Wednesday, 13 February 2013
Todd Rundgren's tenth studio album is a close to perfect example of what happens when record company and artist stop singing from the same hymn sheet, due to a perceived lack of promotion for the artist’s preferred creative environment.
Bearsville, according to Rundgren’s view of things, wasn’t supporting Utopia (his keyboard and synthesiser heavy prog rock outfit), and while he’d managed to extract the band from their clutches the label still had some idea that solo Todd was a marketable commodity and weren’t about to let him go without extracting another solo record from him.
In such circumstances, on the other hand, one wouldn’t be expecting the artist in question to be spending a great deal of time and effort fulfilling a contractual obligation, and the Tortured Artist title probably delivers a fair indication of the way Todd saw matters.
With Art Direction, Engineer, Instruments, Producer and Vocals credits to Rundgren, the album was released in November 1982 and even produced a hit in the form of the infectious Bang the Drum All Day. All in all, given the background it’s a fair bit better than the listener might expect, though I’m left wishing he’d stayed right away from covering the Small Faces’ Tin Soldier. That’s not picking on Rundgren, by the way. Tin Soldier, for my money anyway, is one of those gems that’s almost impossible to cover respectably, let alone match unless, of course, you’ve got a singer with a fair degree of Stevie Marriott’s throaty heartfelt roar. Sadly Todd ain’t got it.
Or perhaps that’s the point. The pop sound that runs through the rest of the album might be heavy on the synths and is probably the sort of thing Todd could knock out in his sleep, and even running on autopilot there are a couple of fairly classy bits of pop rock here.