PREFAB SPROUT: FROM CROKE PARK TO LANGLEY PARK TO MEMPHIS

It takes a while to unravel the insanity of it all and I don’t think you ever completely can but ultimately it just wasn’t to be for the valiant hurlers of Cork: the better team prevailed in this year’s All-Ireland hurling final and the victors now write the story. And with that we shuffled out of Croke Park, our swagger watered down, and our heads and our hearts melted: still in July and already the winter stares at us hard.   

The big days we grew up with no longer swing around like they used to and what was once an almost yearly pilgrimage is now subject to a robust pre-clearance routine. And to those of us now in middle-age a clock ticks on and we’re asking questions we never thought we would. Will we ever see another one, do you think? Will we ever again see Liam McCarthy back in Cork?

So, you take that same old route back into the heart of the city but you’ve doing it by rote now and you’re painting from memory. Even the porter tastes differently in defeat: the pints are a struggle and you’re really just fulfilling a duty and delaying the inevitable. The centre of town is at odds with us and not even the auld hurling guff in our old haunt is enough to keep us pulsed. An early bus flutters its lashes, and we make our way out into the drizzle, back into the sinking.   

My long-time wingman reminds me how, when Cork last took home a senior hurling championship, we were then in our late 30s, parents to new-borns. That feels at once like an eternity ago and a matter of weeks ago. So too that balmy Saturday night last April when, with the reigning champions downed in Cork, a smell of sulphur and the hint of promise popped the clammy air and swept us up the Marina all the way to the back room in Coughlan’s. But now we’re asking again: will we ever see another one?  

The more things stay the same, the more the old order comes undone. In early July, Croke Park resounded to a different, more angular beat when, after a helter-skelter afternoon in the heat, Cork’s old-school victory songs were retired in plain sight. Where once we greeted our wins with traditional airs and arranged-bys, the stadium now rushed to the surge of ‘After All’ by The Frank and Walters, a song that’s been as spectacularly re-imagined and consistently re-energised as the game of hurling itself.

There are numerous pieces on this site about that song, its writers and its origins but suffice to say that, in moments of raw celebration – and as pick-me-ups on the darker days – Cork people know where to go for their sounds. ‘After All’ is the song for Cork now, so utterly in step with a people, a place and their sport that it’s relegated the old reliables. 

The Frank and Walters and myself go back an awfully long way: we met during the banana-shaped summer in 1990 that yielded Cork an unprecedented All-Ireland hurling and football double and we’ve stayed in each other’s orbits in the decades since. Prefab Sprout were one of the groups that bonded us from the off, the common ground on which we could discuss the art of the songwriter and the architecture of the song, of which we did an awful lot. Those were mighty days and heady nights.

The Franks sound nothing like Prefab Sprout – who does? – but Paul Linehan, the band’s creative heartbeat, knows his skirts from his kidneys and his middle-eights from his breaks and fades. Paddy McAloon – his Prefab Sprout equivalent – is one of his favourite songwriters.

I too adore Paddy’s work and, every now and again, I’ll reach for it obsessively: my summer was soundtracked exclusively by his band’s third album, ‘From Langley Park to Memphis’. It’s a lush, far-reaching record that requires that sort of applied devotion and attention and, like the best of novels, films, dramas and indeed hurling finals, continues to throw up the unexpected.

I’m not convinced the album ever generated the respect it warrants, either from the band’s cohort of devotees or from critics. For a record so big and bright, it enjoys nothing like the uncontested garlanding of ‘Steve McQueen’ or ‘Jordan: The Comeback’. Indeed, the record was released to what one might charitably refer to as lukewarm reviews: a recurring theme within which was that ‘From Langley Park to Memphis’ wasn’t ‘Steve McQueen’. Assessed more for what it wasn’t and not for what it was, basically.   

The title suggests a re-birth or renewal from one chapter to the next, nodding to the band’s origins in County Durham, Elvis Presley and stating its widescreen ambition up top. Appropriately enough, the album was released just in time for Easter, 1988, a fact that won’t have been lost on its writer.

The Smiths – on whose every word and note the British music press had feasted regally for years – had broken up in acrimony months previously. And into that vacuum, the U.K. was about to embark on a summer of love in warehouses, fields and forests countrywide.

Paddy, meanwhile, was sticking to what he knew best. With his references to Jimmy Webb, Issac Hayes and Barbra Streisand, he sounded as utterly out of kilter as always. Like a trendy theology student with an academic interest in popular culture, little wonder his work addled many of those charged with making sense of it.    

Its foolhardy to dismiss ‘Langley Park’ cheaply: there’s as much going on under its bonnet as there is on any Prefab Sprout long-player, and perhaps even more. Yes, it’s an ambitious record of scale and, as tends to be the case on those wide-screen affairs –four producers, five engineers, three separate recording locations – the joins are visible. But this was always going to be Prefab Sprout’s breakthrough elpee: the commitment by the band’s record company to see them move in from the fringes and into pop music’s mainstream comes at a cost and is at once a help and a hinderance.

In early-1986, what was then RTÉ Radio 2 played an edited version of a live Prefab Sprout show recorded at Reading University for BBC Radio’s ‘In Concert’ series. The show was acquired by RTÉ as part of an output deal between the two broadcasters and was one of many live concerts – designed and built for radio – that once peppered the national radio schedules.

That Reading show was part of a long tour of Britain in support of the release of the ‘Steve McQueen’ elpee [1985], Prefab Sprout’s second. That road-trip – and the broadcast – featured the group’s best-known line-up: Paddy McAloon on vocals and guitar, Martin McAloon on bass guitar, Wendy Smith on vocals and Neil Conti on drums. The band was augmented on that tour by Michael Graves on keyboards.

I remember that broadcast very clearly: I taped it to cassette on the night and returned regularly to it for months afterwards. And I did so because – and in keeping with a key part of Fanning’s brief on RTÉ radio – it gave us a glimpse into the future. Into previously unreleased Prefab Sprout material.

Originally planned as a follow-up to ‘Swoon’, the band’s debut elpee released in 1984, Prefab Sprout’s ‘Protest Songs’ album was still in cold storage. But from it, listeners were treated to live versions of ‘Wicked Things’ and ‘Tiffany’s’, neither of which were officially available. The edited live set from Reading also included another fresh number we were hearing for the first time: ‘Cars and Girls’.

Here, then, was the shape of things to come. ‘Cars and Girls’ was propelled by Neil Conti at a furious clip: it sounds far more full-bodied played live on the ‘Steve McQueen/Two Wheels Good’ tour than it does as the second track on ‘From Langley Park to Memphis’. For a band often deemed to be overly callow and far too subtle, they could, on occasion, wig out with the best of them. Conti, I think, often played with The Sprouts like he would have done were he in Hüsker Dü.

With this in mind, I refer you to a number of Prefab Sprout B-sides – especially ‘Tin Can Pot’, ‘Vendetta’, ‘Tornado’ and ‘Nero the Zero’ – older songs where the band just cuts loose on a couple of guitar led rumbles, pared back and fancy-free with a rehearsal room finish. They summon that same spirit eight tracks into ‘From Langley Park’ when they kick into ‘The Golden Calf’, the most outrageous, full-on riff-song in the group’s canon.

Carved into the record between the hallowed ground of ‘Knock on Wood’ and ‘Nancy [Let Your Hair Down for Me]’ – ‘The Golden Calf’ is the soundscape to Bruce Springsteen’s fever dream in which he determined, on mature reflection, that ‘life’s a highway’.

Written in the 1970s – when the band worked exclusively with the raw compliment of guitars, bass and drums – the excellent Sproutology website claims the song was knocked off as a joke during recording sessions for ‘Langley Park’. And that it was added to the final track-listing by the band’s record company, who felt it would make a strong single. The cryptic special thanks to Paul Russell on the album’s credits – ‘For telling us where we could stick ‘The Golden Calf!’ – certainly suggests the black arts and a hidden hand.

To the passing listener ‘From Langley Park to Memphis’ – the band’s most commercially successful elpee – is best known for its opening cut, ‘The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’, Prefab Sprout’s biggest-selling single and most popular song. It was accompanied by a promotional video in which the band, all in shades, enjoyed cocktails served up by a frog in a tuxedo while dancing hot dogs added a surrealist bent to the farce. The previous summer, an Italian singer, Sabrina, enjoyed a pan-European hit with a high-octane, electro-pop number, ‘Boys [Summertime Love]’, that came replete with a saucy, holiday themed video, also shot on location at a swimming pool. ‘The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’ clip may or may not have been a tribute or a parody but it’s certainly in similar territory.  

But the promo served a purpose and did its job: it helped to cannon the group to where Paddy had long determined it deserved to be and gave Prefab Sprout its first Top Ten single in Britain. And beyond the mixed marketing message – this is as naked commercial as the band gets – the easy magic in McAloon’s pen is as obvious as always.  A hum-dinging pop tune supports a spectacular sermon: ‘all my lazy teenage boasts are now high-precision ghosts, and they’re coming round the track, to haunt me’, it begins. As couplets go, it’s up there with the imperious outro on ‘Jordan’s closing track: ‘if there ain’t a heaven that holds you tonight, they never sang doo-wop in Harlem’. And there is no greater critical compliment than that. 

‘From Langley Park to Memphis’ bounces off many satellites and, three years after ‘Steve McQueen’, the band has grown into its body. Less wordy than its predecessor, you’ll often see it cited alongside Steely Dan’s ‘Gaucho’ [1980] for critical reference. And with its intensive production and its spread of brass, banks of keyboards, lavish backing vocals and ambitious arrangements, it’s certainly a compatible bedfellow. Even if, to these ears, critical comparisons to Steely Dan have always felt overly manufactured. If anything, I think the reference is far better fitted to one of Prefab Sprout’s label-mates at Kitchenware Records, The Kane Gang, the serially under-rated soul-pop outfit whose leader, David Brewis, produced ‘Swoon’.  

Either way, it’s still a noticeable step-change. The production duties on ‘Langley Park’ are shared between Thomas Dolby, who left such a distinctive footprint on ‘Steve McQueen’, Jon Kelly, Andy Richards and McAloon himself and the record features guest appearances by Pete Townshend and Stevie Wonder. And, most spectacularly, the Andrae Crouch Singers, a gospel choir from Los Angeles with a long and winding history. All of whom are marked as ‘unforgettable experiences’ on the album’s credits. Approaching the summer of 1988, this was quite the distance from acid house.

The Andrae Crouch Singers sprinkle the stardust on a couple of key cuts, most notably the album’s closer, ‘The Venus of the Soup Kitchen’, on which they take one of Paddy’s finest ever tunes into previously uncharted territory. In the same breath, Stevie Wonder lends a rich harmonica solo to ‘Nightingales’, one of the album’s stand out songs and yet another from the McAloon songbook that deals with the magic of music and the richness of sound. ‘From Langley Park to Memphis’ is, by any stretch, a rare achievement.  

In the spirit of Emma Welles – the pseudonym used by Paddy McAloon on the liner notes on ‘Swoon’ – I took to an early bed on the night of the All-Ireland hurling final. The television highlights of the game was just one pointless emotional tussle too far for me and I was gone.

As is custom whenever I find myself at home alone, I reached for the balm of late-night radio to accompany me through the blue of the night and into the safe harbour of morning. Cathal Murray’s ‘Late Date’ on RTÉ Radio One is a constant comfort blanket in this house, the ultimate prayer at bedtime and the perfect punctuation point that joins the dots from day-to-day.  

And there, half an hour in, he pulls classic Stevie Wonder from his stash and follows it immediately with ‘Nightingales’ and a reference, typical of Cathal, to that effortless harmonica solo. In that moment, the night is still and tomorrow can wait.

And an easy sleep overtakes the man, and it brings him release.