Institute of Contemporary Arts Rock Week: January 4th, 1984

Set Listing

01 Couldn’t Bear to be Special
02 I Never Play Basketball Now
03 Cherry Tree
04 Green Isaac
05 Diana
06 Constant Blue
07 Don’t Sing (Capital Radio Recording)
08 The Devil Has All the Best Tunes (Capital Radio Recording)
09 Hallelujah
10 Lions In My Own Garden (Exit Someone) (Capital Radio Recording)
11 Diana

An audience tape of this concert exists. Excellent audience recording.

British Library entry for Capital Radio sound recording C628/844-845. No private copies known. Available via soundserver as 128kbps MP3. Excellent recording from pre-broadcast tape. Broadcast Feb 4th 1984

“And so to Prefab Sprout featuring (you guessed it) more white denim. (Watch out for a double page spread in The Farce heralding this new fab fad).

“At the risk of making myself awfully unpopular, I am entirely unconvinced that Kitchenware in general, and the Sprouts in particular, warrant all the Band of ’84 gush people have been spinning on their behalf.

“I remember a Rock Week early last year when all the flashguns were trained on Friends Again – another young, semi-accoustic band with a couple of hummable singles who had been whisked from indie-anapolis by a kindly major.

“The only reason Prefab Sprout haven’t been compared to Friends Again is that FA are already forgotten. And there’s a moral in there somewhere.

“Prefab Sprout are strong on guitars, weak on vocals and Paddy McAloon and Wendy Smith have been blessed with unexceptional little voices (their new single is rather unfortunately titled ‘Don’t Sing’). When the real spokesmen arrive, they won’t be so polite.

“A day later Billy Bragg and the Redskins stood on the same stage and tromped (sic) all over their memory. They may be this year’s thing, but the Sprouts don’t amount to a hill of beans in my book.”

Luaka Bop, Sounds, January 14th,1984

“(I sat) through most of Prefab Sprout’s set, despite their somewhat ham-fisted performance. Were the monitors on the blink? Everyone stood in stunned amazement at the breakage and burial of Prefab’s delicately meandering mood by last minute stand-in Steve’s stickwork: as a drummer he’d make a good roadmender. Paddy McAloon’s out of tune guitar and Wendy Smith’s equally suspect vocal pitching didn’t help.

“Actually, songs which I was hearing for the first time tonight, like ‘Diana’ and ‘Cherry Tree’, engaged and exhilarated on the basic level of tense contrast between private, anxious romanticism and its frenzied delivery, not unlike Orange Juice. But Prefab Sprout, as shown on their brilliantly beautiful debut LP, the soon-come ‘Swoon’, are delving into musical and lyrical areas even more oblique yet compelling than OJ’s classsic ‘Flesh of My Flesh’. Other reference points: Steely Dan, a touch of Scritti Politti, and, as Paddy sings in ‘Hallelujah’, ‘I hear the songs of Georgie Gershwin’. Such fragility needs careful handling.

“But tonight Paddy’s eloquent articulation of life and love’s twists and subtle gradations – the wistful apprehension of ‘Lions in My Own Garden (Exit Someone)’, the cryptic head-versus-heart battle of ‘Little Green Isaac I’ – was only just discernible. Prefab Sprout didn’t play ‘Cruel’, perhaps one of the most acute, intelligent and touching lover’s laments ever written, but even so they performed many songs of comparable genius. And I’m afraid this evening many people left unaware of that fact.”

Mat Snow, NME, 14 Jan 1984

“Prefab Sprout already had something of a reputation to live up to. Certainly their two singles “Lions In My Own Garden (Exit Someone)” and “The Devil Has All The Best Tunes” set the right air of intrigue and adventure, yet live there was something missing: conviction, swing, an energy to make their conceits come true – I don’t know but things didn’t really gel and a procession of early leavers underlined the anti-climax.

“Dubbed by their supporters as the Steely Dan of the Eighties, is this a welcome comparison you mak well ask? They’ve set their sights well above the average pop aspirns and singer-writer Paddy McAloon may well have the resources to see the vision through.

“Again he’s been blessed with an unusually melodic voice not that far away from a more muscular version of Roddy Frame. He curls these aching vocals through a collection of songs that are sometimes a little tricky for their own good but always refreshingly different and rewardingly demanding.

“It’s the kind of music best assimilated in the more personal atmosphere of home and if they really want to translate their ambitions into a live context their playing needs to become as forceful as their ideas.”

Ian Pye, Melody Maker, 14 Jan 1984

“Prefab Sprout from Newcastle are an airy four-piece with a penchant for scat and jazz and a reputation fostered by the pop press that does them a disservice. The singer and writer Paddy McAloon has an imagination which his band cannot realize. The Sprouts are momentarily pleasant but their Gershwin references never fulfilled their promise, the rhythms were never fascinating and the changes from major to minor barely passed muster.

“Prefab Sprout have made themselves better understood on record. They will need to brush up their timing if they are to impress Big Brother in the months to come”

Max Bell, The Times


“I DON’T like the ICA as a rock venue when it’s full. It’s too small and too square. The sound is patchy, and the crush has its own form of exclusivity — in the murk, everyone looks the same. This week, the earnest young men and women who glide through ICA rock weeks in their old overcoats, their short-back-and-sides with knobs of hair on top, seemed to spend the evenings selling each other identical fanzines.

“Still, the rock weeks themselves are excellently organised showcases for up-coming bands, and are important if only because other London venues are so conservative in their booking policies. It’s at the ICA now that provincial groups hope to impress metropolitan critics and record companies, and it’s the ICA now that best honours rock’s central tradition — live performance, cheap music, the immediate presence of noise and nerves. In an age of video packaging, such live music has a critical edge — there’s more than a good time involved. These musicians want to reclaim rock from the salesmen.

“This time last year, the theme was back to the roots — pub rock roots, dance floor roots — but the groups championed then (Joboxers, for example) soon succumbed to the clichéd video accounts of those roots, macho strutting. The most promising acts of this year’s rock week, Prefab Sprout and Billy Bragg, draw from a different tradition, singer/songwriting. As Bragg wryly noted, this music gets labelled as ‘folk rock’, but the relevant sound and imagery of the man with the electrified guitar actually comes directly from blues and country music and rock-and-roll.

“Billy Bragg is likely to remain an eccentric figure in the British rock scene, however successful he becomes. Prefab Sprout, by contrast, have just signed a long-term CBS deal and, heavily pushed by a Radio One DJ, David Jensen, can be safely tipped for Top Of the Pops stardom.

“Their singer/songwriter/guitarist is Paddy McAloon, a bustling performer with a flop of hair and a nervous determination to be heard. The Sprout’s Wednesday appearance at the ICA was flustered, with a bad sound mix, and, apparently, a brand-new drummer, but McAloon’s talent was evident. His songs are more ambitious than Bragg’s, with melodies organised by sophisticated lyrical lines which conveyed mood more than meaning.

“The Sprout’s music builds on these structures and on the flatness of McAloon’s adenoidal vocals and strummed guitar. There’s a rhythm section to add drive and a woman singer, Wendy Smith, to add colour, not with orthodox back-up or harmony vocals, but as an instrumentalist in her own right. When the mix works, it is so well crafted as to absorb the audience in the most abstruse songs. When it doesn’t, the results are decidedly precious.”

Simon Frith, The Observer


“We played a gig, an infamous gig at the ICA in January, which was really awful… we weren’t very good in one gig we did in London, which wasn’t very good and everyone reviewed it…”

Paddy McAloon to KFM Radio, 4th May 1984

“…We were rushed into doing some support gigs with Elvis Costello at Christmas and we didn’t want to say no because we were greedy. So we auditioned a drummer very quickly and mmm we weren’t very thorough. He learnt the LP very, very fast indeed but he didn’t have it. He was a nice enough lad but it didn’t work out and so when we finally hit London in our own right, at the ICA we weren’t very good that night; it wasn’t atrocious that’s the thing, we went down well, but to all the people expecting perfection it was like ‘What’s all this?’. Sounds especially went to town y’know, ‘oh they’re not very good’. It’s rubbish, we are good, it was just that it didn’t work out that night.”

Paddy McAloon, Falling and Laughing Fanzine, June/July 1984