It looked perfect…. on paper. Take XTC (a band whose name was, by this point, routinely prefaced with the words “quintessentially English..”), add Todd Rundgren, musical Anglophile & legendary producer (whose name was always prefaced with “studio wizard”), place in a studio together in Woodstock for several weeks & expect an album of Abbey Road proportions to appear when finished and… it almost worked out that way. It even managed, eventually, to fulfil some of the enormous weight of expectation that had been placed on its shoulders prior to recording & it now sounds better than it ever did, though it took a most circuitous route to get from there to here. For starters: Todd R. & Andy P. didn’t get on… at all. Recording sessions were tense. Then Todd locked the band out of the studio while mixing the album, leaving depressed band members to return to the UK uncertain as to the value of what had been recorded. When the album was finished, Virgin Records rejected Andy’s sleeve design concept for the very good reason that many shops would simply have refused to stock it; the Parents Music Resource Center with their “parental advisory” stickers, was a recent industry issue. False, though widely believed, stories about reversed Satanic messages hidden on albums were heading towards a court room. Fake News 1980s version.. As Todd Rundgren once sang: “A man would simply have to be as mad as a hatter to try and change the world with a plastic platter..” Then, there was the issue of “Dear God”. Relegated from the album for fears that the same sort of people who listen for coded messages from Satan to their kids might object to songs about God, when it was issued in the USA as part of a 4 track promo 12” by Geffen Records to promote an album on which the song didn’t appear, it unexpectedly became a hit (with people interpreting the lyrics as they wished). This necessitated re-sequencing the album for CD & dropping Mermaid Smiled from later vinyl pressings to include the once rejected “Dear God” which, in turn, helped the album to become a slow burn/steady seller all around the world & XTC’s best-selling & best known album to date. All participants were left belatedly happy & audiences & record companies (both of them) eagerly awaited the follow-up… THE END. Well, not quite: When it came time to master the album on vinyl in 2010, Andy Partridge – still never entirely happy with the overall sound of the finished album – took it to award-winning mastering engineer John Dent, who noticed something that had never previously been spotted. Somewhere, possibly in the transfer from the multi-channel tape to the stereo master, a polarity had been reversed. This is not the same thing as a reversed left/right channel which puts a stereo picture out of phase & makes the sound unlistenable, but a much more difficult to pin down event that can be triggered by something as simple as a badly wired plug in the overall system which, nonetheless, removes some of the punch & presence from a finished recording. With the polarity corrected, the album complete with original artwork & “Dear God” was issued on vinyl as a double LP deluxe edition playing at 45rpm in the original rejected sleeve, then later reissued with the more familiar sleeve…. Leaving some fans to wonder why they couldn’t have the 15 song LP on single vinyl playing at 33 & one third RPM. Well, now they can – beautifully mastered for single LP from the corrected polarity masters by Jason at Loud Mastering & pressed on superior 200gram vinyl.