be around me. .. there's a facetious part of it, a little sarcasm in it." Its lyrics also mention kryptonite and Superman's Fortress of Solitude. Rundgren contributed the keyboard part but was left uncredited. Gregory: "We really didn't know what to do with it. It was just a 'B' side, and he could obviously see possibilities in it. One afternoon, we just left him to it." The snare was sampled from the Utopia album Deface the Music (1980). Because of recording logistics, Prince and Moulding were forced to play around the beat. The guitar solo was played by Dave Gregory on Eric Clapton's psychedelic Gibson SG the Fool, then owned by Rundgren. Gregory spent hours rehearsing the solo. Years after the fact, he realised that he had subconsciously lifted the "little five-note runs" heard in the trumpet line of "Magic Dragon Theatre" from the Utopia's Ra (1977). "Ballet for a Rainy Day" "Ballet for a Rainy Day", lyrically, is a portrait of a rainy town and its raincoats, fruits, and collapsing hairdos. Partridge: "The one thing I remember about the rain as a child was my mother cursing that her new hairdo was going to get ruined." There was an argument over the lyric "silent film of melting miracle play". Rundgren was unaware that "Miracle Plays" were biblical performances from the Medieval times, and thinking that Partridge was mistaken, requested that it be changed to "passion play". Partridge refused because he wanted to maintain the alliteration in "melting miracle". "Tickets for the front row seats up on the rooftops" is an homage to the Blue Nile's "A Walk Across the Rooftops" (1984). According to music critic Joe Stannard, "Ballet" and the two following tracks "distil the flawless orch-pop of Smile and Abbey Road into a handy three-song suite." "1000 Umbrellas" "1000 Umbrellas" is a more somber reflection on a rainy day and the second song about being "dumped" by a woman. Gregory spent weeks working on its string arrangement using a Roland MSQ-100 sequencer and a string patch on his Roland JX-P. He said: "It was a rather doomy, miserable little thing with all those descending chromatic chords, and I thought, 'Oh dear, how can l cheer this miserable song up?'" Rundgren had not originally considered it for the album, since the demo consisted solely of Partridge on acoustic guitar, but was convinced to include it once he heard Gregory's