XTC Skylarking “Improper Sound Polarity”

Skylarking by XTC

Okay, maybe I’m a little behind the times but I just learned about this crazy (alleged) issue.

Apparently (so the story goes) the original version of XTC’s ninth album, Skylarking, was released with “improper sound polarity.”

The British band XTC released Skylarking October 27th, 1986. It is supposed to have been a difficult album to make, with the band’s founder, Andy Partridge, butting heads with producer Todd Rundgren. Whatever their issues, the result is my favourite XTC album and one of my favourite albums of all time.

After a friend mentioned XTC on Facebook the other day, I remembered how much I loved Skylarking and called it up on Spotify, and somehow it was even better than I remembered, and while I was listening to it looked it up online.

And came across the astounding bit of information that when Andy Partridge attempted to remaster the album a few years ago, his new mastering engineer, John Dent, told him that it had been recorded out of phase, and that they needed to reverse the polarity.

WTF?

According to Dent, he encountered this problem a lot. Back in Todd Rundgren’s studio, something had been wired incorrectly and they’d mastered and released the album out of phase.

Honestly, this sounded like complete bullshit to me.

I’ve written about polarity and phase in Adventures in the Radio Trade, in the chapter about the CBC radio show Muckraker, so I won’t rehash it here. (There’s plenty of info online). Suffice to say, how could industry professionals master and release arguably XTC’s finest album with polarity issues without realizing it?

How could any member of the band, the producer, the engineer, studio executives, fans, anyone, not realize that it was at least partially out of phase? I’d listened to it for years without considering it problematic, back in my early days as a sound technician for CBC Radio, albeit during the early period of my career when I probably wouldn’t have recognized out of phase audio for what it was.

But I’m capable of recognizing it now, so I listened to it again on Spotify.

And yes, it does sound a bit thin. The bass is not prominent. And apparently the band (or Partridge, at least) did complain early on that it was “poor and thin ... There was no bass on it, no high tops, and the middle sounded muddy.”

That may be so, but it still sounds good to my ears. Aesthetically pleasing. It helps that the music more than holds up. It really is a damned good album. I enjoy it more with each repeated listen. I’m still listening to various tracks of the uncorrected version of the album every day.

Now, Dent did not claim that Skylarking was released completely out of phase. If it was, I would never have listened to it. Nobody would have. It would have been unlistenable. But Dent, who ought to know (he has a hell of track record), thought he could discern at least some polarity issues on Skylarking, and he convinced Partridge that a problem existed, and they released a new edition that apparently corrects those issues. I have listened to a good portion of this new version myself and I will admit that it does sound different. Better? Not necessarily. It’s just a different mix, is all. Everything could just be mixed at different volumes and equalized differently, with different compression and so on. Who’s to say? Only John Dent (who passed away in 2017 at the all-too-young age of 63), and I can’t find anything about this online direct from him (doesn’t mean it isn’t out there somewhere).

There are bits and pieces about the Skylarking polarity issue online. I’ve read that the issue was actually a studio monitor (speaker) wired out of phase:

“Todd Rundgren later stated that the polarity issue originated from a miswired UREI 813 monitor at Utopia Studios, where the album was mixed. This monitor reportedly inverted the polarity, so when the mix sounded right in that studio, it was actually OUT OF PHASE for other playback systems.”

~ user RXTC r/XTC

If this is true, then the suggestion is that nothing was actually recorded out-of-phase, it was just mixed while listening to it out of phase, so naturally it wouldn’t sound right. It would have resulted in some eccentric equalization choices, and so on.

But this doesn’t ring true either. Surely somebody would have listened to something else through that console and those monitors, something recorded properly, and observed that it didn’t sound right blasting through those incorrectly wired speakers.

A Wikipedia article on the album states:

“Mastering engineer John Dent, who discovered the flaw in 2010, attributed it to a wiring error between the multitrack recording and stereo mixing machines, which would not have been aurally evident until after the tapes left Rundgren's studio.”

That quote is actually from Chalkhills.org (“the longest extant XTC web site”). It’s kind of a vague explanation and, as noted in the Wikipedia article, a “better source (is) needed” as it’s not clear where Chalkhills got that quote, which is at odds with the studio monitor explanation. It also seems to me that if the multitrack recording and stereo mixing machines were actually wired incorrectly, Skylarking would have sounded a whole lot worse, and people would definitely have noticed the issues right from the get go.

Also, to really know for sure that there was a polarity issue, you’d have to go back to the studio and physically identify the issue, actually see that the speaker (or multitrack recording and stereo mixing machines, or what have you) had been wired incorrectly. And I don’t know that anyone actually tracked down that smoking gun (there’s been a lot of water under the bridge since Skylarking was released in 1986 and Dent identified the alleged issue in 2010).

A more plausible explanation is that the album was simply mixed that way. Maybe Rundgren’s ears were a bit fried by that point in his career. But Rundgren wouldn’t have mixed the album alone. Surely somebody else (the band? Patridge?) was in the studio too, or heard the results afterwards. Which does lend credence to the suggestion that the problem occured after the mix, during the mastering process (but weren’t there professionals around to hear the result of that, before the album was released into the wild?)

Frankly, it all strains credulity. And we’ll probably never know the truth.

Whatever the case, I’m happy with the original version of Skylarking, and will continue to listen to it incorrect polarity or not.