Swoon – Prefab Sprout (1984)

August 29, 2025

In the late 1970s, Paddy and Martin McAloon – two brothers from a small town in England – formed a group called the Dick Diver Band, which they would very quickly change to Prefab Sprout (a good choice, if you ask me). Alongside a short-lived drummer (who would leave the band in 1983), the duo recorded and self-released a single in 1982, gaining themselves some attention from music critics despite not having tremendous commercial success. From there, they would connect with Wendy Adams, who attended several of the band’s early concerts, and form what would end up being the core trio of Prefab Sprout. After gaining some additional momentum from their follow-up single, the band would get signed by Kitchenware Records in 1983, and re-release both tracks under their new label. And despite the notoriously prickly Paddy McAloon’s on-the-record comments saying that he disliked many of the popular singer-songwriters of the era, including Paul Weller, Nick Lowe, and especially Elvis Costello – they would still catch Costello’s eye, earning the star’s praise and giving them the juice they needed to release their debut album, Swoon.

Paddy McAloon, Wendy Adams, and Martin McAloon

The album was recorded for only £5,000 (its title is aptly named as an anagram for “Songs Written Out Of Necessity”) and consisted mainly of tracks they had not been performing live in recent shows (exclusively written by Paddy McAloon over the course of the prior seven years). Given the shoestring budget, the band was put under the immense pressure of recording all of the tracks in just one day – leading to a chaotic scene where Paddy demanded that a crying Wendy Smith sing the same two words again and again for over three hours straight. But after all was said and done, the band was signed by CBS and invited to open for Elvis Costello at a series of concerts leading up to the album’s release – notably being referred to as “Costello’s little band” (which I’m sure Paddy handled quite well). And as a result of being on a bigger label and getting the push from a major star, the album performed fairly well in the UK (especially given the fact that it was a largely unknown band’s first record) – with “Don’t Sing” reaching #62 on the singles chart and the album as a whole reaching #22. 

Despite his hatred for Costello and some of his peers, McAloon has since said that he was inspired by many of the songwriters who he felt were able to most successfully straddle the line of being highbrow and commercially viable – including Paul McCartney, David Bowie, Burt Bacharach, and Donald Fagen and Walter Becker of Steely Dan. And in the style of many of these greats, his writing is extremely impressive in its ability to make complex references and themes accessible to the listener. He shows appreciation for British literature with nods to Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory on “Don’t Sing” and Thomas Hardy’s The Trumpet-Major on “Ghost Town Blues,” alongside allusions to Joan of Arc, the Virgin Mary, and the titular Isaac on “Green Isaac.” And McAloon doesn’t shy away from making note of his heroes – comparing the transcendence of chessmaster Bobby Fischer with the lyrical works of Tom Jones on “Cue Fanfare” – as well as ragging on those he doesn’t feel are quite as heroic with his skewering of the political pop gimmicks of Paul Weller and his BFF Elvis Costello on “Here on the Eerie.” He also has some surprisingly self-reflective moments in his lyrics where he seems to understand himself on a deeper level than one might expect given some of his attitudes and behaviors – demonstrating his difficulty with romantic intimacy on “Couldn’t Bear to Be Special,” where he comically points out his own hypocrisy of being a jealous, possessive, so-called feminist when he tells his partner, “the world should be free, but don’t you go following suit.”

Wendy Adams and Paddy McAloon sing at an early gig

McAloon’s lyrical excellence, as well as the strong musicianship of the three members of the band (all of whom were credited as “instruments” in the liner notes), makes Swoon one of the most impressive debut albums of the decade. Given their largely unknown background, heady lyrics, and McAloon’s best attempts to burn bridges – it’s sort of stunning that they were able to achieve as much success as they did. On top of the commercial success in the UK, the band received glowing critical reviews – a combination that would tee up their 1985 follow-up, Steve McQueen, which would one-up its predecessor by barely sneaking onto the Billboard 200. But much like their peers in Squeeze (who were also connected with Elvis Costello), Prefab Sprout is as good of an example as I can think of a band that made sophisticated, complex, genre-bending pop music that was as good or even better than many of their more successful peers, but never quite broke through to international fame. Despite that, both Swoon and Steve McQueen are fantastic records and shining examples of 80s indie pop at its absolute best.