All You Pretty Girls

All You Pretty Girls

XTC

“All You Pretty Girls” is the second song on XTC’s seventh album, The Big Express, and the first single released from said album.

The song began as Andy Partridge “dicking around, playing some… little two-note, quasi-Hendrix thing [that] felt like a really archaic old folk melody.” That melody became the chorus – inspired by Partridge’s father, who was a member of the British Navy.

The song was recorded almost entirely with a LinnDrum drum machine – except for the “execution drumming” during the intro.

The choir during the intro was a Mellotron preset, fed through a very small speaker placed at the bottom of a fire bucket to create a more metallic sound. Said Partridge of the choir:

I just liked the idea of screwing up sounds in sort of Heath Robinson-esque ways. The choir on the Mellotron was quite nice – but it was almost too real – so I thought, “It doesn’t sound dreamlike enough. What can we do to it to screw it up?”

Dave Gregory plays a Prophet V synthesizer “dialed up into an accordion-like setting, sort of like a reed organ.”

The music video was filmed on a budget of £40,000 (adjusted for inflation: £114,800). The record company had rejected every idea Andy Partridge came to them with – so the director came up with a sort of quasi-Gilbert and Sullivan camp theatrical production, filmed on a wharf on the south bank of the river Thames.