RSS

Contact us

Friday 9 January 2009

Timely resprouting

Marcus Berkmann looks back on Prefab Sprout

No one quite believes it, but the new Guns N’ Roses album is finally coming out. Axl Rose has been working on it for 17 years, demonstrating, as rarely before, the fine line between perfectionism and padded cell. It is a reminder, though, that in these busy times quite a few acts have gone missing in action. The stories about Gerry Rafferty, who checked into a London hospital in August for tests on his liver, did a runner, and was spotted several weeks later buying whisky in Harrods, reminded those few of us who used to buy all his records that he hasn’t exactly been at his most productive recently. There was an album six or seven years ago, the first for a while, with horrible clattery arrangements and several pics of Gerry on the CD insert wearing a long coat and looking furious, like an Old Testament preacher before opening time. Since then, nothing. Presumably he’ll be missing in action for some time yet.

Other acts, though, drift so far out of your consciousness that you almost forget that you ever liked them in the first place. I was scanning the shelves the other day, wondering as ever what to play next, when I saw a small pile of Prefab Sprout CDs and I thought, I remember that. Over the years I have played Prefab Sprout’s seven albums so many times that I thought I’d never want to play them again. Paddy McAloon’s songwriting gift is wholly particular — lush, romantic, so quietly ironic you could easily miss the irony altogether (so ironic, sometimes, that you thought you might be supposed to miss the irony) — but the glistening, synthesised production techniques of the 1980s tied his tunes to that decade forever. Since 1990 there have been only two Sprout albums, which I played and played in the desperate hope that they might be as good as 1988’s From Langley Park To Memphis, but neither of them were. There seemed to have been a loss of songwriting confidence — certainly there was a loss of momentum — and in the late 1990s McAloon, who is now 51, started to suffer from a disorder of the retina that affected his vision. It seemed that his time had gone.

More articles from: Marcus Berkmann | this section

Print this article  |  Email to a friend  |  Permalink  |   Comment

Post this entry to:   del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Advertisement

Spectator Business | Apollo Magazine

Corporate | Advertising | Privacy | Terms

Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP

All Articles and Content Copyright ©2008 by The Spectator | All Rights Reserved