I was looking forward to reviewing Oranges and Lemons, thinking it would be the grand synthesis that combined XTC’s exploration of psychedelia on the two Dukes of Stratosphear albums with what they learned from Todd Rundgren about arrangement and the importance of a clear vision on Skylarking. The cover certainly suggests that the psychedelic influences would continue to play a role in both songwriting and production, and the XTC label would easily lead someone to assume that the marriage between Carnaby Street and Swindon could be found inside the sleeve. I also believed Andy Partridge when he claimed near the end of This Is Pop “Once in a while, once in a very rare while, you get a band that starts pretty good and gets better and better and better and better . . . and we are the other band that did that.”

Imagine my utter dismay when I first listened to Oranges and Lemons and felt the urge to fling the album out the window—a reaction very similar to my response to the Oasis disaster Be Here Now. The sound is so Eighties—synthetic, over-layered, slick, glossy, over-produced, cloying, white-soul crapola. Some of the tracks are unnecessarily long, sticking around far beyond the expiration date. I dreaded reviewing a double album filled with such boisterous muck, worried that my senses wouldn’t just be working overtime but on full overload.

I took a few minutes to calm down, and a thought popped into my head. “I wonder if there’s a Steven Wilson remix . . . ”

Yes, there is! Alas, my thought-popping didn’t turn out as well as I had hoped. Wilson was successful in separating the vocals and the more important instrumental bits, giving them greater clarity and space,  but he couldn’t eliminate all the damage wrought by Paul Fox’s amateurish production or the unusually sloppy lyrics.

My subsequent research confirmed my concerns. Gary Ramon of Record Collector observed, “It caught them in a more aggressive, optimistic mood than on previous albums and while a 60s edge was detectable, the sound was firmly rooted in the Eighties.” Nick Reed of The Quietus provided a more thorough assessment:

Where Skylarking was painstakingly edited and arranged, Oranges & Lemons lets everything hang out, and wound up as a double album that flies all over the map. The sort of outlandish tunes that previously wouldn’t have made it past the demo stage were showcased front and center here. Needless to say, many of the fans weren’t really into it; nowadays you generally hear it spoken of in terms of “Well, I like it, but . . .” That’s a big “but.” Indeed, Oranges & Lemons is the first XTC album that gives us a lot to complain about. If only it weren’t so long—sure, English Settlement is longer, but the songs there had a lot more substance. Here, they’re like candy bars; the first few are enjoyable, but fifteen in a row can make you sick to your stomach. If only the production was better—Paul Fox gives everything a shiny, in-your-face gloss that gives the album too much zip, the sort of thing Rundgren would’ve nipped out right away. Nearly every instrument is mixed to the forefront; it’s too well-arranged to be cacophonous, but there’s a degree of sensory overload, especially given the band’s newfound tendency to blast synthesizers in our faces. If only there weren’t so many instruments. And so on. It didn’t have to be this way—there really is a great album buried somewhere in here, if you’re willing to find it.

The only plausible explanation for hiring a neophyte American producer who had never produced a major album in his life was that Virgin wanted XTC to sound more “80s in America” as part of their quest to increase sales in the American market. The best evidence for the case against Paul Fox was expressed by the producer himself: “Fox, an XTC fan, ‘knew that they did not exactly have a great time making their last album,’ and was determined to give them a better experience.” Still carrying a bruised ego from the Rundgren sessions, Andy fell for the Fox sales pitch: “Partridge professes satisfaction with the results and Fox’s respect. ‘It was nice to have somebody who listened to and tried our suggestions, even if they failed. It’s difficult to play tennis on your own. You have to have somebody to whack the ball back; that’s what keeps it going.'”

Irony of ironies, Andy found himself having to restrain the producer’s wild ideas. One idea he failed to nix but thoroughly embraced was the hiring of 80s drummer Pat Mastelotto, whose array of patches, loops and live resulted in the album’s inconsistent and largely synthetic percussion contributions set to loud and louder.

“I wanted to make a very simple, banal-sounding record,” Partridge says ingenuously, “and it got lost in translation a little and came out rather multi-layered—in fact, very dense. We just got swept along with the enthusiasm: for the first time since our very first few albums, we were making an album that people actually wanted to hear.”

Despite the beautiful coherence of Skylarking, Andy was still resisting the idea that discipline and creativity go hand-in-hand. Nick Reed summed it up this way: “So ultimately whether or not this album holds up for you depends on how much you like the band’s boisterous side. While Partridge has matured a lot from the guy who barked all over ‘All Along the Watchtower’ on White Music, something seems to have brought those instincts back—perhaps having kids, which much of this album is a testament to lyrically. Only now he’s got a horn section to play with, and a producer who doesn’t seem able to tell him “no.”

Oh, boy.

*****

Side One

“Garden of Earthly Delights” (Partridge): For the first seven seconds you might think Oranges and Lemons is going to be another Dukes record with the strange sound of the “Eastern Bazaar” patch on Paul Fox’s keyboard buzzing through your ears . . .  then BAM! The full band explodes all at once with Andy semi-singing the word “KID” with a triple exclamation point. The abrupt opening thrust is so shocking that I nearly pissed myself the first time through! Once I managed to collect my shattered occipital cortex, I said to myself: “This ain’t Skylarking, baby, so hold onto your hat!”

Andy explained his thinking regarding the music to Todd Bernhardt, “I guess I had in my head the idea of making a track that sounded like this crazy tapestry of camels and elephants and belly dancers and all the Arabian Nights, interwoven—a big ornate Eastern rug come to life. That’s what it all had to sound like.” I think his musical intent is more accurately expressed in visual form, via the Hieronymus Bosch triptych of the same name:

“Jesus there’s a lot on this track!” Andy remarked to Todd Bernhardt and Jesus, there’s a lot in this painting! Andy referred to the music as “Indian,” but the modality in play is the major Locrian used in Arabic music. The irony of it all is that the music is hardly “delightful,” and even with the greater clarity in the Wilson remixes, it’s a rather exhausting experience.

The lyrics fare much better, for the most part. In the context of the song, the Garden of Earthly Delights is a metaphor for the wonders awaiting Andy’s three-and-a-half-year-old son Harry as he navigates his way through life:

Welcome to the garden of earthly delights.
Welcome to a billion Arabian Nights.
This is your life and you do what you want to do,
This is your life and you spend it all.
This is your life and you do what you want to do,
Just don’t hurt nobody,
And the big reward’s here,
In the garden of earthly delights.

That’s pretty much the advice my parents gave me when I was old enough to ask questions like “How did I get here?” and “Why am I here?” In the second go-round, Andy appends an extra line that paraphrases what my mother told me after Story of O piqued my interest in BDSM:

This is your life and you do what you want to do,
This is your life and you spend it all.
This is your life and you do what you want to do,
Just don’t hurt nobody,
‘less of course they ask you,

Yes, pain can induce pleasure (and vice versa), but I was sixteen when my mother gave me that valuable lesson, not three-and-a-half! The good news is that I doubt very much if Little Harry knew what the fuck his father was talking about . . . or understood the earlier reference to Chekov . . . or what Van Gogh slicing off an ear had to do with anything . . . but I have no doubt that Andy’s heart was in the right place.

Andy’s encouragement to his son is enlightened and encouraging, but it loses most of its impact due to excessive repetition. Was it really necessary to repeat the message four times? This is one of the songs that fell victim to that sweeping enthusiasm, as it goes on far too long and is packed with too much stuff.

I suspect there’s even a kitchen sink in there somewhere.

“Mayor of Simpleton” (Partridge): You want delightful? Now THIS is delightful!

I didn’t care for this song in the least until Steven Wilson lowered the volume on those overpowered drums. Balance restored, I fell in love with “Mayor of Simpleton” before Andy sang a note thanks to the stereo guitars mixing straight electric guitar with Dave Gregory’s marvelous arpeggio showers on his 12-string Ric, the strong forward movement and the extraordinarily intricate bass guitar part that supplies both rhythmic variation and counterpoint to both vocals and guitar:

“Colin had to work very hard to get that bass line. It’s very precise. It took me a long time to work it out, because I wanted to get into the J.S. Bach mode of each note being the perfect counterpoint to where the chords are and where the melody is. The bass is the third part in the puzzle .  . . On many of the songs I don’t tell him which exact notes to play, but with this one, I said, “You have to play this bass line, because it’s taken me weeks to work this out.” I went through and worked it out a note at a time, to go with where the vocal note was at, where the implied guitar chords were, where the actual notes of the guitar being twanged to make that implied chord were. It was built scientifically, it was [laughs] precision-engineered so that every note is in the perfect place. And I think Colin liked the bass line, because we talked about it sounding like a collegiate peal of bells.

When Bernhardt asked Andy, “Why did you feel you needed that kind of driving bass line in there?” Andy replied, “To keep the song moving, moving, moving. I wanted it to have a fleetness of foot, a joyousness to it.” He certainly succeeded on that score, and though “Mayor of Simpleton” sounds like a pretty simple, straightforward pop-rock song, its complexity doesn’t end with the bass. The guitar and vocal harmonies are surprisingly intricate, and as I learned when trying to pick out some of the chords in the fade, the chords are very difficult to identify much less play.

I checked out the available chord patterns in the usual places on the internet but none grasped the nuances I was hearing. Scouring my sources for information, I stumbled upon a link at the very bottom of the Wikipedia song page that led me to YouTube and Rick Beato’s What Makes This Song Great, Episode 76. I strongly advise readers to click that link, as Rick and Tim Smith take you through the entire arrangement bit by bit, illustrating and demonstrating the richness embedded in the song’s DNA.

That leaves me to assess the lyrics, a delightful task indeed.

The theme is similar to Sam Cooke’s “Wonderful World,” but with one huge difference: the guy in that song wants to be an A-student so he can land the squeeze of his dreams. The narrator of “Mayor of Simpleton” adopts Andy Partridge’s orientation regarding formal education:

I guess there’s also a little bit of autobiography in the lyrics. I recently found a load of my school reports — you look at them, and you can just see my interest in school going down through my teenage years. In my first school reports, I’m pretty good at a lot of things, and then I really lose interest. You can see that I’m just not bothering by the time I’m 14 or 15—I’m just not bothered with school at all. It was largely expected that I would fail at everything. But I knew it was not about being academically successful. I knew that that was not going to be important to me. I decided to leave school at 15, rather than go on to grammar school and do another three or four years or whatever it was . . . I couldn’t wait to get out of school. I detested it. I detested the idiots—the idiot teachers, the idiot pupils even worse . . . at one time I thought I might want to be a graphic designer . . .  but I very soon found out, after a year and a half or so at college, that it was just school, too.

It’s pretty obvious when you look at his work and read/listen to the many interviews he’s done over the years that Andy Partridge is no dummy. As a confirmed autodidact, he chose to learn independently, exploring many different areas of interest without having to go through the silly practice of regurgitating what he’d learned on tests. Andy figured out early on that our educational systems have a low tolerance for curiosity that doesn’t lead to the “right answer” and discourage learning outside the box. The Mayor of Simpleton echoes Andy’s sentiments in the unapologetic opening verse:

Never been near a university
Never took a paper or a learning degree
And some of your friends think that’s stupid of me
But it’s nothing that I care about
Well, I don’t know how to tell the weight of the sun
And of mathematics, well, I want none
And I may be the mayor of Simpleton
But I know one thing, and that’s I love you
When their logic grows cold and all thinking gets done
You’ll be warm in the arms of the mayor of Simpleton

The Mayor is smart enough to realize that the problem in the relationship involves the girl’s susceptibility to peer pressure. Her snobbish companions believe that having a relationship with an uneducated lout is somehow beneath her, hence the repetition of the issue in the second verse: “And some of your friends think it’s really unsound/That you’re even seen talking to me.” I’d like to take those bitches aside and give them a piece of my mind, something like, “If you think education makes you better than anyone else, you didn’t learn a damned thing!”

While it’s likely that Andy ran into that kind of bullshit when courting, the issue of “educational elitism” has become a significant problem in our world today, dividing societies all over the world. This may sound odd coming from a woman who earned two college degrees born to parents who each earned two college degrees, but I firmly believe that higher education makes you smarter and dumber at the same time. Think about it—the vast majority of our leaders are “well-educated” and a majority of them are the dumbest fucks on the planet! Some of them talk a good game, but beneath the surface you find their “smarts” consist primarily of manipulation skills and the ability to project a rigid devotion to whatever dogma is likely to keep them in power. The Mayor may be uneducated, but he can spot manipulation a mile away:

I’m not proud of the fact that I never learned much
Just feel I should say
What you get is all real, I can’t put on an act
It takes brains to do that anyway 

Though he doesn’t “know how to write a big hit song” (ha!), can’t unravel riddles, problems and puns, and has no idea “How many pounds make up a ton/Of all the Nobel prizes that I’ve never won,” the Mayor is blessed with advanced emotional intelligence: “If depth of feeling is a currency/Then I’m the man who grew the money tree.” I’ll let Andy have the last word:

“I suppose it’s saying that emotion, and the warmth of emotional honesty, is better than some sort of stinging, cold, rather antiseptic brain power. It’s better to be not so intelligent and more loving—quite a simple message.”

“Mayor of Simpleton” is a fabulous song, both musically and lyrically, but unfortunately, it’s pretty much all downhill from here until we get to the very end of side four.

“King for a Day” (Moulding): After producing a superb batch of songs for Skylarking, Colin went into a serious slump on Oranges and Lemons. “Moulding contributed three songs to Oranges and Lemons—thematic bummers, each and every one of them . . . ‘It’s the winter of discontent,’ he laughs. ‘If you’re in a writing spree for two or three months, usually you don’t feel up and down and up and down. I suppose it was more of a down period for me. I was just feeling really depressed.'” That mood is expressed in the doom-filled lyrics regarding the state of the world at the time and the limp musical accompaniment. It’s bad enough that “King for a Day” has that wimpy white-soul pop sound of the 80s, but there’s a huge disconnect between the slick, relaxed music and the lyrical depiction of the world as one seriously fucked-up, greed-driven, dog-eat-dog world where “the loudest mouth will hail the new found way.” I generally agree with his perspective, but it lacks the emotional impact of a truly great protest song.

And I cringed at the call-and-response line, “No time to fuss and fight,” a lazy-ass modification of the phrase in “We Can Work It Out.” Come on, guys!

“Here Comes President Kill Again” (Partridge): It appears that a virus was going around at the time that affected both Colin and Andy, rendering both incapable of writing a good protest song. Andy’s heavy-handed attack on trigger-happy leaders also falls short in the emotional impact department and his attack on democracy leaves the listener feeling utterly hopeless regarding options for change. And to top it off, the music is exceedingly dull and badly arranged. Boo!

Side Two

“The Loving” (Partridge): After yet another jolt-to-the-senses introduction, we find that Paul Fox is determined to stick with his move-everything-to-the-front arrangement paradigm, making it difficult to appreciate the rather nice melody and background vocals. The melody is fairly catchy but the lyrics are pretty much a nothingburger of nice sentiments about all we need is love and if we love one another right now everything will be hunky-dory.

Been there, done that, didn’t work and Ronald Reagan was elected president in two landslides.

If this is Andy’s answer to the question “What do we do about our trigger-happy leaders?” all I can say is, “I don’t think a Hallmark card will have much of an impact.” And after the hostility he displayed toward those leaders in “Here Comes President Kill Again,” singing “The humble and the great, even those we think we hate/Need the loving” makes him either a hypocrite or a fellow suffering from memory loss.

“Poor Skeleton Steps Out” (Partridge): Andy’s take: “It’s a silly idea that the last ethnic group to be liberated are skeletons. They’re unfailing in their support of human beings but have to wait until we die to achieve their freedom. In the song, the skeleton gets a night out.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

Was this supposed to be reggae or faux-African? Just asking. I don’t really care one way or another.

“One of the Millions” (Moulding): This is the strongest of Colin’s three contributions, which isn’t saying much. The narrator is one of the millions (it’s more likely billions) who leads a life of quiet desperation, dreaming big dreams but is too insecure to make them real. Alas, the lyrics are rather weak and I get the distinct feeling that Colin couldn’t wait to get to the chorus so no one would notice. The music is spectacularly unremarkable except for the intensely annoying instrumental passage featuring what sounds like the bells from a ten-alarm fire and the robotic call-and-response vocals.

“Scarecrow People” (Partridge): Andy’s take: “This is my favorite song on the album. Humans are the most deadly, uncaring, devious and destructive creatures on the planet. So I invented a Scarecrow Land and the aliens from there fly in and want to know how we make war and mess things up because humans are so brilliant at it. They admire all the bad things we do and are as dead as we are from the neck up. It’s a world-turned-upside-down song. There’s an American folk flavor to it also. We had a big sheet of paper tacked to the wall of the studio that said ‘needs sense of Idaho’.”

My take: “Scarecrow People” is conclusive proof that Andy desperately needed a Todd Rundgren-type to quash his unbridled imagination. Getting through this song three times was the most difficult challenge I’ve ever faced. The song is both silly and annoying.

And by the way, Andy, I’m curious about the comment, “Humans are the most deadly, uncaring, devious and destructive creatures on the planet.” Uh . . . aren’t you human, too?

Two more sides to go? Shee-it.

Side Three

“Merely a Man” (Partridge): On the surface, I suppose one could say “Merely a Man” would have made for a decent single thanks to the catchy chorus and Dave Gregory’s guitar work, but once you look beneath the hood the disjointed lyrics do not support Andy’s claim that the song is about “about not following leaders, certainly religious ones.” One random reference to Jimmy Swaggart and a side comment about chasing superstition and fear from our hearts isn’t much of a case against those who tend the flocks. And though the chorus is musically sound, the lyrics meander from expressing love for one person to a cliché rant about higher consciousness expressed in piss-poor English:

I’m merely a man
And I bring nothing but love for you
I’m merely a man
And I want nothing that you can’t do
And you know it’s true
That with logic and love, we’ll have power enough
To raise consciousness up and for lifting humanity higher

Given that Andy attacked logic in “Mayor of Simpleton,” I have a hard time believing he meant the part about logic and love raising consciousness. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.

“Cynical Days” (Moulding): Colin’s voice in the intro sounds like a man on his deathbed, and the coupling of an organ gives the impression that he’s already passed into the great beyond. The music is a meandering mess that veers from light 80s pop to pseudo-psychedelic and the lyrics are more whiny than insightful.

“Across This Antheap” (Partridge): Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, Andy piles on the gibberish while Fox piles on layers of shouts backed by loud drums and pathetic attempts at jazz. File this one under “unhinged rant.”

I can’t believe this is the same guy who wrote “Respectable Street,” “Love on a Farmboy’s Wages” and “Dear God.”

Side Four

“Hold Me My Daddy” (Partridge): We’ll start again with Andy’s take: “Most boys/men can’t talk to their fathers or show affection. It’s not what we’re supposed to do. It’s okay to say ‘Love you, mom’ but it’s taboo to say, or at least it’s not easy, to say it to your dad. I played it for my father and he wondered what the hell it was about. It was a bit touchy. Maybe he was embarrassed. It was a very difficult song to write.”

It is indeed true that men are generally shaped to become unemotional tough guys, and that may have been what drove Andy to write the song, but I have to side with Dad on this one: I have no idea what he’s on about. It sounds like an emotional dump that skirts around the real issue, whatever that is.

“Pink Thing” (Partridge): We finally hit rock bottom (I hope) with a song that forms a rather ornate double entendre. “It’s either about a penis or a son. Whatever you hear first, that’s what it’s about. The penis idea is obvious. The son part might not be. But you can interpret the song as a father talking to his son about girls. The title comes from the fact that my wife and I used to call our first child ‘the pink thing.'” I have to go with “son” because I hope from the bottom of my heart that the line “I want to take you out and show you ’round the world” has nothing to do with a latent desire to commit an act of indecent exposure.

Hmm. There seem to be a lot of songs on this album that could be about this or could be about that. Not good.

“Miniature Sun” (Partridge): I guess rock bottom was deeper than I thought. The opening brass flourish over a bed of synthesizers screams “Eighties!” Andy’s vocal stylings have all the characteristics of someone who deserves to get kicked out of the karaoke bar and the lyrics are utter nonsense. I said it in my review of Skylarking and I’ll say it again, this time with greater force: Andy Partridge and jazz are as piss-poor a combination as tuna fish and peanut butter.

“Chalkhills and Children” (Partridge): Omigod! A decent arrangement! A well-designed composition! Evocative lyrics loaded with beautifully crafted alliteration! An understated, heartfelt and lovely vocal from Mr. Partridge! In the Todd Bernhardt interview on the song, Andy explains how his synesthesia worked to his advantage while inadvertently embracing Joni Mitchell’s assertion that “chords are emotions”:

I had this organ tone, and I set this control so that each note had another note on top of it, a fifth higher. I came up with that funny little [sings pattern from intro of song]—but, because it was all fifths, it sounded really medieval. It sounded like the hills. Because, in Swindon, we’re surrounded by these hills—the Marlborough Downs, these chalk hills.

I thought, “Ooh, that’s the countryside around here.” I guess I started to associate the hills, and maybe I’d had a flying dream recently, and I just remember playing these long, languid, very simple chords, but because they had this automatic fifths tuned into them—don’t remember thinking, “Wow, these are very musical, swish chords,” but Dave said to me, “God, this is so well-composed. These chords are fantastic! How did you find them?” I don’t remember them being a strain—I just remember being guided by what sounded right, with this automatic fifth tuned in. I mean, they were probably three-note chords, but because there was a fifth dialed into each note, they were like six-note chords, you know?

I think I was still Mr. Cardboard Hand at the time—if I found a good shape on the keyboard, I would cut out a cardboard hand to remember it! But once I started playing this very dreamy thing, I started thinking, “I’m floating over the hills—why am I floating over the hills? I’m dreaming, and whole career has been like some weird dream,” and I just started to associate from there. I mean, the whole essence of the song is, I feel uncomfortable with the whole star thing.

That’s the prose version; the poetic expression of that narrative offers a more sensual experience intensified by the brilliant use of alliteration, and consequently, greater evocative power:

I’m floating over strange land,
It’s a soulless, sequined, showbiz moon.
I’m floating over strange land,
And then stranger still, there’s no balloon.
But I’m getting higher,
Wafted up by fame’s fickle fire ’til the . . .
Chalkhills and children,
Anchor my feet.
Chalkhills and children,
Bringing me back to earth,
Eternally and ever Ermin Street.

Ermin Street was an ancient Roman road that Andy referenced to reinforce the contrast between the temporary nature of “fame’s fickle fire” and the comfort we humans derive from artifacts of human continuity: “It’s the ancient quality and the fact that it’s only a few miles away. You know, it runs right past Swindon. In fact, I think there are two of them in England—but Ermin Street is an ancient trackway that Iron Age man would have trodden along with his horse or his cow. It just seemed to have a feeling of real permanence. There it is, in the chalk, up on the hill, trodden for thousands of years . . . ” The ancient roads, the chalk hills and the children all serve as soothing reminders that we exist within a larger, continuous narrative. giving us a sense of purpose and hope for the future.

The arrangement is appropriately restrained (HOORAY!) and rather than giving off funereal vibes, the organ sounds create the feeling of a nice warm blanket on a winter’s day.

*****

The embrace of the Eighties sound did result in a modest increase in sales, but not exactly according to Virgin’s intent. Oranges and Lemons charted higher in the U.K. (#24) than in the U.S. (#44). The U.K. numbers represented a vast improvement over Skylarking, which only managed to chart in the top 100 for a single week (at #90). As is often the case, better sales numbers ≠ a better album.

We can now set aside the myth the XTC got better over time. Oranges and Lemons pretty much follows the pattern of Mummer and The Big Express—one or two great songs and a whole lot of nonsense. I seriously thought of ending my exploration of XTC at this point in the narrative but “Mayor of Simpleton” and “Chalkhills and Children” gave me hope, and I guess I’m a sucker for hope.

I will give XTC credit for getting the title half-right. This album is loaded with lemons.