XTC / Apple Venus, Vol. 1 / 1999
I'd Like That
buoyant, giddy, tender
A cascade of small domestic and historical fantasies stacked into one long conditional wish, this song imagines romantic devotion through playful role-play scenarios rather than direct declarations. It builds from bicycle rides to firesides to rowing boats, each scene ending in the same image of ecstatic growth, until the wish collapses into a single repeated metaphor of blooming.
romantic devotion role-play and historical fantasy growth through love childlike wonder desire expressed as hypothetical
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses a beloved directly, proposing a series of imagined scenes; the interjected question in later verses suggests the addressee is genuinely present and responsive, making this less monologue than a call-and-response courtship.
What happens
The song moves through three escalating domestic tableaux: a rain-soaked bike ride, an evening by the fire, and finally a shared bed and boat journey. Each scenario pairs the speaker and listener with a famous romantic or historical duo, and each ends with the same rapturous release into growth and light. By the end the conditional wishing gives way to a declarative chant, as if the fantasy has been achieved.
How it's built
The song is built on a repeating conditional template ('I'd like that if...') that cycles through three verses of increasing intimacy, each closing on the same lift into the sunflower image. A long coda strips away the verse structure entirely, looping the sunflower refrain until it becomes the song's real destination rather than just a punchline.
Section by section
First verse
“I'd be your Albert if you'd be Victoria”
The bicycle-in-the-rain scenario is small and ordinary, but the immediate leap to royal historical figures signals that the speaker wants to mythologize even the most mundane romantic gesture.
First refrain
“really high, really high like a really high thing”
The repetition here mimics someone struggling to articulate a feeling that outstrips language, landing on a deliberately silly, almost childish comparison that undercuts its own intensity in a way that reads as charming rather than deflating.
Second verse
The fireside scene turns physical, with imagery of being freed from a wire and toasted, suggesting vulnerability and consumption. The Hector/Helen allusion recasts the domestic scene as epic, again inflating small comfort into legend.
Bridge
A moment of tenderness breaks from the pattern, imagining damage to the self healed by the beloved's affection. It is the only spot where the speaker admits fragility rather than pure delight, briefly grounding the fantasy in something more vulnerable.
Third verse
The boat and bed imagery merges rest and journey, and the Nelson/Hamilton pairing extends the historical role-play into a naval, adventurous register, suggesting the relationship as both intimate and heroic.
Coda
The conditional 'I'd like' dissolves into a declarative claim of having become the sunflower, and the outro loops this transformation as pure chant. The wish-fulfillment structure of the whole song resolves here, at least emotionally if not literally.
Craft
- extended metaphor
- Growth into a sunflower stands in for erotic and emotional ecstasy, turning a childlike image of a plant reaching for light into a stand-in for arousal and joy that the song can repeat innocently.
- historical/literary allusion
- Pairings like Albert and Victoria, Hector and Helen, Nelson and Hamilton recast the couple as legendary lovers, giving throwaway domestic scenes an inflated, theatrical grandeur.
- anaphora
- The repeated opening phrase across verses creates a wish-list rhythm, mimicking the cumulative, breathless quality of a crush listing everything it wants.
- call and response
- The bracketed question breaks the monologue open, implying a second voice that keeps inviting the fantasy forward, which shifts the song from pure interiority to something more like flirtation.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a love song that uses historical and literary role-play to dignify ordinary romantic scenes, with the sunflower as a metaphor for orgasmic or ecstatic release that stays coy enough to work as innocent wonder too. An alternative reading hears it as a song about idealization itself: the speaker isn't really talking about biking or rowing but about the impulse to elevate a partner into myth, and the sunflower is less about climax than about self-transformation through being loved and finally seen.
Context
This track appears on Apple Venus, Vol. 1, XTC's 1999 album marked by lush orchestral arrangements after years of guitar-based work; the song's pastoral, chamber-pop instrumentation (strings, wistful melody) fits its imagery of countryside lanes and fireside intimacy, though I don't have reliable biographical detail on its specific composition or inspiration.
Listen for
- how the melody lifts at each 'really high' line, mirroring the lyric's own escalation
- the shift from questioning interjections in later verses to pure declarative chanting in the coda
- the way each verse's historical pairing gets more grandiose, moving from royalty to myth to naval heroism
- the orchestral arrangement's pastoral quality underscoring the rural, tender imagery
About XTC
XTC were an English rock band formed in Swindon in 1972. Fronted by songwriters Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding, the band gained popularity during the rise of punk and new wave in the 1970s, later playing in a variety of styles that ranged from angular guitar riffs to elaborately arranged pop.
1976 - 2006 / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue