MYTHS, MELODIES & METAPHYSICS: - Prefab Sprout

At the club, artists submit their demo tape and the sessionists learn their pieces the day
before the showcase appearances, sometimes spending all day and night in Neil's flat
doing so. All musicians involved must have that skillful balance of technical ability and
improvisation. To this end, Conti excels.
Dolby, "very much part of the team", as McAloon says, had released his first solo single
for four years, Airhead, which reached No. 53 in the UK charts, and was about to get his
debut acting role as Stanley the mad mortician in the horror-comedy-musical film
Rockula, starring alongside Bo Diddley and Toni Basil.
He produced two tracks for Ofra Haza on her album Desert Wind and in late 1989,
whilst having committed fully to the production of Prefab Sprout's fifth studio album,
released his third single from the album Aliens Ate My Buick, My Brain Is Like a Sieve,
the CD of which included a song called Ravivar Fiore. This song was co-credited to Paddy
McAloon, after Dolby had 'borrowed' a piece of music from the Sprout song Blueberry
Pies.
Paddy McAloon had become a good friend of Dolby and admired the variety in his
work, now moving on to acting as well as composing musical scores for films. That was a
field McAloon had also become increasingly interested in. Indeed, it had prompted
another project. He had written eleven songs for what he imagined was an animated
adventure film, written with the idea of the songs going with pictures.
The eleven songs in question, which McAloon started to write in autumn 1986, are a
series of stories told in song for a film entitled Zorro the Fox, in which the animated lead
character, "a heroic and distant Douglas Fairbanks figure who rides a singing horse", set in
1880/90 but with music that is "incredibly modern", quite close to Langley's more
orchestral and colourful style. Zorro is a 'pure' escapism, according to McAloon, from the
things that he usually writes, all about human qualities.
The character Zorro is not very in touch with what's happening most of the time but it
doesn't change the fact that he has a life that's exciting, away from everyone and
everything else.
Subsequently, it is rumoured that Spielberg bought the rights to the cartoon character
outright, leaving McAloon wishing to send off demos in 1993, if he ever got round to it.
McAloon has never been keen on having a massive visual presence, so he would like
maybe to work on a soundtrack or a collection of songs that would help tell a story in
order to let people know he was still out there, providing at least some sort of presence.
Zorro the Fox could provide this, a sort of 'safe haven' between theatre and pop music.
McAloon has strong thoughts about mega-stardom in the music world:
"A lot of Springsteen's reputation lies in his identification with 'the working man', and
there's a worthiness attached to any songwriter who can write a song about 'the working
man'.
"Bruce Springsteen got more plaudits and more credit for his act of identification with
the hard times of the working man than anything else in pop music. Because of my
perverse nature I'm immediately suspicious of that.
"Phenomena bother me, but why is it that Jackson doesn’t bother me and he does?
Jackson's much more of a neurotic and less worthy, but I like to think about these guys,