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Edited on Tue Jan-30-07 01:35 AM by RandomKoolzip
Background? Paddy MacAloon is the lead singer/songwriter and he was possibly the finest of his type to come out of Britain (NOT Scotland, as I had previously thought - thanks Screaming Lord Byron for the correction). Neil Conti was the drummer and his work is indeed superior.
Anyways, theirfirst album, Swoon, came out in '84, preceded by a amazingly sophisticated debut single, "Lions in My Own Garden, Exit Someone," which is still something of a calling card for them; PS sort of took the Postcard aesthetic (as typified by Orange Juice and Josef K: shambolic, semi-twee europop played dinky, rock completely drained of blues and raunch but in a strangely appealing way, brainy lyrics, etc) and merged it with a Gershwin-esque wit, producing a pop blend that indeed, as you point out, always surprises. MacALoon had said in interviews that when the band first started, he wanted to make sure he was playing chords he'd never heard before, which accounts for the somewhat tortured song structures of Swoon.
With 1985's Two Wheels Good, however, PS had come up with possibly the finest pop album to emerge from the 80's: MAcAloon and producer Thomas Dolby were able to make those synthetic surfaces sound human, lush, and romantic; MacAloon's voice had matured into something truly expressive (at times, such as in the chorus to "Goodbye Lucille #1," he could have given Paul McCartney a run for his money- Macca, appropriately enough, was supposedly a fan), and the writing had toned down the rococo flourishes a bit - exactly the right forumla for genius. If I had a choice of 10 albums to listen to the rest of my life, Two Wheels Good (or for me always, Steve McQueen) would be one of them. The sound of this record is the sound of falling in love.
Why they never hit it big in AMerica will always be a mystery - maybe it's because people could obviously sense the intelligence of MacAloon's songs and were put off. I suppose Don Henley seemed a much more appealing proposition back then.
Anyways, their third album, Protest Songs, was also a work of staggering...uh, you know. "Tiffany's" is a masterpiece. It was also never released in the States.
Paddy macaloon's peculiar fixations on American icons: Jesse James, Elvis, Springsteen, Hayley Mills, etc were getting to be a little odd, IMO, and the rest of the catalogue, while offering fistfuls of gems, doesn't live up to the standard set by those three records. "King of Rock and Roll,' from 1988, was a hit in the UK, but the album it came from, "From Langley Park to memphis," was an overproduced mishmash of inspired pop and soggy commercialism.
They stopped touring, and Paddy is still around, writing pretty good tunes - he grew a beard in the early '00s, went blind due to some rare disease, and wrote a concept album about cowboys and the American Wild West which I've never heard.
Anyways, theat's pretty much the lowdown on Prefab Sprout, one of my big faves. PEace out.
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