Sing me no deep hymn of devotion
One of the Broken: Prefab Sprout
Sing me no slow sweet melody
Sing it to one, one of the broken
And brother you’re singing, singing to me
In December 2000, five days before Christmas, I stood on the shore of the Mediterannean Sea, at an oil company residential compound a few miles west of Tripoli in Libya, North Africa singing along to the lyric “End of the road I’m travelling, I will see Jordan beckoning”, and I’ll remember this moment forever. I had just finished working on our IT systems that week, and during my non-working hours, when I wasn’t doing laps of the compound for exercise, I was writing my first science fiction novel THE DAEDALUS TRANSFER. I was in a real sci-fi headspace, something travel always helps me get into, and I had the music of Prefab Sprout on hard rotation as a soundtrack.
I cannot separate two of the Durham band’s albums from Christmas time. JORDAN: THE COMEBACK and FROM LANGLEY PARK TO MEMPHIS. Being a Londoner, something about being in a warm country, with the desert close at hand, while a British winter took hold back home was something new, something that opened me up to absorb new sensations and retain them for years to come.
With Christmas so near, songs like ONE OF THE BROKEN are writ large with the real meaning of this season. This beautiful song, to me, breathes life to the most important message about how organised religion smothers, and appropriates, real, morally good deeds.
But, to go with the season, there are other songs which, thanks to Thomas Dolby’s inspired production, contain icy, hollow sounds that, in Africa, when you stare up at the starry heavens after the sun drops so quickly from the sky, feel like they are coming to you across the empty ether. And there are warm rich sounds too, including Paddy McAloon’s silky voice, which wrap you up in the way you want to be coddled in winter. WE LET THE STARS GO, ICE MAIDEN and MOONDOG exemplify the expansive, wide scope of this incredible record.
These, to me, are Christmas albums. On FROM LANGLEY PARK TO MEMPHIS the song NIGHTINGALES even resounds with a jingling bell so synonymous with Christmas classics, it’s hard to understand why it hasn’t found it’s way into December radio rotations, and THE VENUS OF THE SOUP KITCHEN speaks of helping the vulnerable. And while others play Mariah Carey while they put up the decorations, I’m stringing up the lights outside with JORDAN and LANGLEY.