Song of the Day 11/14: XTC, “The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead”

Filed in Arts and Entertainment by on November 14, 2019

Despite the video’s clear references to John F. Kennedy’s assassination, “Peter Pumpkinhead” actually was inspired not by politics but by a jack o’lantern that songwriter Andy Partridge carved one Halloween.

“It was probably the best jack-o-lantern I’d ever made,” he said. “I just could not bear to throw it away. So I just stuck it on the fencepost, and every day when I’d head down the garden path to the studio, it’d be, “How’s old Jack looking today? Oh, boy, he’s really caving in. … So I’d see the rotting head, and I started to think, “What did he do to deserve to be executed? He did nothing wrong. He was kind of perfect.”

“And then I thought, “Hmmm, what would happen if there was somebody on Earth who was kind of perfect?” I just started to extrapolate on that idea, and really mess around with it in a kind of Dylanesque way. I thought, “Why don’t I come up with ‘The Ballad of’ — the ballad of somebody who’s pretty much perfect?” And the more I thought about it, the more I thought, “god, they’d make so many enemies!” You know, if they really encouraged humanity and humaneness and love and sharing and giving, they would really piss off so many people in power, that those people in power would do everything they could to stop them, including killing them!

“It’s just a little fable saying, there’s no way you can get away with being perfect.”

The video — this was 1992, videos were still a thing — had some images censored in the U.S. for its conflation of Kennedy and Christ.

When the Farrelly brothers made their 1994 idiot-fest “Dumb and Dumber,” they got Crash Test Dummies to record a shortened version, with three verses instead of four to go with a video featuring Jeff Daniels. It’s notable among that band’s catalog for featuring Ellen Reid rather than Brad Roberts as lead vocalist.

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  1. nathan arizona says:

    Not to be confused with David S. Pumpkins.

    https://youtu.be/rS00xWnqwvI

  2. XTC always stimulates the musical pleasure center in my brain.