Extracted from "Totally Shuffled-A Year of Lisening to Music on a Broken iPod"
Paddy McAloon-I Trawl the Megahertz-I Trawl
the Megahertz
When I started
this book on January 1st one of my self-imposed rules was that I
would only write about one track per artist. Now, as I have already shuffled
upon Prefab Sprout, writing about a solo Paddy McAloon track is kind of
breaking the rules somewhat. I do have an excuse though; maybe I’m bending
rather than breaking the rules.
In 2003 there
were rumours spreading across the internet-well, not really flooding the
internet, just the couple of sites that had the residual hardcore of a few
hundred Prefab Sprout fans(including myself), hanging on for any news of
anything new-of a new recording from Paddy McAloon or Prefab Sprout. After a
while it became clear that this new recording was about to be unleashed and it
was going to be a solo McAloon effort rather than something under the Prefab
Sprout banner. Speculation grew rife-there were theories that he had completed
one of his long lost album projects (the life story of Michael Jackson or “Total
Snow”-the Christmas album (never seen and now Kate Bush has beaten him to it, I
think that one’s dead in the water. Who’d have thought that Kate Bush would
beat anyone in to releasing a similarly themed album to her? The only person
who’s slower at working is Mr McAloon himself), or that he’d gone totally
country and Dylan-esque with a sort of “Self Portrait” thing. Some strong
rumours circulated that he was working with Pete Waterman on a techno record or
collaborating with Extreme Noise Terror on a 78 track 28 minute long trash
epic. Nothing however, could have prepared the world for what actually became
the “I Trawl the Megahertz” album.
The first sign
of anything happening-the only sign beforehand- were a couple of grainy photos
of radio antennae on the Prefab Sprout website. This website hadn’t been
updated for years; I’m sure that it said it was best viewed using Netscape.
Anyway, there were these two black and white photos of what looked like
military-type radio dishes. Nothing else;
no narrative and no explanation. Then, a week before the album was
released, there was something about the title of the album and an interview
with Paddy McAloon on a late night programme on Radio 3. Radio 3! I’d worked
out by then that it wasn’t a collaborative effort with ENT or Pete Waterman and
the country angle had died a death as well. He rabbited on about how he’d
fallen out of love with pop music and had been listening to a lot of classical
music, but it was one of those interviews where it seemed to go on for a while
but nothing was really said. There were a few snippets from the album
broadcast, but nothing could have prepared me for when I first heard this
track-over twenty minutes long with a spoken narrative by a female actor backed
by stringed (classical) instrumentation. This was so far away from Prefab
Sprout that it was like listening to a different artist altogether.
And that’s
how I can break my rule.
Get "Totally Shuffled" here as a Kindle book
or here (Part One) as a paperback
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