Exaltation, renunciation, sickness and silence – the legend of Prefab Sprout is a confounding one, yet their mainman abides. Is he the sanest mad genius in pop? “I will write a song about anything,” says Paddy McAloon. “That’s my dark secret.”
Recently, film-maker Spike lee invited songwriter paddy mcaloon to lunch in a posh london restaurant. it prompted a rare excursion into the semi-public sphere by the otherwise reticent prefab Sprout mainman, and some initial bemusement. “One of the first things i said to Spike was, i know! you’re looking for a Santa claus for a christmas movie,” says mcaloon. “morgan freeman’s turned you down.” the reality was perhaps even more unlikely. lee’s younger brother cinqué had written a film, a musical based on the songs of prefab Sprout. “Spike went through the script with me,” explains mcaloon. “On every page there’s a lyric from one of the songs. Surreal.” Sat in a hotel room in his native Durham, clad in crimson velvet and carrying a silver-topped cane, his long beard and snowy locks enhancing an air of twinkly wisdom, the 61-year-old mcaloon could certainly pass for St nick in mufti, or perhaps a Hogwarts’ potions professor on sabbatical. Born catholic, educated in a seminary, but schooled in song by Stephen Sondheim and Jimmy Webb, he joined bassist brother martin, gossamer-voiced Wendy Smith and, later, drummer neil conti, to forge a sui generis brand of highly literate, harmonically complex pop on ’80s albums Swoon and Steve McQueen, before swopping hit singles for industry-confounding concept albums. from the mid-’90s, he slid into the realm of eremitic legend, from whence rumours of unreleased opuses (with titles like 20th century magic, Doomed poets, Zorro the fox) and even the occasional actual unreleased opus, emerged. already dogged by acute tinnitus, a year ago he suffered “another ear disaster”: meniere’s disease, affecting the blood supply to his inner ear. “So i get dizzy and i fall over,” he says. “Hence the stick. i couldn’t hear properly and a lot of the time i still can’t. a bad one for a musician!” With releases at a premium (mcaloon’s last ‘current’ album, Crimson/Red, came in 2013) and cinqué lee’s Sprout movie in turnaround, mcaloon’s manager and longtime kitchenware label boss keith armstrong has his work cut out retro-engineering the singer-songwriter’s career (good job he also manages Jake Bugg). that said, a mcaloon composition, Who Designed the Snowflake, has just been covered by rod Stewart, and in february, a remastered version of I Trawl The Megahertz, the record mcaloon conceived while recovering from multiple operations on his retinas in the late-’90s and released under his own name in 2003, emerges on cD and vinyl. it is an unusual record even in the mcaloon/Sprouts canon, being a lyric-light collection dominated by a hypnotic, 22minute orchestral piece backing a monologue written by mcaloon, and intoned by one yvonne connors in the style of a late-night radio phone-in confessional. it’s heart-
breaking and beautiful. “I felt it was a good thing that kind of got missed a bit,” says McAloon of the reissue, which now carries the Prefab Sprout imprimatur. “OK, it’s not Steve McQueen. It isn’t Swoon. But maybe it is the kind of thing you might expect me to do if I was pushing myself.”
It makes sense that I Trawl The Megahertz is coming out on vinyl at last. It’s an album for heads…
My way of saying it is that it’s a headphone record. It’s its own little world. It won’t suit everyone all the time – what record does? I think I made something – after I had been ill, lying down – that I wish I’d had when I’d been ill, lying down. I’d been listening to audio books, and radio phone-ins, and I thought if only these things had had music, too, something I could have got lost in. I think that’s what drove it.
When pop and rock musicians generally dabble in classical…
…It’s an uneasy mix, yes. I’m naming no names, but from ’68 onwards rock people tried to do it. Maybe they were looking for a kind of validation – “We’re better than that threeminute thing.” Personally, I don’t think I completely got it right. I hate to rat on the product, but if I’m being honest I had ambitions for the 20-minute piece that I don’t think I quite pulled off. But I was caught up in this notion of being lost in this cosmos of sound, with this woman’s voice telling you fragments from her past. It spoke to the part of me that was still interested in progressive rock.
Was there much music in your home as you grew up?
There was music. Both my parents could play the piano, although there wasn’t a piano in the house when I was little. They could both bash something out in a non-tutored way. We had a few records. But they didn’t spend a lot of money on themselves… They didn’t have a lot of things. I spend more in a week on myself than my parents ever spent on themselves in a lifetime.
Did you have a pop music epiphany?
I experienced the ’60s as if through a veil. My childhood is lit up by these strange memories, which are probably false, of being stood in the kitchen hearing Eleanor Rigby for the first time. But the thing that hit me in adolescence was T.Rex. I’m 13 in 1970. I’ve been watching kids at school with guitars and somebody teaches me a chord: D suspended, the Pinball Wizard chord. That got me. And I drove my mother demented with Ride A White Swan. She thought I’d never get over that record.
What was the first song you wrote that you thought was decent?
There were a couple. But did I play them to anyone? I’m not sure I did. There was one called Don Quixote – it was nothing to do with Cervantes, I just liked the name. It was a DADGAD thing. But the first things I wrote that I knew were good? I remember writing Bonny [later to appear on Steve McQueen] – I thought, Yes, you could play that to someone.
Were your songs always more complex than the norm?
The hardest thing for me to do, and I still struggle with this, although I am better at it now – is to relax into C major. Because everyone else has done it. I couldn’t think of anything to do with those tools. So I fought that, and made as many different shapes as I could. Also, I had broad tastes in music. I remember buying, here in Durham not far up the street, the Firebird by Stravinsky. (Sings the finale melody) I thought, That’s something I could imagine Television doing. I could see the correspondence. It struck me these things could be transposed. And that was my attempt to find ground of my own. So if you listen to I Never Play Basketball Now, on Swoon, there’s 50 or 60 different shapes in the first three minutes. Not that that makes it good, but it just has. And that all came out of, I don’t know how to make a convincing song out of C, F and G7. But I wasn’t a jazzer. I wasn’t a Steely Dan fan. I learned about that stuff later. I was like an amoeba drifting towards evolution.
Did you always know what Prefab Sprout’s sound should be, or was it trial and error?
Trial and error. The original thing was gruffvoiced me, trying to sound like I should be at the microphone when maybe I shouldn’t. You work with what you’ve got, but I thought it would be nice to have another colour. Hence: Wendy. I didn’t even know [her] that well. She didn’t really speak to me. She just turned up to gigs with her boyfriend and she’d relay things through him. I was looking for a tone – this really pure sound. I hadn’t even heard her sing.
Did you really decide to put all your most challenging material on your first album?
We could have put Bonny, Faron Young and Johnny Johnny on Swoon. Keith [Armstrong] wanted us to put Bonny on it – I think he would have liked more songs like Bonny. Secretly, I too, would have liked a career with more songs like Bonny. Then we’d have been more like The Rolling Stones, where you have some key songs that only have four chords and I wouldn’t have to struggle so much to remember what I’d written (laughs). Seriously, I’d have loved that – a setlist like that.
Steve McQueen [1985] is Prefab Sprout’s cornerstone album, where the songs and the production came together perfectly. What led you to Thomas Dolby?
The God’s honest truth is that there was an article in the paper that said he was helping Michael Jackson buy food for his llamas. I had a huge interest in Michael Jackson, and I thought, Well he sounds like the guy for me. And Tom had been on that Round Table radio
programme, with Mari Wilson I think, and one of the songs was Don’t Sing off Swoon. And he said, “I hear an explosion of talent.” So that endeared him to me!
Steve McQueen seemed fixated on the end of relationships, and infidelity…
What shaped Steve McQueen was Thomas Dolby choosing the songs that interested him. It was only later I realised the album had this angle – the infidelity aspect, of letting someone else down and letting yourself down. I’m not really that proud of anything I’ve done, but I am pleased that we never really went in for ‘It’s your fault’ songs – “That woman done me wrong.” I always hate that shit. Can’t stand to hear it.
After Steve McQueen, you were hot, hot, hot. What did hotness feel like?
Maybe I was the guy who missed the moment – didn’t really notice he was hot. We finished Steve McQueen in the January [’85]. I wrote King Of Rock ’N’ Roll and Cars And Girls in the February. We did various little tours, like groups do, ’cos it’s a bit of a lark and there’s nothing much else to do and what are the options? But I wasn’t convinced it was the life for me. You could see the possibilities of a life on the road, but also that it will possibly diminish you in other ways. You’re not writing new stuff. You’re propping up the moment. I also think – which may sound strange because I did like my cigars in those days – that if we toured we’d have just ended up like everyone else, with the tabs and the booze. You’d be in that atmosphere so long that when you came back you couldn’t live normally. I worried about that.
Were you an idealist? There was a stand being taken against the trappings of rock. Was ‘on the road’ one of those?
It was a very 1984 thing, to be against the rocky stuff that had come before. I liked Led Zeppelin, but I didn’t see it as a feasible option, for bands to go on like that in perpetuity. I didn’t even have much of a political consciousness. Except that I knew there was a way to write about relationships and women that wasn’t that tired old shit. I saw that too, in [Scritti Politti’s] Green [Gartside]. But I was never too good at hanging out with people. I was a bit standoffish. There were people who were kind to us – like Elvis Costello. He did a version of Cruel and he put us on a gig with him. But I remember feeling that I needed to preserve a sense of being in a bedroom writing a song, and I couldn’t do that by being ‘pally’. I still feel like that.
There are lots of interesting things about your next album, From Langley Park To Memphis [1988], but were you also trying a bit too hard to be the big pop band?
I know where you’re coming from, but… From Langley Park To Memphis mainly suffers from not all being produced by Tom Dolby. Not to put [FLPTM producer] John Kelly down, but to put me down a bit. The thing of it being the big pop band? Hmmm, we may have noticed that the two previous records had got to Number 21 in the charts. For the album cover, we got ourselves styled a bit. Maybe we did wonder what it would be like to be popular popular. It was hardly crammed with hits, though. It had “Hot dog, jumping frog” [ie. The King Of Rock ’N’ Roll]. But that was a throwaway moment for me, like a Yellow Submarine thing. It’s a bit of a laugh and we’ll move on. Except it kind of stays there… It’s a bit like Jeff Beck’s Hi Ho Silver Lining – it shouldn’t reflect too much on the rest of what he did, but it’s a pop moment, and those things have their own power.
The album also seemed to be examining rock stardom – referencing Elvis Presley, Bruce Springsteen…
Yes! I’d forgotten that stuff! Fame in itself interested me. I was interested in these figures and what they meant. The Springsteen thing – when I try to talk about this, my tongue turns to rubber, because it’s a strange concept to explain. Part of it was the feeling that rock stars were held in such high esteem and I wanted to mock that slightly. And I did that by misreading him, as if he didn’t know that life is hard, as if all he thought about was cars and girls. It’s a misreading of Springsteen. But why? To tweak the nose of someone at Rolling Stone? Possibly. Something like that.
You had Stevie Wonder play chromatic harmonica on Nightingales…
And we recorded in Stevie Wonder’s studio! And we had the gospel choir he worked with, The Andraé Crouch Singers. I remember showing Andraé Crouch the chords to I Remember That and him saying, “Oh, you’re bad!” And at the time I wasn’t sure this was a term of approval. But Muff Winwood, our A&R at Sony, was resolutely unimpressed that we had Stevie Wonder on it. He was, “So what?” But to me it was a big thing. Who else can play like that?
“People said nice things about Steve McQueen. And that frightened me – Arrrgh! What’s next?!”