Prefab Sprout

From the union between OndaRock and the monthly magazine Rockstar – two publications inspired by the same idea of freedom and aversion to prejudice – comes a new column, in which we rediscover all the insights and critical ideas that Giampiero Vigorito and his team were able to give us during the magazine's magical decade, the 1980s.

The first issue of Rockstar came out (from the ashes of the magazine Popster) in September 1980, priced at 1,500 lire for 84 pages. In that period of unbridled musical euphoria and emancipation from the ideological constraints of the (by then outdated) Italian criticism, a new concept of music magazine took shape, one in which the culture of graphic design and imagery finally rose to become a cornerstone, combined with a genuine desire to capture the lively music scene of the time in all its facets. A lucid, forward-looking operation, ultimately comparable to what Carlo Massarini achieved on the small screen with his revolutionary Mister Fantasy.

The fact that I, albeit for just a few years, took part in this journey (in the late '90s) can't help but add a small touch of personal pride to this initiative.

The first instalment is dedicated to Prefab Sprout and their gem "Steve McQueen", from 1985. With a review by Giampiero Vigorito, a historic name in our music journalism, from Rai radio broadcasts to editing Rockstar and compiling rock encyclopedias. (C. Fab.)

Prefab Sprout

Steve McQueen

(Kitchenware, 1985)

This record is too beautiful. Too beautiful to sully its sounds with a few cheap words, too moving to risk cracking that thin veneer of well-being that still covers our emotions, too pure to light up just five little stars.

Prefab Sprout are fallen angels. We picked them up, smoothed out their slightly crumpled wings, and waited for them to start fluttering again. And right away, the first syllables gave us a sense of vertigo we still haven't shaken off. Paddy McAloon is a genius. A genius who sings like a child who, having just discovered he has a sweet voice, immediately starts vocalizing, naturally, without any strain. He takes his time, cradles it on his knees, dispenses a deep joy even when he lingers over a word or when he's caught stoking the one that follows. His voice wraps itself around a bassline or two, soft and deep as footprints in fresh snow; it breathes against a pane of glass about to shatter and draws childlike figures upon it. Then, for a moment, he throws himself onto a guitar as if clinging to a pole that might save him from falling, abruptly picks the tone back up and, finally, lands on his feet with the grace of a dancer. What comes out of it are eleven songs, eleven moods, just as many caresses delivered by a heart-shaped hand. This record is too beautiful.

A record conceived and recorded in a state of grace in which the joy of grand designs was savoured, starting from that slightly bitter taste a pencil lead has between your lips. Its beauty is a promise of happiness. A freshly minted coin that is kept in circulation without ever succumbing to the urge to hoard a stash of it somewhere. And the music could only embody this underlying generosity: ideas that run fast, instruments that carve out, one by one, the strings of feeling, Paddy McAloon's voice revealing goosebumps beneath the vocal breeze of Wendy Smith, and Thomas Dolby's arrangements and production managing to draw the most perfect balance out of the highest forms.

I believe "Steve McQueen" was recorded on a cushion of air, halfway between earth and heaven. And this imaginary line that Prefab Sprout have drawn ahead of them is the same one that still breaks our hearts in two. On this album there are no flowers in gun barrels, no romantic ideal to wave about, no posturing to stage a comedy of false actors. It would be easy to overlook it on the grounds that this music builds its beauty in depth without ever letting it explode. Paddy McAloon prefers the candid fantasy of his own imagination to the standard-issue panoply of the rock prototype. There is narcissism in him, certainly, but no self-satisfaction in the way Prefab Sprout so preciously present songs that are as beautiful as they are accessible. Here, the music is made like this: with half-tones, sweeping lyricism, ornaments of guitars and keyboards, funk jolts tempered by panoramic folk, liqueur-like jazz diluted in the great chalice of pop.

Few bands currently send as many shivers down the spine as Prefab Sprout. When Paddy McAloon scratches, with a single fingernail, Lloyd Cole and Morrissey, Steely Dan and Aztec Camera, he does it with an amused wink rather than to settle a debt. His band owes nothing to anyone but itself. Paddy McAloon doesn't want to be a fashionable hero or one of those concrete effigies for people starved of electric jolts. He is simply a modern young playwright capable of extracting the highest, most genuine emotions even from the simplest poetry. What only he manages to create is that cardiac spasm that finds its only possible sounding board in intelligence. Something ardent and sad, warm and moving, beautiful, too beautiful. "Swoon" was a record that made you dream, that produced voluptuousness and sadness in a confused way, and was all the greater for it. Now "Steve McQueen", with its languorous rebelliousness, its ceaseless wind nipping at your cheeks as you ride alone on an old Triumph, has managed to go even further. Its implicit message is that beauty, without doubt, does not make revolutions; but that a day comes when revolutions need beauty. This record is not a revolution, but you'll see, we'll end up getting there.

(Rockstar, 1985)

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24/04/2026