![\"Todd](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Todd-Rundgren-Musician-Artist-Far-Out-Magazine-F-1140x855.jpg\")
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(Credits: Far Out \/ Todd Rundgren)<\/p>\n
Sat 11 October 2025 11:00, UK <\/p>\n
When you grow up among heroes, you\u2019re likely to be disappointed from time to time. Which, unfortunately, happened to Todd Rundgren<\/a> on more than one occasion. <\/p>\n Fortunately, for Rundgren, there was always a valid reasoning behind such an experience. There\u2019s hardly anything worse than when you meet someone you idolise only to be put out by something you can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019d 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\u2019d expected.<\/p>\n \u201cYou expected cleverness and a happy-go-lucky demeanour because of the image they projected up until the point they broke up,\u201d he later told Classic Rock, recalling how, of the entire group, the only approachable one was Ringo Starr. While it\u2019s not uncommon for the underdog in the group to have a charm of humility about them, there\u2019s something savage in his deductions that meeting the rest of the band was always always a \u201clet down\u201d<\/a>. <\/p>\n 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\u2019s ever met anybody they\u2019ve looked up to and felt the same air of strange indifference will understand what it\u2019s like to feel that disappointment and then realise that what they say about meeting your heroes is true.<\/p>\n But even fewer people will know what it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n