Chords for Paddy McAloon interview on BBC Newsnight (4 February 2019)

Now do the following words ring any bells hot dog jumping frog Albuquerque if they do then you're attuned to 80s pop
Favorite prefab sprout and the songwriting gift of packet Paddy Macaloon with hits like the king of rock and roll and cars and girls
Macaloon won a reputation for melodic pop and smart bittersweet lyrics and was compared to his idols Lenin and McCartney and Stephen Sondheim
But despite a string of acclaimed albums
He was always ambivalent about fame and so it was perhaps unsurprising when prefab sprout quietly slipped out of the limelight
But at home in the northeast of England Macaloon has never stopped writing songs despite poor health
And now there's a new reworked pre prefab sprout album
I troll the megahertz the quiet genius of English pop has been talking to Stephen Smith _ _
[Eb] I
_ [B] _ [Cm] _ _ _ [Bbm] _
_ _ _ _ [Fm] _ _ _ [Ab] _
Didn't everyone [Bbm] who could parlay a chorus about frogs and America's favorite [Fm] snack into a top-ten hit
[Eb] _ _ _ _ It required the alchemy of Paddy Macaloon a
Sorcerer among songwriters tell [Bbm] us about the new record.
We want these days.
You might even mistake him for a wizard
I know it sounds terribly pretentious.
I would only say this to you so you can you can have a good good
Go at laughing at me.
I thought the chorus of it _ _
Was haiku without the syllable so that syllabic law hot dog jumping frog Albuquerque
It hasn't got any sense
Other than it's vaguely
_ American feeling to it and it's a bit like you know when you see shirts that have been made in Japan t-shirts and
They've got three disconnected with them there was it a touch of that involved in it
But it's a it's a kind of novelty thing and there we go when it's a hit and you're grateful for those moments _ _ _ _
When this was top of the charts Macaloon met his hero Paul McCartney
[Eb] _ _ _ _ [Bb]
When I spoke to him
McCartney was very gracious about the king of rock and roll saying you got the grannies and you got the little children with that song
the demographics you've got he was he was thinking you've got you've got everything sorted there and I am
very earnestly said
But it's not terribly
Representative like a stupid thing.
They wanted to say.
Thanks Paul.
Let's have a cheese sandwich.
I said
It doesn't really represent what I do man.
You know so that and he went that's your my ding-a-ling and I went
Chuck Berry _ _ _
_ _ _ [Ab] _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ [Eb] _ _ [Dm] _
_ I
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_ _ _ [Am] _ _ _ _ [Dm] _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ [G] _
_ _ _ [Am] _ _ _ _ [Dm] _
_ _ [Bb] Macaloon seemed to have everything you needed to be a pop star, [D] but he was always ambivalent about it
_ _ My interest in fame is that it's over there and all those things that I would write about like Elvis Presley or
Dropping names and songs was to do with being more in a sense a bit like a journalist where you stood watching it
But you don't think it's happening to you
[A] That was that's always been my dick and I still pretty much feel like that because I disappear in between records [A] a _ _ _ _ _
_ _ [Db] _ _ _ [Dbm] Lot of people [Abm] in show business don't [Gbm] care for the business side of it _
_ _ _ [Db] _ _ [Gbm] But Macaloon wasn't a huge fan of the shows either
[Bm] _ _ _
_ _ _ [Em] Did you never play live we did a bit
Never terribly extensively a month here a couple of weeks there, and I would kind of just think I'm not writing
I'm not writing and the
Obsessive thing kicked in and I didn't like it and I'd go home and pretend that [Bb] I I wasn't known in any way
[G] _ _ _ _ [C] _
_ _ _ [Gm] _ _ _ _ _
[Gm] _ _ [F] _ Macaloon would always sooner [G] write a new song than record a finished one
[Fm] The latest prefab sprout album has been years in the works put [Cm] together after the songwriter recovered from [Gm] an operation _ _
As part of my [F] recuperation I started not only to listen to [Eb] audiobooks
But to late-night [Fm] phone ins where [Eb] all the woes of the world [Bb] were being thrown [Eb] at a
sympathetic ear
_ [G] And I taped these programs and one or two sentences [F] came bouncing out of me and one of them was a young woman _ _
[Ab] And she just says [Gm] your daddy loves you.
[G] I said your daddy loves you very much
He just doesn't want to live with us anymore
[Fm] _ _ _ _ _ [D] _
_ _ [D] _ _ [Gb] _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ [Eb] _
[Gb] I
_ _ For sprout fans
It's tantalizing to think that Macaloon might have been penning compositions as good as this and hoarding them in Durham
If I had lived a proper like a kind of a life like a Tom Jones figure
He certainly hasn't lost his magic touch as we were discussing a favorite song of his about the devil this happened
No, what happened there?
Oh my god, oh my god, look at us.
We just mentioned Faust
_ _ _ Just mentioned Tom Jones who's _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ See Smith with Paddy Macaloo now, let's