The Great Escape

Something took my phone on a Prefab Sprout algorithm tour. Which came first, Hayley Williams and Romy singing the song "Wild Horses," and the video hitting everywhere at once, or my friend Aaron mentioning them in a reel, or two other people talking about them elsewhere? I don't know, but it all happened to me on the same day. That's how I wound up listening to 1985's Steve McQueen again after quite a long hiatus.

Clarification for differences in geography: in the UK, where the band is from – songwriter Paddy McAloon, aided by his brother Martin McAloon, Wendy Smith, and Neil Conti, at the time of recording – the album is called Steve McQueen. In the US, it was titled Two Wheels Good. This came about, I'm told, because Epic, the American record label, didn't want any trouble from the McQueen estate. Same cover art, same icy mist, same motorcycle and blushy hand-tinting, same beautiful, sort of pop/sort of not, jazz-influenced songs about sadness.

In 1986, a young woman with a sort of sideways asymmetrical haircut recommended the record to me as one that would make a person feel good. When I bought it on her recommendation, I learned that she had been taken by the gorgeous production – it was quite beautiful, prompting a roommate of mine at the time to state, "This isn't very punk of you." – but that she had not really given the "feel good" lyrics a proper listen.

Here are some:

"Save your speeches/flowers are for funerals."

"Absence makes the heart lose weight."

"I've got six things on my mind/You're no longer one of them."

McAloon's lyrics notwithstanding, the recommendation was directed to me, pointedly, because it would not be very punk of me to listen to it, because I listened to a lot of hardcore, which everyone knew was feel-bad music, and because young men who listened to a lot of hardcore in 1986 needed assistance and direction toward feeling good, even if the beautiful-sounding songs being pushed were actually full of breakups, infidelity, and other sexual misery. It turned out that Prefab Sprout was indeed feel-bad music, so of course I loved them immediately.

If hardcore was the music of furious adolescence, the first stop for youthful unhappiness, then Prefab Sprout was no less about about being young and unhappy, it was just much quieter. Their songs were complex compositions for people in early adulthood who'd already experienced a few disappointing relationships and were maybe developing a minor alcohol problem. When you, the target audience, had never had any relationships at all and had not even given yourself permission to think about developing that sort of add-on bit of trouble, having adopted Ian MacKaye and Morrissey as role models of refusal, it all sounded futuristically romantic and aspirational. I would listen to Prefab Sprout and imagine myself living in a better apartment, having enough money to afford a Wolfgang Puck frozen pizza from the rich-people supermarket, and brooding my way through a few complicated entanglements with attractive people.

To be clear, Steve McQueen did not ease me out of agitated guitar music one bit, but it did ease me into other, gentler, musical environments where nothing was fast or angry. Everything But the Girl had come along, after all. I heard Womack & Womack for the first time. The Style Council. Sade alone would have been enough. All that VH1 shit.

To become more of a been-there, done-that adult, I smoked one cigarette, tried several types of alcohol, and determined that I did not care for any of those accessories. I would face life's oncoming Prefab Sprout activities in a sober state and not listen to this band in a boozy haze of amorous regret after arriving at a rueful state of knowing. I would just listen to them, wait for my moment to live out the lyrics, turn 30, and maybe die soon after that.

Then I turned 30 and 40 and 50 and 60.

Hearing Steve McQueen 40 years later in your cluttered office while ironing your husband's shirts is to be reminded that the songs apply whether you're too inexperienced to have been through any of the grown-up goings-on the record contains, or you're looking back on several decades of having been through or caused at least some of it.

In the meantime, you've also read a lot of depressing contemporary fiction, watched dozens of sad French movies, and a lot of Germans putting each other through the wringer in Fassbinder films, then dumped and been dumped by some real people who were not in movies. This is how a person becomes well-rounded. You will come to the understanding that feeling good and bad at the same time, most of the time, is fairly commonplace, and you will forget the name of the young woman with the sideways hair who was fully correct to introduce you to a new band.

Anyway, these kids today don't know the first goddamn thing about being literate and soft, occasionally treacherous and bummed-out in a sophisticated way, and Prefab Sprout should line them all up and beat their ass or begin a disciplinary book club.