"Fooling Around" - XTC & Their Groundbreaking 1986 Album :: “Skylarking”
Twice sacrificed upon some sacred designation, where endless flowers and sugar skulls covered in flies and ants gaze into the whispering sky that's ever so bright and unforgiving. Scents of fermenting lavender poke through fabricated paintings, while acrylic valleys promise personal scripture moments before rebirth in the artistic vacuum of life and death. Endless poetry is placed heads down on the seemingly rich gravel earth as an imitation of the constellations grows in this forever revolution by perfected instruments and appreciated psyche populism.
Influenced by the great Todd Rundgren of such groups like Nazz and Utopia, XTC stepped into the sonic void for their 9th studio as entitled “Skylarking” for what some would consider their best work to date. A blistering account of futuristic fables and organic storytelling at its finest, the band began recording at Rundgren’s studio in Woodstock, NY in the summer of ‘86 and quickly wrapped up production that fall. Though the album has been well covered over the years, has it been talked about enough within music-obsessed circles and subconscious socialites from around the world? Rundgren acted as a sort of saving grace for the band as they faced creative scrutiny and threats of being dropped from their label if they didn’t meet the proper fruits of their labor via album sales, chart success and other hollow requirements from the soulless suits of the ‘industry’. With many ideas for the title of the album, like “All Day Life, Rite, Rite Things, Leftover Rites, Summer Good and Pink Things Sing”, the band settled on “Skylarking”, which is a Royal Navy term that means “fooling around”. Best fitting the album and the end results that reflect a young sexuality explored with delicate romanticism, existential emotion and soft sensuality, XTC break through the boundaries that were set for a lot of English groups during this time with an extraordinary masterpiece both in personal perseverance and poetic production.
With swelling soundscapes of pristine pop and Baroque bewilderment, “Skylarking” enters this colorful realm of nostalgic naturism filled with nonstop creation and soothing parallels between exercise and experimentation. The transition from the album’s opening track, “Summer’s Cauldron”, to “Grass”, is quite possible, one of the most articulate, seamless moves in music, like that of The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Peter Gabriel and Harry Nilsson, to name a few. Its warm, inviting gesture into the human spirit along with the calculated clawing attempts of sensory solitude are magical, yet abrasive across the album’s 14 tracks. And whether the album was conceptional or not, prior to Rundgren’s influence, the band took his infamous lead and began polishing some of the most unforgettable moments during the band's career. Rundgren went on record during the early stages of the album and said:
...Could be about a day, a year, or a lifetime… There were songs that represented significant milestones along the way: birth, young love, family, labor, illness, death, sprinkled with moments of wonderment. Using this framework, I came up with a sequence of songs and a justification for their placement and brought it to the band.
Thriving in an orchestral ecosystem, the band pushed through the difficulties and collective challenges they faced to unleash a body of work that has faithfully stood the test of time. Whether it's the delicate moments between a hummingbird’s wings as it takes flight on tracks like “Mermaid Smiled”, or the calmness of breath during a morning meditation with “Dying”, XTC’s “Skylarking” transcended the hideous industry in which it was brought up, in by dissecting the ritual of song making in an approach that you now see and hear with band’s today that are trying to achieve this monumental feat, whether their aware of it, or not.
