Prefab Sprout- Jordan: The Comeback: Classic or Dud?

It's still got some great songs on 'though.

Some highlights from JORDAN (from distant memory -- it's been maybe a year since I last listened to this, even though there was a time when I unhesitatingly considered PM the world's greatest songwriter). In each case, it's the marriage of a well crafted song with just the right production touches that raises things to such a rare level of greatness...

The frustrated horniness of "Wild Horses" -- so much intensity here despite the slow tempo, and the drum programming is daringly "empty", which creates a uniquely "laid back" feel, further enhanced by the occasional percussion hiccup courtesy of Dolby.

The nostalgia of "Carnival 2000" -- deeply sad party music. I don't remember what I did to usher in the new millenium, but I should have been listening to this.

"Michael" - PM pulls off an awfully clever point-of-view (topped only by "Hi, this is God here," in "One of the Broken"); Dolby's Gregorian-chant-as-drone is a stroke of genius on the production side of things.

And yes, "We Let the Stars Go" is a perfect song.

I like Prefab Sprout better than Steely Dan, although I like both. I see the similarity in the songcraft -- in particular the jazzy harmonies -- and the polished production, but I think there's a stronger blues/roots element in Steely Dan which diminishes their appeal for me.

(And I like "King of Rock and Roll," although I see how the song, and especially the video, pigeonholed them in an unfortunate way. The single I regard as most uncharacteristic and unlikeable is "Faron Young.")

Can't not put a word in for "Paris Smith", "The Ice Maiden" and "Doo Wop in Harlem", but the main point of the record's genius is in the astoundingly evocative sequencing of tracks, masterful segues and wanderings around an ambitious concept. And of course, Thomas Dolby's production, which t' Sprout have clearly missed since then...

"death is a small price for heaven"

I bought this on iTunes recently. It sure sounds great so far.

Having been turned onto the Sprout only recently I honestly can't get enough of them right now. If Steve McQueen is a bit more immediate than Jordan then Jordan could be the more rewarding over time. Anyway, great stuff.

love this LP!...and have always loved LOVED the "you and I, won't make mistakes, that way that lovers do, saying this will last a lifetime, when it's just a year or two" lyric in "All The World Loves Lovers"...

"one of the broken" is so good. a simple piano ballad that would be on the radio all the time in a better world

Hell yeah, but Paddy had a way of inverting the pop song so that it wasn't as accessible as it seems on the surface.

prefabsprout.net has rumors of one or more albums imminent. One can only hope. And selfishly, would love to see another in the _I Trawl the Megahertz_ vein.

isn't he deaf?

Sounds like he's fixed his eyesight issues, though has a bit of double vision, and he's lost bass frequencies from his hearing. There's a good article linked off that website where he talks about his health problems.

And more interestingly, the various projects and songs he's got squirreled away.

the question is always whether those songs that he's always talking about actually exist. but then the last release had glimpses of things he has mentioned in the past. this record sounds so extravagant and luxurious but surely he didn't command much of a budget. did 'king of rock and roll' make him indispensable and deserving of record company largesse? or is it all down to thomas dolby?

"scarlet nights" is the best song ever

I tend to forget that track due to its spot on the sequence, and always feel a surprised "how could I have forgotten you?" when it plays. "All the World Loves Lovers" is another top one on that disc.

I might be crazy but I think Machine Gun Ibiza is my favorite track on this

I'll chime in with classic as well. Honestly, I never understood the Steely Dan comparisons (well, because I hate Steely Dan) until I heard 'Machine Gun Ibiza.' Great song.
― righteousmaelstrom (righteousmaelstrom), Friday, June 24, 2005 10:07 AM (eleven years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ah, that's what it is

yeah that was my fave off it for the first few weeks after it came out.

you guys should check this out, it's excellent http://www.sodajerker.com/episode-53-paddy-mcaloon/

Machine Gun Ibiza is the song I've been looking for since 1990 or 1991 when I heard it on college radio. I spent a few years asking for the Machine Gun Beaver song. I'm so happy to have randomly found it because of this thread.

i love them all but

"scarlet nights" is the best song ever

― HYPERLINK TO RAP GENIUS (BradNelson), Sunday, December 6, 2015 7:19 PM (eleven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

actually sometimes my fav is "one of the broken" which is weird bc i was allergic to the god side of this album for at least the first few months i listened to it

"End of the road I'm traveling
I will see Jordan beckoning!"

yeah that was my fave off it for the first few weeks after it came out.

you guys should check this out, it's excellent http://www.sodajerker.com/episode-53-paddy-mcaloon🔗/

Awesome, thank you! 🙏

Machine Gun Ibiza va Glamour Profession

jesse james bolero

Speaking of which in "Jesse James Symphony" why does Paddy reference Elvis with the lines "Well the zip code may read Vegas / But the heart beats Tupelo"? Is he comparing Jesse James to Elvis in terms of a wayward life?

Excerpt from Melody Maker, summer 1990 by Simon Reynolds

Jordan The Comeback was originally intended as a double album, and three of the sides are suites of thematically linked songs. One suite addresses the "bad boy" myth, using Jesse James as archetype of the spoilt mothers boys, who goes on the run from domesticity. But, grins Paddy, they're all really about Elvis.

Paddy: "The title track is Elvis as Howard Hughes on the top floor of his hotel in Vegas. I wanted to get an Elvis imitator to sing it, but then decided it was bit gimmicky. It's an Elvis monologue, him looking back at his life and saying 'I didn't do it right, but if I come back it'll be gospel music all the way and sod this 'Wooden Heart' crap. 'Jesse James Symphony' and 'Jesse James Bolero" came about when I was trying to kickstart my writing again, and I thought: 'what if I was writing something for someone like Streisand or Presley?'. I decided to write something that would have appealed to Elvis' own self-image. He liked to identify with mythic things, you can see that in his 'American Trilogy'. So I wrote something that dealt with him in those mythic proportions: the image of the outlaw, and all the sentimentality that allows the singer. The idea of his mother looking at him in the cradle, and then he ends up as this big fat guy onstage in Vegas that half the world wants to go to bed with. He's gone from from wearing your nappy, to wearing a nappy again, cos he's incontinent in your bed, which he was at the end. Finally, "Moondog" is about... if he came back, where would the Colonel have him playing?. There's only one place big enough, the moon. A satellite link-up."

monster classic. possibly the defining text of "poptimism" as a movement in my view? I've gone on record calling it the last record of the '80s before and I still stand by it (that or Behaviour, anyway) -- you can read it as a concept album from a guy who seems to believe that Elvis is genuinely some sort of biblical prophet-in-hiding who can be willed to return if all the forms of 20th-century pop song are ordered in the correct fashion and brought forward into the age of the CD, and it's a sort of deeply poignant celebration for this strange and impossible mythology. there's this bizarre Lucifer : Elvis : Jesse James :: Archangel Michael : Colonel Tom : Robert Ford metaphor going on underneath the surface that gets borderline esoteric in its construction of the popstar as a doomed figure grasping for a return towards eternal life through this mythmaking, and I think the Jesse James duology is the point at which this really comes into relief as this brief moment of lucidity where all these figures align and reveal themselves as finite. and then you get songs like "Machine Gun Ibiza", where another immortal pop figure gets invented out of thin air as if from a dream and becomes eminently unattainable through his effortless cool, while "All the World Loves Lovers" and "Wild Horses" for example gesture at this finitude through the lens of romantic desire, the secret engine of the pop song, and then "Scarlet Nights"/"Doo-Wop in Harlem" ties the whole message together in a sort of wistful Janus-faced acceptance that everything will occur again in this strange pop-myth and also that these things as experienced, these flesh-and-blood figures and the music of things past and the emotions as felt and not transcribed, will end some day. as someone who is not religious I am fascinated by the effect that his upbringing and teenage dreams of joining the priesthood seem to have had on Paddy, a man who seemed to commit fairly hard to agnosticism in his personal life by, like, 1984-ish.

one of the sharpest minds in the business and his band of crack-team veterans suddenly gets really weird and huge for exactly one album and then the whole thing falls apart as he tries to push this envelope further to the chagrin of his label and then has a bunch of health issues while everyone in the band ends up doing their own thing -- but man! what a feat that one album is

that was one helluva post that i only partly understood. :)

good post. great record

I love the post but I can't hold it together as a concept album - either I'm not reading it right, it's too obtuse or, well, Paddy only vaguely meant it to be thematically complete. Not that I give a shit; it's utterly magnificent either way.

That is a great post but is Paddy not a believer of some description? His music/love/god equivalence just seems too persistent.

imo three of the sides hold together as concepts that connect tightly within a side and loosely over sides - 2 lays out the Elvis/Jesse James/Lucifer line, 3 is love/music in/as a life (adolescent pop-love-infatuation, marriage, children), 4 is redemption. I've always seen 1 as a just a pile of great songs (and machine gun ibiza). I think the big thematic sweep works if you squint, but it isn't tightly themed.

paddy has explained this hasn’t be? the four sides are all self contained, side 2 is the Elvis side, one of them is the “perfect pop” side on whatever

He originally wanted to be a priest correct? Rare for the feelings that lead a man there disappear completely imo