PREFAB SPROUT
All music and lyrics composed by Paddy McAloon
Produced by Paddy McAloon and Calum Malcolm
Released March 22, 2019
Even though the music year of 2019 is still fairly young, we now arrive at one of the year's finest reissues.
The extraordinary, enigmatic, elegantly English band Prefab Sprout has firmly etched a permanent space in my musical heart of hearts for over 30 years of my life, as their seminal second album "Two Wheels Good" (released June 1985--and known in the UK under its original title "Steve McQueen"), entered my consciousness sometime during my high school years.
It was their shattering single "When Love Breaks Down" that instantly captured my attention but it was hearing the entire album courtesy of a cassette loaned to me by a classmate in my Journalism class that I fell so completely in love. Memories of myself strolling silently around and around my school courtyard with Walkman headphones strapped to my ears, listening to these tales of romantic woe, longing, heartache, betrayal, and dissolution set to pristine boy/girl harmonies and Thomas Dolby's crisp production are forever riveted into my brain. In fact, it is so ingrained that as I think back to my adolescence, a time whose emotions still remain powerful and instantly ready to be recalled, that those moments with that album feel to be as fully representative of my being as any other formative period. And truth be told, the girl who loaned me the cassette, almost never got that tape back as I loved it so much and perhaps, secretly, I may have felt that there was no way that she could've connected to it as much as I had.
This was the time when Prefab Sprout, and its' band leader, songwriter and frontman Paddy McAloon became one of my favorite groups as the music they created built a musical world I could lose myself inside of, be inspired by and therefore, feel completely transported. Subsequent releases each gradually found their ways into my collection. Their outstanding, bulletproof single "Cars And Girls" became a staple upon my own weekly college radio show.
And their fifth release, the 19 track, Thomas Dolby produced "Jordan: The Comeback" (released September 7, 1990), was a staggering masterpiece that combined essentially a double album's worth of concepts, suites and themes of romance, celebrity, religion and spirituality, Jesse James, Elvis Presley and even a track where McAloon actually intones the words, "Hi. This is God here..." into a glorious amalgamation that suggested nothing less than a work on the level of the finest that Brian Wilson ever released to the world. As far as I am concerned, it is one of the very best albums of the 1990's...PERIOD!
Since this era, the output of Prefab Sprout has dwindled nearly as quickly as the number of band members since as of now, the sole participant in the band is Paddy McAloon, a reality dictated by a series of health issues endured over the years including Meniere's disease and detached retinas that rendered him nearly blind for close to one year circa 1999. It was during this intensely troubling period where McAloon realized what is certainly still his most unorthodox and resplendantly sublime musical project, "I Trawl The Megahertz," which he originally released under his own name as a solo artist in 2003...and incidentally, was then only available as a not so easily obtainable as well as quite pricey import release.
I first heard this album during the early days of internet file sharing and...ahem...the appropriation of music through internet downloads, and even then, I was struck dumb by the overpowering beauty that McAloon had created. I found myself, during periods over the years, driving across the city, entirely enraptured, to the full, nearly 22 minute title track during which McAloon's lush and flowing musical thematics, which suggests Gershwin by way of Miles Davis' "Sketches Of Spain" (released July 18, 1960), provide the soundscape for a mesmerizing, captivating, heartbreaking spoken word narrative performed by the mysterious Yvonne Connors. It was unlike anything McAloon had previously composed, so inexplicably of its own musical universe, and still it felt so firmly connected to the remainder of the Prefab Sprout discography.
I bring this album to your attention at this time as "I Trawl The Megahertz" has been fully remastered and re-branded as an official Prefab Sprout album, complete with a new album cover, full lyrics and liner notes surrounding the genesis of the work written by Paddy McAloon himself and is now available worldwide, making it easily accessible to locate for all interested parties. And I am sincerely wishing that this posting inspires you to seek out this stunning, crystalline, enormously empathetic work of musical artistry.
"Your daddy loves you," I said. "Your daddy loves you very much. He just doesn't want to live with us anymore."
Those words were the catalyst for the music that would become "I Trawl The Megahertz," as Paddy McAloon, convalescing after his eye surgery and unable to even read, found solace in listening to the voices heard upon radio call-in talk shows. The above phrase was heard during one of such programs and thus, reverberated in McAloon's mind, sparking inspiration.
The album's opening title track features a lilting, almost cinematic orchestral setting, complete with musical elements both real and synthetic, conjuring up images of a melancholic Spring day, a hall of magnolia trees with petals slowing falling to the ground. The voice of Yvonne Connors arrives in the form of a nameless character of indeterminate age, speaking to herself (as well as to all of us listening) about "the story of my life."
Through McAloon's often stunning, literary yet purposefully heightened, poetic language suggesting a character that may or may not been artist herself, or a figure that houses a certain pretentiousness that is utilized as a cloak to mask a deep sense of insecurity, and a musical structure that utilizes a series of repetitive themes that ebb and flow, the unfolding of "I Trawl The Megahertz" becomes transcendent in its shape shifting almost dreamlike flush of memories filled with emotional rapture and crippling despair.
Our narrator, after lavishing us with a romanticism infused with war imagery of downed pilots and tending nurses, with she on the path of "the tracks of impossible love," she informs us that "I have only twelve days in Paris and I'm waiting for life to start."
A beginning that occurs only moments later to all of us...
"At first I don't notice you, or the colour of your hair or your readiness to laugh. I am tying a shoelace or finding the pavement fascinating when the comet thrills the sky."
In a world where everyday people are foiled by everyday obstacles, both minute ("trains are late") or tragic ("doctors are breaking bad news"), our narrator finds herself "living in a lullaby" as the birth of love overtakes her...even if it may be one that is unrequited.
"You might be huddled in a doorway, on the make, or just getting by, but I don't see it. You are my one shot at glory. Soon, I will read in your expression warmth, encouragement, assent. From an acorn of interest, I will cultivate whole forests of affection. I will analyse your gestures like centuries of scholars poring over Jesus' words. Anything that doesn't fit my narrow interpretation I will carelessly discard. For I'm careless. I'm shameless. And-Mayday, Mayday, watch the needle leave the dial-I am reckless...
...Soon, I will make you a co-conspirator, if I am dizzy I will call it rapture, if I am low I will attribute it to your absence, noting your tidal efforts upon my moods. Oblivious to the opinions of neighbours, I will bark at the moon like a dog. In short, I am asking to be scalded. It is the onset of fever."
By this stage in the album (a mere nine minutes in), and this song in specificity, you will either be going with the flow or feel ready to depart this experience. But I ask of you to simply read those words again and to please capture the essence of the exquisite prose as well as humor contained. Yet, truly mine your hearts and memories of the times when you firs fell in love with anyone at any point within your lives and what Paddy McAloon has unearthed so wondrously is distinct, magically descriptive truth about how we all place the objects of our affection upon pedestals or how we are so consumed by the glories of what we witness and FEEL for another person, even against better judgements, even knowing that a hard fall might occur. And if there is someone to either catch us or ignore us in unknown.
For our narrator, at some point, her love transforms into sorrow. or as she explains, "the aftermath of fever." It is here where the romantic weight of "I Trawl The Megahertz" arrives crushingly, and especially palpable after the supreme lift of the first section of the piece. McAloon's language and metaphors are explicitly painful and tastefully unlock the flow and as a title of a previous Prefab Sprout song described, "The Sound Of Crying."
This section is beauteously mournful and so correct in its assessments and expressions of romantic pain and loss, for we do not know what has precisely happened to the object of our narrator's affections. But when she tells us "I catch the scent of apples, I hunger for a taste, but I can't see the orchards for the rain," my heart plummets. Every. Single. Time.
The song then returns to its' original conceit. "Your daddy loves you. I said, 'Your daddy loves you very much. He just doesn't want to live with us anymore'," she repeats and therefore allowing us inside of yet another of the song's mysteries. For even as she speaks to us and as she claims the story she is telling herself, is she speaking of an experience recent or of her distant past? Is she using a metaphor to help herself understand her own pain?
Even more on an existential level is the "child" to whom she is speaking to, simply herself...making this entire experience something akin to poet William Wordsworth's "My Heart Leaps Up" and its references to the phrase "Child Is Father Of The Man"--also a phrase and concept utilized on The Beach Boys' astonishment, as composed by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks, "Surf's Up" (released November 29, 1971), itself a song McAloon had admittedly adored? So, is "I Trawl The Megahertz" an expression signifying the child is the Mother of the woman?
While love ends, life itself continues and our narrator is left to ascertain herself for herself and to herself while she continues to perform the act of the song's title.
"They may help us make sense of who we are and where we came from and, as a compassionate side effect, teach us that nothing is ever lost."
So glistening and ephemeral. So tangible and recognizable yet seemingly arcane, clandestine and enigmatic, "I Trawl The Megahertz" is a musical wave that rushes over you, pulling you under and leaving you floating within. It is a masterful effort, where the sweep of the music and the words formulate a symbiotic existence, rising and falling together, subtlety and powerfully.
The vocals of the (again) mysterious Yvonne Connors have captivated me for years upon years, as the dark allure of her voice is not simply a great performance but also an act of audio magic that speaks directly to what occurs when we all hear those voices upon the radio, fully conjuring images of what these figures may look like and to that end, what they might be like in the real world.
I have to admit that I have occasionally attempted to find out precisely who Yvonne Connors is as Paddy McAloon has not divulged very much at all, and I would imagine, purposefully so. He has expressed how she recorder her vocals within a hotel room and how perfect he felt she was. But aside from that, not a word.
She may be an actress. She may be an accountant, for all I know. I have never even seen a photo of her and believe me, I wish to as I desire to see if she remotely resembles what I have imagined...even knowing that most likely, she doesn't look like what I am picturing at all. Such as it is in matters like this. But, her voice is deeply seductive yet without exuding any sense of overt sexuality. It is a voice that fully attracts and lures you into her world and the story and music McAloon has devised. Yvonne Connors' voice is simultaneously expressive and detached, as if hearing her words in a fading dream, yet one that haunts you succulently.
Now, I would not be surprised if you would gather that the experience of "I Trawl The Megahertz" would be all well and finished right here. But remember, the title track is 22 minutes, leaving a full second half to explore and while the results leave the Yvonne Connors' narrator behind, her presence lingers to great effect as her story informs the remainder of the album.
For the second and largely instrumental half of "I Trawl The Megahertz," Paddy McAloon utilizes the space to showcase compositional skills that far extends from the glorious pop songcraft familiar to Prefab Sprout fans and for that matter, even from the first half of this album.
"Espirit De Corps" opens the second half of the album with an instrumental grandeur reminiscent of Aaron Copeland and "Fall From Grace" sounds like an epilogue to The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby," all mournful strings that are punctuated with the sounds of a sad, muted Miles Davis-esque trumpet.
"We Were Poor..." continues the English funereal mood and proceedings yet slowly glides into a Donald Fagen styled jazz pastiche suggesting the continuation of life despite the pain endured. To my ears, there is a fragile tension between the spirit contained within the strings, vibes and trumpet and dark pull of that despondent horn section. It is a piece that feels to suggest the adage, "such is life."
Repeating the opening strings from "Fall From Grace," we next turn to "Orchid 7" that suggests the Synclavier compositions of Frank Zappa or also the hypnotically percolating sequences and patterns of a Phillip Glass piece.
Bringing the album full circle are two especially melancholic selections, each one bridging the music and emotions contained in the title track to greater fruition by adding more troubled disembodied middle aged voices into our atmosphere. "I'm 49" explores the album's original concept by containing a series of talk radio call-in snippets and weaving them into McAloon's orchestral soundtrack, again the music and the words formulating a symbiotic relationship that is palpably wrenching.
"Sleeping Rough" finds us with the only Paddy McAloon vocal upon the entire album as he seemingly inserts himself into the album's over-arching narrative, professing his own feelings and fears that accompanied his illness and isolation. "I'm lost," he sings over and again and in a startling moment of self-description as well as suggesting a long, sad slumber like Rip Van Winkle, he plans to "grow a long and silver beard" that will fall down to his knees (nearly his actual appearance at this current stage of his life). By this point, and with a striking economy of words, the album plunges straight into the malaise of middle age, the full knowledge that youth is long gone yet old age has not arrived yet, the tension resting in the uncertainty of how much time remains.
"I Trawl The Megahertz" reaches its poignant conclusion with "Ineffable" and "...But We Were Happy," the final two selections that each feel to provide the solace, grace and hope necessary to process all that has come to pass as well as prepare for what lies ahead in life. For all of the sadness presented and experienced throughout the album, McAloon leaves us with a musical helping hand upwards, allowing us to continue placing one foot in front of the other with the hopes that love will still exist to shine its light upon us. And with this soulful wink and a nod, the album concludes.
Prefab Sprout's "I Trawl The Megahertz" is a richly beautiful, luxuriously created album of love, loss memory and mortality, that again firmly demonstrated what a gift to the world Paddy McAloon actually is. I am hoping that with this remastered reissue, many more people will now be able to or be inspired to try and discover a work that was far ahead of its time during its original release and is still far ahead of the curve today.
Furthermore and even greater, it is a musical work of tremendous empathy and spiritual deliverance that is indeed of such sadly short supply and in desperate need in this turbulent world. "I Trawl The Megahertz" speaks directly to our collective sense of cultural sorrow and disconnect. Yet perhaps, through the listening, we can find that we really are not as alone as we may feel.
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