There is an album that begins with birdsong and ends with a suicide, and somewhere in between it convinces you that English suburban life is the most beautiful and devastating subject in the world.
Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding had been making increasingly odd pop records since the late seventies, but by 1986 their relationship with their own label, Virgin, had curdled into something toxic. What they needed was a producer who would force them out of their own heads. What they got was Todd Rundgren, and what followed was one of the most famously contentious, accidentally brilliant collaborations in the history of British pop.
How It Got Made
Rundgren essentially ignored what the band wanted. He sequenced the album as a kind of seasonal cycle — a day, a year, a life — without asking permission. He made production decisions that infuriated Partridge, who at one point reportedly refused to speak to him. And yet.
The sessions took place at Utopia Sound Studio in Woodstock, New York, in the spring of 1986. Rundgren used Prairie Prince on drums — the same Prairie Prince who had anchored the Tubes and played on Rundgren's own records — because he wanted someone who could execute his rhythmic ideas without pushback. The results are precise in a way XTC's previous records simply weren't, the kit sitting in the mix with a dry, almost orchestral authority.
The engineer was a young Paul Dieter, working under Rundgren's exacting direction. The sound is simultaneously lush and airy — the guitars shimmering, the strings (arranged and largely performed by Rundgren himself on synthesizer) sitting just below the skin of each song.
The Songs Themselves
Moulding's contributions here deserve more than they typically receive. "Grass" is a perfect single that was somehow kept off the original UK pressing in favor of "Dear God" — a Partridge B-side that American college radio seized on, forcing a mid-run replacement that irked everyone involved and ultimately made the album far more famous than it would otherwise have been.
But "Earn Enough for Us" is Moulding at his most casually devastating, a song about financial anxiety dressed up as a two-minute burst of pure joy. And "The Meeting Place," with its compressed, almost claustrophobic verse opening into that enormous chorus, is the kind of song that makes you wonder why this man isn't mentioned in the same breath as McCartney.
Partridge's "Dying" closes the record. It is not subtle. It is also genuinely moving in a way that almost nothing else from this era manages, a song about mortality delivered with the lightness of someone who has simply stopped pretending cheerfulness is free.
The production choices that enraged Partridge — the programmed elements, the deliberate slickness, the occasional Rundgren-isms — are precisely what make the record age so well.
It doesn't sound like 1986. It sounds like it was recorded in some permanent late afternoon, the kitchen window open, someone mowing two gardens over.