“Hey Manhattan!” by Prefab Sprout
Anyone driving into Manhattan for the first time from John F. Kennedy Airport, perhaps in a taxi and not in an open convertible like Paddy McAloon, his brother Martin and the wonderful Wendy Smith, is overwhelmed by the opening skyscraper backdrop that one can see in usually and cheapest over the Queensborough Bridge, and not over the Brooklyn Bridge mentioned in the song. There is no more stunning entree in our imagination of New York. Because everything is like that, everything looks like you always imagined it. Just a lot better.
There is also no other song that could better describe this entree. A song that sounds like the collectively imagined image of Manhattan, and like the actual movement into Manhattan. It begins with “Guess what, summer’s arrived, I feel the world’s on my side” and a cymbal whir, with a gently rumbling bass and strings that tear up the horizon. “Hey Manhattan! Here I am!” sings Paddy McAloon, songwriter and now sole owner of the former band Prefab Sprout, which played the most glorious, sophisticated pop of the mid-’80s, he sings it in the chorus with Wendy Smith, who was his girlfriend at the time. They count what tourists would tick off, the roamers on 5th Avenue and “look, there’s The Carlyle!”, Sinatra and Kennedy fantasize, they feel as if this place, the city, the longing fantasy belongs to them.
The song is on Prefab Sprout’s third album, From Langley Park To Memphis, released in 1988. The band was at the height of their careers, Stevie Wonder and Pete Townshend were in the fine print, Thomas Dolby was producing (a little too much), they had their first and only top ten hit, and the elation of the good life that they were lucky found that everything was open to them resonates in this song. Then things turned out differently. But “Hey Manhattan!” knows nothing about that. The song is the best entry ticket for any New York novice. It is a sounding backdrop and, what makes it special, a very big, open embrace of life. We’ll talk about everything else when the suitcases are unpacked.