McAloon Test Piece. (no formed title)

Part I

I have just been reading an article about Led Zeppelin that celebrates the release of a live CD and DVD celebrating a behemoth of the turn of one big musical decade into another. It was American and as always, it was interesting and well written. It was a nice mixture of fact and personal recollection and it was as good a way as any to spend a part of the midnight in the middle of the last week of another May. But by the end of it I was thinking to myself, ‘but where the hell is Paddy McAloon?'

I know what you're thinking. Huh? Led Zeppelin, Paddy McAloon. Why not Jerry Lee Lewis, Tim Henman. Alright then, Frank Sinatra, Frank Lampard? Mr McAloon has this to do with Zeppelin: in thirty years time, nobody is going to be releasing a triple CD of Prefab Sprout at the height of their considerable live powers. So no one will be sending me on articles from the New York Times about it. Never mind the fact that at 76 I'll be tucked up in bed every night well before eleven, never mind two in the wee wee hours. And the point is, fundamentally, this is wrong. By the law of all that is fair and holy, McAloon ought to be as important a figure in the history of rock and roll music (for want of a better term to describe popular music from Elvis to the present) as Percy Plant and Jimmy Page.

This is to go off on one I know. I can hear myself being lectured on the side right now: ‘but Led Zeppelin were zeitgeist shapers par excellence. They broke America in about five seconds, and before they were made lepers in their own country by the bone headed smog monsters of the new counter-culture of ‘76, they were Gods of ‘Rock', when the word could still be connected meaningfully if tangentially to the word ‘hip‘. Which is why the new century has seen their spectacular renaissance and rehabilitation from beyond the artistic mortuary. And you want to write about Prefab Sprout?' I do.

You can (if you want) split music into two categories. In the first there is everythng that has ever been declared to be officially Cool by the music punditocracy. Then there's the rest. In this first chamber you will find a wide spread of abilities and genres: Bowie and the Velvets would have to rub shoulders with The Who and The Jam. Talking Heads and The Clash might be playing table tennis with Bob Dylan and The Beatles, while Nirvana and The Stone Roses might well be pooling their ideas on how to roast a perfect sea bass with Nick Drake and Mick Jagger. Cream are still arguing in the doorway. Keef looks after the drugstore with one Peter Green, who has just left casualty corner and the company of the inevitable Brian, Janis, Jim, Jimi and Syd and Sid. And so on and so forth. I think we all know how the song goes.

When you've had your fun drooling over that crowd, you might roll your sleeves up before entering Room 2, because a lot of sub-dividing will now have to be done. Most of the inhabitants will have to be packed onto a boat heading for Greenland or somewhere. Up the gangplank will be sent all the one hit wonders of pop history (Thunderclap Newman and Procol Harum excepted), with all those who ever made bland and downright terrible pop records. We can leave Abba and Olivier Newton John to round that mob up. Next, all the copyists can be sent to watch Exeter City every week: David Grey can be in charge of those. Then all the metalist thrashers can be packed off to hell, the place they're all so fond of shouting about. How are we doing? The crowd is thinning out, I bet.

Those pop types who tried to make good acoustic records can go next. Send ‘em off to all the empty bedrooms we can find far, far away where we won't be able to hear their stupid whining ever again. We'll find a nice big field off in the distance for all the pure folkies. Near the end now. Penultimately, everyone who never wrote a song of their own can be sent out to die and finally, all those who wrote songs without knowing what the fuck they were doing can go with them.

What are we left with? A room of blokes with long hair (mostly), wondering what they did wrong that cost them entry to the first room. Of course, if we all played this game, we'd disagree sharply on who would be sitting around on the armchairs and sofas (don't worry about those sitting cross legged on the floor; the folkies all left for the field ages ago). But, as the saying goes, the thing about taste is, you either have it or you don't. So my room would have the members of Yes, Genesis (pre-1976) and Jethro Tull (I think I might be pushing it to ask for Greenslade to be let in) ready to reminisce with me about the years 1972-75 while the rest just waited around for me to talk to them to do more of the same. Bruce Hornsby would be there, whinging sadly that James Taylor and David Crosby just got allowed into the limbo room where the jury of ex-NME editors will spend years deliberating. And it worries me that he might struggle to find someone out of John Martyn, Ralph McTell, Don McLean and Free to talk to about playing the piano. It would be sad to see Graham Nash there missing his buddies. But the guy I'd be worried about, when not trying to ask Steve Howe and Jon Anderson how on earth they came to produce a masterpiece of the scale of Tales From Topographic Oceans, would be Paddy McAloon. The problem for the likes of his band Prefab Sprout and XTC, the other great unsung band of the post-Beatles era, even in the light of constantly well reviewed records is that the fickle world of musical fame is dependent upon some lunkhead with dependency problems thinking you're cool. It helps if you're dead, doped, overrated and American, and unfortunately, Mr Mc is none of these things.

Okay, fine. So it takes all sorts to make a world. So I like acoustic music from the seventies and progressive bands. But come on, give me credit. I got rid of a lot of talented wasters for you, didn't I? And all those imbecilic bands from the post-1990 age playing songs with four chords and whining about nothing the whole time. Didn't I? However, with my kings of the glorious progressive age of 1967-71 where truly any new form or style was plausible and acceptable and Walter Becker and Donald Fagan who aren't sure where they belong, in my own House Of Sheer Quality, I would have a special place for Paddy. You may not have heard of him. Or only be vaguely aware of a song about a jumping frog, thinking his records were no more than pop gimmicks. Unless you could connect him up that song on Heartbeat. That's possible. What you won't be thinking however, unless you're in the know, is that the best songwriter to be born on British soil after John Lennon and Paul McCartney is this very guy. Which makes me terribly annoyed because it seems to be only fair that those touched with supreme skill and wonderful talent, if not brushed over at birth with a dusting of genius, get their due before they fade into old age.

Mr McAloon - at least not yet - has never had his due because the punditocracy are more concerned with leather jackets and drug-taking than they are with songs. In all probability the problem is fundamentally this: that almost the entire tribe of pop and rock journalists can't sing or play an instrument beyond the chords to Kumbaya and Chopsticks. Because of this they don't want to think and therefore write about music. The will to understand why Satisfaction is a great record and Cindy Incidentally isn't has always been lacking.

So they have chosen instead to concentrate on the peripheral elements of the scene: the clothes, the hair, the drinking, the pharmaceuticals, the image (not the imagery) of the music-makers. Or at the more cerebral end, of the impact of the superstars or unknown artisans and poets of the underground on the culture, their effect on the times. This is to try construct a social history or a Sociology of Rock and it is pitiful. Or focussed, unbelievably, upon lyrics, as if they were eighty per cent of the deal. When there have been exceptions there have been embarrassments such as Ian McDonald's Revolution In The Head, a triumph in terms of the sociological development of music in the 1960s, but a disaster in terms of musical appreciation and analysis. The vast record, cassette, 8-track and CD buying public have deserved a far, far better literature of their music for a desperately long time.

But, though this all adds up to a shameful state of affairs, there are worse tragedies in the world to get worked up about than Paddy McAloon not selling millions of records and being feted for writing huge stashes of brilliant songs for others bereft of the talent for musical and lyrical composition.

And having gnashed and moaned about this unappreciated artist, it's true that his albums have always enjoyed good, if not great reviews. But that isn't enough. The writing fraternity likes heroes and kings. They could have done a lot more to make sure that McAloon was crowned Emperor of post-Beatle songwriters somewhere between the launch of Band Aid and the first Gulf War, and as they didn't, they shall never be forgiven.

Part II

So don't look at me and say that I'm the very one who

makes the cornball things occur, the shiver of the fur

McAloon deserves our attention and approbation for his lyric writing alone. One of the tragedies of popular music is the failure of most of its foot soldiers to aspire to fill their songs with meaningful words. Credit Chris Martin of Coldplay, who on MTV of all places told an interviewer in late 2002 that he didn't like their first record because he thought his lyrics were awful. And he wasn't joking. The problem remains, however, that few artists operating in the new century seem to have this attitude.

Modern music has in fact, completely lost its way, as anyone with half a brain recognizes, partially thanks to record companies who seem more than ever to be doing everything they possibly can to give capitalism a filthy name. Another of its key problems however, is one of identity: it doesn't know whether it's an art form or a good excuse for an orgy.

Everywhere you look there are bands, bands, bands and singers, singers, singers. In as wealthy an age as we have ever known in the western world, people have more money to consume ever more musical product and the interest and inclination too. If sales of CDs are falling, it has nothing at all to do with lack of substantive interest in music per se. And probably more young people want to make music than ever before. Kids want to be in bands again. White kids want to play thrash metal or acoustic guitars and for black kids hip-hop has opened up new worlds. Christ, if you can't play you can DJ. Then if you can play but you can't compose, you can get a tribute band together. In short, there are more categories and types of music being listened to and performed than ever before.

You could take the post-modern or liberal argument and opine that this is a great thing. Look at how democratic the scene is, look at the ease of entry. Look at how easy it is to get some sort of gig. But what does everyone want to make music for? Surely money and fame mop up 80% of the contenders, sex another ten. To avoid the mundanity of every day life no doubt accounts for another eight per cent, say. Which leaves a putative 2% who are in it for the love of being creative. Who want to push their talent to its extremes. Who want to revel in the pleasure of sheer creative expression. In other words, who understand that modern music can be an art form.

I may of course have the numbers wrong. It could be that a whole lot more are in it for the best of reasons (i.e. not just to get laid, trashed and a big car). In which case there's a chapter to be written about why these people make such downright bad and worthless music. For the here and now, let us consider the point that the literary side of the work of Paddy McAloon since his arrival in the commercial arena twenty years ago only serves to emphasize the failure of popular music - at least white popular music as art.

In his earliest work, he seemed to be reaching for, or have chosen a radically different way of presenting his ideas and emotions in word form. At the same time as Morrissey was fetchingly taking the post-New Wave form out to left field - not before time - with irreverence, cheek and nostalgic homosexual romance, McAloon seemed to be writing an eccentrically English beat poetry in the uncertain age of Thatcherism and the return of the Cold War. Take the first line of each of the songs from the first album, Swoon:

An outlaw stands in a peasant land, in every face see Judas.

Some expressions take me back, like “Hair of Gold” and “Sweet Mary” and “Running To Me.”

Stella Mater, light is failing, making such a fool of thee when you'd love to be someone.

It's much more beguiling than children at play. The mind meets dilemma with a heart in decay.

Cruel is the gospel that sets us all free and takes you away from me.

BO BO BEE, BO BEE, BO BO-BO BEE, BO BEE, BO I couldn't bear to be special, couldn't bear, couldn't bear.

I'm not looking to disturb you, just a little to unnerve you.

Sitting alone when her work is through, these days she's listless though that spring sky is blue.

There are those who own the world around your own.

12345/12345....12345/12345 Her husband works in Jodrell Bank, he's home late in the morning.

It's hard to act so simply, it's easy to make noise.

I suspect that now, the lyricist himself may cringe at this work. Of course, it's easy to point and snigger, say his style was terribly arch, way too mannered. But that is to think like a fool. The easiest thing in the world is to opt for the bland. That way no one will hold you up to ridicule because no one will notice you. No one will even be looking. That McAloon began his recording career stretching out for enticing if not exhilarating prospect of difference is to be more than applauded.

These early lyrics are characterised by the sheer audacity of inserting unlikely and unseemly words and phrases into mere songs (for a few of many examples: ‘tuppentup friend,‘ ‘equating elegance and real estate,‘ ‘astrologeewhizzness,' ‘stella mater,‘ ‘reconcile art,‘ and ‘basketball,' around which he built a whole song on the album). We shouldn't be surprised. This is the guy who conjured the title “Lions In My Own Garden, Exit Someone” for his band's first single on the strength of a current girlfriend moving to the town of Limoges in France.

If this seemed to add up to a manic attempt to expunge every platitude from the book of popular music since Elvis walked into the Sun Studio in 1954, well good. If, as a result his lyric style in the beginning felt somewhat frictional on the ear, so what? At least it was new and offered some excitement. Every sub-division of time needs a tyro on the scene tearing down the walls of sad normality. Paddy McAloon was our literate radical of late 1983.

Much of the work was fairly abstruse, almost like trying to get to grips with Eliot, but it was stretching your mind, making you think. How much better, you considered, whilst wrestling with “Here On The Eerie's” ‘cool critique of new Gomorrah, or schoolboy crush on Che Guevara, face yourself or give it away” to be lost in fog than not even being given anything to think about. And anyway, there were a couple of songs on the album which were perfectly intelligible and showed McAloon to be a lyricist of great expression.

“Cruel” was a love song which, apart from the tricky opening line (the aforementioned ‘cruel is the gospel that sets us all free'), anyone could understand and relate to. The development of the first verse is superb. ‘There is no Chicago urban blues more heartfelt than my lament for you,' speaks the narrator. This is lovely poetry. And the next is startling for its directness and candour and for it's freshness of style. ‘I'm a liberal guy,' he tells us in this unusual vernacular, ‘too cool for the macho ache, with a secret tooth for the cherry on the cake.' Well alright, the everyday speech too quickly gives way to the formal poetic form of diction, but you have to appreciate the rhyming and the sheer fact that he is bothering to present to us his ideas which totally avoid cliché. He goes on, ‘with a pious smile, a smile that changes what I say..' Not sure I quite grasp this, but wait; ‘while I waste my time in regretting that the days went from perfect to just okay.'

The conveying here, of the pain and discomfort of being in love but not in control makes for some terrific lyric writing. The impact all too easily hits us in the solar plexus of our own memory, when we too suffered like that. To connect us electrically, if you will, to our past life: isn‘t this one of the prime functions of the best poetry? ‘From perfect to just okay' is, well, perfect. And there are a couple of pearls in the song left yet. “Lordy, what would I do? don't call me possessive, but God if he's smootchin' with you.” Ooh, doesn't that just make you squirm with embarrassment or pain when we felt that hot, red pain of jealousy when we were young (or not so young)? And soon, some great rhyming: “my heart is aligned, it couldn't be neutral, it couldn't be that way inclined.”

Cruel's second verse sees continually unfolding quality. There is the wretched emotional honesty of “If I'm troubled by every folding of your skirt, am I guilty of every male inflicted hurt?” to enjoy. Then the positing of the problem of the writer dealing with the impossibility of converting visceral feelings into words. One could cavil at McAloon turning self-reverential on the one hand, but recognise that the intensity of new love makes would-be poets of us all.

Couldn't Bear To Be Special is probably the other great song on the album, not

least for it being championed by Elvis Costello, if not then the Godfather of UK pop at the time, then certainly its Michael Caine. The absence of the lush keyboard which was to radically alter the Prefab Sprout sound within a couple of years makes essentially a romantic song an astringent experience. This is not to say that it is what it is: a quite extraordinary, powerful recording. There's a good argument to had in asserting that love song composers have historically blown it or had it blown for them by their most personal emotional outpourings presented to the public in the form of a lush romanticism: which is like taking a slice of treacle tart and spreading an inch of caster sugar over the top. Avoiding whatever temptation there may have been at the time to add layers of keyboard and/or real strings to soften the ride, we are exposed to two vocal performances of visceral rawness and pain. At odds with the culture of popular singing, there was little danger of the airwaves being swamped with eager jockeys playing the songs to death. Their being red in tooth and claw may well have suffocated the dozen or so cover versions both songs deserved. Thus Cruel and Couldn't Bear To Be Special remain two of the great unknown gems of popular music.

Characteristic of the first Sprout records was McAloon's preparedness to throw himself into the vocal fray with the exuberance of a knockout boxer. He sounded wild and desperate on 'Special, and could have gone on to have given the studio a decent version of Twist And Shout on the evidence of what made it onto vinyl. His voice was later to soften into the singer McAloon we're more accustomed to. Though his voice is extremely attractive, beautiful even (cf. 'as I walked out' on the magnificent Streets Of Laredo/Not Long For This World from The Gunman and other stories) in its absolute distinctiveness, it's a shame that the openly exposed passion of the early days have been lost. Anyhow, it was clear from the off that the character and sound of this new band's vocalist was another feather in our caps as gleeful acolytes.

Despite the opportunity the neophyte record maker gave the completely dispassionate reader/listener to knock the lyric style for being reminiscent of undergraduate poetry, McAloon, marked himself out in the arena of contemporary lyric writing as someone fresh and interesting. By the standards of the time, and even more so now, he could have been at the forefront of some new avant garde, had there been a bunch of people around trying to stretch the parameters of pop diction.

All this said, rock-pop criticism, or certainly NME rock-pop criticism in Britain, has farcically mistaken songs for the lyrical content of songs. Presumably because of the inability of most hacks to be able to blow a wet fart through a child's recorder, ninety-per cent plus of reviews down the decades focussed exclusively on the artists' words or weltanschaung. So. If at the beginning, Prefab Sprout had lacked the wherewithal to make fine music, as opposed to poetry with cod-musical accompaniment, neither of us would be here for there would be nothing to write about. Naturally, they did. Just as there was an acute freshness to their lyrical breeze, their sound and McAloon's song writing cut across the fabric of their debut year out of left field.

With great fortune, I was able, one innocent Friday evening to watch The Tube and witness back to back debut videos by both The Smiths and Prefab Sprout, the former tearing up the ether with This Charming Man while the latter also lit up the darkness with The Devil Always Has The Best Tunes. Having always had an antenna set permanently to Harmony Alert as opposed to Noise, my ears were entranced and more than somewhat excited. It was a great, great time (the last great time, alas) for new music still.

‘New' might have been the operative word for the sound of both bands (never mind the spectacle of one Steven Morrissey). Johnny Marr's ear for melody and harmony made This Charming Man one of the greatest pieces of music of all time, but didn't manage to dominate the proceedings. 'Tunes was also startling and original as was it's tremendously accomplished B-side Walk On and, as I was soon gratified to find out, the first single Lions'.

Originality was only a small part of the attraction. What songwriters produce is predicated by several factors. The dominant one is their musical ear. The ‘ear' - no doubt in terms of strict science it's the auditory system in the brain - tells us what sounds we like, what excites us, stimulates us, comforts us, soothes us, nourishes us and above all, satisfies us. What satisfies the songwriter, (s)he generally reproduces compositionally. While they are attracted to certain rhythms, more crucially for most listeners, they are attracted to certain chord combinations. These have a quite uncanny ability to produce an emotional reaction in the ear of the listener, sometimes shallow, sometimes extraordinarily deep and all points in between. For some unfortunate people, they produce nothing at all. Paddy McAloon is one whose musical mind is attuned predominantly to the chord progressions which produce emotionally intense feelings. Thus we find the melancholy and sweet emotion of the minor chord all over musical blanket of Swoon and the first singles. He is and was not one attracted to the feelings of doom produced by minor chords threaded together in succession, however. It's unusual to find a minor chord not sandwiched between two major ones.

Understanding early Prefab Sprout music though is more complex. Because from the off he used unusual guitar tunings rather than the E-A-D-G-B-E tuning that all guitar players of whatever ability are familiar with, the Prefab sound tended immediately to the unfamiliar and therefore interesting. The McAloon ear not only looked for the sweetness and sadness inherent in certain chord changes, it was also stimulated by the mysterious and unfathomable. When open tunings are used on an acoustic guitar, the talented player/composer quickly finds unusual but appealing chords tumbling out. The effect is akin to some (purely, I would guess) aural erection. On the evidence of his early work, it seems that McAloon gleefully jumped on the excitement and pleasing uncertainty of the various open tuning chords he found in his developing guitar explorations, and they also dominate the songs of Swoon and provide much of its characteristic sound.

The resultant album is a wild dilettante compared to McAloon's later work, romantic to some degree, but much less so than the even the sophomore Steve McQueen. The surface eccentricity of much of the harmony and the percussive nature of the dominant P. McAloon rhythm guitar leaves the demonstratively emotional Cruel and Couldn't Bear To Be Special well short of lushness or softness. These great songs are presented to us starkly, along with the rest of the album forming almost a challenge.

Almost but not quite. There again, McAloon's predilection at the time for the unorthodox, either in terms of diction, song structure or time signature does lend the album an air of aural discomfort at times. Perhaps by the time of Steve McQueen he saw the style of his band's opening album statement as misguided, the unfortunate but inevitable result of inexperience, naivity or a wilful desire to burst onto the scene in a shell burst of radical departure from existing norms. [Paddy help me out, here, I'm guessing wildly!] There is a paradox here however, which perhaps points the way to the band they were quite soon to become. Lacing the album every step of the way is Wendy Smith.

Wendy's presence in the group seemed peripheral to many early fans, an example of Linda Syndrome, it was thought, though she was a welcome sight for lascivious college boys as Prefab Sprout made their way on the small gig scene in 1984 and 1985. The pleasing softness of her voice provided some ballast to the grainy stridency of the McAloon vocal sound and echoes the current use of the device by Steely Dan, particularly on their 2003 album Everything Must Go. Though the voice lacked strength, substance even, it worked both because the strand she added to the blend made for a more interesting and comfortably integrated effect on the ear and because she could hit the notes with total accuracy. Her pre-Raphaelite soprano also made its own important contribution to what immediately became the outfit's trademark sound. Clearly to McAloon this was important. In retrospect - for what that's worth, use of hindsight being the easiest form of cheating known to man - it appears clear that he wasn't remotely averse to adding a more feminine aspect to the music in a figurative sense. For soon enough, the band would suggest in their work anything but muscularity and stridency. Never again would scratchy rhythm electric guitar and McAloon's voice tearing almost to distortion near the top of his range come at the listener like an earnest cheesegrater.

Though the albums which followed resonate with much greater depth and certainly beauty, Swoon and the opening single statements made their mark on early fans and critics alike because of the talent of the man in the middle of Prefab Sprout. When push comes to shove, great music is always first and foremost about the inherent gifts of the writer, the singer and the player. Even at the beginning of the band's history fans fed on the exceptional gifts of Paddy McAloon, the writer of both music and words. Merely in transit to full-flowering they may have been, but they were evident in abundance to those out there in the music consuming United Kingdom whose ears were tuned to the emotional, the unusual, the melodic and the highly intelligent. By the middle of the Orwell year of grim Conservatism, Paddy McAloon had laid down a sizeable marker for the future.

CT PS Trial Piece June 2003