happened to be in an idiom similar to "Mermaid Smiled". Partridge: "I had in my head that I really wanted to out-do 'Mack the Knife' — the Bobby Darin version. ... [and] it sounded like a spy film title to me. So I thought, 'It'd be great to do sort of a John Barry secret-agent soundtrack thing.' ... I said to Todd, 'Ideally, make it like a Beatnik existential spy movie soundtrack. Can such a thing be done?' And literally, he went away overnight and came back with charts for this stuff." Partridge instructed Prince to drum like a "jazz junkie drummer". On his performance, Prince surmised that he may have unconsciously "channeled" the influence of big band drummer Gene Krupa. "Dear God" "Dear God" is about a struggling agnostic who writes a letter to God while challenging his existence. The song was conceived in a skiffle style but while playing the Beatles' "Rocky Raccoon" (1968), Partridge was inspired to move "Dear God" closer to that song's direction. "Dear God" was not included on original pressings of Skylarking, but it was always intended to be on the album. "Dying" "Dying" was inspired by an elderly neighbor of Moulding's named Bertie. It was wrongly assumed to be about his father, Charlie Moulding, who had died of a heart attack in 1983. Colin had recently purchased a house in the Swindon countryside: "We didn't see him [Bertie] for the first six months and thought he might be dead. But people in the village said that he'd recently lost his wife and had become very quiet and sad. ... He used to get these attacks and be very short of breath. But he loved to talk about the old ways." The sampled clarinet solo was played on a Chamberlin. "Sacrificial Bonfire" "Sacrificial Bonfire" attempts to set the scene of an Iron Age ritual. Moulding started with a pagan-sounding guitar riff: "There was a touch of 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' and a bit of Arthur Brown's 'Fire' in it, I suppose. But I wasn't moralizing. It was just that this was an evil piece of music and good would triumph over it." Rundgren contributed a string arrangement, something Moulding had not envisioned for the song. He said "it made the last two bars of the album more optimistic, which I think fitted into his original Day Passes concept. It was the dawn of another day."