Music Arcades: Todd Rundgren: Go Ahead, Ignore Me

It started, as these things often do, with one track — by Todd Rundgren's band, Utopia, heard on The Friday Rock Show in about 1980. It was intriguing enough for me to consider trying out one of their albums. I remember repeatedly contemplating the copy of (I think it was) Oops! Wrong Planet in Tonbridge's Spinning Disc/Carousel. But I never bought it.

If I had, I think I'd have offloaded it many years ago, and would not have bought this album.

As it was, Rundgren's name kept popping up in unlikely places. He seemed to pioneer all sorts of studio techniques; then there was his ahead-of-its-time development of an online subscription service — the currently in-abeyance PatroNet — to distribute his music to fans without going via a record company. But paradoxically one of the things that impressed me most (though I'm not sure how true this is) was that when his girlfriend, the notoriously fickle Bebe Buell, had a child by Aerosmith's Steve Tyler, he took on the role of father when Buell considered the addled Tyler unfit to take it — and evidently continued this front when the girl's mother shifted her affections a year later first to Rod Stewart and then to Elvis Costello. It's always the women that get left to pick up the pieces of broken relationships, which I think is what makes Rundgren's apparent selflessness all the more laudable.

Oh yeah, and I think Stuart Maconie sang the praises of Rundgren's A Wizard, A True Star on his old Critical List albums programme.

All of that, plus the desire to be a good patron of Polar Bear records on Ecclesall Road, led me to get this album second hand eight years ago. As I've already let slip, it doesn't really do it for me. Having listened to a few Utopia albums on Spotify as well, it seems Rundgren has enormous facility for slipping into the style of many of the great songwriters and producers. But it's almost as though he's never found his own voice. Or, if he has, then it's a '70s FM AOR voice that is only step up from Styx and REO Speedwagon — plus a few ballads that are somewhere between Elton John and Laura Nyro. No matter how many times I listen to the songs, none of them seem to stick.

As is often the case, I harbour the nagging suspicion that I could have all this wrong. With that in mind, I went to see Rundgren at the Royal Festival Hall four and half years ago. Awful.