Paddy McAloon

If you could switch lives with a famous person for a week, who would it be and why?

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When I was younger, I was in awe of rock stars. I would have been very keen to swap places with so many of them. But through the years, I read quite a lot of autobiographies and biographies. I discovered that being famous wasn’t all that much fun 😀.

Back in the mid 1980s, I had was in my twenties, and I had moved on from seeing rock stars as magical. But I still took an interest in music. I quite liked anything I heard from Prefab Sprout – led by Paddy McAloon. And back in 2021, during the COVID lockdown, one of my daughters got into them, which renewed my interest. I remember discovering some albums that they recorded in later years. Paddy McAloon, didn’t really like performing live. Much of his work, especially in later years, would have been quietly recorded at home. I have a lot of music production software that I mess around with from time to time. But I’d love to learn how Paddy McAloon works. But maybe I’d need him around to advise me rather than switching lives with him 😀.

Generally speaking, being famous is stressful. I dislike stress more than I like fame. So maybe I should stick to being me. Yet, I’m so grateful for famous people – both Christian and secular. They’ve added so much joy to my life. And though 2021 was such a dull year, with all the COVID restrictions, I remember discovering all the Paddy McAloon songs that I’d missed. Here’s Cars and Girls from 1988 (on Irish TV) and Let There Be Music, released in 2009, though I think that it was made written back in the early 1990s.

His brother, Martin, who played in Prefab Sprout too, performed in a little venue in Limerick in 2024 – so I went along with my daughter and I met him – the only rock star that I ever met. I saw plenty of them in concert, but never met anyone else. But I did meet some famous Christian preachers and theologians, including Wayne Grudem, Peter Masters, R.T. Kendall, John Stott, and David Pawson. They were all a big influence on me over the years.

I’d like to switch places with Charles Wesley and figure out how he wrote so many hymns – between 4,500 and 6,500 hymns during his lifetime. Here are a couple of them: