" Ah, the eternal question. Prefab Sprout, for those of you that don't know,are a band from a small village near Newcastle in the industrial North of England, who have made several albums over the years, three of which I have produced some or all of.
I first encountered them in about 1983. I was a guest singles reviewer on BBC Radio One in London, a station that at the time had a total stranglehold on the volatile British pop charts. Most of the singles were absolutely dreadful, and of course the slimy DJ was calling them "Fab!" and "Ace!" In the midst of all the dross, one song came on that truly shone. " Dawn breaks in the Southern states" , wailed this soulful Geordie voice over frantic acoustic guitars and harmonica. "...the burden of love is so strange." . It was a song called "Don't Sing" from Prefab's first album SWOON. Of course
the DJ said "ooh that one's a bit weird innit? " but I said it was the best thing I'd heard for ages. Well, as it happened, the band were listening in,and afterwards their manager Keith got in touch with me and said they were getting ready to record again and was I interested in producing them?
So I took a train up to see them at home in County Durham. Two brothers,Paddy and Martin McAloon, had grown up playing music together and decided at an early age to have a band called Prefab Sprout. Paddy, the older, was the writer, guitarist and singer; Mart followed his fingers and played bass.
They lived with their mum on a hill next to a church in a house filled with crucifixes. They were a very religious family, in fact Paddy went to a seminary, accounting perhaps for the heavy Catholic imagery in the lyrics to SWOON and later stuff. Their dad was bedridden and very ill, having suffered a stroke of some kind. Paddy sat down on his bed in a tiny room and pulled
out a guitar and a stack of lyrics, hand-scrawled and with the chords written in over the words. He sang me probably forty songs, and I picked out my favourite ten or twleve, and we made an album called STEVE McQUEEN (or,as it was named in the USA, TWO WHEELS GOOD.)
It was in the same era as "The Flat Earth", debateably my best period.There's something magical about the Steve McQueen album, an openness and expectation that none of us have touched since. I'm sure it's partly because we didn't really know what we were doing.... in our London studio, what the Sprouts really wanted to do all day was eat. I've never seen anyone put food away like that lot. They would eat double cheeseburgers for a snack between meals. Later in LA they would have happily lived at the Pink's hot dog stand if I'd let them. One time a flash record company exec took us out to a 'nouvelle cuisine' restaurant in Soho. When the waiter brought Martin his main course - a smattering of young vegetables surrounding a microscopic
piece of fish - he blurted out "Thas' fer me neck, now what's fer me stummach?"
Wendy, the band's backing singer, was a sweet sylph-like character who had a dual role in those days - singer and the maker of tea and delicious bacon sandwiches for the boys in the control room. She had this wispy voice, and a certain way of delaying the 's' at the end of line, like: " That man Prin........ce. All his songs are about se.........x! " When it was time for her to sing she'd get very serious and pull out extensive photocopied instructions from Paddy - lyrics with E#, A, D written over each syllable.
She'd go off into a corner of the studio with a little Casio and play the melodies and copy each note. Problem was, Paddy and Mart had always detuned their guitars to E flat, and sometimes Paddy had forgotten to transpose Wendy's music. Still, you'd run the tape and she'd happily sing her harmonies precisely a semitone sharp. Once she finished a take, and I said "that was great Wendy - in tune, good tone... do you want to try one with a little more expression?" There was a long pause and then she said almost inaudibly: "I don't sing with expression. I just sing note....s!" Over the years, Wendy blossomed into quite the girl-about-town, swanning around
backstage at Pet Shop Boys gigs and art openings. She and Paddy, who had been an item in the early years, drifted apart. The more cosmopolitan Wendy became, the more Paddy turned into the romantic, reclusive bookworm. Yet for all that, as Nigel Tufnell would say, they didn't let it affect their professionalism.
"Girl when I burn - hell nothing's the same
I'll singe your pretty blonde lashes."
FROM LANGLEY PARK TO MEMPHIS has its moments of brilliance, but it was an awkward growing time for the Sprouts when the commercial and the artistic rubbed each other up not always quite the right way. By now they were a 500,000 selling band in Europe - quite a feat - and yet as Paddy's writing matured he was finding it hard to keep up the schoolboy energy of "The King of Rock'n'Roll." Arguments with Sony ensued.
JORDAN: THE COMEBACK is a massive work of almost literary status. James Joyce would have been proud. It's got enough astounding melodies and lyrics to fill a boxed set. And the themes - the pop mythology of Elvis and Sinatra, the diverging paths of Paddy and Wendy, and the turmoil created in Paddy's spirit by the final passing over of their dad - are so crystal
clear, and so majestically explored through the cycle of the songs, it's almost painful to listen to. I'm prouder of this album, and the way it pairs with my own "Astronauts and Heretics", even than the "Flat Earth"/ "Steve McQueen" pair which is certainly easier to like, and probably stands more comfortably astride the commercial/artistic fence for both Paddy and myself.
Jees, I'm sounding like a rock critic here!
Sadly, "Jordan" and "Astronauts" seem to have no place in the landscape of the nineties rock music industry. They're too personal, too intense, too hard to pin down into a rackable category. They should be sold in bookshops,not record stores. After several years away, Paddy has reportedly finished the demos for the next Sprouts album, so we' ll see if he's been able to
find a comfortable space to occupy for a few more decades.
I often wonder whether it matters to the handful of people who really 'get' what we do, that they only make up a tiny minority of record buyers? and that as far as the music industry is concerned, the kind of quantities we sell are barely worth bothering with, even if to our loyal audience we're one of the more important things in their lives? probably not.??' When I was
fifteen and at my most passionate as a music fan, I didn't even notice whether the Captain Beefheart or Dan Hicks album I was listening to was in the charts. It's just confusing for someone like Paddy or myself, who have each shown we're capable of selling millions, to be told repeatedly that the songs we really care about, which are also the songs our fans really care about, are not 'commercial' enough to justify spending a record company's Big Bucks on.
Then you look at where they choose to put their money instead . . . "
Thomas Dolby
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