Having said that, a greatest hits compilation entitled ‘A Life Of Surprises The Best Of Prefab Sprout’ - described as “damn near indispensable” by Q magazine - reached No. This terrifyingly brilliant nineteen track master-class, featuring meditations on angels, cowboys, Elvis and Ibiza, was again produced by Thomas Dolby and received a Brit nomination as well as a No.7 slot on the UK album chart.ĭespite - or because of? - the success of ‘Jordan: The Comeback’, Paddy retreated further and further away from the mainstream and records were hard to come by. The album included the band’s biggest hit to date, ‘The King Of Rock ‘N’ Roll’, a song that Paddy still refers to as “a novelty record”, indeed a kind of meta-pop song that ”foresees the phenomenon, it says here’s your pop moment … and now it’s gone.” The following year the band released ‘Protest Songs’ (which included the song ‘Life Of Surprises’, later the title of a greatest hits compilation) and the year after that the astonishing ‘Jordan: The Comeback’, a fabulously imagined tapestry that cast Paddy McAloon as a Cole Porter or Stephen Sondheim for the Morrissey generation. In 1988 Prefab Sprout released from ‘From Langley Park To Memphis’ which featured guest appearances by Stevie Wonder and Pete Townsend. The album - which was released in the US as ‘Two Wheels Good’ - stayed in the UK charts for 35 weeks and a re-released version of “When Loves Breaks Down” became the band’s first Top 40 hit. It is also a record that toys with your emotions, the piercingly sincere evocation of heartbreak only becoming more evident when you strip away the extraordinary and unique multi-layers of supraproduction. Lovingly produced by Thomas Dolby, to this day ‘Steve McQueen’ remains as “eloquent as anything by Leonard Cohen, as angry as Elvis Costello at his most spiteful and accompanied by the melodic grace of Brian Wilson” (Uncut). Scary and rather strange sounding these days, it remains a timely snapshot of how Prefab Sprout were developing as a band but it wasn’t until the release of ‘Steve McQueen’ in 1985 that the floodgates truly opened and all bets were off. The album that followed - ‘Swoon’ - released on the independent Newcastle-based Kitchenware label in 1984, drew comparisons with Steely Dan and Aztec Camera but was far more beautiful and complex than that comparison suggests.
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