Please may I introduce you to Simpson's Coefficient, a new concept which measures the relationship between the quality of a band's music and the coolness of their name. A low reading is obtained by having a cool name (Queens of the Stone Age, for example) and terrible music (Queens of the Stone Age again), whereas the highest reading so far recorded has been for the band with the worst name of all but the most heavenly music. Step forward Prefab Sprout.
In particular, step forward Paddy McAloon, singer/songwriter and now alas only member of the band, at least on the new album, Crimson / Red. The Sprouts started life in the Newcastle area as a three piece with Paddy, his brother Martin on bass, and a succession of drummers. Fan Wendy Smith joined on backing vocals, the band signed to Kitchenware Records in the early 80s and then made a succession of records of increasing gorgeousness, from Swoon to Steve McQueen, and having a chart hit with When Love Breaks Down.
Things then went rather badly wrong. Paddy's relationship with Wendy really did break down, and his pitch for an ambitious concept album were vetoed by a suspicious record company. Not long afterwards he started to suffer health problems associated with Meuniere's disease, including tinnitis and partial deafness. A series of bootleg and demo albums surfaced sporadically in the following twenty years (no-one does long-lost demos like the Sprouts), but McAloon retreated to the North East, where he devoted himself to family life, going grey and growing a luxuriantly Brahmsian beard.
I haven't heard Crimson / Red, which McAloon wrote, recorded and produced himself, but I am thrilled and fearful at the prospect. To say McAloon is a great songwriter is a bit like saying the weather in Manchester is changeable. His muse is a kind of masculinity which lies a million miles away from macho stereotype. Paddy is sensitive, romantic, but also somewhat shrewd. "Don't look at me and say", he writes on Couldn't Bear to be Special, "That I'm the very one / Who makes the cornball things occur / The shiver of the fur / I'm just an also ran / There's a mile between the way / You see me and the way I am". There's a streak of nostalgia and regret running a mile wide here too. "After that last unholy row / I never ever play basketball now / it joins the list of things I'll miss / like fencing foils and lovely girls I'll never kiss" (I Never Play Basketball Now).
But also humour. Here he is on the Beatles tribute, Electric Guitars: "I'd a dream that we were rock stars / And that flash bulbs popped the air / And girls fainted every time we shook our hair / We were songbirds, we were Greek Gods / We were singled out by fate / We were quoted out of context / It was great".
Paddy also sees that some things are too awful for pop to encompass, hence Cars and Girls, his attack on Bruce Springsteen: "Brucie dreams life's a highway / Too many roads bypass my way / or they never begin / Innocence coming to grief / At the hands of life's stinkin' car thief / That's my concept of sin".
The difficulties of being an artist, real if not the worst, get an airing on Nightingales ("If singing birds must sing / No question of choice / then living is our song / indeed our voice / best agree, you and me / are probably nightingales") and Music is a Princess ("I'm just a boy, in rags / I'd gladly spend my life / carrying her bags / If their weight is much greater than I first supposed / I'd remember my oath of allegiance / true love is a monarch who won't be deposed / treason hasn't a chance").
And all this set to tunes which owe something to the Beach Boys and Hollywood musicals, sung in a voice of honeyed gold. Why Prefab Sprout were not huge is beyond me. Truly they laid pearls before swine.
I said I am thrilled and fearful of the first new Sprout album for a decade. Fearful because Paddy's star was at its highest when the band teamed up with producer Thomas Dolby, a brilliant arranger and sonic wunderkind. But Dolby has dropped out Paddy's worldview, whether because of personal differences, because Paddy can't afford him or because Paddy now thinks he can do it all himself. As anyone who has tried to self-produce knows, total control robs you of perspective and deprives you of the ideas of others. Nothing Paddy has produced post-Dolby quite matches the highs of Steve McQueen or Langley Park to Memphis. Not because Paddy has stopped writing great songs, but because Dolby helped him realise them perfectly.
But if control is double-edged sword, who better than Paddy McAloon to be swinging it gleefully about his head?
