There was no point to me to have it as an authentic country record - you leave things like that to the Americans.
I wanted to have a playful aspect to it and for me to be more of an arty English artist with it. Making a straight country record would have been dreary to me, though. "Well, I liked it for a time and then I exhausted the mine and I had to move on.
And I liked that." Then again, maybe not. It couldn't be too fanciful, and if for some reason it was then the songs had to stick to the one metaphor. "I felt with this record that, as it was country music, it had to be pretty direct. The title track, The Gunman, was also a hit for that most unlikely of Prefab Sprout fans, Cher.Īlthough McAloon buffs up the project - using the image of the Wild West as a metaphor for heroic romanticism, myths, mid-life crises and autobiographical reminiscences - there's a distinct impression that he's aware it's an under-par piece of work.
#CRAZY LITTLE THING CALLED LOVE COVER SERIES#
In large part, the songs were made to order for Crocodile Shoes, a television series starring fellow Geordie Jimmy Nail (who had a 1995 hit with McAloon's Cowboy Dreams, included on the album). In fact, compared to previous Prefab Sprout offerings it's a disappointment, if only in the sense one feels about not only the album's country-and-western theme but also the procedure in which a number of the songs were written. On its own, The Gunman & Other Stories is a good record, but not one to brag about. But when my girls are old enough they can read to me - an old blind git cursing them from a chair." God has given me a fine cross to bear, I think. The only real thing that winds me up is that I love to read and collect books. "It all depends on what you bring to the situation, doesn't it? At least I'm not in my early 20s, which would depress me even more. At the moment I can see, but it's likely it'll happen again. "I have little devices in my eyes which keep them pressed against the retina. "They've patched me up about three times now," says McAloon with equal amounts of restraint and despondency.
#CRAZY LITTLE THING CALLED LOVE COVER FULL#
The logical outcome is that, if the jelly keeps on shrinking - thereby continually detaching the retinas - full blindness will follow. His retinas detach of their own accord due to the shrinking of the jelly of the eye. In a suitably ironic touch, the new Prefab Sprout record, The Gunman & Other Stories, brings them right down to earth.īut first the bad news: one of the reasons for the four-year delay between studio albums is a recurring vision problem about which McAloon, tragically, doesn't hold out much hope. It's been four years since the band's previous album, the extraordinary Andromeda Heights, took McAloon's superlative songwriting skills and cast them into outer space. Years go by without a Prefab Sprout record being released, but fans don't mind because they know that whatever comes next will be at worst good, at best stunning, always admirable. Paddy McAloon, meanwhile, is essentially a traditionalist, a person who uses his songwriting genius to broad effect. Yet the band is still here and is still special because it dares to proclaim that love - fickle, fleeting, frustrating and downright fidgety - might not be such a bad thing altogether. He's a man in his mid-40s, a serious orchestral chronicler of love in all its ruffled aspects, and he cares little about the text-messaging generation with its press-on tattoos, Lady Marmalade cover versions and flower-power flares.Ī band that strode through the1980s in a pair of hefty size-10s, but which has now tucked its feet underneath a hot-water bottle, Prefab Sprout is against emotional shortcuts.
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