affinity for dub and reggae; "He's got a great innate sense of rhythm. He'll say 'No, don't put that beat there, why don't you come down on 3 instead of 2 on this part here?' ... He never put [cymbal crashes] where you'd expect to find them." Producer Chris Hughes likened the band's fashion of playing guitar to an automated music sequencer. Over the next few years, XTC began showcasing their vintage psychedelic influences through the use of Mellotron and backwards tape recordings on the albums Mummer and The Big Express. In 1987, he acknowledged that the group had "really changed personality. We didn't notice it bit by bit but over 10 years, suddenly it seems, wow, we're different." The Beach Boys' 1968 rendition of "Bluebirds Over the Mountain" was one of the first records Partridge bought with his own money. Although it is widely assumed that the Beach Boys influenced XTC throughout their career, Partridge stated that he was originally only familiar with singles such as "I Get Around" (1964) and "Good Vibrations" (1967) which were an enormous influence for him. It was not until 1986 that he discovered that the Beach Boys had an album career, when he first heard Smiley Smile (1967) in its entirety. Moulding credited the arrival of Dave Gregory with reviving Partridge's interest in 1960s bands like the Kinks. However, Partridge similarly only knew of the Kinks through the group's 1960s singles, and did not listen to any of their albums until the late 1980s. Partridge also claimed that "the Beatles were the farthest thing from my mind" until 1982; at another time he stated that the opening F chord on XTC's 1978 single "This Is Pop" was directly based on the opening chord from the Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night" (1964). Discussing the recording of the Mummer track "Ladybird", Partridge recalled that he told producer Steve Nye that he was afraid people would think he was copying the Beatles, to which Nye's response was "Who gives a fuck?" Partridge said that "from that moment onward, I started to recognise that those songwriters—the Ray Davieses, the Lennons and McCartneys, the Brian Wilsons—had gone into my head really deeply. He later considered "Rook" (1992), "Wrapped in Grey" (1992) and "Easter Theatre" (1999) to be the "perfect songs" of his career, feeling that he had "exorcized a lot of those kind of Lennon-and-McCartney, Bacharach-and-David, Brian Wilson