Skylarking is the 1986 album that lastly gave XTC a big profile on American faculty radio, albeit not with no measure of controversy; however we’ll come to that.
Within the XTC timeline, Skylarking slots neatly between 25 O’Clock and Psonic Psunspot, the EP and album launched by the band’s psychedelic alter ego, The Dukes Of Stratosphear; and with hindsight, it appears inarguable that the Dukes’ dilated-pupil worldview and vivid colour palette leached into Skylarking’s temper of existential surprise and contemplation.
“‘Skylarking’ was a term for mucking about”
“We were giving ourselves permission to be The Dukes Of Stratosphear in plain sight,” XTC’s Andy Partridge tells uDiscover Music. “Songs like ‘Summer’s Cauldron,’ ‘Season Cycle,’ ‘Man Who Sailed Around His Soul’, and ‘Dear God’ had existed for a while, so I knew this was going to be a gentler album. In fact, one of the titles I was rolling around in my head for it was Down And Butter Sun Field Magic. I can’t remember why we didn’t go for that, but we opted for Skylarking instead. My dad used to say to me, because he was a navy fellow, ‘Come on, get out of bed, you’ll be late for school, stop your skylarking.’ In our house, ‘skylarking’ was a term for mucking about.”
Hearken to Skylarking on Apple Music and Spotify.
In profession phrases, XTC had been below some strain to infiltrate the US – to which finish their label, Virgin, assembled two lists of potential producers for the forthcoming album. “The only name I recognized was Todd Rundgren,” Partridge remembers, “though I found the second list again recently, and I now know some of them. In fact, one of them wasn’t American: it was Chris Thomas. Wouldn’t that have been interesting? I love his production.”
“Todd took the songs that he thought made a journey”
With the encouragement of XTC guitarist Dave Gregory, an ardent fan, the band opted for Rundgren – although, from the outset, this resolution upended the band’s ordinary working practices. “Skylarking could have been a very different album, stylistically, had Señor Rundgren not got involved,” Partridge confirms. “It was the primary time we’d been sequenced earlier than we even began recording a observe. Usually we’d go right into a studio, report every part we’d acquired, after which say, ‘OK, what are the best songs?’ And out of these, what’s a breezy opener, what is a good nearer, and many others…
“But with Skylarking, Todd took all of the cassette demos, dumped them to tape, and then took the ones that he thought made a kind of journey. A day, or a life, from early in the morning until the darkest night, or a life that started with a child out in the fields, ending in a death and a sacrificial bonfire which hopefully heralds a new beginning the day after, or the life after. He edited them all together, and when we flew out to Todd’s studio in Woodstock, it was a case of: ‘You’re going to be playing the album in this order…’ which stunned us, because we’d never done that before. It had always been a case of picking the strongest children.”
“We had battles”
On high of the revelation that XTC was now unwittingly assembling an idea album of kinds, the band had been bemused to find no drummer on the premises. “Todd had stated that we should always use Prairie Prince, The Tubes’ drummer, and we stated, ‘OK.’ However after we acquired there, Prairie was in San Francisco whereas we had been in upstate New York. Todd stated, ‘You’re going to play to a click on monitor.’ Colin [Moulding, XTC bassist] simply freaked out. He stated, look, I can’t try this, I have to know what patterns the drummer is taking part in, and what patterns are proper for the music, and I’ve to know the place to position my bass notes.
“Colin is a consummate bass player; he’s got to play so it hits just after that bass drum strikes, and Todd was trying to convince him: ‘No, play where you think you should play, and we’ll get Prairie to play just slightly ahead of that.’ So Colin had to map out what he might be playing, and then when we got to the San Francisco leg, in a studio called The Sound Hole, the real drums – ie, Prairie Prince and Mingo Lewis, the percussionist – came along.”
“We ended up on antibiotics”
Infamously, relations between Partridge and Rundgren shortly got here below pressure. “We had battles, there’s no getting away from it,” Partridge displays. “But plenty of other artists have had the same battles with him. He just likes to do things his way, and if you don’t surrender totally, it’s going to be a battle. But as an arranger, he’s really excellent. His string and brass arranging for several of the songs was immaculate. Maybe in a perfect world, it should have been Chris Thomas engineering and producing and Todd arranging. But who knew?”
To compound the issues, the band was hit by a bout of illness. “Obviously, things were going a bit awry,” Partridge summarizes. “We weren’t used to this manner of working, it was very alien to us, on high of which Colin and I had been sick, as a result of we had been ingesting effectively water and acquired some form of amoeba-type infestation. Dave, who was both having bottled water or boiling all his water to drink in his tea, was fully effective. Colin and I had been simply sticking our heads below the faucets, nevertheless, and ended up on antibiotics.
“The only time that Colin and I have ever really argued in the studio was him putting the bass on ‘Earn Enough For Us’: he was really stressed and unwell, and I was really stressed and unwell, and it was just over some scale he was playing. I thought, instead of playing a minor scale he should be playing a major scale, and happened to mention it, and it was just kind of the last straw for both of us.”
“I’m immensely proud of a lot of it”
Given this litany of grievances, the miracle is that the band ended up with an album that radiates heat, wit, compassion, and unanimity of goal; one which is commonly cited, with good motive, as one of many brightest jewels within the XTC crown. The songwriting is next-level, the sequencing is impressed, the musicianship is seamless and the preparations are each supportive and hanging.
“There is a nice roll to the whole album,” Partridge observes, “and I’m immensely proud of a lot of it. ‘Season Cycle’ is as good as anything I’ve ever written, and the album contains probably my best-ever lyric, which is ‘The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul.’ A bit of beatnik existentialism. And the way ‘Summer’s Cauldron’ came out, grafted on to ‘Grass’ and then back again, was a great little stroke: almost like a mini version of the Abbey Road principle.”
Colin Moulding’s compositions, in the meantime, significantly ‘Dying,” ‘Sacrificial Bonfire” and ‘Grass,” also represent some career-best markers. “Colin’s songwriting was on a roll,” Partridge concurs. “I think he was at the height of his songwriting prowess, and I think he would admit that himself. He’d been building up to that.”
Dave Gregory, in the meantime, excels with a usually glowing, flawless solo in “That’s Really Super, Supergirl” (carried out on Eric Clapton’s previous Gibson SG with paintwork by The Idiot, latterly owned by Rundgren), and together with his jaw-dropping, filmic association for the metaphor torrent of “1,000 Umbrellas.”
“You know the little quartet that are playing in the garden in Pepperland, in the Yellow Submarine animation? I saw it as that,” Partridge remembers. “Dave lived in Stanier Street, and I’d walk down the hill once or twice a week for a cup of tea and to see how the arrangement was coming on. I’d said, ‘The more baroque, the better,’ you know, the more unnecessary filigrees and curlicues the better, and he really rose to that. He was programming it all into a sequencer, one note at a time.”
“It led to firebombing threats”
Skylarking attained no small quantity of notoriety, because of the contentiously barbed, perennially pertinent “Dear God,” which minimize to the very coronary heart of the dichotomy between consolatory religion and wilful self-delusion (“Did you make mankind after we made you?”).
“‘Dear God’ was a worrier for me,” Partridge remarks, “as a result of it’s an enormous topic, human perception; and I assumed, effectively, three-and-a-half minutes, have I carried out it justice? After which the following factor was that Virgin stated, ‘Look, you’re going to upset American radio stations with this, and the American label isn’t too enthused about it, so we predict it’s best to take away it…’ Or they stated the entire album is just too rattling lengthy, and requested if we may take one thing off.
“So ‘Dear God’ got left off some of the early pressings and was on the single of ‘Grass’ instead. But then American radio stations started playing it and causing a real hoo-hah, which led to firebombing threats and crap like that… So it was decided to put it back on the album, because people were saying, ‘I bought Skylarking, and that track I like’ – or that track I dislike! – ‘is not on it, and why not?’ That track I love to hate is not on it.”
“Dear God” is memorably topped and tailed with a vocal cameo from the then eight-year-old Jasmine Veillette, a household buddy of Rundgren’s. As Partridge explains: “Todd stated, ‘How do you feel about the first verse of “Dear God” being done by a child?’ As a result of I’d informed him that the music initially got here from that wretched e-book referred to as Pricey God, of kids’s letters to God. Which I assumed was a sickly, cynical train. I believe placing faith on children is little one abuse, personally.
“But I saw this book in WH Smith, and flicked through it and thought, Ohh, that’s really repulsive. So I thought, I’m going to write a song called ‘Dear God,’ which is the dying embers of my wrestling with the religion that was put into me as a kid. Jasmine sings the first verse and the closing line, and she did a great job.”
“People complained… I didn’t know what to do”
Additional controversy was generated behind the scenes owing to Partridge’s unique idea for Skylarking’s art work. “I wanted it to be like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, with male and female pubic hair having weeds and field flowers threaded through it. So the photo session was done and a 12” x 12” album sleeve was mocked up: they’d a gathering at Virgin about it, and a few folks complained. So that they then acquired their gross sales group to go round to the large chains of the time, like Woolworths, HMV, and many others, to ask if they might have any issues stocking it. They usually replied: ‘Ooh no, that’s too risqué. We may solely have it below the counter or in a brown paper bag.’
“So Virgin got cold feet. I didn’t know what to do, so I took a book of 50s advertising art to the toilet one day, as you do, and literally opened this page on which there was this nicely done, quasi-Greek vase drawing of two people lying in a field playing flutes to each other. And I thought, if we change that around a bit, and make the eye of one of the figures, which almost looks like a bird, into a bird… and that became a stopgap, last-minute sleeve.”
Launched on October 27, 1986, Skylarking, tacitly acknowledged to be not simply considered one of XTC’s finest albums, however probably the greatest albums ever, modestly nosed into the UK charts for a single week. However naked chart statistics have by no means mirrored XTC’s important inventory and the respect they command within the musical group, far much less the timeless love they nonetheless encourage from a fittingly ecstatic international fanbase. It’s at all times a particular thrill to show this album to individuals who haven’t heard it earlier than and register their expressions of rapture and amazement. Attempt it your self.
We’re re-publishing this interview with Andy Partridge, which initially passed off in 2019, on the anniversary of Skylarking‘s launch. Skylarking might be purchased right here.
