Yet |||||| this is true most obviously in the profoundly 80s sonic palette. McAloon has said that Steve McQueen is Dolby's record- he presented the producer with a vast archive of songs and asked him to choose his favorites. He had a grand sense of pop music, and in 1985, that kind of grandeur seemed to be available via producers like Thomas Dolby. He aspired to the standards of Stephen Foster, Gershwin, Sondheim, Quincy Jones, McCartney saw himself as a contemporary of Prince rather than Lloyd Cole. But as McAloon made plain, his ambitions were far grander. The Sprout- it's ironic that a writer so fleet-footed lumbered himself with such a clunking band name- had debuted in 1984 with Swoon, a record that suggested they were post-graduates of the Glasgow School, taking the Postcard label template to new levels of cryptic wit and elliptical jangle. It's this guile and grace that bands like Stars and Junior Boys still yearn for. For a year or two, just before Live Aid and Q magazine, the challenge of making new pop for grown-ups without being dowdy, smug, or jaded was met, quite superbly. Yet in records such as the Blue Nile's A Walk Across The Rooftops, the Pet Shop Boys' Please, Kate Bush's Hounds of Love, Scritti's Cupid and Psyche 85, and especially in Prefab Sprout's Steve McQueen, you have some of the most beautiful, enduring British pop music ever made. Some hard-hearted professors of pop would have it that 1985 was the absolute nadir of British music: all the fizz of new pop gone flat, the independent scene a twee shambles. Almost anywhere, you might have thought, other than Britain in the mid-80s. Or maybe some place on that off-kilter middle of the road between Burt Bacharach and Jimmy Webb in the 60s.

In another time, in another place, Paddy McAloon might have been happily productive somewhere between the Algonquin and Broadway in 1930s New York ('I want to be,' he once crooned, hopefully, 'the Fred Astaire of words.') Or beavering away in an office in the Brill Building in the 50s.

Prefab sprout steve mcqueen rar