having gone missing from CBS. By September 1986, Prefab Sprout had resolved to start anew on a fully-produced follow-up to Steve McQueen; the band considered rerecording songs from Protest Songs, but decided to leave the album untouched. The resultant album, From Langley Park to Memphis, was released in March 1988. In a February 1988 interview, Paddy McAloon provided an update on Protest Songs, indicating it was still due for release: "CBS know they're on to a good thing, they know they've got a record that's been made for next to nothing that a lot of people are going to be interested in, even if they are the real diehard fans. It's not an embarrassment - OK, it’s not a CD-ish career move-type album, but they could still make a buck out of it". Composition Musical and lyrical style The album features a stripped down approach in contrast to Prefab Sprout's other work, leading to one reviewer to dub it the band's "own Basement Tapes". According to Q reviewer Phil Sutcliffe, the songs are "pretty, warm, user-friendly". McAloon felt the album was difficult to define as it was not recorded as a 4-track demo album like Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, describing it as instead "mid-way between what we’ve always done and something slightly rougher". The album was named Protest Songs because the songs, though not overtly political, generally relate to daily existence more than most of Prefab Sprout's work. McAloon commented ahead of the album's release; "they’re not strictly protest songs as Bob Dylan or Billy Bragg would recognise them but somewhere in that field". Several of the album's songs ("Dublin" "Wicked Things" "Pearly Gates") contain references to God and religious imagery, which was to become common in Prefab Sprout's work. McAloon is from a Catholic background, but describes himself as an agnostic "with a healthy interest in the mystical". He has said he considers religion a great subject for songwriting because it comes with a unique but widely-understood vocabulary and a poetic resonance. Songs According to Stuart Maconie's NME review of Protest Songs, the opening track "The World Awake" "cartwheels across your living room, the kind of tune that makes you want to jump for joy and buy the world a drink, its chords dangling in the air like a string of pearls". Both "The World Awake" and the album's second track "Life of Surprises" were described as being in a