Virgin 1986 / Ape House 2024
Troubles on cloud nine: British pop-art proponents seek storms in Transatlantic paradise.
Skylarking
It’s all fun and games until somebody gets offended – or have their album overshadowed by a song which wasn’t there in the first place – and this ensemble learned that in the most difficult way, but then the “easy does it” method always worked wonders for them on both literal and figurative levels. However, when the Swindon trio began creating a follow-up to "The Big Express" to harness their essential Englishness, progressing beyond the collective’s split personality didn’t seem to be simple, because between their 1984 detour into memory lane and “Skylarking” lay another record, “25 O’Clock” from XTC’s alter ago THE DUKES OF STRATOSPHEAR, and shedding its psychedelia in favor of something more, or less, experimental didn’t feel right. Nothing did, in fact, at least from the inside, so bringing in an external producer could indeed remedy the situation, especially given the outsider in question, Todd Rundgren, had been known as an Anglophile – and offered a convenient financial deal as well.
Of course, he also assumed quite a lot of artistic control, and though his charges balked at the extent of the American’s input, they were too indecisive to see a concept in the multiple demos Andy Partridge prepared to shape the fresh platter: a cycle of existence for an unspecified period of time. Only due to that fragile idea, a certain single amounted to a giant liability – and here’s why the sublime pop number “Dear God” didn’t land on the record’s original pressing. There may have been different reasoning from the label and the writer – despite its arresting tune, the former found the song quite controversial and the latter too weak in its anti-religious stance – for omitting this piece, yet its inclusion would remove the conceptual ambiguity and suggest lifespan instead of a day or a year the album’s running order could imply otherwise. Later on, it was restored, and the cut’s placement as the third track from the end, linking the diaphanous bossa nova “The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul” – full of percussive grace and adventurous spirit and propelled by Dave Gregory’s piano – and the bleakly ticking “Dying” which slowly builds a sense of urgency, should leave no doubt as to what’s going there.
But never mind this multidimensional, chamber-like space where a kid’s voice and acoustic riffs frame Partridge’s fervent delivery of hard-hitting lyrics: the distance separating the ruminative finale “Sacrificial Bonfire” that trades strings-drenched triumph for transcendental solemnity and the effervescently rapturous “Summer’s Cauldron” must be crossed by unfolding the semantic strata, literal and figurative, of the record’s title. Without accessing all the album’s layers, the listener is apt to overlook the siren songs which appear in the fittingly mesmeric “Mermaid Smiled” to resurface later on. And while Colin Moulding’s jovial “Grass” and “The Meeting Place” – one segueing from a folk-tinctured opener into a raga-tinged meditation on the grand scheme of little things, a snapshot of frivolity; the other, radiating joie de vivre, an intimate swirl of sonic imagery – roll away a milestone of aural locale, some pieces point to temporal signposts. In hindsight, the soulful, almost hymnal “Ballet For A Rainy Day” even sets the course for the “Oranges & Lemons” longplay which would emerge in 1989, before “1000 Umbrellas” throws a bridge of cinematic, faux-symphonic elegy to “Season Cycle” that flaunts patinated, albeit infectious, harmonies with a lot of flair.
Still, the scintillating “That’s Really Super, Supergirl” turns out to present a sweetly cynical new-wave front, so typical for Andy’s worlds, and “Earn Enough For Us” introduces, in a similarly upbeat manner, sitar-spiced bitterness to the flow, preparing the palate for “Big Day” whose arrangement is exquisite, vocal polyphony celestial and brief twangy solo extremely heartfelt, and for the big-sky expanse of “Another Satellite” which scans cosmos on a macro scale. The cosmos that’s explored in vivid detail on this reissue.
Comprised of CD and Blu-ray, it features Steven Wilson‘s 2016 mixes, stereo and surround-sound, but there’s a Dolby Atmos variant to render it definitive. And if a smattering of bonuses – including “Extrovert” that takes the band’s love for quirky funk to the fore, with an all-important line “I feel like someone else” ramping up the brass-splashed alienation, and “The Troubles” with its Bo Diddley beat and delicate six-string weave – fails to add much to the album’s context and concept, these numbers provide a further peek into the ensemble’s mindset at the time. In the period which, marked by the “Skylarking” classics, proved to be timeless.
*****
