Everything has gone into trying to recreate those sounds within the box.” The latest Prefab Sprout album, Crimson/Red, is a characteristically lush record, brimming with lovely, artful songs, recorded at McAloon’s home in County Durham. “When I look at it now - and this isn’t just old man’s talk - I’ve thought about where it’s all gone. “Y’know, the big studios that we were in, maybe to some degree we took for granted because we were young and foolish and all of that business,” admits the 56–year–old in his gentle north–eastern English burr. Coming up through the indie world of the early ‘80s, when the best acts from small labels would quickly be snapped up by the major record companies, he subsequently enjoyed the generous production budgets of the era and made albums in top–flight studios on both sides of the Atlantic, before latterly settling into a more homespun recording approach. You listen to a Peggy Lee or a Frank Sinatra or a Beach Boys record, where they’re done in what I assume to be rooms with well–designed acoustics, they have a sound.” After over 30 years trading as Prefab Sprout - previously the songwriter and leader of a four–piece band, he now uses the name in effect as a shop front for his solo career - McAloon knows what he likes to hear in the recording studio. If recording is done well, it will have that unique stamp. I still think things from the ’50s and ’60s are the best–sounding records. “The sound bashing off the walls, the same old instruments that everyone uses, but being played in a real live atmosphere. “A lot of what goes on in a studio is on a sub–molecular level,” says Paddy McAloon. These days, things are a little different.
Prefab Sprout rose to fame in an era of indulgence and eye–watering studio budgets.
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