| Cover: | Easter Theatre XTC.jpg |
| Type: | single |
| Artist: | XTC |
| Album: | Apple Venus Volume 1 |
| Recorded: | 1998 |
| Genre: | Chamber pop |
| Length: | 4:37 |
| Label: | Cooking Vinyl |
| Prev Title: | The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead |
| Prev Year: | 1992 |
| Next Title: | I'd Like That |
| Next Year: | 1999 |
"Easter Theatre" is a song written by Andy Partridge of the English rock band XTC, released as the lead single from their 1999 album Apple Venus Volume 1. According to Partridge, the lyrics were an attempt to match a "muddy" ascending chord progression. "There's the little melodic figure at the beginning, which I thought sounded medieval and earthy, combined with placid, droning high keyboard chords, which sound like you're floating—so it suggested floating over a land."[1] He further elaborated in an interview with Guitar Player magazine: "The ascending figure sounds like something pushing up and growing out - like springtime. The whole meaning of the song came out of the onomatopoeia of these ascending chords."
Partridge called "Easter Theatre" one of the few "perfect songs" of his career in a 2010 interview for the XTC fansite Chalkhills, feeling that he had "exorcized a lot of those kind of Lennon-and-McCartney, Bacharach-and-David, Brian Wilson type ghosts out of my system" with the song.[2] He jokingly apologized for "the fake Brian May guitar solo ... I thought it was really incongruous, but everyone thought I should leave it."[3] Demo and instrumental versions of the song appear on Homespun (1999) and Instruvenus (2002), respectively.
XTC
Additional performers