Prefab Sprout

“I want a life like Steve McQueen”. Who knows why music is so fascinated with the myth of the American actor, the reckless, rebellious antihero par excellence (like Clint Eastwood), all women and engines, the king of cool for the way he wore clothes and accessories. We're talking about Vasco Rossi in “Vita spericolata“, of course, but then came Sheryl Crow and M83, who in turn titled a track from their albums “C'Mon C'Mon” and “Hurry Up, We're Dreaming“. Meanwhile, someone dedicated an entire album's title to the artist who passed away in 1980, even though it wasn't a biographical concept record at all, but rather the evocation of an American icon of the twentieth century that already, in itself, highlights certain coordinates of Sprout's work: “reckless” chord progressions, often built on sevenths to feed their bittersweet aftertaste, lyrics with a refined storytelling quality born of passionate reading, a cover photo of the quartet on the Triumph TR6 used by Steve McQueen in "The Great Escape" to keep the songs from being pigeonholed as strictly British (in their pantheon are the star-spangled heroes Jimmy Webb, Brian Wilson and Stephen Sondheim, and there's even a song titled “Faron Young”) and the 80s. You can't judge an album by its cover, but this one speaks pretty clearly.

It was 1985, and the English quartet Prefab Sprout had already made their mark on the music market the previous year with a debut album (preceded by two singles, "Lions in My Own Garden (Exit Someone)" and "The Devil Has All The Best Tunes"). "Swoon", recorded in eighteen days ("Steve McQueen" would take three months), was fresh but angular and not always accessible, spare, with its unpredictable harmonies and learned references to Graham Greene's "The Power and the Glory" in "Don't Sing". Without a big production behind it, a certain performance anxiety was palpable, yet it was enough to put Paddy McAloon and his fellow travellers on the map as one of pop music's great hopes of a certain taste and "density". Elvis Costello, someone who knows a thing or two, was a fan. So was a certain Thomas Dolby, artist and producer, who heard "Don't Sing" while a guest on Radio 1's "Roundtable": DJ Tony Blackburn and Mari Wilson weren't convinced at all and even started mocking the track, while Thomas saw things very differently. "Something miraculous came out of the speakers. The song had strange time signatures and key changes and no recognisable chorus... In short, it was absolutely fantastic".

"I'd heard him defend us on the radio", said frontman Paddy McAloon. "And I thought, 'well, that would be an unusual combination'. I'm not one to keep repeating the same things. I want to work with people who can teach me something". It wasn't long before Muff Winwood at Cbs decided to bring the two together: Dolby, with his pop sensibility and his skill with cutting-edge technology, would bring out the band's music, polishing it and making it more accessible to a wider audience. There was just one problem: no proper demos existed, so Thomas agreed to take a train to Witton Gilbert to hear Paddy play the songs for him on his mother's Spanish guitar. "Paddy took me up to his room and pulled out this stack of songs. He'd look at them, half-closing his eyes, and play them on guitar. He'd jot down chord notes and melodies above the lyrics, but really they were mostly poems".

"Steve McQueen" isn't a concept album, but thanks to the shrewd sequencing of its songs, it gives the impression of telling the stories of a boy just out of adolescence, sung in retrospect by the man he became. Thomas Dolby, on the train back, had a considerable amount of material (forty songs recorded on his Walkman, some dating back to the Seventies), and a careful selection would whittle it down to the best twelve songs. Not only that: the producer would encourage Paddy, Martin, Wendy and Neil to make room for every part and let them breathe without rushing, to simplify the arrangements without losing sight of the importance of those precious lyrics and of Paddy's voice, described by Dolby as "so intimate and sensual, in stark contrast to Wendy Smith's detached vocals" — and precisely for that reason a perfect match that made the songs unique.

"Steve McQueen" came out a year after the usual chart battle between Duran Duran (with the live album "Arena") and Spandau Ballet ("Parade"), with Wham winning teenage hearts thanks to "Make It Big". But room had already been carved out for a gentle, sophisticated, cultured brand of pop like that of Lloyd Cole and the Commotions ("Rattlesnakes"), which looked to Steely Dan (China Crisis), to latin jazz and to John Martyn's "Solid Air" ("Eden" by Everything But the Girl). Prefab Sprout sit precisely within that space. Different from Mtv's teen idols, but also from Morrissey's Smiths, to whom some began drawing comparisons on account of the literary references in the lyrics and the taste for namedropping.

The first single was "When Love Breaks Down", released in a different arrangement and produced by then-Cure bassist Phil Thornalley. Dolby handled a new mix for the album, which hit shelves in June 1985. Sales were good but hardly spectacular: the Lp reached number twenty-one in the UK charts, "When Love Breaks Down" made number 25, but the next three singles ("Faron", "Appetite", "Goodbye Lucille #1") failed to crack the Top 50. Critics greeted the record with enthusiasm, and at year's end Nme named it the fourth-best album of the year, behind Jesus and Mary Chain's "Psychocandy" (itself, curiously, a record that looked to Brian Wilson's Beach Boys melodies, albeit in a wholly different spirit), New Order and the Fall. In the States the record came out under a different title, "Two Wheels Good", due to objections from the American actor's estate. The title of "Faron Young" changed too (to "Faron"), and two extra tracks were added to the tracklist, "The Yearning Loins" and a cover of "He'll Have To Go".

What made Paddy McAloon such a masterful, timeless pop songwriter? "I never took music lessons, but I was drawn to the music I read about and devoured everything, from T.Rex to Igor Stravinsky", he revealed in an interview. "I'm almost embarrassed to say it now, but I dreamed of influencing the course of pop music. I'd been writing songs since I was 13, but after the release of David Bowie's 'Station To Station' I started studying his methods, his tastes, and even his dislikes. He didn't like country and western music, so I wrote 'Faron Young' from the point of view of someone who didn't like country music". The subject matter of the songs isn't always easy to pin down: "Bonny" (covered in recent years first by Tom Smith of Editors and later by Lo Moon, the band featuring Sam Stewart, son of Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics and Siobhan Fahey of Bananarama and later Shakespears Sister) sounds like a funeral elegy addressed to his father, who nonetheless was not dead.

Another song, "Goodbye Lucille #1" (so titled because it was meant to be the first in a series...) started out as a parody of Fifties doo-wop but took a different turn. "Most breakup songs were either sad or accusatory, but I positioned myself between the point of view of the 'intense' boy and that of the girl leaving him" ("She's a person too"). Speaking of broken hearts, "When Love Breaks Down" (later covered by Lisa Stansfield, with a lyric change made by McAloon himself) is a very personal song for Paddy. "I worked so hard that I neglected other things. My relationships suffered for it".

The pairing of Thomas Dolby and Prefab Sprout comes close to perfection on "Appetite", probably the best-known track in Italy, which was also performed at the 1986 Sanremo Festival, with the band appearing as international special guests. A synth intro sets the mood instantly, arpeggios run through the chorus, pads mirror Wendy's diaphanous backing vocals, the lyrics are sharp, the melody particularly inspired, and Neil Conti's drumming is spot on. More jazz-inflected and closer to the style of "Swoon" is "Hallelujah", with its disarming poetic flashes ("sweet words rot the teeth like candy") and fine, prominent Les Paul work.

The high points of side B? "Moving The River", about personal insecurities and the anxiety of not living up to our parents' expectations, though not without a line or two that raises a laugh ("I heard you've got a new girlfriend/ how did your wife take it?"). "Desire As", with its mantra "I've got six things on my mind/ you're no longer one of them" (which surely appealed to Zucchero Sugar Fornaciari, who opens "Hey Man", on the 1987 album "Blue's", with "I have six things on my mind/ and you're no longer there/ I'm sorry"), explores a lost love in tormented fashion, with atmospheres close to David Sylvian's "Brilliant Trees".

More complex, but no less catchy, is "Horsin' Around", which was originally intended for a Glasgow band, Sunset Gun, while "Blueberry Pies" (almost a Broadway-esque interlude) takes the prize for the most cryptic lyrics of the bunch. A strange way to prepare us for the curtain falling on "When The Angels", a heartfelt tribute to the late Marvin Gaye (Paddy and Martin, alongside Beatles and Bowie songs, used to play "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" in the garage). A tribute utterly different from the one the Commodores paid with "Nightshift". "I wanted to be irreverent and flip the sky the bird", Paddy explained. "Here the angels are turned into 'hard-faced little bastards' who 'take away the angel voice'".

Thomas Dolby did his best to bring out these precious creations, songs that could have existed twenty years earlier or twenty years later without losing any of their charm. Of course, the Fairlight CMI work marks the original versions as children of their time: if the "Eighties sounds" might put some listeners off (especially on "Appetite" and "When The Angels"), don't miss the 2006 acoustic reworkings included on the Legacy Edition released the following year (and reissued as a standalone vinyl LP). The songs are leaner, though the absence of Wendy Smith sometimes leaves them feeling hollow. "Desire As", perhaps the most successful remake, floats in a space where Johnny Cash's "American Recordings" meets Kings Of Convenience.

There's no end to discovering and appreciating fresh nuances in the songs of "Steve McQueen", in the most exuberant tracks as much as in the most reflective ones. Sondre Lerche certainly knows it, as do Phoenix, Eg White (author of that hidden gem "24 Years of Hunger" with singer and former BMX champion Alice Temple), former New Radicals frontman Gregg Alexander, but also Dan Bejar of Destroyer and Sports Team (what is "I'm In Love (Subaru)", after all, if not a brazenly explicit tribute to Prefab Sprout, seventh chords proudly on display and Wendy Smith-style harmonies to match?).

"Steve McQueen" doesn't invent a new genre, but it's a one-of-a-kind record in the way it blends "The Catcher in the Rye" (and not only that) with Burt Bacharach, the everyday life of a young petrol-station attendant and former seminarian with his cinemascope dreams. Our advice: strap on a helmet, warm up the engine, and let yourself be won over (again) by a timeless record.

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30/11/2025