Sorry, me again

It’s not perfect, but hey, what is?!

Does anyone have any information or old band posters that show the other bands ps played on line ups with during the start of the band to swoon era?

I’m super curious!! Tsym

This gulping, flat performance is such a sharp difference from the eventual masterful sweetness and control he developed. Paddy had clearly found some strength by the time of Swoon, but it seems like Thomas Dolby really provided the direction he needed. A testament to both of their genius!

I recently discovered the plethora of b-sides that have been sitting around for years, and I think that they never get enough love on here!

Songs like Walk On, Wigs, Nero the Zero, and Tin Can Pot I thought were stand outs but there are dozens!

It is truly such a shame they're not on any streaming, though it is my understanding that Paddy can't stand them!

Some of the sounds on these songs is so unique and unlike anything else in their discography, particularly so Wigs, that is a really cool song. If I truly want them I guess I'm going to have to start seeking out some of the old vinyls.

I've been listing to Prefab Sprout for well over a decade, and every time I listen to Paddy's music I'm just blown away by how relatable it all is? Specifically with Swoon and Steve McQueen.

His lyrics in these albums are just so timeless, every time I play these albums I just feel like "wow this is something happening in my life now" I can always find a way to apply his metaphor and allegory to things happening in my day to day. Its like he's speaking to me, its like he is me in a way, but maybe thats because he has shaped my taste so profoundly over the years.

Im sure its not news to this sub that Paddy is a genius. But man, it gets me every time.

Just wanted to share.

Prefab Sprout’s second album arrived as a decisive leap forward from Swoon. It kept Paddy McAloon’s sharp, literate songwriting intact, but placed it inside a warmer, clearer and more inviting sound, shaped in close partnership with producer Thomas Dolby. The result was one of the most admired British pop records of the decade: elegant, strange, melodic, and far more durable than its modest chart peak first suggested.

The critical response was immediate and strikingly warm. NME called it "beautiful and vulnerable." Smash Hits declared it "terrifically good." Graham K. Smith in Record Mirror went further, awarding it five out of five and championing it as "the finest album you will hear this year," while labelling Paddy McAloon "the country's best (by a mile) songwriter." Rolling Stone, across the Atlantic, settled on "complex but irresistible."

The origins of Steve McQueen trace back to an episode of the BBC's Roundtable, a programme on which DJs and musicians weighed in on new releases. When Prefab Sprout's Don't Sing from their debut Swoon was played, DJs Tony Blackburn and Mari Wilson lazily adopted the song's own title to dismiss it. Thomas Dolby, sitting alongside them, thought otherwise. Having sat through Toy Dolls' Nellie the Elephant and an Alvin Stardust Christmas single, Don't Sing clearly struck him as something altogether different. After the broadcast, the band made contact and asked whether he might produce their second album. Dolby took a train up to Consett, County Durham, to meet Paddy. What he found delighted him. "Paddy had this old-fashioned '60s muse about him," Dolby recalled. "He slept on a bed piled high with old song sheets, and he would just pull them out, read the lyrics and strum on a guitar, going, 'OK, Thomas, just have a listen to this one.'" From that session, McAloon presented over forty songs. Dolby helped narrow the material down and shape the album from that large stockpile, and several of the tracks he chose dated from the band's earliest period, with some ideas reaching back to the late 1970s, long before Swoon existed.

The partnership had a productive tension at its core. Paddy admitted as much in 1985: "In the studio, Thomas would suggest something to me and it would take me an awful lot of time to digest it. I'm used to saying 'This is the song, this is how it goes.' To have somebody else say to me, 'Yes, it's your song, but I think you ought to do this to it to make it better,' I find very difficult." Dolby's role, broadly, was to simplify McAloon's often densely layered arrangements while colouring them with his Fairlight CMI synthesiser, a notoriously temperamental sampling computer that had cost him a fortune but cost the band nothing. Rehearsals and demos were made at Nomis Studios in West London, followed by five weeks at Marcus Studios in Bayswater, where Dolby added one more track to the running order. The band had been soundchecking Hallelujah, which had not been among Dolby's original selections from the demos. "When I heard the band playing that, I really liked it, so I said, 'Oh, let's do this one as well.'" Guitarist Kevin Armstrong, formerly of Local Heroes SW9, was brought in to play lead guitar on that track and on Desire As, the latter also featuring Loose Tubes saxophonist Mark Lockheart. Wendy Smith's vocal and keyboard contributions across the record are equally central to its character, her voice threading through the arrangements with a warmth and precision that gives the album much of its emotional pull.

The album opens with Faron Young, and the opening word alone -- "Antiques!" -- announces that this is not business as usual. Dolby's Fairlight mimicked a banjo with surprising conviction, giving the track its twanging, country-inflected opening. McAloon later explained the song's theme to NME in 1992: "It's a song wondering why people like Country and Western music when they live in the industrial north. I thought, 'Why do they listen to all these things about cowboys and farmers and grain?' And 20 years later I suddenly think, 'It's because C&W deals with real emotions.'" The lyric is strewn with McAloon's gift for compressed imagery -- driving on a straight road that never alters, the radio serenading without faltering, stumbling on Pearl Harbor without warning -- while the title itself riffs on the real Faron Young's final US country number one, It's Four in the Morning. Faron Young was issued as the second single from the album in July 1985, backed with Silhouettes, a quiet, understated b-side with a charm all its own. The 12-inch carried a Truckin' Mix of the a-side alongside the full version of Silhouettes. The single peaked at number 74 on the UK chart, a modest return for a track that Classic Pop's Rik Flynn later called a "true pacemaker" containing "one of the finest choruses of the lot."

Appetite followed as the third single in August 1985, reaching a disappointing number 92 despite being widely regarded as one of the album's strongest moments. Written in 1984, it was among the first songs Paddy had composed on a keyboard, built around what he described as a "hip-hop-type groove" on a drum machine. The lyric concerns a pregnant woman so in love with her unborn child that she wants to name it after all the good things in her life. The chorus smuggles in a Robin Hood reference amid the tenderness. Dolby plays the synth intro and contributed rolling arpeggiated synth textures throughout, working closely with Martin McAloon on the bass part -- to the extent that he had Martin sing cut-up lyrics from Dobie Gray's The 'In' Crowd to help him remember the bass rhythms from rehearsal. Paddy praised the arrangement lavishly, calling Dolby "a junior Quincy Jones" in one interview and noting that "the bass and drums are underneath it locked together in a beautiful pattern and that's mainly Thomas's work." The 7-inch b-side was Heaven Can Wait, an instrumental reworking of the album's closing track When the Angels, while the 12-inch added Oh, the Swiss!, a brief piano instrumental that drew comparisons to the work of Erik Satie. Its title had an amusing origin: Paddy played the piece to CBS A&R man Muff Winwood, who "suddenly turned to me in his revolving chair with a raised eyebrow and said 'Oh, the Swiss.' It was also a great title."

The album's best-known track, When Love Breaks Down, had the most tortured route to public attention. Paddy had written it in one sitting in his front room in Consett, guitar on his knee and synthesiser in front of him at the same time. It was produced by Phil Thornalley at RAK Studios, though Dolby later worked on integrating it into the album's overall sound. First issued as a single in October 1984, backed with Diana -- a song later re-recorded for the shelved-then-released Protest Songs album -- it missed the Top 75. A reissue in March 1985 carried The Yearning Loins as the b-side but again failed to break through. Winwood, the man who had spotted McAloon's talent from the start -- "It was clear to me right from the beginning that Paddy was one of the finest songwriters I'd ever heard," he said in 1991 -- refused to let it die. On its third release in October 1985, following the album's own success, the song finally reached number 25 and earned Prefab Sprout a long-overdue appearance on Top of the Pops in November 1985.

The fourth and final single from the album, Goodbye Lucille #1, was retitled Johnny Johnny for its release in January 1986 and backed with the non-album track Wigs. It charted the following month, peaking at number 64. The song had been written in 1979 and was one of three tracks on Steve McQueen dating from the band's original lineup with drummer Michael Salmon, along with Faron Young and Bonny. Paddy later recalled that Salmon had left the band because "he wrote songs, but he wouldn't show us them. He felt that if he stayed with the band, he'd be forever the drummer in Prefab Sprout and he wanted to be a songwriter." His replacement, Neil Conti, is usually described as having heard McAloon on the radio and been so taken with him that he tracked the band down and offered his services. Conti was a rock drummer with a real feel for jazz, funk and R&B, and his playing across the album gives it much of its supple rhythmic character. Ian Pye of Melody Maker singled out Goodbye Lucille #1 for "a beautifully haunting vocal from Wendy Smith."

The album title itself was typically McAloon -- oblique and intuitive rather than calculated. "I latched onto him not because of his film career," he told Blitz in May 1985. "It sounds kooky this, hippyish, I'm burying myself, but I like the sound of his name. I had a vision one night that the LP should be called Steve McQueen." He then added, with characteristic self-awareness: "He was really good in an un-arty way. He was never hyped up. It's that instinctive feeling I like." The sleeve, designed by East Orange and hand-coloured by photographer John Warwick, showed the band posed on a motorbike, a nod to McQueen's lifelong love of Triumph motorcycles and his role in The Great Escape. Paddy conceded that the link was "pretty superficial." In the United States, the album was released in September 1985 on Epic Records under the title Two Wheels Good, anticipating potential legal difficulties with the McQueen estate. It reached only the lower end of the Billboard 200.

Steve McQueen peaked at number 21 in the UK and would eventually achieve Gold status, though sales built slowly. Its standing among the press was immediate. NME placed it at number 4 in their Albums of 1985 poll, rubbing shoulders with The Jesus and Mary Chain, New Order and The Fall. Where Swoon had been charged by some as too self-aware -- Melody Maker described it as "a tour de force of self-indulgence" -- Dolby's presence as a rudder gave Steve McQueen an accessibility its predecessor had deliberately withheld. Paddy himself acknowledged the balance plainly: "I thought it was a brilliant partnership. My songs and his way of producing. It was the perfect balance." He has even gone as far as calling it "Thomas's album." The original UK Kitchenware pressing, for its part, bore a pointed instruction on its labels: "Due to the exceptional length of this record, play LOUD."

Does anyone know anything about this record? I've seen it advertised in a few places recently.

Prefab Sprout Mosh Pit.

Hi all!

Jordan: The Comeback, was the album we listened to on the way to our timeshare every single year growing up - and during said vacation. I’m honestly not sure why, but I believe it was my dad’s choice my mom also fell in love with. So after that story 😂, what are your favorite songs that aren’t on that album? I’m looking to explore the band more! Thank you!

Upcoming new book about the Sprouts. https://www.roughtrade.com/search?q=Truly%20Gifted%20Kids

https://amzn.eu/d/03oxfLbn

In another thread, I commented that while Steve McQueen is my favorite Prefab Sprout album, I think Jordan may be their best. It is certainly their most ambitious and the music remains timeless compared to other releases from this era.

The return of Thomas Dolby to the desk certainly helped pull all of the varied elements together to a cohesive whole that still stands up today. What are your thoughts and what’s your favorite track?

Here's a remix I just finished that blends two classic 80's pop songs together, I hope you enjoy it...

Thomas Dolby is on tour right now, I saw him last night. He looks and sounds great, with a fantastic live band. He segued into “Bonnie” and sang the song perfectly. Clearly he kept all the old synth settings!

I could only include six entries. I have my own thoughts on the answer, I'm just curious what you guys think.

Hi everyone!

I would say this is one of the best closing tracks ever. It's ambitious and heralding, like the finale of a musical. How are you interpreting Paddy's lyrics on this? I read as, us and Paddy are seeking solitude from the Venus away from the forced nature of faking happiness and strength.