The Alternative Number Ones: XTC’s “The Ballad Of Peter Pumpkinhead”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

I'm about to make some enemies. Or maybe I'm about to make some eeeeyh-nuh-mayyys. I get absolutely no satisfaction out of this. If you're reading this column, you presumably paid actual cash money to support this particular website and, by extension, to keep me supplied with electricity and sour gummi worms. For this, I salute you. But judging by the comments section's reacted the last column about XTC, there's also a good chance that you're one of the people who enjoys the madcap highfalutin quasi-pop stylings of the demonstratively eccentric British band. If that's you, feel free to stop reading right now. Because I think "The Ballad Of Peter Pumpkinhead" is ass.

That's not a spoiler. You shouldn't be surprised. XTC's music is exactly the kind of cleverly clever, whimsically whimsical look-at-me smartypants bullshit that has always driven me up the wall, and I think I made that clear in the last column. In XTC's decades-long catalog, there are at least a couple of songs that I genuinely fuck with, like "Generals And Majors" and "Dear God." But XTC's overriding impulse was always to overload their songs with layer upon layer of sparkleflash frippery and then to sing those songs like they're trying to startle their garden gnomes. I find most of their music to be intensely offputting, and it remains fascinating to me that this group could've ever been considered a theoretically commercial proposition. This stuff is simply not for me. It really couldn't be any less for me.