Any music-loving parent hopes that their kids will inherit their musical taste, so I’m delighted to report that my daughter has developed a appreciation for Prefab Sprout which echoes my own. Inevitably a few of the jazz-influenced chord changes on ‘Swoon’ (1984) threw her a bit on a first listen, some of the more obtuse lyrics on ‘Jordan: The Comeback’ (1990) are a bit over her head and she found the sentiments of ‘The Sound of Crying’ (1992) a bit saccharine, but then to be fair she is only five weeks old.
She’s already more of a fan than some of the people on the Prefab Sprout online forum. Last week an associate of the Sprouts’ frontman Paddy McAloon uploaded a video to Youtube in which, accompanied only by an acoustic guitar, Paddy sings a moving lament which celebrates the most inclusive and welcoming aspects of US society at a time when its worst instincts are to the fore. Some fans in the ‘Sproutnet Community‘ were quick to dismiss its platitudinous appeals to the spirit of ‘liberal humanism’ (urgh! humans!!!). It seems strange that someone could spend 25 years following the Prefabs, putting up with Paddy writing albums called things like ‘Let’s Change the World With Music’ (2009) in the forlorn hope that he’ll some day release one called ‘Isn’t it about time we sent some gunships to deal with those so-called refugees for once and for all’, but this is, after all, the internet and no one nowadays wants to be accused of being a ‘snowflake’.
My daughter also responded in an unusual way to a song clearly designed to bring a tear to the eye: she stopped crying. For four minutes she listened in what I take to be wonder but may have just been a temporary absence of gastric discomfort. She has also reacted very well to being gently swayed round the living room to some of the more lilting moments on ‘Steve McQueen’, and even managed to get through a good 12 minutes of ‘I Trawl the Megahertz’ without bawling her eyes out for even more milky-wilky.
As for myself, I’ve been a fan of Prefab Sprout since 1988, when I was 17, at a time in my life when I was trying to come to terms with my inner snowflake. I bought all four albums in one day, probably in response to a review by some absolute genius in Melody Maker. Their unabashed erudition mixed with shameless appeals to the heartstrings twanged a very resonant minor chord in my sensitive teenage soul. That, in fact, is the theme of one of the songs on ‘From Langley Park to Memphis’ (1988) (‘Enchanted’). It was apparently inspired by the feeling that nothing again strikes you with the same force as it does when you were 17.
Although Paddy himself is not as fresh-faced as he appeared in their commercial heyday, there remains something entirely free of cynicism in the view of the world expressed in his songs. It is heartfelt, earnest and enormously sweet without any aftertaste of bitterness. From ‘Swoon’ to ‘Crimson/Red’ (2013) by way of the unembarrassable AOR of ‘The Gunman and Other Stories’ (2001), there is a wide-eyedness to his work which is, for people like me who recognise him as a full-on no-holds-barred actual songwriting genius, relentlessly endearing and comforting. He is a magnificent lyricist and can do things with a succession of key changes that very few bar Steven Sondheim and George Gershwin have done before him.
There are so many great Prefab Sprout songs that I’m not going to list them. If you do appreciate or don’t know their music you will enjoy the playlist that follows this piece. Sadly Spotify doesn’t feature one of Paddy’s very greatest moments, so I urge you to click here and take twenty one minutes out of your wonderful/impossible life to listen to it. It comes from an extraordinary album (‘I Trawl the Megahertz’, 2003) which was famously killed stonedead by the Guardian’s heartless decision not to review it*, but which in a far better world would have become the new national anthem of the human race. The rest is a personal selection of some of the most moving and inspiring songs ever, ever written. I hope you enjoy it as much as my daughter does. Well, seems to.
* Serious Sprout fans are still holding out for a Chilcott-style inquiry into this sorry episode.
Infinite Coincidence 