Hot dog, jumping frog, Albuquerque”: The pop genius behind the strangest lyric of the 1980s

Paddy McAloon's Prefab Sprout stormed the 1980s charts with sophisticated pop hooks like When Love Breaks Down. A re-release of 2003's astounding I Trawl The Megahertz, mixing orchestral multi-tracks with radio phone-in snippets, brings him out to meet Newsnight's STEPHEN SMITH.

Wendy Smith and Paddy McAloon of Prefab Sprout in 1983 | Getty Images

Paddy McAloon materialises out of a snowstorm in a long, white beard, red fedora and matching ensemble, and sporting a silver-topped cane. On his journey to London from his native North-East, the frontman and songwriter of Eighties chart-toppers Prefab Sprout was asked for a photograph by an admirer. “You're my favourite actor,” sighed the fanboy, “Dumbledore!”

Well, you can see where the kid was coming from. McAloon certainly has the look of a wizard. And he is not lacking in the necromantic arts. How else to explain his vanishingly rare facility for marrying melodic pop hooks to smart, bittersweet lyrics?

Irresistible compositions such as Cars and Girls, When Love Breaks Down and The King of Rock 'n' Roll (Altogether now: “Hot dog, jumping frog, Albuquerque!”), and the sublime albums Swoon and Steve McQueen, earned McAloon comparisons with his idols Lennon and McCartney, and Stephen Sondheim.

The Prefabs had their moment, and as these things go, it was rather glorious. They've only released one album of new material since the turn of the century, Crimson/Red in 2013, so fans could be forgiven for fearing that 'the light is gone', to coin the lyrics of their lovely ballad We Let The Stars Go.

Their underrated singer Wendy Smith has 'retired'. She may be the same Wendy Smith who popped up on my Twitter timeline recently as director of cre.ative learning at the Sage, Gateshead.

But just as Sondheim and McCartney aren’t the sort of songwriters to knock it on the head, neither is McAloon, it turns out. All these years at home in Durham, he's been writing “obsessively”, he says.