Will the real Faron Young.....

After all this time:

It’s pleasingly circular that a band whose name came from a misunderstanding while listening to song should do the same for one of their fans namely me.

Like all sensible people I loved Prefab Sprout when they first appeared and their 1st lp with the mysterious line “you give Faron Young ....four in the morning”. I’m not sure I knew who or what Faron Young was (and this was before there were more than 10 computers in Yorkshire let alone the interweb) I think in my mind I thought that FY was a she someone like Farrah Fawcett i.e. some kind of impossible unattainable sultry Californian goddess (as in this old national geographic shot I found ).

This seductive idea had persisted for a long while, in fact up to just last night when I got round to playing a recent batch of “rescued” singles. I’d been flicking through the mouldy Cilla 7 inches and had seen Faron Young’s “4 in the morning” and bought it purely to see what Paddy McAloon had been singing about all those years ago.


Now I’m not sure about the song yet but I’m slightly disappointed that Faron is a bloke and seemingly a purveyor of standard (for 1972) country and western songs. Now I know Paddy McAloon is more sensible in these matters than I but I was little let down, you’ll be telling me next that “Lola” by the Kinks wasn’t about a woman!