My friend Wenceslao Bruciaga recently asked to write an essay for the Mexican music magazine Marvin, to run as a companion piece with his own on the songwriting of Paddy McAloon. One of the foundations of our friendship has been the icon position we reserve in the pop canon for McAloon/Prefab Sprout, so it made sense to share a space reserved for their praise.
As the piece has only been published in translated Spanish, I offer it here in its original English version.
***
As a teenager, I would not only take command of the family car’s stereo system, but would purposely play music I thought would irritate my parents. If a song failed to do so immediately, I would offer up incendiary commentary.
From the very beginning, McAloon seemed intent on subverting
love-song clichés, finding uncharted anxieties in dark corners of the human
heart. In “Cruel,” from the audacious 1984 debut Swoon, he celebrates feminism while lamenting the predicaments it
presents for straight male lust: “If I’m troubled by every folding of your
skirt/ Am I guilty of every male-inflicted hurt?” The sentiment is repeated three
albums later in “Nancy (Let Your Hair Down for Me),” which depicts an emasculated
office worker who accepts his wife as his boss, but pleads for her to show her
feminine side at home: “Nancy let that fall off your shoulders/ I’ll be your
husband once again.”
His favourite characters, from Jesse James to Lucifer, are
haunted by past mistakes, yearning to make amends, but somehow held back from
redemption. Even at McAloon’s most rapturous, there’s sand in the ointment. “Love
is the Fifth Horseman of the apocalypse,” a line from 1997’s dreamy Andromeda Heights, does not conjure an
evening spent cuddling. The devil (who appears in Prefab Sprout’s songs almost
as often as cowboys do) may have the finest tunes, “but of course it’s always
over much too soon.”
As the piece has only been published in translated Spanish, I offer it here in its original English version.
***
As a teenager, I would not only take command of the family car’s stereo system, but would purposely play music I thought would irritate my parents. If a song failed to do so immediately, I would offer up incendiary commentary.
“This is a criticism of Bruce Springsteen,” I told my father
one day, when he seemed to be grooving to Prefab Sprout’s “Cars and Girls,” a
hit from their third and most radio-friendly album, From Langley Park to Memphis.
“Why would they want to do that?” asked my father, scowling
at the thought of a (supposedly) posh Brit insulting a working-class hero.
“Because life’s more complicated than cars and girls!” was
my answer.
In the intervening years, I have personally softened on The
Boss. And I’ve come to understand that the lyrics of “Cars and Girls” flatter
Springsteen as much as they scorn him. Prefab Sprout’s chief songwriter and
lead vocalist Paddy McAloon starts off, “Brucie dreams life’s a highway/ Too
many roads bypass my way.” But by the three-minute mark the contempt dissolves:
“Brucie’s thoughts, pretty streamers/ Guess this world needs its dreamers/ May
they never wake up.” Brucie might be naïve, but perhaps that’s the best way to
get through this life.
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These are not the lyrics of a man who believes in an eternal
love that washes away all problems, or that eternal love is something attainable
at all. Prefab Sprout’s discography is filled with the polished tune-smithing
and the sly sauciness of McAloon’s heroes George and Ira Gershwin. But the best
songs are too loaded with frustration and disappointment to sit easily as
cheerful standards in the pop canon, even when the breathy melodies are busy
conjuring shimmering summer days. McAloon seems determined to thwart listeners
who want to love his music for purely sentimental reasons.
Though Prefab Sprout is undeniably a pop group (these days comprised
solely of McAloon), individual pop songs alone haven’t been able to contain
McAloon’s anti-sentimental romanticism. They’re an album band. Loosely
connected song sequences allow McAloon sift through the stages of infatuation, entanglement
and heartbreak from multiple points of view. On 1990’s ambitious Jordan: The Comeback, the seduction of
an “Ice Maiden” leads to the birth of Baby “Paris Smith,” followed by apologies
from a hapless protagonist incapable of dancing “The Wedding March.” On 1985’s
brilliant Steve McQueen, the
confession of an affair in “Horsin’ Around” (“I was the fool who always
presumed that/ I’d wear the shoes and you’d be the doormat,” a line seemingly
designed to make Cole Porter smirk) is answered with the rueful, bitter fallout
of the next song, “Desire As:” “So tell me, you must have thought it all out in
advance/ Or goodness, goodness knows why you’d throw it to the birds.”
What makes McAloon a legendary songwriter, though, is his
ability to seed grace amidst all this futility. There’s the companionship of
being “one of the broken,” one of “us poor cripples” or with someone “behind
enemy lines.” There’s the impulse to search, regardless of whether it ends in
love or redemption (it probably won’t). And there’s the power of music. It took
McAloon until 2013’s Crimson/Red to
make the baldest declaration of his artist thesis, the five-word song title, “Grief
built the Taj Mahal.”