1984 Music: Prefab Sprout, Swoon

Release date: 12 March 

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Yes. 

I remember buying this on cassette very shortly after its release and reading the lyrics on the train home from Liverpool city centre. My god, this is poetry! I knew other people who listened to the Teardrop Explodes (though not, I think, to Cope’s solo records): I didn’t know anyone who liked Prefab Sprout. I then bought the EP that compiled their two early singles and, slightly later, the 12-inch version of the first release of ‘When Love Breaks Down’. I don’t know why I took a chance on Swoon: I didn’t read the music papers regularly, and the reviews quoted below would scarcely have encouraged me to spend my pocket money even if I had seen them. Perhaps Annie Nightingale or Janice Long played a track on the radio (I listened to both more regularly than Kid Jensen or Richard Skinner – I didn’t listen to John Peel at all). But I suspect my purchase was a response to The Tube broadcasting a ‘video’ of ‘Cruel’: 

 

I haven’t gone back into 1982–3 to check the early coverage of the Sprout in the NME and Melody Maker, but I suspect they may have been victims of music-paper syndrome: fawning early coverage, followed by bitter dismissal when they threatened to become successful. In any case, in 1984 their first album fared no better than Julian Cope’s. From Jim Shelley in the NME on 10 March: 

‘Swoon’ absolutely swims in wordplay, coy clues, dumb puns, arch artificiality, smart-alec allusion in a way that is so-so, clever-clever, ham-fisted, high-handed, even half-hearted … ‘Swoon’, in rejecting simplicity and sentiment, does have a definite, caring craft to it, a self-involved craftiness, a plucky capacity for cunning. But for all its deft complication and wordiness, it never excites or excels, is wildly harmless, consistently irksome and virtually passionless. Finally, it doesn’t say much. 

Or Adam Sweeting in Melody Maker on the same day: 

One way and another, this is drivel, mostly of the twee and gutless variety. … it’s rambling, disjointed, strings of devious chord changes toppling into one another without any sense of urgency or consequence. … “Swoon”, apparently an acrostic from Songs Written Out Of Necessity (bullshit), is a gigantic folly, a tour de force of self indulgence. As you can tell, I’m horrified. 

The group also seem to have been dogged by comparisons with Steely Dan, which seem baffling now, but this was obviously a serious black mark against them in 1984, allowing journos to dismiss them as too-clever-by-half sterile musos. 

There is some force to the criticisms in these reviews – insofar as one can identify actual criticisms among the rhetorical flourishes, which are almost as baroque as those in the songs under attack. Swoon is very much a first album by a young man trying to impress: again, I’m no musicologist, but I have no doubt that it’s full of weird chords and time signatures, and many of the songs have a herky-jerky, stop-start quality, with the vocal lines overcrammed with words. As Sweeting notes, ‘Technique’ begins with a 1-2-3-4-5 count-in, seemingly just to let you know it’s in 5/4, while ‘I Couldn’t Bear to be Special’ opens with an irritating scat-line ‘Bo, bo bee, bo’, whose purpose similarly seems to be that it isn’t ‘La-la-la’. The lyrics to the album’s opener ‘Don’t Sing’ are based around an ekphrastic paraphrase of the plot to Graham Greene’s novel, The Power and the Glory, about a ‘whisky priest’ hounded to his doom by revolutionaries in Mexico – as ludicrous a conceit as Scott Walker’s mariachi re-telling of The Seventh Seal fifteen years earlier. Even worse: Paddy McAloon seems to be not merely retelling the story, but using the novel’s emotional arc as a parallel for some vaguely defined personal crisis. Similarly with the summary of Bobby Fisher’s dramatic career as a chess grandmaster in ‘Cue Fanfare’. 

But isn’t there something admirable about this throw-everything-at-the-wall overegging? Showing off isn’t always a fatal flaw – if one has something to show off about. And there’s real talent on show here: not a paucity of ideas, but a surplus. 

 

A comparison with the Sprout’s second album, Steve McQueen, is instructive. The production on Swoon is relatively anonymous and, since the indie-label budget from Newcastle label Kitchenware was presumably limited, there are few flourishes, just a basic palette of sounds focused around various guitars (mainly acoustic) and keyboards (mainly electric piano). All the instruments have their own space in the mix. The band get a co-production credit with David Brewis. Conversely, Steve McQueen is very identifiably produced by Thomas Dolby, and while his presence is not as oppressive as, say, Martin Hannett’s on Joy Division’s records, the songs somehow feel simpler and more direct even among the addition of various studio effects. They have a clearer identity despite sharing the limelight with Dolby’s production. 

We all know that pop songs have a Proustian quality, summoning us back to our youth – especially, perhaps those we first heard between the ages of fourteen and nineteen. But I have two later memories associated with this album. In 1994, when I hadn’t heard it for several years, I caught a crackly broadcast of ‘Cruel’ on a pirate radio station on my first visit to Italy to do a language course before starting a doctorate in Italian history – and realised I could still quote the lyrics verbatim (which I suppose makes this a memory of a memory). 

I'm a liberal guy, too cool for the macho ache 

With a secret tooth for the cherry on the cake 

With a pious smile, a smile that changes what I say 

While I waste my time in regretting 

That the days went from perfect to just okay 

Quite what it was about this student-union sexual-politics handwringing that appealed to my goofy, jug-eared, never-been-kissed fourteen-year-old self I don’t know. Probably only that I had so few albums that I knew the lyrics to all of them (I can also quote large chunks of Larry Norman’s Only Visiting This Planet, for example, a 1970s Christian album with a sensibility far removed from Swoon). 

Another memory: in early 2015, when I’d bought the album again to immerse myself in all-things 1984 before starting to write The Angels of L19, I used to listen to it on the bus on my way to work in a call centre. So now it summons in me not just a feeling of teenage nostalgia, but also a sensation of dread and smothered panic attack.