Take two quirky brothers wielding hot pants and Hitler moustaches, add the sound of King Crimson laying waste to The Archies, and stir in 70s glam rock megastardom. That unrepeatable recipe raised the question we explored in 2012: how prog are Sparks?
“When I was in The Futureheads,” recalls Peter Brewis of Field Music, ”Sparks were a big influence. In fact, you had to like their albums Kimono My House and Propaganda, and their single The Number One Song In Heaven, to be in the band!"
Sparks’ curiously serpentine melodies, twitchy time signatures and quirky-though-muscular musicianship – evident especially on mid-70s albums Kimono, Propaganda, Indiscreet and Big Beat – are, in a bizarre way, comparable to bubblegum pop as performed by a prog band.
Imagine King Crimson (actually a favourite of Sparks in the early days) laying waste to The Archies. Although perhaps Old Grey Whistle Test presenter Bob Harris’ estimation of brothers Ron and Russell Mael and their band comes closer: a cross between The Mothers Of Invention and The Monkees.
“They’re very melodic,” says Brewis. “All the proginess and rhythmic strangeness comes from the melodies, which I always presumed Ron wrote at the piano. That’s what influenced us in Field Music – the modular nature of the songs, with their very defined sections. Even though they don’t go on for ages and ages like, say, Larks Tongues In Aspic, they still have little sections or modules.
“I can see why Todd Rundgren liked them,” he continues, referring to the time Rundgren urged label owner Albert Grossman to sign Sparks, then known as Halfnelson, to Bearsville in 1970. “I can see a lot of that bite-sized-morsel approach to pop on Todd’s A Wizard, A True Star.
“I grew up believing that was how pop songs were meant to sound, with loads of different sections and sounds crammed into a small space: Wizard, 10cc’s Une Nuit A Paris, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody – and, of course, Sparks’ own This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us. I thought that was what you had to do if you wanted to make pop music.”
According to Russell Mael – whose tumbling feminine curls and near-operatic falsetto proved as much of a shock as Ron’s poker-faced stare and Hitler moustache – there was never an actual strategy for pursuing the peculiar. But he does acknowledge they’ve led an unconventional career, taking in glam, synthpop, new wave, hard rock, electro, neo-classical chamber pop and – yup – prog, right up to their 22nd album, 2009’s The Seduction Of Ingmar Bergman.
“We never discussed our motivation, even in the early days,” says Russell of the late-60s period when the Los Angelinos and arch Anglophiles began making music under The Move, The Who, Procol Harum and Pink Floyd. “But we’ve always tried to do something special, to be heard above all the clutter that’s out there.
“We don’t have board meetings, but the ideas has always been to do things we haven’t tackled yet – rehashing what you’ve already done is less exciting than approaching something different . Whether we succeed or fall flat on our faces in each case is another matter. But we want to attempt something where we don’t know the outcome.”
In a way, Sparks are the Zeligs of rock, ingeniously blending in with whatever era they happen to be in, but somehow remaining apart from it all. They refused to merge with the early-70s West Coast psychedelic or troubadour scenes with 1971 Rundgren-produced debut album as Halfnelson, or 1973 follow-up A Woofer In Tweeter’s Clothing.
But once they’d settled in Britain they made perfect sense in terms of flamboyance, matching Messrs Bowie, Ferry and Bolan every glam step of the way. For choral ambition they marched to the same regal tune as Queen, and for sheer intricacy and idiosyncrasy they orbited the art-pop camp alongside 10cc.
In a sense, Sparks also offered versions of prog’s florid indulgence, only compressed into three-minute pop ditties – helped in no small part by the heavyweight instrumental skills of Martin Gordon (bass), Norman ‘Dinky’ Diamond (drums) and Adrian Fisher (guitar). It’s a concept that Russell says hasn’t come up before in interviews; and now he thinks about it, that surprises him.
“We really liked King Crimson a lot, especially 21st Century Schizoid Man, and I do see certain similarities between us. If you strip away the images and judge it purely on the music, you could put This Town against a King Crimson song and its musicality and ambition it would fit. A lot of the guys in Sparks at that time were big fans of bands like Yes – so who knows if their playing seeped in to make the songs sound that way? A lot of the jagged rhythmic stuff on Kimono and Propaganda, and the structure of the songs, was very proggy.”
Between 1974 and 1975, Sparks made several visits to the UK charts with This Town, Amateur Hour, Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth, Something For The Girl With Everything, Get In The Swing and Looks, Looks, Looks. It could easily be argued that, given how astonishingly original and inventive they were, Sparks should have been far more popular.
Looked at another way, however, considering the feverishly eccentric nature of the music and absurdist logic of the lyrics, it’s a constant source of amazement that they sold any records at all. “We sometimes think that!” laughs Russell. “Both sides are true.
People would say: ‘When are you going to put on your stage outfit?’ We’d be like, ‘This is our stage outfit!’”
“You look at old footage of Sparks and see the girls screaming along to complex pieces like This Town and it is really weird. There was something in the way it was delivered – the image of the band – that made young people identify with it. How important was my hair in the delivery of that message? Extremely important! It still is. It’s always been 50 per cent about the music, and 50 per cent about the hair!”
Equally unusual is the phase-like nature of Sparks’ success. Following their quasi-prog glam-era phase, they had a second spurt in the late-70s with The Number One Song In Heaven, Beat The Clock and Tryouts For The Human Race, all courtesy of Italian sequencer-disco producer Giorgio Moroder.
Ron and Russell were recast as a proto-synthpop duo, with the latter as gregarious frontman and the former tashe lugubrious keyboardist, providing a template for Soft Cell, Erasure, OMD, Blancmange, Pet Shop Boys and all the other odd electro couples. There was a period when they were massive in France and Germany, with singles such as When I’m With You, and a silver streak in the 80s when they became new wave stars in LA on the back of the albums Whomp That Sucker (1981), Angst In My Pants (1982) and In Outer Space (1983).
Then they came back and did it all over again – particularly in Europe – in 1994 with Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins and its hit When Do I Get To Sing ‘My Way.’ Their critical stock in the early 21st century has arguably never been higher, with the albums Lil’ Beethoven (2002) and Hello Young Lovers (2006, featuring the extraordinary baroque metal of Dick Around), and the record-breaking 20 consecutive dates they performed in London in 2008, which culminated in the unveiling of album 21, Exotic Creatures Of The Deep.
That album number 22, The Seduction Of Ingmar Bergman, was such an eccentric departure, even by their standards, augurs well for a fifth decade of exploratory forays and rampant experimentation.
Sparks fans like Peter Brewis most appreciate the consistently changing nature of their music, and their unrelenting adherence to the notion of play. “The bands of my generation have been caught up in the idea of authenticity, which is ludicrous,” he states. “They don’t have that playfulness and it smacks of a lack of sense of humour. Today’s bands are way more po-faced than any of the guys in King Crimson. That’s what I love about Sparks growing up: I couldn’t believe bands were allowed to be that silly!”
He compares Ron’s stern-headmaster persona and Russell’s androgynous preening to the theatricality of Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson and Genesis’ Peter Gabriel, as well as to Bowie as Ziggy. The difference was, in the Maels’ case, they weren’t play-acting or role-playing. “Especially with Ron,” asserts Russell. “There really is no separation between his daily persona and his stage one. People would say: ‘When are you going to put on your stage outfit?’ And we’d be like, ‘This is our stage outfit!’”
Held in such esteem as they are, Russell couldn’t be happier with Sparks’ current position and their freedom to create. When Prog suggests that they had their thunder stolen somewhat by Queen – who were like Sparks with a lot of the idiosyncrasies ironed out – he agrees. But he has no regrets about refusing to bow to commercial demands.
“If you pile up our sales over the years in France and Germany and England and LA and Mozambique – we were very big in Mozambique – it would be a decent sum by anyone’s standards. Queen maybe found a way to make their music more palatable to a bigger audience. Trouble is we could never, as you say, iron out the idiosyncrasies. The idiosyncrasies are so embedded in what Sparks do!
We never had massive commercial success, so we never fell into the trap of trying to recapture it
“We’ve never given in to anything. Our 22nd album is a musical opera about a Swedish film director! Ours has not been a typical career path, and that’s something I’m really proud of. Since we never had massive commercial success, we never fell into the trap of continually trying to recapture it – that freed us from not having to worry about the commercial side of things.
“And maybe that’s what our calling is; maybe that’s the good thing about being chameleonic, and why we’re still here. We’re not motivated by sales – we’re motivated by a desire to shake up the universe. And there’s not that many bands you can say that about.”
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