“Tis in my memory lock'd

A long time ago,in a Cork sixty miles down the road, there was multi-channel. Multi-channel was finely tuned cable system that allowed us parity with our cousins in the pale. It brought us access to the glorious BBC. More importantly, back in the 80's , it gave us local TV.It also gave us Trevor Welch's sports programme. It gave us a quasi local news programme.  But Glory of glories it gave us Tony O'Donoghue's Music programme. Tony has since become known as  the Trappatoni-baiting sisdeline reporter on RTE sport. Back then he was for us teenagers in 1980's Cork, what John Peel was for the English or what Dave Fanning was for the Dubs. Tony played all the local bands, Cypress, Mine!, notice the beautifully pretentious punctuation, singing about The SugarBeet God down at the Lee open air swimming pool, Belsonic Sound grooving madly in Sir Henrys and even Burning Embers, yes even Burning Embers. 

Tony played lots of good music but he played one song nearly every week. "My Love and I, we work well together........" Paddy McAloon and the lead single from the second Prefab Sprout album was on constant rotation and I loved it. I bought Steve McQueen and played it and played it and played it. It's an album I return to again and again. It is a beautiful thing. But this is not about Steve McQueen. This is about Crimson/Red, their newest album. It is a beautiful thing.

All is well from the outset. Opener ‘The Best Jewel Thief in the World’ starts with sirens and develops into one of those effortless pop gems that McAloon sings as if a week has barely passed since 1985. His voice is truly remarkable. Listen to the gorgeous and wistful ‘List of impossible things’ where only a lyricist as gifted as him could fit in Abstract Expression into its word play. The bubbling ‘Adolescence’ is jam packed with hooks and melody, and many will note the similarly between ‘Devil came a calling’ with the urgent drive of ‘Faron Young’ . In it McAloon has a tryst with Old Nick and wittily observes that “The Devil came a-calling, no brimstone fire and rain/In fact, I found him charming, articulate, urbane”. A clear stand out on Crimson/Red is the harmonica driven ‘Billy’ a song which sees McAloon at his joyous best. The excellent acoustic driven country sounding ‘Old Magician’ tells of a fading talent and regrets that “death is a lousy disappearing act”, while the concluding ‘Mysterious’ is a lush gently rolling ballad. This is topped however by the longest song on the album the beautiful ‘The Dreamer’ which will melt the hearts of those it touches. Finally the ‘Songs of Danny Galway’ is plain great.

McAloon recently admitted in a detailed interview with the Scotsman that Crimson/Red is essentially a cherry pick from his long awaited unfinished projects such as Earth – The story so far accumulated over the last 15 years. It is a sort of greatest hits collection of unreleased material the oldest of which is 1997s dramatic ‘Grief built the Taj Mahal. Everyone is aware that a range of health problems not least severe tinnitus has in turn compounded McAloon’s obsessive perfectionism. Whether the gap to the next Prefab Sprout album will again be a matter of years is a matter for conjecture. It is great to hear that McAloon’s health has improved more recently and he is actively promoting this album. Music so badly needs this ‘Old Magician’ particularly if he has more albums quite this good up his sleeve.

Milan Kundera said that the Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. sometimes it's nice to look back. It's nicer still when the past comes to you announced by avoice as clear and harmonious as Paddy McAloon's 

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Every man thy ear, few thy voice

Paul Buchanan's first album at 56
Mid Air is a collection of 13 ballads and an instrumental, recorded at some 3am of the soul, in the cell in the tower of song a few storeys above where Leonard Cohen is eternally recording Songs From A Room, Sinatra is composing “Where Are You?” and Tom Waits is working on Small Change. It barely rises above murmur and sigh, the clang of the night-train, the chime of the city clock, the foghorn from the docks.

It’s also, it almost goes without saying, magnificent. But here is a record that in its determinedly modest way – Buchanan describes it as a “record-ette” and apparently toyed with titling it “Minor Poets Of The Seventeenth Century” – matches their immaculate ’80s albums A Walk Across The Rooftops and Hats. It’s no great departure; it’s more like a refinement or elaboration of latent possibilities in the earlier music. In a way, Mid Air revisits the deep, still pool of Rooftops’ “Easter Parade” and explores the musical and emotional space as though it were a new ocean.

“Easter Parade”, in fact, always felt like the first draft of an ideal Blue Nile torch song, one that Buchanan pursued keenly down the years, across the classic early B-side “Regret” (“It’s 3.30 and I’m thinking of you…”) , Hats’ “From A Late Night Train” and Peace At Last’s “Family Life”.

Mid Air amounts to 14 enigmatic variations on this mood, just piano, voice, the occasional pale moonbeam of orchestration, which miraculously never feels monotonous or morose. This is partly due to the songs’ brevity (none lasts more than three minutes) and the spare neon-haiku imagism of Buchanan’s words. The title track lists “the buttons on your collar, the colour of your hair”, like the ingredients in a spell to conjure someone’s presence, while “Wedding Party” is not much more than a handful of snapshots – “tears in the carpark”, “a long walk in the wrong dress”, “I was drunk when I danced with the bride” – that seem to condense lifetimes of regret. But it’s also down to Buchanan’s peerlessly evocative croon. From a country known for its bluster and bravado (from the sublime – Billy Mackenzie – to the ridiculous – Jim Kerr), Buchanan signifies heartsick soul-storms with little more than the muttered, broken “yeah…” that closes the final song, “After Dark”.

It is an effortless portrait of life in all its simple glories and heartaches. Remarkably wonderful.