FEATURE:
Two Wheels Good
Prefab Sprout’s Steve McQueen at Forty
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IT is a bit…
IN THIS PHOTO: Prefab Sprout in 1985 (left-right: Neil Conti, Martin McAloon, Wendy Smith and Paddy McAloon)
of an awkward start, as there are various sites that give different dates regarding the release of Prefab Sprout’s Steve McQueen. It was definitely released in June 1985 but a bit of debate in terms of the exact release date. Whether it is 21st or another day in June. However, as it is definitely forty next month, I will do an anniversary feature that is unique. One where I am not entirely sure of the date but feel the album is too important not to spotlight. The second studio album contains classics such as When Love Breaks Down, Faron Young and Appetite. Ahead of its fortieth anniversary, I want to get to some reviews for Steve McQueen. I am going to start out with a feature from last month from Classic Pop. I last wrote about this album five years ago. I wanted to revisit it ahead of its fortieth anniversary. I am going to get to some reviews. It is good to learn some of the background to this true classic. Perhaps Prefab Sprout’s finest hour, I would recommend everyone listens to it if they have not heard it already. A masterclass in songwriting from Paddy McAloon. Alongside Wendy Smith, Neil Conti and Martin McAloon, the band created a masterpiece in Steve McQueen:
“When Swoon’s first single Don’t Sing was given the Jukebox Jury treatment on Radio 1’s Roundtable, DJs Tony Blackburn and Mari Wilson used the song’s title as a lazily adopted barb with which to dismiss the track, but guest reviewer – synth-pop soloist Thomas Dolby – thought otherwise.
Having sat through Toy Dolls’ Nellie The Elephant and Alvin Stardust’s So Near To Christmas, Don’t Sing was clearly a revelation. “Out of the speakers came something miraculous!” he recalled in his memoir. “The song had weird time signatures and key changes and no discernible hook… In short, it was utterly fantastic.”
In that moment, a glorious chain of events was set in serendipitous motion. Dolby would not only end up producing Prefab Sprout’s second album – his first major production duty – but would be entrusted to handpick the songs from McAloon’s dog-eared bedroom vault.
I thought it was a brilliant partnership. My songs and his way of producing. It was the perfect balance.
Back in the North East, Paddy and Martin were tuned in. “I’d heard him sticking up for us on the radio,” Paddy told Melody Maker. “I thought, ‘Now that would be an unusual combination”. I’m not one for repeating formulas. I want to work with people who can teach me something.”
It was the band’s new label boss at CBS, Muff Winwood, who was first to float the idea. “Paddy and I didn’t get it at all, initially,” admitted Kitchenware’s Keith Armstrong. “We thought Muff had gone mad.”
Nonetheless, a meeting was arranged to probe the possibilities. Amidst the unpredictable nature of Paddy’s songwriting – all tempo changes, odd time signatures, off-kilter hooks and ambitious arrangements – perhaps a tech-savvy, pop-minded mentor – a steadying hand – wasn’t such a bad idea.
“I’d read in a magazine somewhere that he was working with Michael Jackson, and I thought, ‘That’s good enough for me,’ Paddy said. With no demo available, Dolby paid a visit to Witton Gilbert to hear Paddy play.
“I took the train up,” Dolby remembered to Puremusic. “Paddy took me to his room and pulled out this stack of songs. He’d squint at them and strum his way through them. He would write notes for chords and melodies over the top of the lyrics, but primarily, it was about the poems.”
Seated on Paddy’s bed, Dolby listened enthusiastically to complex “asymmetrical phrases” with “odd numbers of beats” and “tricky chord changes”. “The songs came thick and fast,” Dolby enthused, “with soaring melodies, finely nuanced chord sequences, and poetry that alternatively cut like a knife and tugged at my heartstrings.”
The producer returned to the station clutching a cassette recorded on his Walkman and, by the time his train pulled into London, he’d narrowed the 40-something songs down to a shortlist of 12; some of which originated as far back as 1976.
Steve McQueen was to be a record, the majority of which would tell the stories of a boy barely out of his teens, retrospectively sung by the man he had grown into. Dolby’s job was to translate Paddy’s skewed genius for the outside world – or, as he put it: to be a “caretaker for someone else’s music”.
Swoon had been a challenging listen; Steve McQueen was to be just as pioneering, but palatable to boot. And not only that – with CBS onside – this new album was to be made under more luxurious circumstances. Swoon took 18 days: Steve McQueen needed three months.
In Autumn 1984, the band were installed at London’s Nomis Studios to begin sessions under the working title ‘June Parade’.
“My first job as producer would be to encourage the band to simplify the arrangements, create space for all the parts, and restructure the songs, without losing the focus of the vocal and lyrics,” wrote Dolby.
“[Paddy’s] voice was extremely intimate and sensual, while Wendy’s was sterile and detached; the contrast was unlike anything I’d heard, and with the wide harmonies he wrote for her, it all added up to something beautiful and precious.”
Out from under the bed came diverse tracks such as Faron Young, Bonny, Goodbye Lucille #1 and Hallelujah. Dolby added Fairlight, piano and synth and worked on intros and solos “to propel it along while making space for Paddy and Wendy’s vocals to slip into”.
New drummer Neil Conti streamlined the sound, as did Dolby collaborator Kevin Armstrong, who added “some grittier chunks on his Les Paul”.
With arrangements in the bag, the ensemble moved to Marcus Studios in Queensway, where engineer Tim Hunt set up baffles and mics in the large wood-panelled live room. “The result,” wrote Dolby, “was an open, natural sound with the punchy and organic rhythm section and piano driving the grooves.”
Overdubs were added, including doubling Wendy’s vocals with synth to add some gloss.
The first the world heard of the record was pacemaker single When Love Breaks Down, albeit a version produced by The Cure’s then-bassist Phil Thornalley quickly lost amidst cornier festive fare. Dolby made sure to recut the vocals and remixed the song to fit the Steve McQueen mould.
The album appeared in June 1985 like the sorest of thumbs amidst a habitat dominated by synth-pop and MOR, and clawed its way to No.21.
After several failed attempts, When Love Breaks Down managed No.25, but the singles that followed underperformed: Faron Young made No.74, Appetite stalled at No.92, and Johnny Johnny (Goodbye Lucille #1) teetered at No. 64.
While sales took time to build – it eventually won Platinum status – the critics lapped it up. Hip vindication arrived when NME placed it at No.4 in its Albums Of 1985 poll, alongside a cast of cool including The Jesus And Mary Chain, New Order and The Fall.
Renamed Two Wheels Good in the US (for legal reasons), it only managed No.180, yet Rolling Stone declared that it was “complex but irresistible”.
Where Swoon was charged by some as being too self-aware – or “a tour de force of self-indulgence”, as Melody Maker impugned – with Thomas Dolby as its rudder, Steve McQueen sat just right.
In many ways, Steve McQueen was born of two people’s visions. Paddy has even gone as far as to call it “Thomas’ album”. “I thought it was a brilliant partnership,” he explained. “My songs and his way of producing. It was the perfect balance.”
Alongside Steve McQueen’s innocent themes of love, Paddy’s namedrops and odd references evoke a world that’s far too tempting not to dip a toe into.
As a result, Prefab’s second album has gained exalted status among lovers of intelligently written, sophisticated – and emotive – pop music and regularly makes the ‘Greatest Albums Ever’ listings. And deservedly so.
As far removed from their peers musically as they were geographically, with Steve McQueen, Prefab Sprout put Witton Gilbert on the map”.
Just before getting to a couple of reviews, I am heading back to 2020 and a feature from The Guardian. Paddy McAloon and producer Thomas Dolby discussed making the album. I would encourage people to read the whole feature. However, I won’t include the whole thing and will get McAloon’s perspective and recollections. It sounds like a really exciting time for the band. They released a work of brilliance in June 1985:
“Paddy McAloon, singer, songwriter
I grew up in Witton Gilbert in County Durham and started Prefab Sprout with my brother [Martin, bass] and Michael Salmon, who lived down the street. Michael borrowed a drum kit and Martin and I shared an amplifier. We rehearsed in my dad’s run-down wooden-framed petrol station. We were as rough as can be, but we sounded like a band, at least to ourselves.
I didn’t have music lessons but I was drawn to music that I read about and devoured everything from T Rex to Stravinsky. It’s almost embarrassing now, but I dreamed about influencing the course of pop. I’d been writing songs since I was 13, but after David Bowie’s Station to Station came out, when I was 19, I started to study his methods, likes and dislikes. He didn’t like country and western, so I wrote Faron Young from the worldview of someone who disliked country music.
Bonny was written around the same time. People think it’s about my father’s death, but he wasn’t dead then – I imagined grief. Goodbye Lucille #1 started out as a 50s doo-wop parody – “Ooh, Johnny Johnny Johnny” – in waltz time, but turned into something serious. Most breakup songs were sad or accusatory, but I straddled the viewpoints of both the intense guy and the girl breaking up with him (“She’s a person too”).
I’d always written on an acoustic guitar, but just as we started making records I had a crisis and thought I’d exhausted the guitar and started writing instead on a Roland synthesiser. I was too eccentric or nervous a songwriter to incorporate a big chorus, but when When Love Breaks Down came along I didn’t fight it. I wrote that, and Appetite – over a hip-hop-type groove on a drum machine – and then Desire As in the same week in June 1984. “I’ve got six things on my mind. You’re no longer one of them” is so cold. I wouldn’t want to say that to anybody. “Desire as a sylph-figured creature who changes her mind.” I’ve no idea where these things come from.
I’d used my most off-kilter ideas on our first album, Swoon, and I’d deliberately held back my more commercial songs. The album title – Steve McQueen – came to me in a dream. It doesn’t mean anything, but I decided to use it and we shot the cover using a motorbike like the one McQueen had in The Great Escape.
The album went gold and has sold steadily ever since. I’m humbled that it’s become a classic and people still discover it, but I still remember driving away from the studio in the snow thinking we’d get a lot of praise for something I felt I didn’t have much to do with. It was us playing the songs in the studio – Thomas Dolby and the team did a marvellous job of making us sound grand and opulent. When we were doing Johnny Johnny there was this embarrassing clunk, which was the sound of me hitting the microphone stand while singing. Thomas loved the take and wanted to keep it, so he went to the Fairlight sampler, looked at the wave form of the sound and just took out the clunk. I remember thinking, “Wow, so that’s what pop is going to be like in future”.
The first review I am bringing in is from Pitchfork. In 2007, they reviewed a remastered and reissued Legacy Edition of Steve McQueen. The edition features new acoustic renditions from Paddy McAloon. Pitchfork explored “The defining record of 1985 sophisto-pop”:
“In another time, in another place, Paddy McAloon might have been happily productive somewhere between the Algonquin and Broadway in 1930s New York ("I want to be," he once crooned, hopefully, "the Fred Astaire of words.") Or beavering away in an office in the Brill Building in the 50s. Or maybe some place on that off-kilter middle of the road between Burt Bacharach and Jimmy Webb in the 60s. Almost anywhere, you might have thought, other than Britain in the mid-80s.
Some hard-hearted professors of pop would have it that 1985 was the absolute nadir of British music: all the fizz of new pop gone flat, the independent scene a twee shambles. Yet in records such as the Blue Nile's A Walk Across The Rooftops, the Pet Shop Boys' Please, Kate Bush's Hounds of Love, Scritti's Cupid and Psyche 85, and especially in Prefab Sprout's Steve McQueen, you have some of the most beautiful, enduring British pop music ever made. For a year or two, just before Live Aid and Q magazine, the challenge of making new pop for grown-ups without being dowdy, smug, or jaded was met, quite superbly. It's this guile and grace that bands like Stars and Junior Boys still yearn for.
The Sprout-- it's ironic that a writer so fleet-footed lumbered himself with such a clunking band name-- had debuted in 1984 with Swoon, a record that suggested they were post-graduates of the Glasgow School, taking the Postcard label template to new levels of cryptic wit and elliptical jangle. But as McAloon made plain, his ambitions were far grander. He aspired to the standards of Stephen Foster, Gershwin, Sondheim, Quincy Jones, McCartney; saw himself as a contemporary of Prince rather than Lloyd Cole. He had a grand sense of pop music, and in 1985, that kind of grandeur seemed to be available via producers like Thomas Dolby.
McAloon has said that Steve McQueen is Dolby's record-- he presented the producer with a vast archive of songs and asked him to choose his favorites. Yet this is true most obviously in the profoundly 80s sonic palette. Rather wonderfully and typically, it seems that Dolby even chose to play the banjo on the opening track, the country pastiche "Faron Young", via a Fairlight sampler. And the presence on this new reissue of an additional disc of acoustic versions of the songs-- which took longer to record than the original-- suggests that McAloon now feels embarrassed, as though the production has dated or even damaged his songs.
I think he needn't be so bashful; one of the defining qualities of the record is its pop ambition, its willingness to engage with its times, precisely by not being a sullen singer-songwriter would-be timeless classic. Imagine if Sinatra had decided that Nelson Riddle's arrangements tied his albums to closely to the early 50s. According to this additional disc, Steve McQueen might have been some perfectly prim and pleasant Go-Betweeny acoustic curio, rather than how it ended up: the kind of record you imagine Elvis Costello might have made had he been signed to ZTT and been ensconced in a studio with Trevor Horn.
One thing the new versions do highlight is the astonishing maturity of the songs. Coincidentally, almost all of Dolby choices dated from 1979, when Paddy was 22. Yet they sound all the more appropriate sung by a man of 50. "Life's not complete, 'til your heart's missed a beat," he sighed on "Goodbye Lucille #1", but now when he sings "and you'll never get it back," his voice breaks with the wisdom of another two decades.
Ironically, considering the producer's name, it's a record in so many ways about infidelity. Or let's say about the consequences of romanticism. Take that cover: Paddy, looking like a dreamy young D.H. Lawrence, astride the kind of Triumph that would have carried the record's namesake to freedom. But the whole album rails against easy escapism: "Appetite", sung from the perspective of a girl left to bring up the baby of some young firebrand; "Desire As" seeing no escape from a lifetime of new flames; the rueful regrets of "Bonny".
And maybe I'm too much a child of those times myself, but it still sounds great to me: the glittering guitar that opens "Goodbye Lucille", the 10cc/ZTT moments of "When Love Breaks Down". Even Wendy Smith's gaseous backing vocals, haunting the record like the ghost of Hayley Mills.
In fact it seems to me that instead of stripping back the songs from their 80s incarnations, the additional disc could have more profitably commissioned some original covers. McAloon was, after all, the original Stephin Merritt, so there's no reason why he shouldn't have his own Sixths. You can imagine these songs performed by, oh, Marianne Faithfull, Bryan Ferry, Will Young, Kylie Minogue, Rufus Wainwright, or Antony Hegarty. A handful of these songs have the quality of standards: there's no reason why their real after-life shouldn't begin now”.
There is a track-by-track guide that is worth reading. You get more of a sense of the brilliance of each song rather than the album as a whole. I am going to end with a 2007 review by the BBC when they experienced the Legacy Edition of Steve McQueen. There may be people who have not heard of Prefab Sprout and are not sure what the fuss is about. This is songwriting at its very best. You need to hear this album in full! It still sounds so incredible forty years later:
“This is one of the greats. Some may complain that the 80s was a poor decade for music, but this record destroys those ignorant moans. Re-mastered by original producer Thomas Dolby, Steve McQueen sounds terrific. There is no escaping the 80s-ness of the synth sound and the breathy super-cool voice of Paddy McAloon, but why escape? What was happening here in 1985 was happening for the first (and perhaps the only) time.
This was the second album from Prefab Sprout, a band consisting of two brothers (Paddy and Martin), Wendy Smith on keyboards and backing vocals and Neil Conti on drums. The name is one Paddy made up when he was 14, they released many albums over two decades and their biggest hit was ''King of Rock and Roll'', you know: 'Hot dog, jumping frog, Alberquerque…'.
But this is trivia.
What really matters is the music. Really. If you have never listened to this album then I urge, no, demand that you do. And I am not caught up in the reverie of yesteryear; I was told to listen to this a few years ago when slagging off the '..jumping frog..' lyric. What I heard was a record full to the brim of wonderful ideas with an unapologetic singer flitting from heartbreak to sugared-out bitternes to all-out love with such deft lyrical brilliance that I was reminded of Cole Porter or Lorenz Hart. He sings surprising melodies flung about almost off-hand around killer hooks, never letting a song get predictable. Dolby’s bloops and grinds learned while forging his own proto-electro pop career are crucial.
Paddy's lyrical skill lies in his honesty and humour which is sometimes oblique but never hard to understand. 'I'm turkey hungry, I'm chicken free and I can't breakdance on your knee' from ''Movin' The River'', or 'Sweet talk like candy rots teeth’ from "Hallelujah".
Everything else on this album is born of rigour and attention to detail. The stuff that lead Paddy to proclaim himself as ‘probably the best songwriter on the planet’. Taking effervescent invention, playfulness and intelligence and corralling it into songs of an unusually high caliber is what both made their name and limited their success.
The acoustic versions of Paddy’s favourites on disk 2 (which took twice as long to record as the original record) are quite different. Paddy’s guitar playing is still sharp and maturity has not dulled his irony or his expressive, knowing tone. He is older, so is his voice, and lyrics that meant one thing 22 years ago now have a new slant. When he sings ‘they were the best times, the harvest years’ on '‘Desire As’' it all becomes much more personal. It even rivals the original. Essential stuff...”.
I will end it there. Even though I cannot find any site that gives a definitive date the album was released, it was released in June 1985 and was a modest commercial success. In years since it has been ranked alongside the best albums of all time. This sublime work from the brilliant Prefab Sprout sounds sensational…
FORTY years later.