Prefab Sprout

Prefab Sprout biography

Kitchenware Records are delighted to present a lost masterpiece from legendary cult band Prefab Sprout.

This is not a reunion. Not a return. Not an attempt to recreate past glories. This is the real thing, the holy grail for Prefab Sprout fans. Let's Change The World With Music was written and recorded in 1992 by reclusive band leader Paddy McAloon at the height of his powers, and then shelved for reasons that even he seems uncertain about.

A fascinating, complex character, critically revered as one of the greatest songwriters Britain has ever produced, McAloon announced his retirement from the music business four years ago. But actually he has never stopped writing and recording at his home in Durham, where he lives a quiet life with wife and children. "I have this massive creative urge, which I struggle with," confesses the warm, wry McAloon. "Usually the desire to write is much stronger than the desire to turn any of them into records. Financially, its the act of a madman. I feel like someone in an Edgar Allan Poe story, buried under my boxes of albums.".

Between 1982 and 1997, Prefab Sprout had seven top 40 UK albums, including such classics as Steve McQueen, From Langley Park To Memphis and Jordan: The Comeback. They had top ten hit singles with The King Of Rock N Roll and When Love Breaks Down. Their lyrically complex, musically sophisticated, glistening yet fragile pop was revered by critics and music lovers, bestowing upon McAloon and his band an enduring cult reputation. Prefab Sprout never actually broke up, although composer, singer and band leader McAloon retreated from the musical limelight.

"From a record company point of view, I can see the vast unreasonableness of my position: 'Yeah, I'd love to make a record for you but I have no intention of doing anything to promote it.' Its not very dignified to throw yourself in front of people if that is your state of mind. So I backed off. I wish I didn't have these problems, I wish I could be someone else sometimes, but I'm stuck with me.".

Let's Change The World With Music was, in essence, recorded in 1992 as demos for the next Prefab Sprout album by McAloon, working alone on a 16 track home studio in his kitchen. It is one of the most uplifting and romantic albums of the entire Sprout canon. The songs are glittering hymns to the power of music, full of humour and idealism. "Whatever you think is good in life, it might be speaking through music. Even the notion of a deity: if God was to speak then music would be where you would find that voice. I revere music, there's great comfort in it." Always a perfectionist, McAloon toiled for nearly a year on the album, "just me in a room with a lot of machines", trying to create "almost a Quincy Jones album, combining strings with a funkier approach."

17 years on, the album does not sound dated or of its era, perhaps because of its almost classically rich musicality. Prefab Sprout records always stood outside of fashion because they married the aesthetic of edgy, left-field singer-songwriting with the super polish of pop and jazz, creating something utterly unique. "It's a shiny aesthetic," agrees McAloon. "I've always liked that attention to sonic gorgeousness. It's not so much the gloss as the detail. Everyone who calls themselves a friend of mine urges me to just to stick a microphone in front of a guitar and sing. I could make a record in a day in that way, but there's something in me just resisted. If it's someone else, I enjoy a warts and all approach, but for myself there's no real artistry in just putting it out like that, it's not what I intended." .

Although not recorded with the rest of the band, it feels like a Prefab Sprout album because it was made with that mind set. "It would have been an interesting thing to have done with (producer) Thomas Dolby and the Sprout, but secretly this is actually how I wanted to do it, I don't think I got second best." McAloon is not entirely sure why it never emerged at the time. He thinks his record label, Sony, may have been overwhelmed by the scale of the project, for which he originally demoed 16 songs (pared down to 12 for the finished release). The presence of God in several tracks may have led to "mutterings behind the scenes."

"I remember having a meeting," recalls McAloon, "and they were saying 'there’s so many good ideas, why don’t you just take one of them and expand it'. And I took the song 'Earth: The Story So Far' and I expanded it for two years until I had thirty pieces of music. And one day I woke up and thought 'surely this is not what they meant?' I had just followed my own mad train of thought. And I stopped doing it and put it away.

There is an irony in the situation that one LP was lost when I was supposed to be doing something a little simpler, and I ended up working on something even more complicated, and lost that too. 'Earth: The Story So Far' is still in the boxes, I haven’t been able to bring myself to dig it out and look at it."

Prefab Sprout released one more album, 'Andromeda Heights' in 1997 (again, a UK top ten) before McAloon was "asked to write some songs for Jimmy Nail" and went "off on another journey." A succession of health problems, however, have caused him to retreat further from the frontline. McAloon had several eye operations to counteract a progressive degenerative disorder of the retina. He was recovering from this when he had what he describes as his "hearing disaster". "It was six months of noises in my head, so loud I felt other people must be able to hear them. It was very traumatic. When it receded it left me with damaged hearing in my right ear. So I’m very reluctant to go anywhere where there’s loud music playing, I wouldn’t stand in front of a drum kit, but I can still plug things in and work on a low level, and that’s really where I am."

When Kitchenware Records enquired if he would be interested in reviving any of his legendary lost albums, McAloon hauled the tapes for 'Lets Change The World With Music' out. "I was a bit shocked when I heard it. It’s a strange thing to hear yourself when you’re a younger man and basically at the peak of your powers, and I can't help but saying that I was moved by it. I put my heart into it, I put everything I had into it, so I think its exempt from the normal run of eighties people coming back for one time around the enormo-domes of Europe for the pension plan. It’s a good record. My friend and engineer Calum Malcom, he’s got Pro-Tools and all this wonderful gear that can get in there in and do sort of audio keyhole surgery and just lift little things. But basically its old tech. I've always loved those songs, and I had a chance to put a historic wrong right."

Read about Prefab Sprout on Wikipedia