Released on 22 June 1985 "Steve McQueen" was the second studio album by English alternative pop band Prefab Sprout, released on 22 June 1985 in the UK by Kitchenware Records. On 3 September 1985, the album was released by Epic Records in the United States as Two Wheels Good in anticipation of legal conflict with the estate of American actor Steve McQueen. The album cover references McQueen's lifelong passion for Triumph motorcycles and his 1963 film The Great Escape. The album sspawned four single "When Love Breaks Down", "Faron Young", "Appetite", & "Johnny Johnny"
The band subsequently contacted Dolby, who met with frontman and songwriter Paddy McAloon in the latter's County Durham home. McAloon presented Dolby with a number of songs he had written, "probably 40 or 50" by Dolby's estimate, some written as far back as 10 to 12 years prior. Dolby then picked his favourites and asked McAloon to make demo
recordings of them; these recordings served as the basis for Dolby's
initial process of planning the album's recording.
In the autumn of 1984, Dolby and Prefab Sprout began working on the album's songs in rehearsals at Nomis Studios in West London, after which they moved to Marcus Studios for proper recording. The sessions were amicable, with the band being respectful of Dolby's
edge over them in recording and musical experience, and Dolby keeping
into account the band's wishes, knowing that McAloon "wouldn't want to
be diluted" by Dolby's additions to the album. Subsequent mixing was carried out at Farmyard Studios in Buckinghamshire.
These were McAloon's songs, but of Dolby's choosing and done Dolby's
way. Dolby began noticing unusual things about the band’s methods, like
how Martin worked out his increasingly knotty bass parts around the
lowest notes that he could see his brother’s hand playing – not at all
the same thing as the root note familiar to bassists – or how harmonies
were established not by group singing but by Paddy writing down notes on
a lyric sheet for multi-instrumentalist Wendy Smith to learn by singing
against a keyboard. What if these outlier tendencies could be brought
to the fore? Drummer Neil Conti remembers a “tense start” when Dolby wanted him to play like a drum machine, but Conti – who came from a
jazz, funk and calypso background – held his nerve. After rehearsals,
the band and producer moved to Marcus Recording Studios in Bayswater to
record the album.
The first sounds that you hear on Steve McQueen are
twanging, rockabilly guitars. ‘Faron Young’, titled after the Louisiana
country singer and referencing his 1971 hit ‘It's Four In The Morning’,
is a relatively anomalous start to the album, a convivial but weightless
country rock track complete with a hoedown banjo part programmed by
Dolby on the Fairlight. Then the tempo drops, and this strange album really begins to speak. There's a pre-Swoon demo of "Bonny" that helps unpick exactly what Dolby achieved with Steve McQueen.
Scratchy and melodically repetitive, you can sympathise with the band. But Thomas Dolby strips it to bare parts –
in this case, gossamer thin acoustic guitar and McAloon’s now calmer
and conversational vocal, offset by haunted, windswept electronics –
before blowing the production up to a peak.
"Appetite" was one of the most recent songs written for the album,
penned in the summer of 1984 and stacked full of gorgeous McAloon lines –
a young mother "wishing she could call him Heartache / but it’s not a
boy’s name", McAloon reserved
special praise for Dolby’s programming on that track, and the
sophisticated, Quincy Jones-style drum and string counterpoint
underneath it all. More than this, Dolby samples and manipulates Wendy
Smith’s breathy backing vocals through the Fairlight, doubling them up
with twinkling keyboards to produce a vocal effect that is the signature
of both "Appetite" and "When Love Breaks Down".
Paddy McAloon remembers writing ‘When Love Breaks Down’ as an attempt
to get out of his own way, writing with a guitar but also a synthesiser
on his knee. “It all came pretty quickly in one night,” he explained in
a 1986 interview to Chris Heath, describing the words coming out as
though singing "an old hymn or a folk tune." After this, "Goodbye Lucille #1" spends much of its runtime
incanting the name Johnny like a mantra. Like any good mantra, do it
long enough and it becomes transcendent: the final minute of the track
is pure fireworks.
With its second side and a more subtle and impressionistic
work takes shape. Take "Blueberry Pies", a romantic drama in miniature,
or the fizzing, celestial soul finale of "When The Angels". "I wanted to
talk about somebody dying young with a wonderful gift," said McAloon to
Melody Maker in 1985, who spoke about wanting to write a
tribute to Marvin Gaye that was not sombre and serious. McAloon had a bit that he liked to
do for music journalists where he declared his common cause with giants
of show tune like Richard Rogers or Stephen Sondheim. You can hear some
of this in "Hallelulah's reference to "Georgie" Gershwin, or the
outright eccentric "Horsin' Around".
This is what’s so interesting about Steve McQueen. It’s
remembered as an indie record, but if so it’s a very odd one, because
one of its chief architects was trying to write for Broadway, the other
attempting to turn in a work of pristine Los Angeles hi-fidelity
production. But in that push and pull, it reveals a path not taken, one
where British indie might have become more modern and sensual rather
than nostalgic and obvious. How much better could British indie music
still be if people dared to form these against type pairings?
For Paddy McAloon and Thomas Dolby, Steve McQueen was the
start of a five year collaboration. 1988's single ‘The King Of
Rock’n’Roll’, a vivid and detailed Dolby production, became the band’s
sole top 10 hit. Musically, Steve McQueen is informed by Dolby's lush, jazz-tinged production, a suite of literate songs that draw as much from 1950s rock and country as from Elvis Costello." Wendy Smith's backing vocals have been described as "serving as guide rails" on the album. McAloon's lyrics on Steve McQueen touch on a number of themes, including love, infidelity, regret, and heartbreak.
Critically acclaimed at the time of its release. The finest album you will hear this year talking about 1985 and Paddy McAloon as "the
country's best (by a mile) songwriter". McAloon as one of the best writers of "depressingly precise
songs about the joys, fears and disappointments of love" and lamented
that listeners might be put off by the "obscurity and complexity" of
Prefab Sprout's music.
Steve McQueen Track List:
1. Faron Young
2. Bonny
3. Appetite
4. When Love Breaks Down
5. Goodbye Lucille # 1
6. Hallelujah
7. Moving The River
8. Horsin' Around
9. Desire As
10. Blueberry Pies
11. When The Angels
