From Langley Park to Memphis: Prefab Sprout's American Dream
A paradoxical mix of pop ambition and the mockery of that ambition, From Langley Park to Memphis makes the American dream a truly human scene.
Review by Harrison Lemke
A band name like Prefab Sprout might be most readily envisionable in psychedelic bubble lettering, but this band’s sound is far from psychedelic: It is controlled, synthetic art pop meets new wave. The songs of its leader and sole songwriter, Paddy McAloon, are Gershwinesque, formalist, unexpected but always meticulous. He is as odd a pop star as Prefab Sprout is the name of a pop band, a scrawny Geordie of Irish-Catholic stock with little immediate charisma. His voice is none-too-powerful, marrying scholarly soulful tics to the pristine diction of one anxious to be understood. In music videos he wears gaudy, ill-fitting costumes that serve to underline a certain boyish ungainliness. Nevertheless, according to some, he is the greatest songwriter of his generation. “The Last Pop Genius,” said Rolling Stone in 1991; one need only Google “Paddy McAloon genius” to be flooded with breathless introductions to reviews and interviews. And there might be no stronger single argument for his genius than the group’s third album, 1988’s From Langley Park to Memphis.
The follow-up to a commercial breakthrough (1985’s Steve McQueen), From Langley Park to Memphis is superficially the expected move. Its glittery arrangements and approximations of Michael-Jackson whoops and Elvis-Presley sneers beg for repeat radio play; its title and those of its singles demand the attention of a cosmopolitan, and especially an American, audience. Yet at every turn the songwriting surprises, nuancing or contradicting first appearances. It is an ironic deflation of stardom, a friendly rebuke to the starstruck.
The opener, “The King of Rock ’n’ Roll,” is the group’s only Top-10 U.K. single, but already something is amiss: its goofy novelty-song chorus is in fact the haunting memory of its washed-up rock star narrator’s own novelty hit. The song is woozily self-referential, a hall-of-mirrors meditation on being trapped in a future dreamed up by one’s youthful self, on how a self-chosen fate can be as fatal as any. “Cars and Girls,” meanwhile, takes aim at Bruce Springsteen for what the narrator perceives as his naive escapism. While these song concepts are heady, their glory is in how natural and inevitable McAloon makes them seem, and how thoughtlessly infectious they are as pop songs on top of it all.
Whether stars or starstruck, when their dreams abandon them, they all end up sleeping in the same place.
The album’s third single, “Hey Manhattan,” strikes at another American icon—not a star, but the place stars are made. As with “The King of Rock ’n’ Roll,” the song explores the nature of human mythmaking: “Strolling Fifth Avenue / just to think, Sinatra’s been here too / these myths we can’t undo / they lie in wait for you / we live them till they’re true.” McAloon later twists these phrases, turning his gaze to the human cost of a myth that serves only a few: “Scrounging Fifth Avenue / just to think, the poor could live here too / but what are they to do? / these myths belong to you.” Yet under all of this is evoked the very myth itself, Broadway, Sinatra, and Lou Reed all at once. It is emphatically a lie, and yet no pop star—no matter how astute or British—can hope to escape it.
These motifs come to their finest point in the album’s closer, “The Venus of the Soup Kitchen,” a lullaby for the down-and-out of every stripe: louche stars of yesteryear, eyes bloodshot and bank accounts running dry; the drifters, stranded by the highway side; the desperate, scrounging Fifth Avenue. McAloon croons over synth arpeggios straight from some late-80s public television program and gospel-choir “whoa”s. I’m uneasy at the co-opting of religious music into the secular, and in the case of Black gospel music in particular it is hardly my place to absolve, but the basic impulse rings true. The song plays as a sort of cockeyed hymn by a wayward Catholic boy to the Virgin Mary in disguise, the titular “Venus”: “All us poor cripples who’ve been in the wars / end up sleeping on her floor.” The wars in question are not identified. The ambiguity of the characters’ plight suggests the universality of suffering, drawing all the figures in the preceding songs into unity. Whether stars or starstruck, when their dreams abandon them, they all end up sleeping in the same place.
Of course, this is not a concept album, per se. “I Remember That,” “Nightingales,” and “Nancy, Let Your Hair Down for Me” may be three of the purest adult-contemporary dreams ever set to tape, but they’re not, as they say, “socially conscious.” And yet a sense of unmet desire runs through these songs, connecting them to their headier neighbors like beads on a chain.
For McAloon, America functions as a potent symbol of the basic human tragicomedy: the place where the most impossible of human myths are chased with the greatest fervor, and dreamers meet their unhappiest ends.
Taken as a whole, From Langley Park to Memphis is something that appears to delight its chief architect: a paradox. It’s full of both pop ambition and the lampooning of ambition. There’s a weight of holiness about the music, vocals ever ready to transmute into a sigh or a groan, and yet the heaviest moment is also often the funniest, metatextually embodying the very British-Irish sentiment expressed in the final song: “When you’re scared of down-and-out / you keep it to yourself / and if anyone suspects / you say: ‘Who, me? Hardly.’”
Almost every one of these songs is dressed up like satire, yet at their depths they reaffirm the beauty and hidden sadness of “these myths we can’t undo”—of romance, of New York City, or of music itself.
McAloon insists that this is not an “American” album. Indeed, everything from his diction to his dry humor and emotional diffidence is unmistakably English. The title phrase, though, and its appearance in the closing song, is clarifying: “Hey, if something’s hurting you / could be it hurts your brothers too / from Langley Park to Memphis.” Whether because America, land of rock stars and movie stars, has made a certain kind of dream its export, or because of something deep in every human heart that finds its loudest voice in this weird experimental country, America’s dreams are felt all over the world—even in Langley Park, a sleepy village in County Durham. For McAloon, then, America functions as a potent symbol of the basic human tragicomedy: the place where the most impossible of human myths are chased with the greatest fervor, and dreamers meet their unhappiest ends; where innocent young souls hit the open road in search of what can’t be found and end up coming to grief, carsick, down-and-out and lonely but—if they are very lucky—sleeping on someone’s floor.
Harrison Lemke is a songwriter and musician. He writes from Austin, Texas. He can be found online at harrisonlemke.com and on Twitter at @harrison_lemke.
From Langley Park to Memphis was released on March 14, 1988, by Kitchenware Records.
