Paddy McAloon was in his early 40s when the singer and songwriter of the English band Prefab Sprout suddenly went blind.
The retina in both of his eyes was detaching. Often a boxing injury, it can also happen due to a congenital condition. Luckily, it can be treated with laser surgery.
During recovery, McAloon was unable to work, read or even sit upright, so he listened to lots of audiobooks and radio programmes. Late at night, he’d eavesdrop on phone-in chat shows, where callers told dark stories and made even darker confessions.
He recorded these listening sessions, and they turned into source material for I Trawl the Megahertz, the beautifully strange 22-minute opening composition from Prefab Sprout’s 2003 album of the same name.
It was different from anything McAloon had written before.
An orchestral piece inspired by his favourite composers Ravel and Débussy, it featured spoken word vocals vaguely recounting the life story of the protagonist, a woman of unspecified age.
Once heard, you won’t forget some of the poignant lyrics:
“Your daddy loves you very much, he just doesn't want to live with us anymore.“
“Twelve days in Paris, and I'm waiting for life to start.”
“Repeat after me: Happiness is only a habit.”
So many quotables in this piece.
And then, the music. That mourning trumpet over a lush string score, reminiscent of classic Broadway musicals.
It’s truly breathtaking – and for a renowned pop-rock songwriter, totally out of character.
It’s no surprise that Mojo Magazine once included I Trawl the Megahertz in their list of “The 50 Weirdest Albums Ever”.
Even McAloon himself believed it was too weird to get a major label release. He was afraid it might alienate Prefab Sprout fans.
The album would be released by his label Liberty Records, a subsidiary of major label EMI, in 2003 – more than three years after it was written and recorded – under his civil name.
15 years later, It would get reissued under the Prefab Sprout moniker.
“I thought we could do anything”, McAloon writes in the liner notes for the reissue. “And Megahertz is true to that spirit. The music here is of a piece with everything I’ve ever written. It’s from the heart.”
McAloon had formed his band in the late 1970s, after dropping out of Catholic priest seminar.
Paddy sang and played guitars and keyboards, with his brother Martin on bass guitar. The rest of the line-up would change throughout the band’s existence.
Prefab Sprout’s early albums, starting with 1984’s Swoon, were cherished for their unconventional arrangements and poetic lyrics.
They landed their biggest commercial hits in the following decade. After mainstream success waned, the group boiled back down to the two brothers, then essentially became Paddy’s solo project.
He’d always been kind of an eccentric and never loved the spotlight. Now he turned into an actual recluse, stopping to play live shows completely.
In spring 1999, still recovering from eye surgery, McAloon started writing segments of string music on his “ancient” Atari computer. To bring these MIDI sounds to life, he’d involve arranger David McGuinness, who helped him translate his ideas into an orchestral score. Co-producer Calum Malcolm enlisted a string ensemble and other session musicians for the project.
“I wondered if it was possible to make a moving record that wouldn’t involve me singing so much”, McAloon writes. “So that I might have the arcane novelty of listening to a Prefab Sprout record without having to listen to myself.”
Inspired by his radio recordings, he wrote the lyrics for I Trawl the Megahertz, finishing and connecting some of the callers’ stories, depicting disjointed scenes from the protagonist’s life.
“I imagined a woman unselfconciously unburdening herself into an old fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorder. She may be in a hotel suite. (…) She seeems to have lost something, someone. She is talking to herself in a heightened language, and all these strange images come pouring out.”
The mysterious female voice on the record belongs to an American stock broker named Yvonne Connors. Her voice perfectly embodies that air of sadness, loneliness and regret.
In October 1999, they made a test recording at a London hotel. On a later studio date, they wouldn’t be able to recapture the magic of the hotel recordings. They ended up using the original tapes, just editing out the air conditioning noises.
The rest of the album consists of eight shorter instrumental tracks and songs written in the same period. Some would include samples of the radio recordings, just one would feature McAloon’s voice (“Sleeping Rough”).
I Trawl the Megahertz still stands as one of his most personal works. It’s an album with little companions in popular culture, often getting compared to Jon Brion’s soundtrack for Michel Gondry’s film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
McAloon couldn’t have known Brion’s score, as it was written after I Trawl The Megahertz. Instead he mentions Gavin Bryars’ composition “Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet” (first released on Brian Eno’s Obscure Records in 1975), which he says he didn’t think of while writing the piece but it might have had a “subconscious influence”.
I Trawl the Megahertz remains totally unique and outstanding. I’ve never even been a huge Prefab Sprout fan, but I return to this brilliant album every so often. Its vague melancholy never fails to move me.
Media Diet
Listening 1: Blue Lake – Weft (2025)
I loved Sun Arcs, the 2023 album that Dallas native/Copenhagen resident Jason Dungan recorded in a cabin in Sweden. While we’re waiting for a follow-up full-length, he just dropped this EP of new material that moves deeper into the Americana-infused ambient country realm. These songs feature some new instruments (piano, melodica, 12-string guitar) next to the old ones (zither, flute, clarinet, cello) and were mostly recorded live in the studio. Favourite tune: “Tatara”.
Listening 2: U.e. – Hometown Girl (2025)
A new album under a new moniker from the elusive experimental musician Ulla Straus. Like her recent collaboration album with Perila, Jazz Plates, this is a mostly acoustic affair, with Ulla on woodwinds, piano and other analog instruments. There are still some of the patented glitches of her lauded last solo album foam, but overall it reminds me more of Jonnine’s brilliant Southside Girl (not just because of the title). These sketches have a similar raw lo-fi quality that makes them feel like personal diary entries. The perfect ambience for cold, rainy January mornings.
Listening 3: Green Cosmos – Abendmusiken (1983/2025)
A forgotten jazz album from 1983, Abendmusiken is the only release by this quartet from Marsberg, a small town in rural Western Germany. The moody midtempo tunes and ballads seem grounded in the modern jazz tradition, but standout cuts “Über dem Berg” and “Kalimba Suite” sound totally unique, with kalimba, double-bass and piano building raga-style repetitive structures for moving saxophone improvisations, creating a kosmische take on spiritual folk-jazz. Beautiful rediscovery.
I think Paddy is one of the great English songwriting geniuses. It’s criminal he doesn’t get more recognition. Thanks for this 🙏
Am a huge Prefab fan and I think Megahertz is one of the best albums they/Paddy ever did. Would so love another album but that may now never happen…