Well I never forgot him. I’ve just looked up the chart record of this band, Prefab Sprout, just three albums scraped into the UK top twenty and one single made the top ten. No matter, I’ve always rated Paddy McAloon as one of the great songwriters. Just my view. A ‘great lost voice’ says the article. Much like the story of the Earth so far, so many rich possibilities. The planet where Prefab Sprout were never a massive thing. Also known as this one. And here’s what we had, and what could have been.
Paddy McAloon, pop's great lost voice, is leaning forward, singing softly to me. The song is a duet he wrote with Barbra Streisand in mind.
"Barbra, do you think that we can change the world with music?
If a sane man overheard us he'd shout 'Two straitjackets please'/ Because all we've got is music/ It's a wonderful ambition/ But our only ammunition/ Is a bunch of do-re-mis..."
The singer and songwriter who is Prefab Sprout pauses, then sings the lines he imagined Streisand singing back to him.
"Patrick, you're forgetting that the heart responds to music.
That the heart responds to music is an undisputed fact.
So let's change the world with music.
This is not a foolish notion.
It's not logic but emotion.
That compels the heart to act..."
Now, the chorus.
"Let's change the world with music.
Let's be a little naïve.
Let's change the world into something they'll want when we leave..."
I saw Prefab Sprout on The Tube in 1984, bought 'Swoon', and have been swooning ever since to Paddy McAloon’s impeccably crafted songs, songs of lost love and wounded hearts and soaring souls. A mercurial talent.
It’s just my view, and I’m not sure it matters much in the wider scale of things. But I spent the 1980s trying to get people to listen, and I haven’t given up hope that Paddy McAloon may yet get the public recognition his talent deserves. He is quite simply an exceptional, original and ambitious song writer, with lyrics and melodies that get right inside you and raise you up. A truly gifted wordsmith, with lines that stay with you, and with melodies that touch your soul. This music remains fresh, dreamy and romantic, it sneaks up on you and works its way into you, mixing sadness and happiness. Such is life.
I said it all through the 1980’s, and it seems I’m going to go on saying it – Paddy McAloon, the master of the intelligent pop song. And, yes, there is such a thing. Just great songwriting. Maybe making it big was never much important to Paddy McAloon. But I’ve been part of a secret plan since the 1980’s, to turn the ears of the coming generations to the sweeping soundscapes and lyrical tapestries of the Sprouts, and maybe redeeming the promises of popular music by raising a new generation of songwriters, and I mean individuals who write songs as opposed to twiddling nobs to generate repetitive a thud-thud.
I doubt that Paddy is worried about money. But I think he is a national treasure and hope that his incredible songwriting talents will one day be more widely recognised. Music for dreamers and special people.
Despite the passing of time and health problems, - he has tinnitus and a detached retina, hearing and sight impaired, his vision is still intact. Music that comes out of a dream.
Anyway, enough of me.
There’s loads more great songs from this band to check out.
Don’t Sing
Cue Fanfare
Cruel
Hallelujah
The World Awake
Golden Calf
We Let the Stars Go
Moon Dog
One of the Broken
Swans
Electric Guitars
The Mystery of Love
Love will find Someone for You
The Gunman
Ride
The Best Jewel Thief in the World
The Dreamer
The List of Impossible Things….
‘Write write write. McAloon can't do anything else. He's not much interested in singing his songs (too, literally, painful). He's certainly not up for performing them (he last toured nine years ago; again, now, too painful). He's most emphatically not interested in "punting" them, as his clinical psychologist friend recognised 30 years ago. Hence his (still reluctant) enthusiasm for Let's Change the World with Music, a record on which he did all the hard graft 17 years ago.
"I don't know what to do!" he smiles with a sigh. "I've written too much stuff, that's my problem. It's ironic. Stockpiling it for the bad days. Now it's crushing me. I laugh about it, but I get vaguely depressed about it. Ah man, how did you get here? I know how you got here: you thought you were being productive. You thought you had a vision of yourself as someone who worked all the time. But it's locked you in the corner of that room, behind the amplifier that needs the wires stuck in. I'm pinned back against the wall with it all, and slowly trying to find ways..."
So what, if anything, will tip him over into singing, recording, releasing? "Probably financial concerns. Someone saying, you gotta do this, you gotta make some money. Or disgust at myself at having sat on things for so long. You know, in one way I can describe my life as being immensely productive. I've stayed true to the... most pure thing. Haven't cared less about an audience. I'm the audience. And if it pleases me, I hope to please someone else. I start there. Doing this to amuse me. I've stayed true to that.
"But on the other hand, in terms of taking care of business, disaster. Disaster." Another of those easy smiles, and a shrug. The white gloves are back on. "What can you do? If I can get away with it, I get away with it. And I write. And that's what I do."
“Tonight let’s raise a glass, my friends: To the best jewel thief in the world. To the Fred Astaire of words. To the last of the great romantics. To Paddy McAloon, the bard of County Durham.
If music is a princess, you’re the king of rock’n’roll. Words, music and everything: your plans are ambitious, a blueprint of wishes – a grandeur that won’t be controlled. Every line is evidence: to catch the world in images. Grander than castles, cathedrals or stars, some things hurt more than girls and cars. While words are trains for moving past what really has no name, any music worth its salt is good for dancing. And the most eloquent way to speak or to pray is straight from the heart. Pounding out messages loud on the drum. Just because you can.
Meanwhile there is a real world, but you are living in a lullaby. Now they call you a recluse, been in the desert so long – you’ve grown a long and silver beard. And although duty may not track you down, you’re only as good as the last great thing you did. All those insights from retrospect, there in the cards there in the tarot. Trust what you cannot know. Living is your song, indeed your voice.
From an acorn of interest you have cultivated whole forests of affection. Our eyes are blunted with living with compromise, but you’ve got a dream we’d like to sleep on to. This world needs its dreamers, as reason has to bow if love demands it. We worship the silence that sings like a bird, although absence makes the heart lose weight. We ask for more than you bargained for and then we ask for more.
As the mythic fog descends, you remain mysterious to the last. Ride with stateless kings, and spread your golden wings. Watch your legend grow, as we’re basking in the glow. And thank you for the sounds and words in sweet communion – echoes of a better world.
To Paddy McAloon, on his 60th birthday by Björn Wahlberg, 7 June 2017.
Prefab Sprout sold millions of records in the 80s, but singer Paddy McAloon always made music for himself rather than the masses. Now he's back breaking silence with a new album
Paddy McAloon wants to set the record straight. The driving force behind Prefab Sprout once did an interview in which he declared that he was too "reasonable", too un-extraordinary, to be classified alongside his favourites: the Brian Wilsons and Michael Jacksons, those visionary dreamers from the US with a glint of the divine and a hint of the insane. He decided he belonged to a rather more modest and sensible British songwriter tradition that included Elvis Costello and Morrissey.
Well, it's 2013 and McAloon has revised his opinion. For one thing, Costello and Morrissey aren't so sensible. And he, McAloon, is not so modest. "That statement was a lie," he starts, in the genteel surrounds of a hotel lounge in his home city of Durham. "It was a lie because I'm more unreasonable than you might guess.”
McAloon is renowned among Sprout enthusiasts for having a trove of unfinished albums at his house in the village of Consett, including Earth: the Story So Far, Zorro the Fox and Zero Attention Span.
“But I won't move towards the listener first, not before I please myself. And I'm prepared to be bloody-minded about it, even to do without an audience to make the music I want. I'm not interested in the Laters … He's a nice man, Jools Holland, but it's not for me. My manager says: 'Oh, but you'll reach so many more people and sell more records.' But I'd rather not, frankly."
He laughs, loud enough to draw the attention of the hotel guests. "It is a very radical step because it can lead to penury. But that's my take. I will withdraw if I don't think I'll be able to do something to my satisfaction."
There is a line on The Best Jewel Thief in the World, the fabulous lead single from Prefab's new album, Crimson/Red, that goes: "Watch the legend grow." After The Gunman, he recorded a solo album, 2003's I Trawl the Megahertz. Its title track comprised 22 minutes of cinematic strings and a female voiceover reciting heartbreaking extracts from a phone-in to a radio show by a divorced 49-year-old father. It was torn from McAloon's soul and it was all but ignored."
That record was so important to me," he sighs. "I was disappointed – extremely – that the Guardian never even reviewed it. That stayed with me. I kept waiting week after week: 'Come on, if you're thinking they don't make records like they used to, if you're looking for personal vision, something unusual – I'm your guy!' But it never came."
"I look on it as a grail quest – to do whatever is humanly possible to make it work," he says, heading back out into the sunshine of Durham where the locals either give a wide berth to the strange bearded man in the white suit or presume he's "just flown in from the fantastic hyper-reality world of Los Angeles".
"I was 28 when Steve McQueen came out, you know? I'm double that age now." He pauses, then laughs one final time. "Every 28 years I come up with a good 'un."
