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Prefab Sprout’s Steve McQueen by Johnny Black
Prefab Sprout released Steve McQueen, in June 1985, a month when rock seemed so bereft of inspiration that snooker ace Jimmy White was featured on the cover of NME in preference to any current music star.
In that sunless wasteland of soul-less stadium rock, processed dance fodder and New Romantic dregs, head Sprout Paddy McAloon’s transcendently luminous second album should have been received as manna from Consett, County Durham. Instead, it never rose above No21 and its highest charting single, When Love Breaks Down, peaked at No25.
To be at No1 in 1985 involved playing the game - affecting designer togs, striking modish poses, talking down to the kids who adored you - and McAloon didn’t. He was more likely to be found scratching his straggly beard as he wandered around Consett in tartan plimsolls, with his green MAndS pullover pulled over baggy pants.
He was, however, quite brilliant at writing radically beautiful music, inspired by such unfashionable gurus as The Beach Boys, Burt Bacharach, Isaac Hayes, Jimmy Webb and George Gershwin. After critical acclaim greeted early singles on Newcastle’s independent Kitchenware label, a cheaply recorded debut album, Swoon, was released in 1984 through Epic Records.
As luck would have it, synth-wizard-producer Thomas Dolby enthused on Radio One’s Round Table about one of those early singles, Don’t Sing. Suitably encouraged, the band invited him to Consett where, Dolby vividly recalls, “Paddy slept on a bed piled high with old songsheets. He would pull them out, read the lyrics and strum on a guitar, going ‘O.K. Thomas, listen to this one.’ Out of maybe fifty songs we picked ten to record.”
The sophistication of McAloon’s songs stunned Dolby. Yet, being an exceptionally accomplished musician, he realised that commercial success could easily elude material with such ambitious arrangements. As their new producer, he decided he’d have to “simplify what they were doing, and point out where, maybe by tweaking the arrangement a little, they could keep the same groove but still accommodate the chord and rhythm changes.”
Happily, McAloon had already come to the same conclusion. “I wrote When Love Breaks Down in June of 1984 in the front room after I’d come back from tour. It was a Saturday night and I wrote it with the guitar on my knee and the synthesiser in front of me at the same time. I was trying to break my ways of writing things. Always before it was on the guitar, tapping my feet. This was simple, like an old hymn or folk tune.”
Many of the Steve McQueen songs, including Bonny and Johnny Johnny, had been composed much earlier. “Faron Young was at least ten years old. I’d written it at a point when I couldn’t understand how Country could be so popular in England. I didn’t understand the universal message.” Even harder to grasp, given their elegant complexity on the album, is the fact that Faron Young started life as a slab of heavy metal and Johnny Johnny was a punk thrash.
The album’s closing track, When The Angels, is a tribute to another of McAloon’s heroes, Marvin Gaye. “In many ways, the song is me trying to work out why he died at that moment. His name isn’t mentioned because, if you try and write in the party line, whether it be about politics or music, then you don’t give people enough room to manoeuvre.”
Compared to the cheap and cheerful Swoon, Steve McQueen was a big budget production. As McAloon recalls, “I’d never been in a studio for three months solidly, where every day for eighteen hours you’re looking at the same stuff. And I loved it.”
On release, Smash Hits rated it “terrifically good”, and Record Mirror hailed it as “the finest album you will hear this year”. In the NME it was “a thing of crystal; beautiful and vulnerable” and for Sounds it was “the finest, most harmonious run of tunes since Dylan’s Blood On the Tracks”. All the more astonishing then that chart success in Britain was so limited but, within ten weeks of release, the album had sold half a million copies in Europe, and eventually attained platinum status.
Frequently cropping up in Best Albums Ever polls, Steve McQueen has endured and grown in stature over the years. It recently charted high in Mojo’s 100 Greatest Albums Ever Made, where it was dubbed “the finest slice of ‘80s thinking boy’s pop you’ll ever hear”.
All of this acclaim hardly seems to matter to Paddy McAloon. “I’m not really interested in expanding the boundaries of pop music,” he has said. “I’d rather hear someone whistling one of my songs.”
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Prefab Sprout released Steve McQueen, in June 1985, a month when rock seemed so bereft of inspiration that snooker ace Jimmy White was featured on the cover of NME in preference to any current music star.
In that sunless wasteland of soul-less stadium rock, processed dance fodder and New Romantic dregs, head Sprout Paddy McAloon’s transcendently luminous second album should have been received as manna from Consett, County Durham. Instead, it never rose above No21 and its highest charting single, When Love Breaks Down, peaked at No25.
To be at No1 in 1985 involved playing the game - affecting designer togs, striking modish poses, talking down to the kids who adored you - and McAloon didn’t. He was more likely to be found scratching his straggly beard as he wandered around Consett in tartan plimsolls, with his green MAndS pullover pulled over baggy pants.
He was, however, quite brilliant at writing radically beautiful music, inspired by such unfashionable gurus as The Beach Boys, Burt Bacharach, Isaac Hayes, Jimmy Webb and George Gershwin. After critical acclaim greeted early singles on Newcastle’s independent Kitchenware label, a cheaply recorded debut album, Swoon, was released in 1984 through Epic Records.
As luck would have it, synth-wizard-producer Thomas Dolby enthused on Radio One’s Round Table about one of those early singles, Don’t Sing. Suitably encouraged, the band invited him to Consett where, Dolby vividly recalls, “Paddy slept on a bed piled high with old songsheets. He would pull them out, read the lyrics and strum on a guitar, going ‘O.K. Thomas, listen to this one.’ Out of maybe fifty songs we picked ten to record.”
The sophistication of McAloon’s songs stunned Dolby. Yet, being an exceptionally accomplished musician, he realised that commercial success could easily elude material with such ambitious arrangements. As their new producer, he decided he’d have to “simplify what they were doing, and point out where, maybe by tweaking the arrangement a little, they could keep the same groove but still accommodate the chord and rhythm changes.”
Happily, McAloon had already come to the same conclusion. “I wrote When Love Breaks Down in June of 1984 in the front room after I’d come back from tour. It was a Saturday night and I wrote it with the guitar on my knee and the synthesiser in front of me at the same time. I was trying to break my ways of writing things. Always before it was on the guitar, tapping my feet. This was simple, like an old hymn or folk tune.”
Many of the Steve McQueen songs, including Bonny and Johnny Johnny, had been composed much earlier. “Faron Young was at least ten years old. I’d written it at a point when I couldn’t understand how Country could be so popular in England. I didn’t understand the universal message.” Even harder to grasp, given their elegant complexity on the album, is the fact that Faron Young started life as a slab of heavy metal and Johnny Johnny was a punk thrash.
The album’s closing track, When The Angels, is a tribute to another of McAloon’s heroes, Marvin Gaye. “In many ways, the song is me trying to work out why he died at that moment. His name isn’t mentioned because, if you try and write in the party line, whether it be about politics or music, then you don’t give people enough room to manoeuvre.”
Compared to the cheap and cheerful Swoon, Steve McQueen was a big budget production. As McAloon recalls, “I’d never been in a studio for three months solidly, where every day for eighteen hours you’re looking at the same stuff. And I loved it.”
On release, Smash Hits rated it “terrifically good”, and Record Mirror hailed it as “the finest album you will hear this year”. In the NME it was “a thing of crystal; beautiful and vulnerable” and for Sounds it was “the finest, most harmonious run of tunes since Dylan’s Blood On the Tracks”. All the more astonishing then that chart success in Britain was so limited but, within ten weeks of release, the album had sold half a million copies in Europe, and eventually attained platinum status.
Frequently cropping up in Best Albums Ever polls, Steve McQueen has endured and grown in stature over the years. It recently charted high in Mojo’s 100 Greatest Albums Ever Made, where it was dubbed “the finest slice of ‘80s thinking boy’s pop you’ll ever hear”.
All of this acclaim hardly seems to matter to Paddy McAloon. “I’m not really interested in expanding the boundaries of pop music,” he has said. “I’d rather hear someone whistling one of my songs.”