(Alternative/Indie Rock, Sophisti-Pop) [BSCD2] Prefab Sprout - Protest Songs (Blu-spec CD 2) - 2013 (1989), FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

01. The World Awake 04:27
02. Life of Surprises 04:08
03. Horsechimes 04:24
04. Wicked Things 03:12
05. Dublin 03:42
06. Tiffanys 03:51
07. Diana 04:11
08. Talking Scarlet 04:35
09. ’Til the Cows Come Home 04:12
10. Pearly Gates 05:30
Al songs written by Paddy McAloon

“‘It’s Just a Nervous Flickering of Old Flames’: Prefab Sprout’s Protest Songs”
Protest Songs has always gotten a bad rap. Originally conceived by Paddy McAloon as the successor to Prefab Sprout’s successful Steve McQueen, Protest Songs was recorded around the same time and following the Steve McQueen sessions, and was meant to follow said album in December 1985, six months after Steve McQueen’s June 1985 release on the Kitchenware label. However, thanks in no part to the interference of Kitchenware, Protest Songs’ planned December 1985 unveiling was nixed due to the fear that the band’s proposed third record would impact sales of Steve McQueen and cause a loss of profit—greed had its way and caused the shelving of the third Prefab Sprout album, leaving fans without a proper followup for almost three years until the March 14th, 1988 release of the Thomas Dolby produced From Langley Park to Memphis. Left to gather dust in the archives for four years and with a few copies managing to get into the hands of bootlegger’s throughout the United Kingdom, the barely-forgotten record was prodded out to no fanfare by Kitchenware in June 1989, performing rather respectfully for an album seen as a stopgap of demand for the hyped Jordan: The Comeback, which wouldn’t come for another year.
Protest Songs did what Langley Park couldn’t: offer a proper sequel to Steve McQueen; and for added bonus, an album that was arguably just as good as the album many consider their finest hour. With Dolby now absent from the producer’s chair, the band self-produced Protest Songs, which featured a similar framing as its predecessor, yet without the refinery that defined the sound of Steve McQueen. The opening pair of “The World Awake” and “Life of Surprises” immediately continue where Steve McQueen left off, offering themes of nostalgia, heartbreak and subtle irony. Cuts such as the desolate “Dublin” couples a bare, acoustic accompaniment with a narrative concerning the IRA (Irish Republic Army) and its convoluted methods of spreading propaganda amongst its supporters; while “Tiffanys,” a song written several years earlier and perhaps meant for inclusion on Steve McQueen, is reminiscent of the rough jangle pop of 1984’s Swoon.
“Diana” tells of the titular Princess of Wales, weaving stories of jealousy and betrayal, while commenting on the overt public obsession with Diana herself. “Talking Scarlet” speaks of unrequited love between the narrator and Scarlet, “harbouring thoughts of kissing her neck” and telling himself it’s merely platonic love; while Scarlet, portrayed by vocalist/keyboardist Wendy Smith, knows that “he’s thoroughly miserable for me”. “Pearly Gates”, on the other hand, strips back the slick production Dolby once offered to a husk, leaving a desolately beautiful song in its wake. Featuring themes of mortality, religion and the afterlife, it evokes imagery of the final moments of one’s life and the arrival to the aforementioned “Pearly Gates.” In a way, it’s a perfect precursor to the final section of Jordan: The Comeback, which also concerned the same themes presented on this one track, most notably “Doo Wop in Harlem,” which also depicted the narrator’s ascent to the afterlife.
Protest Songs unfairly never received the same praise or attention that Steve McQueen or Jordan garnered, nor did it merit the following Swoon did in following years. No singles were released upon its release, with only “Life of Surprises” to represent the album on the 1992 compilation of the same name, and accompanied with a new music video to promote the album. Disregarded for its lack of hits and recognizable traits, it’s an album ignored by all but hardcore Prefab Sprout fans; yet it follows the same template as its preceding albums from the lyrical subjects to its style, with only the stripped-back production being a major difference between it and Steve McQueen. Like Steve McQueen and Jordan before it, it’s only a matter of time before many discover the genius of Protest Songs, and give it the acclaim it deserved all those years ago, but now can be appraised for a new generation that can appreciate it for what it is.
(Posted on 04/12/2017 by Aaron W. (sputnikmusic.com)
https://www.sputnikmusic.com/review/75528/Prefab-Sprout-Protest-Songs/

One of the most acclaimed British pop bands of the ’80s and ’90s, Prefab Sprout was the creative vehicle of vocalist, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Paddy McAloon, who has been regularly hailed as one of the greatest songwriters of his era. McAloon has often been compared favorably to Elvis Costello, Paul McCartney, and even Cole Porter, not just because of his lyrical and instrumental gifts but for the ambitious creative vision of his catalog. A notorious perfectionist who is also known for his shyness and his struggles with health problems, McAloon has created a relatively small body of work (ten albums in three decades), but Prefab Sprout’s music is beloved in the U.K., and they have a smaller but passionately loyal audience in the United States. Moving from the smart, beautifully crafted pop of 1984’s Swoon and 1985’s Steve McQueen (titled Two Wheels Good in the U.S.), Prefab Sprout would explore the influences of American music on 1988’s From Langley Park to Memphis, embrace the sound and style of stage musicals on 1990’s Jordan: The Comeback, use the Old West as a metaphor on the 2001 concept album The Gunman and Other Stories, and celebrated the power and energy of music on 2009’s Let’s Change the World with Music and 2013’s Crimson/Red.
Prefab Sprout were formed in Newcastle, England, in 1977 by Paddy McAloon, who sings and plays guitar and piano, and his bass-playing younger brother, Martin. In the group’s early days, McAloon spun several fanciful tales about the origin of their odd name (one favorite was that the young McAloon had misheard the line “hotter than a pepper sprout” in Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood's “Jackson”), but the truth is that an adolescent McAloon had devised the meaningless name in homage to the long-winded and equally silly band names of his late-’60s/early-’70s youth. With an early fan, Wendy Smith, drafted into the lineup to sing helium-register backing vocals, the trio released its first single, “Lions in My Own Garden (Exit Someone),” on its own Candle label in July 1982. Written for a girlfriend who had left Newcastle to study in Limoges, France (check the acronym of the title), the song was exceedingly clever, but obviously heartfelt. The single’s warm reception, including many plays on John Peel’s radio show, led to the Sprout’s signing to CBS subsidiary Kitchenware Records, which reissued the single in April 1983. Another single, “The Devil Has All the Best Tunes,” followed later that year.
Prefab Sprout’s first album, Swoon, was released in March 1984. Shortly after Swoon’s release, drummer Neil Conti joined the group, and Thomas Dolby was tapped to produce the second Prefab Sprout album, 1985’s Steve McQueen (retitled Two Wheels Good in the U.S. due to litigation from the late actor’s estate). Dolby smoothed out the kinks a bit, and his keyboards helped enrich the album’s sound. Prefab Sprout returned to the studio without Dolby in the summer of 1985 and quickly recorded an album’s worth of material that was initially meant to be released in a limited edition as a tour souvenir. However, several months after Steve McQueen was released, its song “When Love Breaks Down” (which had been released as a single four different times in the U.K. without chart success) finally became a hit, and CBS feared a new album would hurt its predecessor’s sales, so the project was shelved.
The “proper” follow-up to Steve McQueen was 1988’s From Langley Park to Memphis. It became their biggest hit, thanks to the massive U.K. chart success of “The King of Rock and Roll” (about a one-hit wonder stuck performing his silly novelty song on the nostalgia circuit; ironically, it was Prefab Sprout’s sole U.K. Top Ten hit and remains their best-known song) and the U.S. college radio success of the genial Bruce Springsteen parody “Cars and Girls.” Following that chart action, CBS dusted off the shelved acoustic project from 1985 and released it (in the U.K. only) under the title Protest Songs in June 1989. Issued in 1990, Jordan: The Comeback, which McAloon describes as a concept album about Jesse James and Elvis Presley, was released to enormous critical acclaim in late 1990, but unfortunately, its ornate, lush production and suite-like structure doomed it to commercial failure in the U.S., though it was another big hit in the U.K. A fine but unimaginative best-of, A Life of Surprises, met similar respective fates in the summer of 1992.
Many thought Prefab Sprout disbanded at that point, and indeed, Conti did leave the band at some point in the ’90s. However, McAloon had written (and in some cases, recorded) several albums’ worth of material during the first half of the decade, abandoning them all before finally releasing the crystalline Andromeda Heights in 1997. The album wasn’t even released in the U.S., but it was another deserved U.K. hit. An album of subtle beauty, Andromeda Heights showed how far McAloon had come as a songwriter and singer since Swoon.
A much-improved two-disc anthology, The 38 Carat Collection, was released by CBS in 1999 as the group was leaving the label. (Unexpectedly, the group’s U.S. label, Epic, belatedly reissued this set as The Collection in early 2001.) Wendy Smith left the group during this period, after the birth of her first child. Prefab Sprout, by this point consisting solely of the McAloon brothers, signed to EMI in late 2000 and delivered their Western-themed concept album, The Gunman and Other Stories, in early 2001. Unfortunately, the album’s release was delayed several months when Paddy McAloon was diagnosed with a medical disorder rendering him partially blind. As McAloon was homebound due to his health problems between 1999 and 2002, he wrote an album of music inspired by true life stories he recorded from radio broadcasts. Combining the radio recordings with orchestral arrangements of McAloon’s melodies, the mostly instrumental I Trawl the Megahertz became his first solo album when it was released in 2003.
After a six-year layoff, McAloon returned to recording as Prefab Sprout and released the self-produced, performed, and recorded Let’s Change the World with Music in 2009. This set’s songs and concept date to 1992 and were originally to be recorded as the follow-up album to Jordan: The Comeback; for various reasons, those sessions never happened. It was initially issued by Ministry of Sound and later in the year licensed by Sony/BMG in the U.K. In 2010, the independent Tompkins Square imprint issued the album in the United States. Both the album Crimson/Red and its lead single, “The Best Jewel Thief in the World,” were issued by the Icebreaker label in 2013. In March 2017, a video posted on the Internet featured a homemade solo acoustic clip of McAloon performing an original song, “America,” a protest against U.S. immigration policies under Donald Trump. In 2019, Sony reissued McAloon’s I Trawl the Megahertz under the Prefab Sprout banner. (Stewart Mason, AllMusic)

Protest Songs was recorded by Prefab Sprout in 1985, in the wake of the masterful Steve McQueen (Two Wheels Good in the US), but shelved in favor of the subsequent From Langley Park to Memphis; it finally surfaced to little fanfare in 1989, appearing almost as mysteriously as it was abandoned four years earlier. It’s a wonderful record, but perhaps too close in sound and spirit to Steve McQueen for comfort—From Langley Park, for all its flaws, is a much more adventurous effort, and with the benefit of hindsight, it seems reasonable to assume that Paddy McAloon wished not to stick with the tried-and-true but instead attempt something new and different, successful or not. That said, fans who loved Steve McQueen and its gossamer pop beauty will find much to savor here—songs like “A Life of Surprises,” “Talking Scarlet,” and “Diana” (the latter an evocative portrait of the late “people’s princess” and her effect on British society) rank alongside McAloon’s finest, informed by the stately grace and ingenious wit which remain the hallmarks of every Prefab Sprout record. By no means a lost masterpiece, it’s still an essential piece of the puzzle. (Jason Ankeny, AllMusic)

Neil Conti
Martin McAloon
Paddy McAloon
Wendy Smith
Produced by Prefab Sprout