizing over nature and “questioning things deeper: God, existence—the chewier questions,” he later said. The transformation in his lyrics was undeniable; and his voice, once a rabid yelp, had softened into serene hysteria, like a rescue puppy outgrowing its trauma. Despite their media portrayal as backwater bumpkins, XTC were brewing a new identity—something a star producer would surely dilute.
Partridge’s bandmates felt differently. Guitarist Dave Gregory, a Rundgren superfan, was thrilled, and the docile Moulding—by now immune to Partridge’s arm-twisting—sided with Virgin, reasoning they all had mouths to feed. If only to humor them, Partridge held his nose and acquiesced.
At his Utopia studio in the Catskills, Rundgren insisted on recording the songs in order, so sessions commenced with “Summer’s Cauldron.” His fingerprints are instantly visible: Skylarking opens in the nervous charge of dawn amid dog barks and crickets. As Rundgren’s melodica smears sunlight across the horizon, Partridge swans in from the wings and belts out a Broadway-sized croon, duetting with the lazy arc of a Moulding bassline. Just as the song builds to fever pitch, the producer plays his ace, scooping you out of “Summer’s Cauldron” with the summer’s-breeze strings of “Grass,” Moulding’s ode to al-fresco romance. A dreamy riff plays off his West Country burr, fizzles and dies like something unsaid.
Beneath Skylarking’s twin sunrise, optimism was dimming. It’s hard to pinpoint when hell broke loose, but within a few days the studio had descended into extravagant pettiness. Partridge says Rundgren had sarcasm down to “an extremely cruel art,” mocking everything from his lyrics to his trousers; when the singer flubbed a vocal take, he impatiently offered to record him a guide track. Partridge, in turn, deemed Rundgren’s keyboard skills “incredibly primitive,” nicknaming him Old Banana Fingers. Whenever the producer hulked toward the studio, weary and long-faced, the band had taken to jamming the “Munsters” theme tune.
One flustered night, Partridge gathered his bandmates. “I’m thinking of knocking the album on the head,” he confessed. “It’s like having two Hitlers in the same bunker.”
As war raged, the sessions remained a spring of wonder. Moulding, a psych-pop reformist, came into his own with songs like “The Meeting Place,” reflecting Swindon’s rituals and industry in gorgeous stained glass. Partridge specialized in the melodic trapdoor, establishing awkward patterns and flooding your serotonin receptors at unexpected moments. The lyrics are just chewy enough to distract from each incoming sugar rush, creating endless replay value. (“Who’s pushing the pedals on the season cycle?” he quips wonderfully in “Season Cycle.”) Themes and images trespass between songs, from the vaudevillian pomp of “Ballet for a Rainy Day” into the melodramatic “1000 Umbrellas,” whose Dave Gregory string arrangement makes heartbreak seem an ancient, noble fate.
In all this, Skylarking expresses a comic, cosmic apprehension of the natural world—not the banal site of ready-made tranquility but the arena of psychedelia, godliness, and permanence. Partridge and Moulding grew up on the border between urban and rural Swindon, ever ready to abandon the cinema of smalltown life, hop a fence, and explore a fantasyland of wildlife. Their formative years account for two XTC archetypes: the put-upon breadwinner and the serene observer of nature. That contrast—as much as Partridge and Moulding’s divergence—is a crux of the band’s character. From:
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/xtc-skylarking/
