I listened to Andromeda Heights right through yesterday and it struck me what a pleasant album it is to listen to
Ok it can be a bit sugary in places and I'm still not sure about the chorus of The Fifth Horseman but what really struck home with me was Paddy's clever use of other instrumentation, trumpets, saxes, clarinets, harps and flutes are all in the mix but most are cleverly used on intros and outros
For instance the mournful flute introduces The Mystery Of Love and then is never heard again until almost as the song fades out.
Quite a few songs use this technique and by introducing another instrumnt on the fade it really lifts the song.
If nothing else it shows Paddy's skill as an arranger

i actually just came on here to post about Andromeda Heights.

It came in the mail today and I've listened to it once. A little bit lighter than I expected it to be. I really liked the first two songs but after that it sort of went downhill for me. Maybe repeated listens will allow the album to grow on me. Right now I can understand why some people were suggesting I skip out on this album. I'm glad it's in the collection, though.

Andromeda Heights is probably one of those albums that will grow on you with each listening. And with age. The album celebrates 15 years now, and the older I get the more I appreciate the message of love and using one's time well.

Andromeda Heights is one of my favourite records of the 90's -here's my top 3 off the top of my head-'Avenue Of Stars' which is such a undiscovered gem,'Swans' which is one of the best things Paddy has ever written,it's on a par with Brian Wilson imo,and 'Andromeda Heights' the song itself - it is both ethereal and down to earth at the same time-which sums up the album for me,it's very romantic,and a bit dreamy and out of all the records I get a feeling that this is the most representative of what Paddy is about creatively.

i agree with rock, the album's best song is in my opinion avenue of stars !! I love also the song Andromeda Heights, really brilliant song. That whole album is good, but causes me a bit of sadness, maybe, because is the first album after seven years of hiatus and shows quite clearly that there is no more a real band.

Andromeda Heights is one of my very favourite Sprout albums - it's just a beautiful, beautifully-arranged series of songs. And I don't mind the soppy sax. Nothing Paddy does is accidental, and there will have been a reason why he chose to use an instrument that already has so much baggage attached to it.

Don't listen to people who tell you to skip this record, and do listen to it more than once! This record is absolutely what Paddy McAloon is about.

Here here, bro

I found my Andromeda Heights CD floating around my car the other day and decided to pop it in. Still a bit disappointing to my ears as a PSprout album but it's probably the best album The Carpenters never made.

I'll probably continue to feel the way that ronchito does. The album is sort of disappointing but after listening to it more, I am starting to like some of the songs more. I'm sure Paddy knew what he was doing but having the saxophone is a bit of an odd choice, especially for that time.

Swans is a pretty good song

As an unapologetic Steely Dan & easy listening fan in general, I have no issues with the saxophone -- in fact I think some of the sax work is quite nice. Again, one's tolerance for easy listening arrangements must be rather high to enjoy it. I can even forgive the somewhat flat digital production and Paddy's ultra-pronunciation of every syllable (rivaled only by Maureen Corrigan's maddening book reviews on NPR). But the lyrics are what kill it for me. The jump from the inspired, eccentric poetry of Jordan to the Oprah-friendly triteness of AH was one of the biggest musical disappointments I've ever experienced. As the soundtrack to a musical it would work perfectly, but there's a reason I stopped going to musicals a while ago.

Best, most creative songs on the album - Weightless and the title track. There's an eeriness in those songs, and perhaps in the atonal section in Anne Marie and the haunted vibe of Swans. Works well - easy listening has always had a slightly eerie, ethereal undertow to it. The rest I can do without.

So far my two favorite songs are Electric Guitars and Swans.

As for the lyrics, maybe it just happened because of Paddy's aging. I'm still not sure what's on Gunmen, so I don't know if the lyrics drastically changed. I'm assuming that they did since that album is supposed to be about the American west. The lyrics on Andromeda actually don't bother me as much as the overall feel and production of the album.

Deadnumber, keep listening to it, IT IS a great record.

Maybe John's book will provide some better insight into this, but from various quotes it appears that Paddy was on a gradual quest to become more "simple" in his songwriting -- moving away from the more angular/obscure style that characterized much of his earlier work. My opinion is that everything after Jordan (Megahertz excluded) took this too far but that's not a universal opinion. Too many "Love is a _______" songwriting exercises (aka Metaphors Gone Wild) and not enough "Paddy". Nonetheless, all the albums have their moments and he truly is a unique voice.

it's pleasantness hadn't been apparent prior to that? as eureka moments go that's unique.
The Fifth Horseman is a bleedin dreadful, the production apocalyptic-and not in a good way, the tune is poor. how is the instrumentation (which sound like over the counter samples) 'clever', what's clever about it? why is there use as intros 'clever'?
Life isn't a miracle for many people-it's shit, and looking above you and noticing 'there are no more stars like this one in the sky' won't change that, it's gibberish and yet another average tune.
There are some great moments, but many bad ones, and if i hadn't been a sprout fan prior to that and heard it i'ld have dismissed it out of hand as bland.

Are you Paddy McAloon?

Nope, that's Father Christmas ;)

Just thought I'd chip in about the saxophone contributions to the record. At the time of Andromeda Height's recording I did a series of gigs with Tommy Smith in the North of England - I've never worked with a finer musician. His playing on the Sprout record is nothing like his natural style, I'm guessing Paddy was after a particular sound (which to my ears is quite James Taylor-ish). Coincidentally, at the same period of time I was also working with the percussionist on Andromeda Heights. But I didn't listen to Prefab Sprout at the time, so didn't realise the connection!

I saw Tommy Smith play live around the time Of AH and agree that he's a much more dynamic and creative saxophone player than the record suggests.

Will never forget his bullet header for Liverpool's second goal in the 1977 European cup final either. You don't get a sense of his bite-yer-ankles passion from the smooth sax work on AH.

:lol: priceless bisonrav!

This made me wonder what my reaction would have been if I hadn't been a sprout fan prior to AH...I think I'd have been converted on the first listen.

When AH was released no-one else was making music like that...I don't think you can say quite the same thing about previous Sprout releases (because the likes of Aztec Camera, Danny Wilson etc. were at least operating in something like the same ballpark in those times). But AH appeared in the midst of Britpop, no?

And if you compare the musicality, subtlety, melodic invention, of Andromeda Heights to Oasis et al...for me that's a no brainer (not that I dislike Britpop...but one has to recognise a difference between what was essentially well executed glam rock revivalism and genuinely top-notch songwriting craft).

OK some of the lyrics are a bit naff...and others are as good as anything McAloon ever wrote (which means better than just about anybody else).

Already being a Sprout fan though I do recall being slightly dissapointed by the production on the first few listens...it misses Dolby's touch (which I suppose was instrumental in defining a Prefab Sprout 'sound').

But its still a terrific record...absolutely not of its time.

Quite agree Duffy

I remember reading one of the reviews when it was released which crititized it's over use of an "X-Flles" type whistle in the songs

I must admit many of the songs use this device and I find myself listening out for it and it does detract the music somewhat

I can't understand why Paddy used this effect in so many of the songs? perhaps it was a flavour of the month for him or perhaps because the album has a constant "stars" theme running through it he felt that it represented space?

Or maybe it was a private joke for himself

Take a listen and see how often you can spot the effect

Britpop is often over-characterised as revivalism, i agree there was a large amount of retromania involved, but vast swathes of Blur are very inventive and even Oasis and Pulp delivered quite a lot of unique sounding stuff-they drew a great deal on late sixties/seventies pop/rock, but a hell of a lot of the time this was just a starting point.

There is a tremendous beauty to some of the Paddy's songs on AH 'Swans' springs to mind, but the productions are entirely subordinated to the songs on that album in a way that makes them vulnerable should the song fail to deliver. So for example, 'whoever you are' delivers a kind of melancholy sigh, but little more, because the song sounds somehow incomplete, and the supine production only reveals this starkly. Play some Joni Mitchell stuff and see the difference, subtle can be dynamic too, some of the arrangements on those early albums were almost bare, but the sheer brilliance of song-writing and performance mean they transcend the what might appear to be the limitations of the genre in a way Paddy tends not to be able to do. Joni's sound improvised, flowing, paddy's sometimes sound written but not completete-on 'whoever you are' there are parts that almost seem to stop, they seem u somehow unresolved.

I agree there are exceptions, 'swans' sounds hymn like, and the metaphor isn't abused in the way that paddy can do, it's wonderful.

It's not of it's time, it's about the song and I think easy listening is like a soft blanket you allow yourself to fall into, i love some carpenters stuff, but when it's not really good, it just grates.

Maybe he never watched X files and thought it was a nice sound, i think it's a nice sound, but you do think of X files as you say.

btw you're not that guy with a brillo pad on his head who advertises blue nun on tv are you?

No - same name but without the income!!! :lol:

Totally agree .

Yes..yes, this is exactly what happened to me. Forgive me if I bore you with my story, there was only two times in my entire life that uplifted me back into a connection with pop music.

The first time was when I was very young, seven , eight years old, sitting in the back of a big yellow school bus and someone turned on a cheap pocket size transistor radio. The song that exploded in my ears was "She Loves You " by the Beatles. This was the first twinges of individual joyous romanticism.

The day pop music died for me was back in around 1985. I think it was when Hall & Oates stopped making their string of hit songs and some dude by the name of Huey Lewis stepped in, something like this.

As you may know I'm a huge Jimmy Webb fan but not one of his songs gives me this mysterious uplift and connection. His words and music for me is more like a 'personal therapy" that I can relate to in accordance to my own past romantic sorrows.

I would say it was in the year 2000, 2001 I was complaining to someone online about listening to the same old same old oldies. That person suggested That I download the song "The Mystery Of Love " by Prefab Sprout. So , I did. The first minute and ten seconds of the song I didn't care for but when the tempo began to pickup and the soft consistent vocals singing stuff like "What you see in me" and "ignorance is bliss" started this physical chain reaction of the crawling of my skin from my spine to my neck up on to my scalp like some kind of wave, waves of delight, feeling emotions. I was emotionalizing and intellectualizing at the same time. What a real thrill!. Yeah, this was the second time.

So, I consider myself fortunate and lucky to have Sprout in my ears from AH to Swoon.

I don't mind the saxophone too much - The Mystery Of Love is pretty dire, but there's a lovely little angular sax break during the coda which really lifts it. The X files whistle is bizarre, although for Paddy it probably has some vague associations with Brian Wilson's interest in the quirky portamento of the theremin. It's Paddy's prissy vocal delivery that gets me - a line like 'in bar after bar' could have been given a knowing tragic/devilish spin by one of those wounded male crooner types. From Paddy it just sounds like he has priggishly checked around every bar on his route to locating someone.

"Well, do let me know if you see her! Toodlepip!"

Maybe easy listening really does benefit from a bit of theatricality.

AH is a good album to me. Their songs are lovely and yes, some of the lyrics talks about a goodness that doesn't match reality and real people. But God, these are (regardless the lyrics issue) the moments that can have the rapture effect:

...and if the dead could speak, I know what they would say to you and me---

----the closing bars of The Mystery of Love---

------The whole of the title track, especially the intro----

------Avenue of Stars, when Wendy joins near the end--- This could have been a superb track if it had been produced in another way. Still, it is really nice as it is.

Swans, especially nearing the end when Paddy or Wendy sings Swans, Swans (different pitches)---

------The melody of Anne Marie. Does anybody else find that this tune belongs in a possible musical..?

---------Scattered sounds in the Fifth Horseman----

--------Whoever you Are, is the soundtrack of dreamers, the same sort of The Last of Great Romantic. I think that Paddy, as a means of inspiration, must have seen himself as that character in Dostoievski's tale, White Nights.

Now what I don't like about the album is...

The instrumental break (with the acoustic guitar) in Anne Marie because it sounds like a forecast report (you see the maps, the clouds and the suns?).

Whoever you Are is a beautiful song, but luckily my friends or the people who know me speak very little English; they would say Oh, it's about you! :ph43r:

Swans is beautiful and has gorgeous sounds but it is so sweet that you wouldn't play it for your one-track-mind friends or women who prefer the tough type.

The 5th Horsemen has good sounds but the chorus is somewhat weak.

And, what does it mean "and if they fall into your arms, don't be surprised to find the weight that you can bear"???? Is it about some sort of circus number variation performed for a change when making love?

Otherwise, I do like AH. In fact, I'm going to play it when I go out for a ride in a little while in this sunny, winter morning in my city.

It's probably a personal thing, but for me Andromeda Heights is irretrievably connected with the memory of losing £500 at top trumps at a German online gaming site. It's very difficult to get past that.

It was early in my return to Prefab Sprout, and I was idly listening to the collected works on Spotify, while engaging in a loyalty points scam at the gaming site. Briefly, you played top trumps on Football Legends for tiny stakes on a strategy basis, until one of about 5 no lose bets came up, Ronaldo, Zidane and some others, when you would whack the stake up to £500 and make very large quantities of loyalty points which were linked to stake size. These could be exchanged for 400 euros monthly in cash as well as lots of different kinds of merchandise, and across a few accounts a few afternoons work resulted in lots of money and a seemingly endless supply of towels, footballs, poker sets (3 different ones), radios, USB memory sticks, playing cards, USB TV tuners, more towels, T Shirts, and a PS3 turning up in the post (a friend of mine who was doing the same thing amused himself by buying all the lottery tickets for a VIP trip to a Real Madrid game, and I had my eyes on the table football game when they finally figured out what we were doing and changed the rules).

Anyway, having given my Sprout vinyl to a charity shop a few short months previously in the misguided belief I would never again listen to it, I was ruefully rediscovering Swoon and Steve McQueen on Spotify, then decided to have a go at Andromeda Heights, which I must say I very much enjoyed. But for whatever reason, whether lulled into a torpor of easy listening or surprised by the length of the intro, or possibly just suffering from the effects of several days continuous trumping, 'Avenue of Stars' caused me to mistake Rivaldo for Ronaldo, and slap down an irrevocable £500 stake. All was not lost as I could still win the bet, but as Paddy crooned about Silver Highways I chose 'Total Goals' with a high chance of winning, but came up against FUCKING ZIDANE, the total goals BANKER. It still hurts.

Suffice it to say that I still listened to the end of the album with appreciation, and came out well ahead on Top Trumps. But I still have a pain reflex about the sax playing.

I can say with 100% assurance that if AH was my introduction to the band I wouldn't be a member of this board right now. I can only listen to it in the context of being obsessed with Paddy's earlier output and interested in his career trajectory. Despite all the talk of love of the album, it comes across as emotionally distant as, say, Cupid & Psyche. But whereas Green Gartside made philosophizing about love an art form unto itself, Paddy's strength (for me) was always having a genuine emotional undercurrent beneath his eccentricities -- something that I feel is totally absent in AH.

Andromeda Heights
This is a great thread y'all..
It's funny because AH really suits the Summer weather here in England at the moment, while listening to AH yesterday I got the idea to extend it and stick a extra chorus at the end.. ;)

On the amusing side I think of some kind of variation of Crosby, Stills , Nash and Young "Love the One your With" or yeah, it could be about some sexual circus number but I'm almost sure he didn't have Charlie Sheen in mind. I can't help think that it surely has some type of religious feel or destiny, a metaphor of some type.
What really interest me is that he uses the plural 'they', if THEY fall into your arms, "they" not meaning people but "they" meaning problems, obstacles of uncertainty (weight) that we can bear. Surely the history of the human race is most surprised by just how much it has endured. This toleration entertains a miracle which is a part of life.

A suitable Paddy quote:

“I had a vision of a lush Ravel record. I was trying to do away with the kind of excitement that rock feeds on; there was nothing on it conventionally exciting like a Who record. I thought I was onto something, but of course it’s judged as rock music. Someone said to me of Andromeda Heights that there’s not much cynicism. I took that to mean not much grit nor reflection on the so-called real world; everything on it is idealised, almost romantic. But I try to keep out of my music the junk of who you are: my opinions. Like most people I’m very opinionated, but I try to make music nicer than I am, more useful. It’s a distorted view, but I hope a good distortion. At night you look up and what can you see? The stars. But what you really see is all this dark stuff; when I write, I like to screen that out. It makes a nicer object. It’s valuable to be Lou Reed but not everyone has to paint that same world. I’m in the other camp.” (Mojo #191, October 2009)

"they" is also a way of avoiding saying "he" or "she", i.e. it's a non specific reference to someone you love and who you tell you love.

I don't think you need go further than the obvious - tell someone you love them, and if they fall into your arms you can share the considerable weight of their troubles. Since the incomprehensible wordplay of Swoon, Paddy was striving to become less obscure, you can see that progression quite clearly.

So he just says what he thinks a romantic song about love and existence should say, very directly. There's not a lot of subtlety, and that's part of what makes the album feel cheesy and schmaltzy, we expect more metaphor and distance and less directness. To me, it feels awkward and tentative in the way that ITTM doesn't. Forced even.

I think that's a good point and lyrical directness, or relative directness, is matched by a simpler musical approach and because of the lack of wordplay and musical complexity i sometimes find it all a bit empty.
One aspect of this simplicity is that he’ll often employ a metaphor that runs throughout the entire song-like ‘swans’ or ‘andromida heights’. Because of an increasing unwillingness to resort to fancy wordplay, there’s a directness to these that can work beautifully, but occasionally sound a little cloying.
i love ‘cornfield ablaze’, but you can almost sense his attempt to keep the metaphor going, regardless, and i think if the song had been just a little longer the song would start to sound rediculous-more tractors, burning fields, firemen etc.
The line about ‘you took a scarecrow and made him a man’ is amazing though, i think ‘The Gunman’ is an example of him having crossed that line- it sounds contrived.

"I had a vision of a lush Ravel record. I was trying to do away with the kind of excitement that rock feeds on; there was nothing on it conventionally exciting like a Who record. I thought I was onto something, but of course it’s judged as rock music. Someone said to me of Andromeda Heights that there’s not much cynicism. I took that to mean not much grit nor reflection on the so-called real world; everything on it is idealised, almost romantic. But I try to keep out of my music the junk of who you are: my opinions. Like most people I’m very opinionated, but I try to make music nicer than I am, more useful. It’s a distorted view, but I hope a good distortion. At night you look up and what can you see? The stars. But what you really see is all this dark stuff; when I write, I like to screen that out. It makes a nicer object. It’s valuable to be Lou Reed but not everyone has to paint that same world. I’m in the other camp.” (Mojo #191, October 2009)"

Perhaps this quote is Paddy simply responding to criticism by presenting a generalised, exaggerated idea of rock music so as to distinguish and argue his corner. If not, Andromeda Heights was very nearly a very worthy conceit – I think aesthetically, lightness and elegance is very, very hard to do well, and sadly, very much missing in popular culture. ‘Darkness’ is fairly easy, although almost seems to have become a superlative and something synonymous with ‘depth’ and integrity amongst artists and critics. We all know how rockism works. What the above quote suggests to me though, is a suspicion I’ve long had about Paddy’s move into a world of purified easy listening – it feels inescapably bound up with a rather heavy handed rejection, and failed disavowal of rockism. So, having determined that cynicism is something that generally emanates from the more Dionysian side of things Paddy contrives the sort of sickly sentimental, panglossian approach that comes over like the favourite food of Beelzebub himself. Paddy is too bloody knowing to do this stuff convincingly. It comes over like inverted cynicism and never breaks out into something genuinely light, sweet and classical.

"So, having determined that cynicism is something that generally emanates from the more Dionysian side of things Paddy contrives the sort of sickly sentimental, panglossian approach that comes over like the favourite food of Beelzebub himself. Paddy is too bloody knowing to do this stuff convincingly. It comes over like inverted cynicism and never breaks out into something genuinely light, sweet and classical."

"One aspect of this simplicity is that he’ll often employ a metaphor that runs throughout the entire song-like ‘swans’ or ‘andromida heights’. Because of an increasing unwillingness to resort to fancy wordplay, there’s a directness to these that can work beautifully, but occasionally sound a little cloying.
i love ‘cornfield ablaze’, but you can almost sense his attempt to keep the metaphor going, regardless, and i think if the song had been just a little longer the song would start to sound rediculous-more tractors, burning fields, firemen etc."

Those two quotes (especially the bolded part) very eloquently express how I feel about most of Paddy's post-Jordan work, ITTM excluded. His gradual move towards some idealized version of pure optimism & metaphor-heavy directness sounds completely forced. One thing that drew me to Paddy's work was that he wasn't afraid to explore the dark side but there was an erudite, eccentric, poetic, and subtlely optimistic way he did it that differentiated him from others. There may indeed be some nice musical aspects ("craft"-wise) to his latter work but it just doesn't feel genuine.

I just can't like that record.

I can see that there are some good songs on there, albeit not up to the standard of the best Sprouts material to my ears at least. But the execution of them feels awkward and clunky, and even demo-ish in places. Good songs but none of the Sprouts magic.

And I'm sorry to say there are some awful moments as well, especially Swans - which is just embarrassingly cloying and weighed down with overblown pathos, as well as being leaden and dull.

Swans has actually become my favorite song on the album.