This is wonderful.
Anyone who is in the “Paddy McAloon and Prefab Sprout” Facebook group will know the extremely talented and prodigiously strong-left-handed Steven Bennett, who has been producing video walkthroughs of Prefab Sprout songs for a while, complete with chord shapes. Even if they were originally written for keyboards.
He’s now created a YouTube channel with the collected works, and it is brilliant, if a little scary for those of us with slightly less suppleness in our chord forming hands. In the videos, the chords flash by a bit, but I’ve been chatting to Steven and in between the other things we’re doing we hope to feature songs in a little more detail with some notes on harmonic structure and so on.
If nothing else, seeing these songs done like this demonstrates that Paddy is not some chancer of a busker – he does things harmonically which are astonishingly clever and rather unique in pop at least.
Click on the photo to access the channel. And watch this space in case we ever get things together enough to do some posts.
Incidentally, you can find some more material including the rather simpler “Life of Surprises” songbook and the original chords to “Lions” here.