Theme from The Now Now Express

by The Prongs

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Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
10 blistering tracks by The Prongs! As heard on the radio.

If you already love the wordy spoken tunefulness of the sound of eternally young yet wise Dublin in the form of John Fleming and Niall Toner jr, you will be ordering these compact disc goods by the time you finish this unwieldy sentence. And if - due perhaps to some flaw in your character or a blip in your aesthetic purview or a quibble with the words "young" and "wise" - you think you might hate The Prongs, now is the time to see for once and for all how wrong you are. We ask simply that you lend us your ears and purchase the goods. This CD comes in a lovely gatefold card case with photography by Dave Clifford. The disc is perfectly circular. But be careful! Do not exceed the stated dose.

These tunes are the soundtrack of a novelistic fake sociological fresco. They are pop tones for every Irish diaspora, but particularly that to London in the 1980s. Music for stalwarts of inverse ambition. The new wave and the post-punk punched together into a literate, sonic treat.

The Prongs recently aired these fine tunes (and several more - who can forget Map of a City, Did Things by Halves or indeed the sharp melodrama of The Ballad of The Prongs?) in public in the stately confines of Dublin's Project Arts Centre. With a full seven-piece band featuring Elliot Murphy (cello), Daragh McCarthy (bass), Paul O'Brien (drums), Ray Boyle (second guitar) and Darragh O'Kelly (keyboards) and Mr Toner's own sharp guitar and overall musical direction, the show whipped the full-house audience up into a frenzy and left them wanting more. This CD goes a long way to satiating the baying crowd. But enough of the old PR.

Please treat yourself to this CD, perhaps a T-shirt and a few digital tracks. You won't know yourselves. For we don't either.

Sincere thanks,

John and Niall
(The Prongs)

Includes unlimited streaming of Theme from The Now Now Express via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. ... more

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1.	Seagull Albatross 00:30	lyrics	buy track
SEAGULL ALBATROSS I knocked a seagull into the turbulent sea It floats in the ship’s slipstream And then in the wake The seagull is an albatross And it drowns with a curse That takes effect As and from now.
2.	Fake Samuel Pepys 03:42	lyrics	buy track
FAKE SAMUEL PEPYS Fake Samuel Pepys Keeps writing while he sleeps Fake Samuel Pepys Tired of life he leaps Right off the page To document his age Fake Samuel Pepys Tired of London, tired of life Tired of his family, tired of his wife Tired of Copperfield/Tired of Lear The sputtering bulbs of Blackpool pier Blind Milton bumps into Blind Pew On the platform of a station called Crewe Plastic spoon, fork and plastic flick-knife It’s the time of your life Fake Samuel Pepys Herds words like he herds sheeps Money lines that London dump in heaps Fake Samuel Pepys Job interviewers are all creeps Once a joke he told, The streets they are paved with gold Your future will unfold Awake one morning cold From kitchen encased in mould He set off on his adventure bold Outside he did behold A kerbside mound of gold (Sung chorus) All that glisters must be told Those filthy streets were paved with gold My blistered hand tried to grab hold Of that absolute crock of gold I’d really like to get rich now But think I will just take a bow And kick away these crocks of gold And start instead late tomorrow Fake Samuel Pepys Tears of ink as he weeps Out a stained-glass portrait of his time Four Dublin boys Sail across snot green slime To push back against closing time No national anthem plays, their discourse is cultured mime They are counterfeit Samuel ‘Pepy’ Misprinted up and sold off cheap A time capsule of detail Unpublished memoir for future retail (Sung chorus) All that glisters must be told Those filthy streets were paved with gold My blistered hand tried to grab hold Of that absolute crock of gold I’d really like to get rich now But think I will just take a bow And kick away these crocks of gold And start instead late tomorrow Animate this fake sociological fresco With funds diverted from Unesco Into lager from Sainsbury and from Tesco Strangling Samuel Pepys In his bed as he sleeps Behind his words he really weeps The Mocking Boys we are lords we leap And tread carelessly for we tread upon our dreams It’s Channel 4, it’s the BBC’s beams Deflected to sound like Ponzi schemes For those who tire of London Before they even arrive You could have had a career But you would have had to strive Stuck in this generational fresco Still embezzling those funds from Unesco Gloss over your own history’s worth With Valiant heroes of IPC comic cut mirth Burn your one-way ticket in this hellish inferno Write the diary of Janus Stark and the diary of Adam Eterno.
3.	Named After Bars 03:10	lyrics	buy track
NAMED AFTER BARS We've been living our life Way way way below par Mulligan, Foley, Murphy and Neary Dragging our keys on the side of a car Mulligan, Foley, Murphy and Neary. Each of us named after A famed Dublin bar We went away from that city But not all that far A conscience can be troubled by the occasional pang But we formulated friendship in the shape of our gang The Mocking Boys Beware. Beware. Beware. The Mocking Boys Uneasy young men We strike fear into only ourselves. A mapped London lifestyle We permanently marr In bitumen toil and dole office fraud Time turns lunch pints to inevitable tar That we taste and spit out, see how far? SEE HOW FAR? Our sincerity is sketched in lie-detect graphs We know what we do and we do it for laughs. Time crawls past So grindingly slow We'll never get it back Walthamstow, Walthamstow. Our compass was cruelty Ambition our cross We deluded ourselves daily and laughed at our loss The Thames was a river The city forced to flow We pissed on its ripples All those years ago The laps of its waters The Victorian bridge Tight confines of E17 quarters A growling broken fridge The dark of that river Embankment lights that still glow Our suitcases sinking So slow, so slow DHSS dispatches a jobseeker query Our prompt reply: We're Mulligan, Foley, Murphy and Neary. Mulligan, Foley, Murphy and Neary We meet for a beer and see everything clearly 4am harshness, a 40-watt bulb Blame a bad memory, this portrait is bleary.
4.	Drowning Is What Water Dreams 01:04	lyrics	buy track
DROWNING IS WHAT WATER DREAMS Back to Holyhead Walk out on the water On the crest of a wave Veer to the cradle but never the grave No longer lonely are the gregarious brave Walk on the water From Holyhead Kill your London life And leave it dead A dog-eared life Too well-read Dublin’s no metaphor You can be there instead Drowning is what water dreams Mail boat lists on rotting beams Rudderless cargo of migrant teams Drowning is what water dreams Mail boat lists on rotting beams Rudderless cargo of migrant teams Reversing the flow You know where to go Air seeks to suffocate in its schemes Drain the colour from your face Drag the black from your lungs And bear down on you as night Fire caresses you with violent flame A Kings Cross cinder completely to blame Crawl back to the suburbs From whence you came Lack of ambition has made you lame.
5.	The Now Now Express 03:33	lyrics	buy track
THE NOW NOW EXPRESS There’s a missed boat There’s a missed train There’s your bag hand And it’s blistered That girl Mercedes? Yeah: you ditched her Some Christmas party in a vast Georgian room It was shabby genteel Functional footwear and occasional high heel In the magic dark of a new year’s eve You held her hand and tried to believe But your other hand was a fist around the radiator pipe And you imagine and know it’s tripe But your ex is on some other floor And she grips on to another radiator pipe And you are reunited for evermore Mercedes yes you ditched her You ditched her It’s all aboard The Now Now Express Wear every excuse As casual dress Tube-discarded copies of the Evening Standard Equal the free press Your identity is a gang. It’s the cult of friendship and you’re all depressed The love in this city, you are a round-buying signal of distress The Now Now Express It’s a train and it runs On tracks Always one lap ahead of where you think you should be At this stage of your life Speeding off Miles ahead Across peaks and toughs A life cycle Out of sync with you and your life The Now Now Express It’s a train and it jumps Its tracks In a page-one pile-up Its passengers zonked And hog-tied Across The rails As you travel through The big conk-out of your early twenties Through tunnels Past platforms On a train Under a city whose dimensions were twisted by Its distorted schematic map Every day you lie down To sleep And dream The Now Now Express Derailed Every day you lie down To sleep And dream The Now Now Express Derailed For time is the rolling stock of routine Time is the rolling stock of routine Time is the rolling stock of routine Your travel pass each day Spews from a broken ticket machine.
6.	Figurehead 00:56	lyrics	buy track
FIGUREHEAD I wrote a manifesto that targeted the class to which I belonged And subsidised bread and circuses and the protest crowds which thronged I rewarded blank indifference and punished those already wronged And to control the pitchfork peasants my machinery of state was multi-pronged And when they carve my statue It won’t be to actual scale My stone eyes stare to the horizon Granite lips sneering at the frail My foes all fled for shelter My friends I simply jailed I was hoisted up on a gleaming plinth By the heaving masses I had failed. It was London It was Dublin I had to wait til I was dead It was London It was Dublin I was a figurehead.
7.	Kango Hammer 03:15	lyrics	buy track
KANGO HAMMER Krakens wake Krakens wake London Bridge London Bridge Labourer toils to tear down the bridge With Kango hammers Kango hammer Every so often one would break away And plunge into the water and there it lay Kango hammer… break away Plunge down into the water and there it lay The bridge was dismantled and shipped away Shipped away, shipped away… Purchased by a Yank and reassembled in a theme park in the USA [Robotic voice from riverbed]: But the kango hammers lurk on the Thames river bed Rusting monsters Rusting monsters Slumber down there on the river bed Building site tools pretend to be dead Building site tools their blood rust-red Bide their time on the river bed Building site tools pretend to be dead Building site tools pretend to be dead Labourer’s life unfolds as he embraces business theory Escapes building site ditch and focuses clearly Against city economics he fights fire with fire Employs pals in his family firm specialising in plant hire Labourer gradually transforms his muscular life Goes off and gets children and he gets a wife Suffers decades of trouble and decades of strife Insomnia cuts his sleep like a carving knife The paint-chipped JCBs/The fork-lift trucks The broken hods/The skips for crooks The contracts signed/The meaty handshakes done Budgets and schedules all overrun. Insomnia cuts his sleep like a carving knife Every night Every night And then the Kraken kango hammers come back to life Crawl out of the water To ruin his life Kraken kango hammers come back to life Crawl out of the water To ruin his life Rusty kango Rusty kango Flexes like tails they drag behind Pogo across pavements to destroy what they find Bulldoze London Bulldoze London Chisel every brick Chisel every brick Pogo kango hammers kill Christoper Wren Tunnels and bridges of Isambard Brunel then Building site ghosts cause mayhem and trouble Reduce the built environment to dust and to rubble Lifetimes of work are finally demolished But the kraken kango hammers gleam newly oiled and polished.
8.	Brain Drain 04:21	lyrics	buy track
BRAIN DRAIN “This is the night train crossing the border/Bringing the cheque and the postal order Letters for the rich/Letters for the poor The shop at the corner and the girl next door” This is the mail boat forcing social order/Bringing diaspora to the coastal border Fetters to be severed from every cute hoor Duty free shop and we all want more This is the mail boat forcing social order/Bringing diaspora to the coastal border Brain drain Cranium strain Special 1980s pain Biscuits were plain Potholed lane Rickety rust crane Take the mail boat to the mail train No one took the unaffordable plane Prodigal son: Abel or Cane You’re so vain “Mainland?” MAIN? Gibbering elder Frogspawn suit Acquired from a yellow copy of Loot Literacy level scored by Shoot Ten cups of tea And a decade of The Rosary The Now Now Express runs along the tracks Between the wheel’s revolutionary clicks and clacks We find time to stab ourselves in the backs The mobile phone was a Filofax Nation’s safety valve but no commemorative plaques Shacking up in London in some sort of shacks In between those seconds There were cracks Into which you crammed what you could In between the seconds there are cracks Inside these you live your life to the max Investing yourself in passive attack Against all the confidence that you lack In between those seconds There were cracks Into which you fell And never got out Beasts of burden Engaged in toil Made of the suburbs more than soil Diverting our minds from affairs of the state We engaged as great thinkers in lively debate A nation of poets and visionary seers Stumble down gangplanks like duty-free King Lears Sons of free state parliamentarians Sons of butchers and sons of doctors Daughters of barmen and of bankers And daughters of drivers of diesel tractors Failed film extras in crowd screens by flaky US directors Sons of car salesmen And quiz show presenters Daughters of nurses And teachers in schools Holyhead lemmings Statistics used by liars and fools Forced out from diminishing national gene pools Set to find loopholes in the Queensbury rules The nurses, the navies, the paid by the word The exodus snaking, obedient and absurd We’d watched the 1970s sitcoms And heard the glam-rock hits They’d closed down the mines And this was the pits Immaculately coiffured or car-coat-begarbed We’d strike out with insults both witty and barbed Past Hamstead homes of the wealth rewarded Fast forward into future retarded Mail boat disgorges its laughing cargo Newspapers story: imposed embargo “This is the night train crossing the border/Bringing the cheque and the postal order This is the mail boat forcing social order/Bringing diaspora to the coastal border Fetters to be severed from every cute hoor Duty free shop and Peig-scarred folklore Brain drain Cranium strain Cardboard suitcase Snapped Doctor Martin bootlace It’s the national disgrace Interview tie coiled like a banished snake For job opportunities you would never take Somebody wearing Farah slacks Credit card maxed out to the max The Atrix’s Wendy with a Brillo pad under her chin Sips cold Mulligatawny soup out of a tin The economy had bribed her hormones With penal rates and unaffordable loans Intriguing culture facet: Our youth traded in as the State’s greatest asset.
9.	MiddleMarch17 03:44	lyrics	buy track
MIDDLEMARCH17 Festooned trucks from the factories preen MiddleMarch17 Day the whole world turns shades of green MiddleMarch17 Masters of brand and the whole charade MiddleMarch17 Saintly man and the annual parade MiddleMarch17 * Patrick St Patrick I’m no longer afraid Patrick St Patrick It’s the way that I’m made Patrick St Patrick The name that I took From a hero wielding a crosier hook The patron saint and perpetual myth Benign icon for Ireland’s kin and its kith St Patrick please bless our balance of trade Gross domestic product – we export the home-made St Patrick: avatar of the banished-snakes brigade MiddleMarch17: Off to the parade * MiddleMarch17 Life stetches from the infinity of being young and keen To the wastelands of the middle-aged demographic mean MiddleMarch17 From plywood and formica gleams retro sheen It’s MiddleMarch, it’s 17 Industry markets this well-oiled machine Shades of green spill from cans of paint Patrick now needs the patience of a saint Parade kicks off from Parnell Square Slither past the GPO, Eason’s and some assassin’s lair Inside: Vengeful, nervous and overwrought A migrant psycho needs just one clear shot A bouncing bullet, a patsy and not to get caught Some economic militia put a price on his head The diaspora hires a hitman to do the job instead Patrick will pass through the crosswire but never be dead Postboxes are green, they’re not blood-red A shot rings out The mail boat sinks National saint slumps forward Another large round of drinks Its Kilburn, Stockwell The closed King Ludd The Sir Alfred Hitchcock They’re spilling pints like blood A shot rings out around the world The parade’s a damp squib, the bullet’s a dud. MiddleMarch17 The national saint and his stolen identity Sign on as him as a DHSS non-entity But ahead of the serpent, ahead of the pack St Patrick chose his moment: he knew when to come back. [Fade/out] In the middle of March from East 17 Set off at 11am and drink the slate clean Stockwell Swan Railway Tavern Spice of Life Intrepid Fox George Robey King Ludd Sir Alfred Hitchcock Three-leaf clover Constrained by the crumbled cliffs of Dover Shamrock pinned to a boy’s cable-stitch knitted pullover Banished forever but it’s never over N, S, E and W Homing pigeon calms its troubled breast And returns lest It loses sight of its broken-twig nest.
10.	King of Hibernia 00:38	lyrics	buy track
KING OF HIBERNIA By St Paul’s I rose in fictional rank I was crowned the King of Hibernia By the power vested in me I would get to know my emigrant subjects I would shoulder the diaspora burden I was Patrick The saint of the Irish psyche The brain drain were my congregation I could already hear their hymn

about

At last, the debut long-playing compact disc from the young Dublin band everyone is talking about. Yes – that band who leaped from the pages of a 1980s cult novel. Here it is: "Theme from The Now Now Express". The new-wave post-punkers offer a dizzy selection of delights from their vast fake sociological fresco. Niall Toner's infectiously intelligent music and John Fleming's vividly voiced lyrics bring you the already radio-smashing MiddleMarch17 and Fake Samuel Pepys. In there too, you’ll find Kango Hammer, Brain Drain, Named After Bars and, of course, The Now Now Express. The select audience at The Prongs July 8th sold-out Project Arts Centre show will be happy these pop tones run up against the Elliot Murphy cello-backed terse poetic deconstructions of Seagull Albatross, Drowning is What Murder Dreams, Figurehead and King of Hibernia. Don't delay. Buy now while stocks last. Many thanks. - Your good pals The Prongs.

credits

released August 3, 2023

Words and voice: John Fleming
All music and production: Niall Toner Jr
Cello: Elliot Murpy

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about

The Prongs Dublin, Ireland

Ears tuned to the kaleidoscopic new wave, The Prongs are plugged in. Fleming’s words weave a memory net for years that never quite slipped by while Toner’s multi-instrumentalism mines eternal pop. It's a lyrical evocation of psycho-sociology and angry young manism aged into post-punk pop permanence. Dublin-based, The Prongs make literate catchy tunes fuelled by JF's lost novel The Now Now Express. ... more

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