Pop que sueña que está soñando/Paddy McAloon’s sad, beautiful Taj Mahal

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.

“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.

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

Prefab leak

Exhibiting symptoms of Internet-distraction-itis, this week I went from watching the Stars video “Hold on When You Get Love and Let Go When You Give it” to co-lead singer Torquil Campbell’s voluminous Twitter feed. When I read Campbell's tweet, “All thats left online of the prefab album which recently surfaced and vanished. I've heard it though....,” I went on a frenzied mission to see if I could dig up the alleged album, employing nefarious means if I had to.

I found it. It’s been dubbed The Devil Came A-Callin’ which is also the name of one of the tracks. For Prefab Sprout fans, it’s manna from heaven. Devotees ascribe band leader Paddy McAloon with legendary song-writing powers, though his output has been minuscule since the early 1990s. So the fact that the leaked album is also very good—and very satisfying for fans—is enough to make me delirious.

It’s hard to tell when the 10 songs were written and recorded. The band's last release, Let’s Change the World with Music, came out in 2009 but was comprised of demos recorded in 1993. That album had a grand self-important sound that came across as bit stilted and surprisingly sentimental for a band that built its reputation on being anti-romantic (One of their best known songs, “Cars and Girls” from 1988, was an attack on Bruce Springsteen’s supposedly limited view of matters of the heart). It didn't have much humour.

This new mystery album channels the looser, raw quirkiness of the early albums, though the song craft is some of Paddy McAloon’s best. There are no breathy vocals from Wendy Smith, so we have to assume that the material is, at the very least, more recent than 2000, when Smith reportedly left the band.

Is it real? Of course it is. There’s the exuberant glee of “The Best Jewel Thief in the World,” the soulful “Mysterious” and the heartbreaking “Grief Built the Taj Mahal,” where McAloon chases Gershwin as doggedly as he ever has.

No word on if and when the album will be released—no word acknowledging the thing at all—but some of us will certainly will be raking the sky, “listening for smudged echoes of the moment of creation” until it appears.