Cast your mind back to the golden age of music criticism when formulaic was one of the ultimate pejoratives – the caveat to give us the ick. How times change.
Pop formulas are on the syllabus at music schools. Melodies and song structures are engineered to anticipate our expectations rather than confound them. To quote Computer Music’s 2021 tutorial on Songwriting basics: how to create a modern pop song using just 4 chords, individuality is welcome, but, “if you want your tunes to fit well against the current landscape, they’ll inevitably need to conform to some extent to what your audience is expecting”. That’s just how it is.
But the brothers Ron and Russell Mael of Sparks never bought into any of that. They exist, Sparks exists, to summon something new out of the ether. Probably something a little weird.
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Sparks are tribunes of pop’s avant-garde wing, career subversives who will give you what you want just as long as it’s a sense of surprise. Who else would advertise their “first full concert album” as having been recorded “at the beautiful Taruntius Crater” on the moon, with Hollywood A-lister Cate Blanchett the LA duo’s emcee for the evening?
The glint in Russell Mael’s eye as he joins MusicRadar over Zoom suggests Live On The Moon has a more terrestrial provenance but where and when on their MAD! Tour that would be telling.
No, this is Sparks going once more unto the breach, going “beyond” the music and deeper into their own universe, daring the audience to follow.
“The people that we have always liked the most in pop music have like, it seems to me, a universe around them where you can’t separate the person, or the artist, from their work,” says Mael. “It’s one and the same, and I think that it’s not something that we ever set out to do, but it’s just the way we are as artists, wanting to create a universe through the music – the lyrics, the image, the videos, the album artwork…”
The brothers Mael have been a blur of reinvention since the beginning, when they were presenting glam rock as radical pop theatre, a medium for absurdist lyrics, and over the course of 28 albums their stylistic convolutions have augmented the rock-and-pop idiom, laying the ground for the ‘80s synth-pop explosion, reinventing the rock opera…
You have Russell, the whirligig master of ceremonies with a puckish stage presence and falsetto range. You have Ron on keys/synth, stoic and theatrically impassive, his Chaplin/Hitler moustache now clipped into a less troubling pencil profile redolent of old Hollywood.
Even after Edgar Wright made a documentary about them, the brothers still seem enigmatic, wired to a different grid.
Mael feels today’s pop lacks something else beyond the immediate.
“[With] a lot of artists now, there’s a lot of this confessional kind of pop music that seems to be, like, it’s literally about, ‘Oh, that guy, he left me. I’m gonna pay him back!’ It is a lot of that,” he says. “It’s this confessional stuff that is kind of one-dimensional. It just seems like it’s there on the surface, and it’s literally about that.”
“What I really like is people who have a craft, or a craft for their music, where you care about the lyrics going beyond [that], and hopefully the music is going beyond, and the music always being challenging, and that you have – like you said – created a universe, and the rules within that universe can be anything, because it’s your world that you created.”
This pop-auteur theory afforded Sparks the freedom to follow their musical curiosity to see where it might lead. Not everyone wanted to follow them on that journey. The universe Sparks created bewildered some critics.
Their reinventions were a little too far ahead of the game, like when their heads got turned by the futuristic sounds of Giorgio Moroder’s studio work with Donna Summer as the disco era embraced new synthesized sounds. Why couldn’t the disco ball shine light across Sparks’ expanding musical universe? They would do a Moroder record their way.
“And for us, it was all consistent,” says Mael. “But at the time, you know, some [people], especially critics, thought that we were being blasphemous to whatever they thought our cause should be, that ‘it’s not rock music anymore’, or whatever. ‘You’re using electronics,’ and all that. Just being able to shift and work – with any kind of backdrop – that’s what we really enjoy. It’s the freedom that, we have a band, but it doesn’t mean that you have to use the band in a traditional way on every song.”
This freedom took Sparks from the bombastic avant-rock theatre of their 1974 hit This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us to the ecstasies of the Moroder-produced studio album Nº1 In Heaven in just five years. Welcome to the future.
Electric guitars were temporarily decommissioned in favour of the synthesizer, and yet tracks such as Beat The Clock, Tryouts For The Human Race, and The Number One Song in Heaven were quintessential Sparks. This was the Mael brothers doing disco, even if stumbling out of Studio 54 in the wee small hours was never their scene.
“It’s never been, from our standpoint, a thing of being infatuated with club music, or dance music,” says Mael. “What we liked was the sound of what Giorgio was doing with I Feel Love, and that sort of thing, and so we thought that the marriage of electronics with what we were doing, and with our lyrics, and my singing and all, would be something really fresh and special.
“And so it wasn’t that we ever hung out at Studio 54 or anything. [Laughs] It’s probably about as far from our sensibility as you can get.”
In Moroder they had found a kindred spirit. Dan Wyman, who had just worked with John Carpenter on the Halloween score, was hired to program the synths. Keith Forsey, who gave Blondie’s Moroder-produced hit Call Me its propulsive beat, played drums.
Nº1 In Heaven was something new for Moroder, too. Here he was working with a band, with two brothers at the heart of it. It was a collaboration on a different scale.
“No matter how amazing Donna Summer was, it was a challenge for him to be working with people coming from a band sensibility,” says Mael. “And so I think that was something from his standpoint, too, that was exciting.”
Sparks came as prepared as they usually did, which meant that some material was written and the rest was “winged” in the studio as they went along.
“It’s kind of what we do, and I think that was also what made it interesting,” says Mael. “Nobody knew what the final outcome would be, and it came out like it did. And I think it’s just working with three really strong people – Ron, myself, and Giorgio – and each coming with our own strengths and abilities, and pooling those things together.”
The synthesizers and sequencers brought a different energy to Sparks, a relentlessness. Moroder’s electronic production had the transformative effect they were looking for. Repetition, especially in lyrics, has always been a leitmotif of the Mael brothers’ songwriting, vocal refrains repeated to the point of giddiness, but here there was an electronic accompaniment doing something similar with the instrumentation.
Looking back, Mael simply saw it as a chance for them to push themselves and come up with something different.
“We just like having challenges and being thrown into situations where we’re uncomfortable, and I think that that was a situation where we were uncomfortable because it was out of our normal element,” he says. “I think it’s always good to be thrown into situations where you are uncomfortable because hopefully something new will come of it.”
It is one of the reasons why Sparks have always been so keen on collaborating with filmmakers. Cinematic references abound in their discography, in paeans to Katharine Hepburn, Veronica Lake, Gone With The Wind, and Ingmar Bergman. Dramaturgy’s Fourth Wall would certainly be a challenge worth scaling, allowing the Maels to work both sides of the curtain with a knowing wink.
They famously came close to working with the late Jacques Tati on his Monsieur Hulot films, a picture titled Confusion in which the veteran French director considered killing the character off in an on-set accident with a prop gun.
Their title track for the movie ended up on 1976’s Big Beat, with Sparks performing two tracks from the album in the 1977 cult disaster thriller Rollercoaster. Sparks stepped in after Kiss turned it down and played Big Boy and Fill-er-up. A young Helen Hunt can be seen rocking out to them.
But Sparks had to wait until 2021 to really scratch their cinematic itch when they teamed up with director Leos Carax for Annette, the musical starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, with Carax co-writing lyrics alongside the band.
“It’s throwing you into a world that is not your normal world, and that there’s a whole other set of rules,” says Mael. “And you’re fresh coming into that with your own sensibility of how things should work. I think that’s why a movie like Annette was really special and unique, because it was not going at it with a kind of jaded knowledge of what you do when you’re making a movie – and especially a musical. Any situation like that where you’re forced to be in an uncomfortable environment is potentially good for the outcome.”
![SPARKS - Whippings And Apologies [Live On The Moon] (Official Video) - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/kZxG9F0TqMc/maxresdefault.jpg "Russell Mael on how Sparks created their own sonic universe 22")
Live On The Moon opens with So May We Start, the curtain raiser from the Annette soundtrack, and dives deep into the Sparks catalogue.
There are lesser-performed tracks like Academy Award Performance (another Hollywood reference) and Whippings And Apologies from their 1972 sophomore album, A Woofer in Tweeter’s Clothing, and performing them alongside perennials such as The Nº1 Song In Heaven and Sparks’ calling card, This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us (hey, another Hollywood reference).
“It’s a special song,” says Mael. “It was special then. I think it’s still special and unique now. So it’s a song that we would be remiss, I think, not doing it – and we enjoy doing it, and the fans enjoy hearing it, too.”
When Mael looks out from the stage, he is seeing younger faces in the audience.
Edgar Wright introduced the band to a lot of people that weren’t aware of Sparks
“Some of it – a lot of it – we owe to Edgar Wright with the documentary [The Sparks Brothers], because he introduced the band to a lot of people that weren’t aware of Sparks,” he says. “I think those new fans that were attracted from that movie, and also from Annette… They see the new albums, the latest albums as being the focal point, and then going back and discovering albums like Kimono My House [and] Nº1 In Heaven.”
The cinema can be a compelling recruiting sergeant. But maybe it’s also a question of the audience seeking out new thrills.
Sparks have always been ahead of their time but in an era of programmatic pop – and worse, an era in which AI programs have digested the pop formulas required to make music ex nihilo with no living human needed, maybe we need a band who is just too weird to be anything other than human. A band that invites us all to consider the absurdity of the human condition, and to rejoice in it.
- Live On The Moon is out now via Transgressive
- Catch Sparks live at Green Man Festival this weekend Aug 23, at York Barbican on Aug 25 and Cliffs Pavilion, Southend On Sea on August 26. See Sparks for ticket details.
