(Credits: Far Out / Todd Rundgren)
Sat 11 October 2025 11:00, UK
When you grow up among heroes, you’re likely to be disappointed from time to time. Which, unfortunately, happened to Todd Rundgren on more than one occasion.
Fortunately, for Rundgren, there was always a valid reasoning behind such an experience. There’s hardly anything worse than when you meet someone you idolise only to be put out by something you can’t quite put your finger on. And even in moments when that pesky adage of never meet your heroes rings true, Rundgren could almost always see through it.
This was the case when he met The Beatles. Like many of his peers, Rundgren had grown up in awe of the Fab Four. He’d even started out loosely wishing he would one day grow into the kind of musician big enough and well-established enough to rival them. But when he eventually got to crossing paths with them, his experience was a little stranger than he’d expected.
“You expected cleverness and a happy-go-lucky demeanour because of the image they projected up until the point they broke up,” he later told Classic Rock, recalling how, of the entire group, the only approachable one was Ringo Starr. While it’s not uncommon for the underdog in the group to have a charm of humility about them, there’s something savage in his deductions that meeting the rest of the band was always always a “let down”.
In all fairness, meeting a group of people placed as highly on the pedestal as the Liverpudlian greats would have given anybody a strange sense of malaise. Anybody who’s ever met anybody they’ve looked up to and felt the same air of strange indifference will understand what it’s like to feel that disappointment and then realise that what they say about meeting your heroes is true.
But even fewer people will know what it’s like to experience that feeling during the making of a project and still feel proud of it. Which is incidentally how Rundgren feels about XTC’s Skylarking. Rundgren already admired XTC, and so breezing into this project felt right for both parties. But they famously experienced numerous disagreements, painting the entire experience in a strange, sinister hue.
Nonetheless, the entire album remains on Rundgren’s most-proud-of list, even though he also admitted he had almost predicted the disagreements beforehand. As he rather bluntly explained to Music Radar, “Sometimes it’s best not to meet your idols. I took on the project because I was a fan of the band, but I was not naive about what would happen. Life is short, art is long.”
When you look at all the things that went wrong, it’s hard not to see Rundgren’s high standards as a point of contention. There are many stories that paint him to be someone chasing perfection without the softer motivational skills needed to make any attempts at bettering the music seem less like a reprimand (Andy Partridge later criticised Rundgren’s overly “sarcastic” tone in the studio, among other demeaning remarks that made it all feel a little toxic).
But there’s also a reason why it became one of XTC’s most celebrated and well-known albums. After all, who knows, without the frictions in the studio and Rundgren’s input in a broader sense, Skylarking might have never reached the impossible heights it did.
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