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

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."