I've just learnt Prefab Sprout, one of my all time favorite bands are releasing a new album on the 7th Spetember.

The album Let's Change The World With Music was originally recorded in 1992 but the record company weren't too keen on the demo's so it got shelved. Paddy McAloon has gone back to the demo's and tweaked them.

I personally can't wait to get my hands on this album.

Below is an article I found on the net all about the forthcoming album.


The first impression is confusing. There's a man in a coat and hat, with a long, gray beard, standing in a field of flowers. Is he a butterfly-collector? A physics Nobel Laureate? Paddy McAloon can't help grinning a little when he hears those associations, prompted by his recent photo session. "I'm not quite sure myself how I would categorize myself pop-culturally with that look. Legendary, perhaps?"

With self-deprecation and subtle English humor, one of the best songwriters in pop-music describes the last five to seven years of his career: "I've been writing songs. Dozens, maybe hundreds. But I just didn't feel like releasing a single one of them. It just didn't interest me. Sounds strange, doesn't it? My idea of being a pop-star has changed completely. If you will, I'm kind of a Brian Wilson in his rough phase. Just without psychiatrist and psychopharmaceudicals."

So, Paddy McAloon is kidding.
Since the last album from his (peacefully dissovled) band Prefab Sprout "Andromeda Heights" in 1997, and the electronic experiment "I Trawl the Megahertz" in 2003, McAloon has been keeping to himself at his cottage near Durham: a genius in early retirement. He did some commissioned work for British soul singer Jimmy Nail, but that was a long time ago. "I have a family, which is a beautiful job in itself," he just says.
But his somewhat mysterious retreat from the big stage isn't as blythe and unclouded as it might seem. Standard works on pop music call his band "a classic" and list him along-side Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello. But despite the commercial success of "Steve McQueen" (1985) and "From Langley Park to Memphis" (1988), Prefab Sprout never belonged to the mainstream. A little too perfect for the taste of the masses, a little too clever to repeat themselves like stadium rockers do: "I'm just enjoying that I'm not part of this rock circus anymore."
And there are the setbacks as far as his health is concerned. For a long time, McAloon suffered from a disease of the eye, there was the threat that he might lose his eye-sight. "For a while, but fortunately that has been stopped," he says. Thanks to doctors and modern laser-technique. But then there was the tinnitus, caused by a virus, intermittently affecting his hearing. "I couldn't hear some frequencies right. And I was over-sensitive tonoise. Bad premises for a rock star, aren't they?"
So it fits in with the general picture of this exceedingly witty and surely also headstrong artist, that his new album is not a „normal“ album. It’s actually from 1992/93 and was rumoured to be lost for a long time. Comparisons to the Beach Boys’ „Smile“-project are unavoidable. „Well, it wasn’t as dramatic as that,“ McAloon remembers. „In any case, those 11 songs are from the period between ‚Jordan: The Comeback’ and ‚Andromeda Heights.’ For a long time, I just didn’t find them good enough. Then the band broke up, and the finished demo was shelved.“

It was Keith Armstrong, head of Prefab Sprout’s home label Kitchenware in Newcastle, who rediscovered the recordings last year, finding that beautiful songs like „Let There Be Music“ had just timelessly matured. „And so I returned to the demos. I reworked them in something like post-production. Without guest musicians, without a 26-piece orchestra. I am a big fan of studio software. In a way ‚Let’s Change The World With Music’ is a techno-album. Although it doesn’t sound like one at all,“ McAloon chuckles.
Instead, there are elegies and song-miniatures in the finest Prefab-Sprout-manner. „Earth, the Story So Far“ floats along like a romantic river in the spring sun. „Meet the New Mozart“ combines wit and hymnic exuberance. Whereas earlier masterpieces dealt with eternal topics like love, suffering, and devotion, MUSIC is now at the centre of McAloon’s work: a masterly late work with titles like „Last of the Great Romantics,“ „Sweet Gospel Music,“ or „I Love Music.“ And Paddy McAloon wouldn’t be Paddy McAloon, if he didn’t put all his poetic art into lines like „Music is a princess – I am just a boy .. .in rags.“ Only Paddy McAloon is capable of emphatic images like this – without being kitschy at all.
There aren't many singer/songwriters anymore who can pull this off. "LCTWWM" will prove once again that Paddy McAloon is the "Stanley Kubrick of pop music," as they say. HMV have chosen Paddy McAloon for a large-format poster campaign in Great Britain. In this campaign, big names from music history present their favorite lyrics. Paddy McAloon - pictured with beard and hat - chose some lines from Bob Dylan. It's not improbable that this year, at the age of 52, Paddy McAloon is reaching those spheres himself.

Looking forward to this!

1. Let There Be Music

2. Ride

3. I Love Music

4. God Watch Over You

5. Music Is A Princess

6. Earth: The Story So Far

7. Last Of The Great Romantics

8. Falling In Love

9. Sweet Gospel Music

10. Meet The New Mozart

11. Angel Of Love




I've managed to find the image of the album cover and the track listing. Paddy Mcaloon is a songsmith without equal. Thanks for the thread!

I know that paligap will be especially glad to hear about this.


tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431

I always thought he would be a logical choice to replace John had the beatles ever decided to reform before george's passing. The acoustic version of Two Wheels Good is on myspace, check it out.
[Edited 8/17/09 16:02pm]

from the looks of the song titles.....it seems like a boring record

no offense because i at one point loved this band too

...

I've been counting down for the last few months!

I'm hoping it's half as good as Jordan...The Comeback...I'm a huge fan, though I gotta admit, I wasn't that thrilled with the last two, Andromeda Heights, and The Gunman and Other Stories....

I know that it's basically demos for an early 90's unfinished Sprout album, without much else, production-wise....

The first tune, "Let There Be Music" ...I dunno-- I love the Chorus---but that fake hip hop opening kinda threw me off....

It's great to have Paddy back, though!



















...
[Edited 8/18/09 8:39am]

I thought The Gunman was poor but I liked Andromeda Heights alot.

The b-sides from that album where great two, especially Never Trust A Spell and Just Because I Can. I think these two where from another abandon project called Knights Of Armour.

Apparently the new album doesn't really sound like a bunch of Demo's, I've got high hopes but I don't expect it to be as good as Jordan..The Comeback.

I agree about the opening but I still really like the song even though I'm trying not to listen to it much.

OK i've just heard the album, every track was played on a German radio show and I've got to say my first impressions are that it's a great album.

it's a beautiful record.

I can't wait to hear it again on the 7th.

Romeoblu said:

Lucky!!!!




...

This is a great album.

Been playing it now for the last week.

I'd say if you like Langley Park and Jordan you gonna enjoy this.

I love Music, Music is a Princess and Sweet Gospel Music are glorious.

Hopefully Paddy will continue to let more stuff out of his vault.

Paddy McAloon Interview

September 2009

As Prefab Sprout release their first album in 8 years, their thoughtful founder Paddy McAloon discusses his struggle with the creative urge.

"Have you ever seen those documentaries about people who stockpile newspapers and bread and bicycles?” chuckles Paddy McAloon. “I’m a bit like that.” He is only half joking. With long, grey hair and a wild white beard, the 52-year-old former leader of cult pop band Prefab Sprout lives a quiet life of reclusive, domestic retirement in his hometown of Durham, with his wife and three daughters (aged 11, 9 and 6).

He disbanded Sprout in 2001 (after 17 years, and 8 albums) and has released only one album since, the instrumental and spoken word piece, ’I Trawl The Megahertz’ in 2003. But it turns out he never stopped making music, he just stopped letting anybody hear it.




“I have this massive creative urge, which I struggle with,” confesses the warm, wry McAloon. “The desire to write is much stronger than the desire to turn any of them into records. At a certain point it went from being a sort of sensible strategy of laying things away for a long winter and now I’ve got a mountain of junk and music. I feel like someone in an Edgar Allan Poe story, buried under my boxes of albums.”

Prefab Sprout are about to release their first album in 8 years, ’Let’s Change The World With Music’ (on Kitchenware). Only its not a reunion. And its not even new. It is one of McAloon’s lost works, recorded in 1992, when Prefab Sprout were still firing on all cylinders, their glistening, emotional pop revered by critics and music lovers alike. And it is an extraordinary album, a rich, glorious, melodic, poetic, wry and romantic pop hymn to the power of music. Although recorded as demos over the course of a year by the perfectionist McAloon completely on his own, it has everything you could want from a Prefab Sprout album, marrying the aesthetic of arty, left-field singer-songwriting with the super polish of pop and jazz. But it was shelved after an A&R meeting when doubts were expressed about whether the world was ready for a concept album with references to God.

He was encouraged to go away and work on something else but although Prefab Sprout released two more studio albums, the seeds of McAloon’s withdrawl had been sown. “It was a fraught area for me,” he admits. “I couldn’t help being wounded. My ego was saying I entrusted my best material to people who didn’t get it.”

What seems utterly ridiculous from the remove of two decades is that the album is actually so sleek, smart and beautifully distilled, you wonder how anyone could have doubted its worth. It is not even, as he points out himself, particularly religious.

“There’s the vaguest of metaphors in there for the notion of a deity: if God was to speak, then music would be where you would find that voice. I’ve not nailed my mast to the flag of any particular denomination or point of view. I don’t know where I stand on belief. Whatever era we’re born, we think we have the definitive model of the way the universe is and our place in it. In the 19th century, they thought it was a mechanistic universe. The analogy now is a computer. And I just think it’s all wrong. Bob Dylan believes in God, and Richard Dawkins is never going to win an argument against Bob Dylan, cause you need a poet to discuss these things. So let’s just say I’m with Bob.”

It might be surprising that McAloon would express any sort of faith, because he seems to have suffered the trials of Job in recent years. McAloon had several eye operations to counteract a progressive degenerative disorder of the retina. He was recovering from this when he had what he describes as his “hearing disaster”. “It was six months of noises in my head, so loud I felt other people must be able to hear them. When it receded it left me with damaged hearing in my right ear. So I’m very reluctant to go anywhere where there’s loud music playing, I wouldn’t stand in front of a drum kit, but I can still plug things in and work on a low level.”

Through it all, he has continued writing and recording. “There’s something in me that wants to do an impossible thing. I like the songs, but I don’t want to go away and have to sell them afterwards.” There’s a biographical album about Michael Jackson (which would now require a new ending), a musical called ’Zorro The Fox’, a suite of spirituals known as ’The Atomic Hymnbook’, a 30 song epic ’Earth, The Story So Far’ and a dark concept album about modern life, ’Zero Attention Span’, all malingering on the shelves of his Durham home studio.

“The subject matter is ageing as we speak, and that is a problem,” admits McAloon, who cut a song about Princess Diana (written while she was still living) from ’Let’s Change The World With Music’. “I have written many things from the newspapers and watched them turn yellow in their boxes.”

The album is coming out now because McAloon’s former label, Kitchenware, asked if they could release it, and McAloon was moved by the experience of listening back. “I put my heart into it, I put everything I had into it, so I think its exempt from the normal run of eighties people coming back for one time around the enormo-domes of Europe for the pension plan. I’ve always loved those songs, and I had a chance to put a historic wrong right.”

To talk to McAloon, he seems like one of the most reasonable, thoughtful and self aware people you could meet. “I have a good family life, I do the school pick up, I have friends. But I am reclusive in a lot of things. I don’t really care for the brave new world. You’re talking to a guy who doesn’t drive. I’m not on the internet. But I don’t think it’s as mad as it looks,” he says of his self-imposed artistic isolation. “If you decide to devote your life to something as an artistic endeavour, you’re doing it cause you think it’s worth doing. Its not some act of grandeur for myself, its more that I can get away with it, and concentrate on the exciting bit, the flowery bit. I feel like when I talk about it, I’m coming from a sensible place. But I know how it makes me sound. Maybe it’s the beard.”




http://www.telegraph.co.u...rview.html
[Edited 9/14/09 13:14pm]