Talent Is an Asset- The Story of Sparks

by Daryl Easlea

  The album united musicians who would end up at different ends of the musical spectrum. On June 14, 1974, Steven Morrissey, an avid contributor throughout his teenage years to the NME’s letters page, said of Kimono My House, “Today, I bought the album of the year. I feel I can say this expecting several letters saying I’m talking rubbish.” Staff writer Charles Shaar Murray wrote in reply, “The eyes of Mr Morrissey gleam with a missionary zeal that shames into submission the cringing doubts of those yet unconvinced.”

  The NME cartoonist of the day, Tony Benyon, legendary for his Lone Groover strip, accompanied the letter with an astute drawing: his illustration of Sparks as a firework. Written on the side was an amusing swipe at the band and the Island hype machine. “Warning — this could be a damp squib — if it does not go off please approach quickly with more publicity and cash.”

  Jon Savage notes that “Morrissey would’ve liked [Sparks] because if you wanted intensity in that period, it was very hard to find. Kimono goes along at a hell of a lick with lots of twists and turns.”

  In a 2006 interview with Maels on his Jonesey’s Jukebox radio programme, Sex Pistol Steve Jones said that he and Pistols drummer Paul Cook used to listen to Kimono My House (and Propaganda) obsessively in Cook’s west London bedroom alongside Roxy Music, David Bowie and Mott The Hoople. One of the lead letters in Sparks Flashes was from one Simon Barker who said that “I feel Sparks are definitely the group to make it in 1974”. Barker would go on to be one of the Bromley Contingent, alongside Siouxsie Sioux and Billy Idol.

  It’s alleged that Nirvana leader and poster boy for a generation, Kurt Cobain, nominated Kimono My House as one of his favourite albums of all time.

  With a tour less than a month away and promotional performances needed for the chart-climbing ‘This Town…’ finding a replacement for Gordon was of the utmost priority. It was also felt that a second guitarist would be viable to flesh out Fisher’s tricky Kimono My House playing onstage. Gordon’s replacement was the affable Ian Hampton, whose bass had kept appearing everywhere. Edinburgh-born Hampton had been playing music since the age of three when his parents bought him his first harmonica. He’d taken piano lessons when he was six, which put him in good stead when asking for a Hofner guitar on his 12th birthday. With his best friend from school, Ian ‘Ralf’ Kimmett, Hampton began playing in a series of rock’n’roll bands.

  “One day, out of the blue I got a call to join a band,” Hampton remembers. “Ralf got a guy up from London, Trevor White, with him. We rented the proverbial cottage in the country and we got Jook together, with the proviso that I start playing bass, which I’d never played in my life before. I got a cheap bass and we put it all together.”

  Jook found a style that added grit to glam and John Hewlett was involved from the off.

  Ian Hampton: “[Hewlett] was a hustler, and he’d always devote his time to the major act he was working with, which is fairly typical of the age.” Hewlett hooked Jook up with Mickie Most, signing a deal with RCA. “Although John really made us feel part of things, our biggest regret was that Mickie and his brother Dave didn’t do any production for us,” says Hampton. “It was all farmed out to other people.”

  Although their live reputation was immense, none of Jook’s singles really connected with the UK public.

  Ian Hampton: “Sweet and Slade were huge successes at this time. We were kicking against the norm because we refused to have long hair and spandex. There was an aggression in our live performance that never manifested itself on the records.” A band Jook encountered was The Bay City Rollers, who were to have considerably more success with a sanitised version of the same formula. “The Bay City Rollers and Tam Paton came into our dressing room and told us we had a great image,” White says. “Within a month we started to see great similarities in the band’s appearance to ours.”

  Hampton first became aware of Sparks through Hewlett. “He started mentioning them, and I saw their first gig at The Pheasantry. Initially I was mind-boggled — nothing had been heard remotely like it before. I saw their Old Grey Whistle Test appearance as well. We hung out a bit, they came to some Jook gigs — this was long before there was any conception that Trevor and I might join them. I was aware that the other guys had gone back to LA and John was looking after them, but it was never really mentioned beyond that.”

  With Martin Gordon out of the group, it seemed natural for Hewlett to enlist his old bass player. “It was a panic job,” Hampton says, chuckling. “John told the brothers that Jook were winding down and I was available. It was straight in at the deep end, two weeks’ rehearsals and then out on the road. Kimono My House is not the most straightforward of records to learn. It was a complete jolt to the system, completely different to the usual 12-bar rock stuff that I was used to playing, a real breath of fresh air.”

  Hampton seemed to suit the equilibrium just fine. Soon, Hewlett also brought Trevor White into the fray. “Jook was Ian Kimmett’s chance to do it and he gave his heart to it,” says Hewlett “I couldn’t get Jook a record deal after RCA dropped them, and it was then they had just recorded their best stuff. It was a terrible dilemma for me. I ended up offering Trevor and Ian the gig and that shot Ian Kimmett and drummer Chris Townson in the foot as well. Ian feels aggrieved to this day that I let him down. Unlike the decision about Martin, which I had nothing to do with, I knew totally what was going on with Jook. In fairness to Ian and Trevor, I couldn’t let that opportunity pass them by.”

  Hewlett and White had been friends for many years. White had previously been a member of Surrey group the A-Jaes and had sold Marc Bolan a Gibson SG (“He paid me money, I presume he liked it”). White was to have replaced Bolan in John’s Children had they not fallen apart. White’s aggressive style fitted in with Sparks’ playing perfectly.

  Trevor White: “I still feel strange about leaving Jook to join Sparks. At the time, I thought it was crazy but it was the only thing to do. We’d been doing Jook for three years, touring and whatever. I had a wife and family and was offered the opportunity to join a band that had just entered the charts; it was a pretty difficult one to turn down. Later on, Ian and Chris were cool, they would have done the same thing. We weren’t stars. I would have loved to have carried on as we’d just made those demos and started to get really good.”

  Any initial reservations the auxiliary guitarist may have had about stepping on Fisher’s toes were unfounded.

  “Adrian was absolutely fantastic to me,” White says. “I wondered when I joined whether he would feel put out as I was the rhythm guitarist — he said ‘Fantastic, I’ve got another guitar player to talk to.’ That was the way he was, just wonderful. If I didn’t know something, he’d teach me to do it. He was a very generous guy.”

  Neither Hampton nor White knew Martin Gordon and weren’t aware of the issues surrounding his departure. “I didn’t know Martin,” says White. “I’d seen him once or twice, but I didn’t know him. Ian and I were there doing our thing. It was just a case of some guy had left and I’d joined.”

  The first duty was to record another Top Of The Pops performance, with hardly any rehearsal, for broadcast on May 24.

  Ian Hampton: “We had to pre-record in those days as the Musicians’ Union would be down on you like a ton of bricks if you mimed.”

  Because this TOTP performance of the single is the only one to exist in the BBC archive, aside from the rarely seen promo video, it’s as if Martin Gordon never existed.

  Martin Gordon: “I was sitting in Bombay when I was working with Boy George many years later and he didn’t believe that I’d been in Sparks. I told him to go back and watch Top Of The Pops. He came back after watching a BBC compilation of the show, and sure enough it wasn’t me.”

  In reality, all eyes were on what was happening out in front. It was all about Ron and Russell. It was such a strong, unforgettable image.

  “Television had just become important and the close-up had begun to matter,” Ron told The Word in 2006. “On TV you coul
d make an impact with a small, subtle action that would have had no effect in concert, in a big hall. You could strike people in a big way — a raised eyebrow, a changed expression, a moustache. I’d done them live before, but nobody had noticed! Now they began to have a massive effect.”

  However, no matter how sizeable the effect, ‘This Town.’ just could not get past the number two slot. Tim Clark had been in an identical position before. “We had the same thing with Free’s ‘All Right Now’, which was kept off the top by Mungo Jerry’s ‘In The Summertime’. We pulled out all the stops to get Sparks to the top. Island didn’t actually get a number one until Buggles [with ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’] in 1979.”

  Bedecked in their white berets, studio confection The Rubettes, who had benefitted from Sparks’ absence from the show on May 2, were at the top with the Fifties pastiche ‘Sugar Baby Love’, which had taken over the top spot from Abba’s ‘Waterloo’ on May 18, and stayed there, resolutely, for four weeks.

  Sparks were now the hot ticket. Ron and Russell were invited to the premiere of George Lucas’ American Graffiti at the Empire Leicester Square in June. The dailies clamoured to speak to them: Sparks’ keyboardist told the Daily Express that he was in fact not related to Charlie Chaplin. Of all the articles written about the group during 1974–1975, it was said that only two failed to mention Adolf Hitler. Even Bearsville got in on the act, issuing for the first time ‘Girl From Germany’ B/W ‘Beaver O’Lindy’ to capitalise on the group’s new-found success.

  Sparks’ first full UK tour ran between June 20 and July 7, 1974 and commenced at the Winter Gardens in Cleethorpes. This off-the-beaten track venue provided a chance to break the band in before going to the more familiar Southend Kursaals, Birmingham Top Ranks and London Rainbows that lay ahead.

  Trevor White: “It was really strange. The first gig was totally ridiculous. I had no idea it would be like that at all. We’d spent ages rehearsing intensively with Sparks. It felt like we had been shot into something different. I was in a daze. I knew the songs back to front, but all these people were going absolutely crazy.”

  Oscar and Miriam Rogenson would periodically turn up, supporting their boys.

  John Hewlett: “It was strange having the parents there. They were just fans. They were really interesting. It was cool; they were real supporters of their kids. I liked them, got on well with them. They would always be at a gig in the background out of the limelight.”

  Their inaugural UK tour ended at The Rainbow, formerly the old Finsbury Park Astoria. As Howard Sounes described in his book Seventies: The Sights, Sounds And Ideas Of A Brilliant Decade, it was “one of the largest movie theatres in the world when it was built in 1930… its escapist décor — Moorish foyer with fountain, Spanish styled auditorium lending a faux grandeur to any gig”.

  And faux grandeur was exactly where Sparks were at. Ira Robbins was in London to promote his newly founded magazine, Trouser Press. After a visit to the offices of Zigzag magazine, he found out that Sparks were playing in town that night. “I remember that Rainbow show very vividly because Russell was wearing a loose-fitting white linen suit and girls were throwing themselves on the stage and wrapping themselves round his ankles while he sang. I knew who they were obviously but I knew them to be an arch, iconic, ironic sort of band of thoughtful artists, and really they were being treated as I imagined The Beatles at Shea Stadium had been — just complete pandemonium. It delighted me no end. It really changed my vision of them because I had kind of taken them to be sort of Roxy Music: very stylised and sophisticated. To see they were making 10-year-old girls go absolutely crazy, I was just fascinated. It was enormous fun and was one of those pivotal events where what you think you know is completely wrong and something else replaces it in an even better way.”

  Robbins’ description emphasised the dilemma Sparks were to face for the next 20 months, as Ron said in 2003. “The only downside was that the teenybop following alienated a section of those people who only wanted us to be an art-rock band. All of that screaming forced away a lot of the people who appreciated us musically.”

  “Sparks were an American band being promoted as a British band,” Ira Robbins suggests. “It was a prideful thing for me; I just thought that they had gone onto the other side in the best way. In 1974, the idea of two Californians being accepted as Brit-pop superstars to me was kind of miraculous.”

  To capitalise on the single’s success, a second track was pulled from the album, the ebullient ‘Amateur Hour’, backed with another non-album B-side, ‘Lost And Found’ (“It’s not really a metaphor for anything,” Russell said in 1991. “It’s just about a guy finding a wallet and not wanting to give it back.”) Despite a strike at the BBC that forced Top Of The Pops off the air, the record climbed to number seven in the UK chart.

  “Singles have a lifespan of about four minutes in England,” Russell said in 1991. “Thus, while ‘This Town.’ was losing steam, ‘Amateur Hour’ was released as the follow-up. It was satisfying that a song that was so different in nature from our initial success with ‘This Town.’ could also be successful with the British and European public.”

  Although it was said that the Maels lived in a flat in Beckenham (boasting a “variety of gas and electrical heaters that the Maels hope to convert into geranium holders for the upcoming warm weather”), Ron and Russell moved out of Hewlett’s Purley home and took up residence in a rented flat in Kenneth Tynan’s South Kensington house. It wasn’t exactly the big time, but they had come a long way in the space of a year: a hit single and album, a sell-out tour and, more to the point, a record company that liked the product and wanted more.

  More interesting still for Ron and Russell, Kimono My House began to excite the more discerning US rock writer. The New York-based music press were especially interested as there had been a great resurgence in Sixties power pop, in places such as Max’s Kansas City and the recently opened CBGBs where bands such as Television and Ramones were playing.

  Ira Robbins: “It took a while to sort of get a hold of who they were and what they sounded like, but the idea that Sparks were under the care and feeding of someone who’d been in a band with Marc Bolan was kind of amazing. That kind of tied it all up in a neat bow.”

  * In an email to Finnish Sparks fan Petteri Aro, Fisher wrote, “[I was] Shocked about Martin, but he was a threat to Ron and Russell — much better image than they had foreseen, before they knew it. Pissed me off. Felt for M.G.”

  Chapter Seven

  Spewing Out Propaganda

  “Sparks aren’t going back to the ‘60s — it’s to the ‘40s. Nazis, Jews, troops, the military, and the ever present war between men and women.”

  Phonograph Record, 1974

  “I think mystery is a good thing.”

  Ron Mael, 1974

  “For anyone who says ‘It’s lonely at the top’, lemme tell you — it’s great at the top”

  Russell Mael, 2003

  The past six months had been a whirlwind. Sparks started to make the transition from being earnestly written about in New Musical Express and Melody Maker to the covers of children’s magazines Look-In and Mirabelle. Their story began to fan out across continental Europe thanks to a series of launches involving sweets and pastries orchestrated by Peter Zumsteg, Island’s European press and marketing co-ordinator. His job was to keep the label’s distributors in Europe — such as Ariola in Germany and Sonet in Sweden — happy. Like the media they were delighted with this interesting and exotic confection.

  However, the Maels seemed threatened by the fact that the group as a whole was being accepted as a proper band, not simply the brothers and hired hands. The boys in the band occasionally run riot, of which the Maels did not approve.

  Adrian Fisher: “We were in Paris for a TV show. Trev, Ian and me, after getting severely pissed in the George V, went to get some nightclub life. We found this very flash sleazy club but we didn’t realise how expensive it was, and had to make good our escape from this outr
ageous bill. We just made it out and lost the pursuing bouncer some way up the street. More drinks, some place. It’s about 5 am and we get arrested for being drunk and singing ‘You Are My Sunshine’ at the top of our voices. Trev and me could not talk [too pissed], Ian could [just] and told the police where we were staying, so they told us to basically ‘Shut it!’ and get inside as we were nearly at the hotel. We went to one of our rooms and demolished the fridge contents and passed out. Oh yes, we will always have Paris.”

  There was a clear divide between the boys on one side and the brothers and, at that time, their manager, on the other.

  John Hewlett: “Ron and Russell and myself, we were straight. I don’t think I even smoked, a joint until much later on. They didn’t drink and didn’t smoke, which was pretty cool. It’s OK if you don’t partake, but if you look down on those who do, I don’t like that. To make judgments and be aloof, that to me is a negative attitude. Total respect to them for keeping their minds free, but it doesn’t necessarily bring about compassion.”

  To capitalise on the success of the debut and mindful of the shelf-life in pop, Island demanded a follow-up album, one that would introduce Hampton and White on record. Propaganda was recorded at AIR Studios between August and September 1974, with Muff Winwood returning to produce. While Kimono My House had undergone an 18-month gestation period, Propaganda had about three months to be written and recorded.

  “[That] album was incredibly hard because there was a lot of pressure,” Ron Mael told Trouser Press in 1982. “Kimono was incredibly popular in England, and we were under the microscope. Anything we did was going to be judged. We went into the studio with a lot of songs, but a bit scared. We kept thinking about The Beatles and their constant rise. We tried to make Propaganda a little more complex than Kimono My House”

  Ian Hampton: “Propaganda was great fun. It was a great time, best time of my life. It was a huge buzz learning the songs, fiddling around with them, changing them here and there. Muff was a great producer; he did a great job, getting that amazing rock sound out of Sparks. These are instant records. It felt very rock’n’roll. We tempered that by being sober and restrained and trying to get it all down properly. For the English guys it was a different kind of music. The brothers would come in with the songs and we’d throw it up in the air and we’d all be critical of each other’s input — it was very democratic, I must say.”