I Trawl The Megahertz

Paddy McAloon has always been the most literate of pop songwriters. Back in the late ’80s/early ’90s, when gaudy synth-pop outfits and shrill-torch singers were contaminating the gene-pool of pop with test-tube DNA, McAloon and his Tyneside cohorts in Prefab Sprout formed one of the last lines of resistance against the threatened colonisation of the mainstream, infiltrating the daytime airwaves with such masterfully constructed, wistful laments as ‘The King Of Rock And Roll’ and ‘Wild Horses’.

Following the dissolution of the Sprout in 1999, McAloon was waylaid by ill-health, a turn of events which – as the singer explains in the sleevenotes to his first solo album, I Trawl The Megahertz – resulted in him, “passing the time by listening to and taping all kinds of TV and radio programmes”. Never one to slouch, McAloon used his period of convalescence creatively, editing the random audio traffic into a dense, impressionistic – though impressively coherent – biographical monologue.

The resultant soliloquy was spoken by Yvonne Connors, christened with the title from which this album takes it name, and set to 22 glorious minutes of cinematic string swells and hugely atmospheric, Miles Davis-flavoured jazz flourishes. ‘I Trawl The Megahertz’ is quite simply one of the most dazzling, audacious songs I’ve heard anywhere this year, with a deft lyrical touch so resonant McAloon attains near Proustian gravitas: “We start with the joyful mysteries, before the appearance of ether, trying to capture the elusive, the farm where the crippled horses heal, the woods where the autumn is reversed, and the longing for bliss in the arms of some beloved from the past”.

Perhaps drained from the effort of sculpting such a monumental opening, McAloon eschews lyrics altogether for the remainder of the record, opting instead to create a supremely elegant suite of plaintive chamber music and jazz-soaked ambience. This record could easily be a Bernard Hermann-composed score for one of those sublimely melancholic espionage movies which surfaced in Britain following the end of WW1 and the subsequent plunge into Cold War paranoia: The Third Man, say, or The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

Indeed, the over-riding image is of a hangdog Dirk Bogarde sequestered away in a dimly-lit corner of some ’60s Viennese café, with only a smouldering cigarette and a creeping sense of existential doubt for company. Christ, let’s just hope we don’t have to wait another four years for McAloon to send a follow-up dispatch down the wire.