Paddy mcaloon biography of martin
Prefab Sprout: Paddy McAloon interview
With his only solo album I Trawl The Megahertz now rebranded as a Prefab Sprout record, Paddy McAloon is ready for a rare opportunity to discuss his collective’s wondrous legacy.
There may be less Prefab Sprout music than anyone – including Paddy – would like, but no-one can argue with the quality of what’s there. Paddy tells Classic Pop about the difficulties of his obsessive writing and how hearing problems make him cherish his singing more than ever.
Nobody comes closer than Paddy McAloon to being a pop wizard. It’s not just his softly magical albums like Steve McQueen, From Langley Park To Memphis and Crimson/Red.
He even looks like a picture-book wizard, too: horn-rimmed round-lensed glasses, flowing silver hair, and a matching beard he sometimes strokes when pondering the reasons why Prefab Sprout rarely toured or how he’s ended up writing a musical with Spike Lee.
If Paddy resembles Dumbledore, down to the mischief in his eyes as he resolutely refuses to take his status too seriously, then he greets Classic Pop in classical surroundings to match – a book-lined, spacious suite at the five-star Gore Hotel near South Kensington station in West London.
Its opulence baffles Paddy, who admits: “My wife says it doesn’t matter where I am because I live in my head, and she’s right. This hotel is nice, but it could just as easily be a Premier Inn.”
A Premier Inn just wouldn’t be right for someone so respected. Paddy rarely gives interviews, so why not celebrate when he does? One of the melancholic tasks for any true Prefab Sprout fan is keeping track of the dozens of albums Paddy McAloon has written, but hasn’t finished.
Having to explain his music to the media is one reason there isn’t more Prefab Sprout music. “If I make something, it kills it stone dead if I spend too long talking about it,” Paddy says.
“So I end up skipping the stage where I actually make the record. I write it and move o
Gig review: Martin McAloon of Prefab Sprout at Metronome
From playing bass guitar in much-love art-rock band, Prefab Sprout, Martin McAloon has stepped forward to centre stage. Suffering from retinal and tinnitus issues, his brother Paddy is no longer able to tour live, so, in a heart-warming tribute, his younger brother has swapped four strings for six to breathe new life into the best of the Durham act’s material...
There’s a very good reason some of the nation’s major players have located their call centres in the North East. When you ring up in a fury because your broadband has been disconnected or you’re frustrated at your lacklustre mobile phone deal, hearing the lilting sing-song tones of a genial Geordie on the other end of the line seems to have some kind of Jedi mind trick-like pacifying qualities.
Now 62, and a longstanding Newcastle native, Martin McAloon is also in possession of this type of winning repartée which soothes and calms. The bass-player in much-cherished 1980s art-rock outfit, Prefab Sprout, McAloon has pushed himself front and centre to take the songs penned by his brother, Paddy, out on the road.
Performing over two sets with five classics guitars and a couple of amps for company, McAloon kicks off with Moving The River from the trio’s acclaimed Steve McQueen LP before swiftly slipping into the textured Looking For Atlantis followed by a request from a rowdy bloke in the first rows, the layered Technique, from the album Swoon.
A great anecdote about taking Martha Reeves home after finding her in a Newcastle pub nursing a Guinness causes much mirth before McAloon rounds off the first set with a stripped back version of the epic, When Love Breaks Down.
The second half sees Electric Cars flow into I Remember That and Nancy (Let Your Hair Down For Me) before McAloon leaves on a high with a quirky T-Rex-inspired rendition of The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll then Cars and Girls.
And while there
A Life Of Surprises Is Born
Paddy McAloon, and younger brother Martin, grew up in rural England during the 60s and 70s, fed by a musical diet of British legends like the Beatles, and the Who, along with American popular song standards from the songbooks of such luminaries as Burt Bacharach and Jimmy Webb. McAloon, the elder, formed his first covers band in the mid 70s, called Avalon, and by his college days was beginning to pen his own songs. In the late 70s, whilst attending college in Newcastle, Paddy McAloon decided the time was write to form a new outfit, through which to channel some of the songs he’d been writing. McAloon handled the vocal/guitar duties, whilst younger brother Martin came in on bass, and drummer Mick Salmon rounded out the original line-up. Over the next few years they honed their sound (which was initially a bit rough and ready, in the style of punk) on the pub and college circuits, as Prefab Sprout. The origins of the name Prefab Sprout have seemingly sprouted a mythology all their own. One theory (apparently kickstarted by McAloon himself), was that the name was chosen because he had misheard a line in the Nancy Sinatra/Lee Hazlewood hit ‘Jackson’. He interpreted the lyric “hotter than
From the gawkily posed photographs that have survived the decades, its clear they stood steadfastly out of step with their peers and, you’d think, knew that much best themselves. But although Prefab Sprout’s shape and style has evolved out of all recognition in the years since 1977, it’s that same sense of mis-match – the uneasy young buck in an out-sized dinner jacket and cheap shades – which has consistently defined them through the many moons and their many moods since.
Beyond the obvious, much of the band’s story is still soaked in loose talk and urban myth. Music’s mainstream, with which they flirted briefly, gave up on them twenty odd years ago and, ever since, the gaps in Prefab Sprout’s narrative have been filled by obsessive, fan-fuelled levels of hearsay, suggestion and general tattle. But nothing really changes there, either: the band’s frontman and writer, Paddy McAloon – the eldest son of an Irish Catholic immigrant family – was initially presented as a former seminarian.
What we do know for certain is that McAloon’s band first took root in the small village of Witton Gilbert in the North East of England, seventeen miles from Newcastle, during a peculiar period in British music history. The Clash had released their first album, The Sex Pistols had hi-jacked the Queen’s silver jubilee year – 1977 – and unofficially sound-tracked it while disco was approaching it’s commercial and creative pomp, flirting increasingly in the margins with electronica as it went. By the end of the following year, The Bee Gees were out-selling the field and Sid Vicious was arrested in New York for the murder of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen.
Worlds away in every respect, Paddy McAloon was twenty years old and lugging Prefab Sprout’s improbably ambitious songs – and the group’s cheap equipment – out into a variety of pub venues around County Durham for the first time. The band had been in gestation for years – in theory, in dreams – and although Paddy’s earl