At first, Paddy McAloon thought he had to invent his own chords to write songs. As a result, the earliest music by his band Prefab Sprout can sound comical and haywire, like a jazz band entertaining themselves at a cocktail party before the guests arrive. As McAloon continued refining his voice, he earned comparisons to Elvis Costello and Steely Dan, but his heroes were people like Michael Jackson and Prince, Stephen Sondheim and George Gershwin. He dreamed of writing songs that the whole world could sing along to—but he wanted to do it his own way.
Four new vinyl reissues offer a thrilling survey of his journey as a pop songwriter. The series comprises the band’s 1984 debut Swoon, 1988’s commercial peak From Langley Park to Memphis, 1990’s double album Jordan: The Comeback, and 1992’s The Best of Prefab Sprout: A Life of Surprises. These reissues—which feature subtly improved artwork and sharp remasters from McAloon and his brother Martin—leave out but orbit around Steve McQueen, their 1985 masterpiece that remains the ideal entry point to their catalog. It was a breakthrough for the band members, marking their first collaboration with producer Thomas Dolby, whose playful, surreal touch helped define their characteristic sound. Dolby even helped curate that album’s tracklist, choosing songs from a stockpile that McAloon had amassed since forming the band with Martin in County Durham, England in the late ’70s.
Several of those songs predated Swoon, their scrappy debut, whose post-punk edge would be abandoned for a smoother, more sophisticated sound. While Swoon was unrepresentative of the band that Prefab Sprout would become, it set the template for how they’d navigate the pop world. The brothers were joined by multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Wendy Smith, who accompanied McAloon for wordless refrains and non-sequitur exclamations that took pleasure in twisting expectations. McAloon was beginning to write eloquently about heartbreak and adulthood (“Cruel,” “Elegance”) but he was also having a blast addressing questions that most songwriters might find trivial: What is the life of a celebrity chessmaster? When was the last time you played basketball?
After Swoon and the critical acclaim that followed Steve McQueen, the band recorded and shelved a quieter follow-up (Protest Songs, eventually released in 1989) before setting off to make something that capitalized on their newfound momentum. At the time of its release, the cinematic From Langley Park to Memphis was largely overshadowed by its first two tracks: the semi-novelty hit “The King of Rock and Roll” (which arrived with a fittingly absurd music video) and the Springsteen-referencing “Cars and Girls.” As a one-two punch, they rightfully stand among Prefab Sprout’s most recognizable songs, and the rest of the record is just as catchy and complex.
McAloon was now penning his own version of standards (“Nightingales”), reverb-coated alt-rock anthems (“The Golden Calf”), and dramatic singalongs that could find a second life on Broadway (“Hey Manhattan”). His writing favored narrators in sad, autumnal stages: “All my lazy teenage boasts are now high precision ghosts/And they’re coming ‘round the tracks to haunt me,” go the opening lyrics to “The King of Rock and Roll,” imagining the life of an older touring musician, every night singing the same meaningless words that he wrote decades ago. And yet the music sounds colorful and hopeful and alive—everything seems to sparkle, right down to the glossy band photo on the album cover.
With that photo, lovingly filtered here to look slightly more artful, the band signaled that they were pivoting away from their underground beginnings. Released at a time when American indie bands like R.E.M. and the Replacements were beginning to make bids for larger audiences, McAloon was making a similar leap, even if he still preferred staying out of the spotlight. While his songs were newly poised for radio and MTV, he remained wary of fame, setting on a reclusive path that would span the rest of his career. “This isn’t meant to sound snobbish,” he told Melody Maker at the time, “but I’ve never felt a part of any community… I don’t go out and look for like-minded people and I’ve never found anyone on the planet who fits the bill.” From Langley Park remains the band’s closest brush to stardom, but McAloon kept finding new ways to push himself.
On Jordan: The Comeback, the most ambitious Prefab Sprout album and one of their greatest, McAloon created his own mythological world to blend into. The cast of characters are drawn from the Bible (including star turns from Michael the Archangel, Satan, and God himself) as well as rock history. A suite of songs in the middle of the album imagines Elvis Presley, having faked his death and retreated to the desert, dreaming of the perfect comeback song to launch his next act. McAloon, meanwhile, was also searching for the follow-up for his own biggest hits. “Wild Horses” is a romantic fantasy whose sleek arrangement still sounds fresh, while “The Ice Maiden” offers one of the most memorable lyrics in his songbook: “Death is a small price for heaven.” It was a comeback album obsessed with comebacks, from rebound relationships to resurrections. Less commercially successful than Langley but just as rewarding, it’s a work so layered that, decades on, it still seems to hold new secrets.
When it came time to compile Prefab Sprout’s career highs into an album-length primer, A Life of Surprises didn’t quite capture the full picture. The picks from Jordan are less meaningful stripped of the album’s purposeful sequencing, while the one selection from Swoon sounds jarringly out of place in the non-chronological tracklist. Not to mention, “Bonny,” a stunner from Steve McQueen, is nowhere to be found. What the set does provide, however, are two essential non-album cuts that lend fitting closure to this era of the band’s career. The glittery, pulsing single “If You Don’t Love Me” would later be reimagined as a piano ballad by Kylie Minogue, bringing McAloon’s unlikely pop dreams to reality. But it’s “The Sound of Crying” that really shows how far he had come, pairing one of his most gorgeous melodies to a strange, brilliant vision of the world in flux. “Sometimes I think that God is working to a plan,” he sings, his voice breathier and softer with age. “And other times I’m sure that he is improvising.” Lamenting a chaotic universe, he casts a higher power in his own image: obsessive and inscrutable, observing us from somewhere that he can’t be reached, and searching for a tune.
Buy: Rough Trade (Swoon) (From Langley Park to Memphis) (Jordan: The Comeback) (A Life of Surprises: The Best of Prefab Sprout)
