Andy Partridge on the children’s books that inspired XTC’s ‘Dear God’
There is a school of thought that punk began with Patti Smith, in which case, the line, “Jesus died for somebody’s sin but not mine,” was the first put to record. The snarling genre doesn’t often get credited for its literary bent, but behind the bombast was a decidedly bookish side. So, it seems fitting that Smith’s opener was a take on a quote from Albert Camus’ Notebooks 1942-51: “Maybe Christ died for somebody but not for me.” XTC‘s Andy Partridge was certainly a star who continued to carry this mantle.
Partridge has undoubtedly been one of Britain’s best songwriters. Evidence for this comes from the mere fact that he was bold enough to tackle the biggest subject of all: God. The track, ‘Dear God’, taken from 1986’s Skylarking, sees an agnostic protagonist almost tortured by his uncertainty. In many ways, this proved to be autobiographical. As he explained to Todd Bernhardt: “It’s such a vast subject – human belief, the need for humans to believe the stuff they do, and the many strata involved, the many layers of religion and belief and whatnot.”
He continued: “So I thought I’d failed to address this massive subject for all mankind – and also a big subject for me, because I think it’d been bugging me for many years. I’d struggled with the concept of God and Man and so on since I was a kid, even to the point where I got myself so worked up with worry about religion that – around about the age of 7 or 8 on a summer’s day – I saw the clouds part and, you know, there was this sort of classic Renaissance picture of God surrounded by his angels looking at me scornfully.”
It is a moment that stayed with young Partridge, but it took a series of books to fully make sense of it many years later. The Dear God children’s book series saw David Heller turn his study – collected in the course of research on the religious development of the young, these letters were written by children ranging in age from six to 12 and from a variety of religious backgrounds – into various volumes of published texts.
The novels served to highlight the social construct of God rather than anything spiritual. As Partridge continued regarding his own lukewarm spiritual experience, shrouded in the guilt of God as a Western tool of over-watching: “Normally you see stuff like that, and you get sanctified, and they start a convent or abbey in praise of you, and you become a saint and all that, and become very religious. But with me, I was just so wound up about the idea of religion and guilt and all that kind of thing, even as a kid, that it really plagued me.”
So, he vented this in song. “I guess the song ‘Dear God’ was me trying to come to terms with this thing,” he said. “Though I thought those Dear God books – you know, kids’ letters to God – were a pretty tacky concept, I liked the title. I liked the idea of writing to God to address the fact that I didn’t believe he existed. I just wanted the thing to come back with an angelic stamp on it, saying ‘Return to Sender’. Written in fiery letters!”
Alas, in retrospect, Partridge seems to opine that the medium of punk wasn’t perhaps the best vehicle. He concludes: “I think it would have taken more than three-and-a-half minutes to do the subject justice.” And he even got a string of hate mail for his troubles. But it did, at least, break the top 100 in the UK, so there’s always the seven pieces of silver that comes with that to celebrate.
