Talent Is an Asset- The Story of Sparks

by Daryl Easlea

  Chart-wise, ‘Get In the Swing’ had reached 27 in the UK; the follow-up single, ‘Looks, Looks, Looks’, reached one place higher. Whereas the Kimono singles had been Top 10 and the Propaganda 45s Top 20, Sparks were now a Top 30 act.

  Trevor White: “The singles weren’t doing as well but, in a way, if you were a total singles band that would be a problem. After Kimono My House I think we headed towards being an albums band in the old-fashioned sense, so the charts, for us, weren’t that much of a problem. A lot of other things were going well. If it was going slightly down in Britain, on the continent we were growing. When we played anywhere on the continent we had a great reception.”

  Just before the group set off on tour, their old support act, Queen, released a single called ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. It had been written in May that year, allegedly inspired by 10cc’s groundbreaking ‘Une Nuit A Paris’ from The Original Soundtrack. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was a record that moved from heavy camp to heavy metal in little over five minutes. With its tempo shifts, strange operatics and grandeur, at one stroke, there seemed little need for Sparks in Britain any more.

  * There was additional material recorded for the album that later turned up on the reissue of Big Beat. Mary Hopkin, Visconti’s wife at the time, can be heard as Jacqueline Kennedy on the B-side ‘The Wedding Of Jacqueline Kennedy To Russell Mael’. She also recorded a version of ‘Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth’, which was finally released on her 2007 rarities collection, Valentine.

  Chapter Nine

  Throw Her Away (And Get A New One): Big Beat

  “When it came to piquant takes on pop music, I was not a novitiate.”

  Rupert Holmes, 2009

  Towards the end of the 1975 UK and US tour, Ron and Russell told John Hewlett that they were breaking up the band in favour of using American musicians. Hewlett was shocked and tried to persuade the brothers otherwise. However the Maels were unshakeable in their conviction that getting an American sound would finally enable them to take on their home market. “I have a major regret that I hadn’t been more forceful in telling them not to do it,” Hewlett says today. With their next two albums, breaking America would become Sparks’ main objective.

  After the occasionally over-manicured Indiscreet, the Maels knew another change of direction was essential. For some reason, they turned to muscular proto-metal, a style that recalled the early Bearsville albums, only with the overt weirdness removed.

  “We got sick of England,” Ron Mael said in 1982. “The weather was disgusting and we tired of the provincial atmosphere. What at first is quaint later becomes really annoying. As much as we liked the music scene there, we had to move back to Los Angeles to defrost.”

  There was also the nagging issue of exactly who Sparks were — the Maels liked the hush and reverence of American audiences as opposed to the screaming Brit teens. “Someone like Supertramp just had the music,” Ron said in 1993. “They were as ugly as sin and in the long term that’s probably the best thing.” In the US there was no such confusion, as outside of the cognoscenti, few were aware of Sparks.

  Columbia had picked up Sparks’ contract in America, so finally a stable home for the group’s releases with good nationwide distribution was in place. “I think the Maels simply wanted to use their return to the US to head in a new direction for a new label,” suggests Rupert Holmes, who was to play a big part in Sparks’ career over the following year.

  As the Maels had done three years previously when jettisoning the original American band, it was time to do the same with the English model. Hewlett broke the news to White, Hampton and Diamond while in San Francisco.

  Trevor White: “It was very strange. We were told after the show in our hotel bar. When it’s as stark as that you just don’t take it in. We didn’t see Ron and Russell at all. John’s hands were tied; it was a pretty typical Ron and Russell thing to do at the time. ‘Let somebody else tell them, we’ll disappear’. They’d done it before.” The guitarist felt saddened as he thought the unit still had a great deal of potential ahead of them. “I just thought it was really silly. They’d gotten to a point where they were well-known, wanted to do something else and thought ‘We don’t need these people.’”

  Conversely, Ian Hampton feels it was all happily accepted and that everybody knew it had come to a natural end: “I think we knew our number was up. We were out in LA with Ron and Russell and we discussed it quite openly, they said that the time was now. I said, ‘I think you’re right, we all feel the same’, and ‘I don’t really see a point in continuing as we are.’”

  So that was that. The three British players returned to the UK and hung together as a unit for a short while, cutting demos at Island’s Basing Street Studios. Adrian Fisher joined them and after a week’s rehearsal, the quartet recorded four tracks with Kimono My House and Propaganda engineer Richard Digby Smith.*

  Beyond that, Hampton became a much sought-after session player. “I worked with Elizabeth Barraclough at Bearsville [where his old Jook bandmate Ian Kimmett now worked] and toured with her, but her album never sold.” Coincidentally, another player on the Barraclough session was none other than Todd Rundgren. “I’d never met Todd before. As soon as he walked in the room, we talked about Sparks and reflected on how small the world was.”

  In 1976 White released a solo single on Island, re-recording the Jook track ‘Crazy Kids’ backed with ‘Movin’ In The Right Direction’, featuring Martin Gordon on bass and Chris Townson on drums. Two years later, they would have called it power pop. Sadly, it sank without trace.

  Trevor White: “We then worked with a guy called Mac Poole, who I knew through Ian Kimmett. We cut a reggae track, ‘Without Your Woman’, but it didn’t really agree with Mr Blackwell. His whole thing was having authentic Jamaican reggae bands on his label. He wafted in from Jamaica, listened to what was going on and didn’t like it.”

  Within a day or so, Hewlett had more bad news for White. Although David Betteridge had liked what he heard, White’s solo career at Island was not to go any further. “It should have been a longer term development situation,” Hewlett says today. “[Trevor] was as interesting as Jess Roden or some of the things that did get signed to Island at that point.”

  White ended up in Radio Stars, the band that was increasingly becoming a convalescence home for people who’d worked with John Hewlett, having both Martin Gordon and Andy Ellison in it.

  “I really enjoyed my time with Sparks,” says White. “It was a blast. I enjoyed playing. To be playing 24/7, which we were, was wonderful. If you weren’t in the studio, you were rehearsing, if you weren’t rehearsing, you were touring. It was just a shame it stopped. Everyone could have made a lot of money”.

  The player who took it the hardest was Norman ‘Dinky’ Diamond, by now the only constant in the group since Sparks’ first UK sessions in autumn 1973.

  Tony Visconti: “Dinky liked the trappings of being in a band. He used to hang around the Island offices, sit behind any empty desk and pick up phones and look at the paperwork and all that. He eventually settled down with one of the secretaries there.” That secretary was Lee Packham, who’d previously worked for The Spencer Davis Group and had been a constant in the Sparks circle since the brothers relocated to Britain in 1973. The couple got married, but were later to part.

  Diamond, who was frequently called ‘Double’ Diamond, after the Ind Coope ale that was phased out in 2003, did like a drop. All the way back to Sparks Flashes in ‘74, Fleury’s gossipy titbits revealed, “Dinky, a bit thrown back by his doctor’s advice that too much alcohol consumption is bad for his kidney, has been seen spiking his orange juice with pineapple juice.”

  Trevor White: “Dinky was in a world of his own. He was one of those guys who could get a job wherever he wanted. When he got off the drink, he’d apply and get jobs; selling cars, garden logistics, sending trucks all over the world. He was a very bright guy, but something wasn’t right there. His ex-partner would say the same thing; people would a
sk why she was with him and she’d reply it was never dull.”

  The drummer drifted out of music and ended up in some unusual places. “Me and my wife were taking our nephews out for the day at Thorpe Park,” Muff Winwood recalled, “and we were on this paddle steamer ride. The captain bounded up to me, calling my name excitedly.” It was none other than Dinky.

  John Hewlett: “OK, Dinky drank, but if he was told not to, he wouldn’t. Losing Dinky was such a mistake — that was like The Who losing Keith Moon. You can’t really replace someone like that.”

  Diamond took his own life in 2005. Russell and Ron were deeply upset and sent a wreath to the funeral. Their website carried the message: “We are very saddened by the news of Dinky Diamond’s death. We hold fond memories of working with Dinky and of his contribution to several of our albums during the Seventies. Our hearts go out to his family and friends.”

  Working with Fleury, Hewlett was ready to oversee Sparks’ next stage, although he became increasingly angry at how the Maels had let key players go. He feels that they should have embraced certain idiosyncrasies and moved forward. “You can’t expect all parents to love every child the same — some kids are a pain in the arse. With a band, the main thing, though, is that you stay together; you love one another because of who you are. There was a great band and it ended because Ron and Russell were not good parents.”

  The story of Big Beat starts in England, returns to LA and ends in New York. Released in October 1976, the album has always been a problematic addition to the Sparks catalogue. Its description in The Great Rock And Roll Discography — “an expensively disastrous attempt at sub-metal posturing” — encapsulates the populist view. Caught between pomp and hard rock, unlike its immediate predecessor, Big Beat travels on pretty linear tracks, given that they are ones of boundless irony and frequent sarcasm.

  John Hewlett: “On paper Big Beat was completely on the money. Being in New York at the time of punk, it was very much Ronnie and Russell unleashed.”

  The original pre-production discussions had Mick Ronson to produce and play guitar on the album. “We got along with him really well,” Russell said in 2006. “He actually played along on all the songs when we rehearsed it. We have some really bad quality cassette recordings of the rehearsals.” Unfortunately, nothing was to come of the arrangement. Ronson, who, at that point had been working with Bob Dylan as part of the Rolling Thunder Revue, could not commit. The cassette, according to Ron, “sounds twice as good as the album — partially from [Ronson’s] playing and partially just the way the album turned out.”

  The brothers needed both a guitarist and a producer. As a commendable alternative, the Maels hired Jeff Salen, of the band Tuff Darts, and Rupert Holmes was selected as producer.

  Much has been made about the strange choice of Holmes, who on first glance appeared too much of an AOR/MOR producer to work with the Maels. “I was asked to [produce] by CBS Records,” says Holmes. “[Holmes’ production partner] Jeffrey Lesser and myself were actually quite a logical choice at that point in time. We’d become de facto staff producers for CBS, and we were accustomed to working with idiosyncratic and ‘picturesque’ artists who were not mainstream rock ‘n’ roll. Like Sparks, we were Americans who felt at home in England — in point of fact, I had been born in England and still had family in Cheshire.”

  Holmes was an interesting character and a fairly unusual artist. His first album, Widescreen, had been selected as one of 1974’s 10 best LPs by the New York Daily News. Holmes had no permanent band and created a different sound for each song on an album, doing his own arranging, orchestrating and conducting.

  In 1975 the BBC playlisted his single ‘Our National Pastime’, a tale of an oafish bloke trying to pick up a girl at a baseball game, singing his seduction to the tune of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ with a reggae beat. Instead of an instrumental solo, it featured dialogue between Holmes and the woman in question. He was also known for a Beatles pastiche, ‘I Don’t Want To Hold Your Hand’, which, Holmes claims, “George Martin had been generous enough to call better than the original.”

  CBS asked Holmes and Lesser to produce Orchestra Luna. “I’m not saying that Orchestra Luna was exactly like Sparks in sound,” says Holmes, “and certainly they were very different lyrically; Richard Kinscherf (later Rick Berlin) wrote lyrics that were sexually ambiguous at the least, sometimes pixie-ish in nature. The songs did not have Ron Mael’s fabulous irony, scathing wit, or terrific, hypnotic grooves. But had Orchestra Luna opened for Sparks on a tour of the UK or USA, no one would have found it an odd coupling.”

  It was around this point that the A&R teams of Columbia and Epic merged, and the latter’s slightly left-of-centre artists came together with the more mainstream acts of the former. The extravagant style of Widescreen had impressed Jack Nitzsche (the man who might have produced Halnelson had the lights not failed) who was working as an arranger with Barbra Streisand. Streisand was impressed by Holmes’ talent and, with Lesser, he arranged, conducted and co-produced her Lazy Afternoon.

  Holmes and Lesser moved to London to record Dutch band Sailor, leading to the hits ‘A Glass Of Champagne’ (on which Holmes plays the piano solo) and ‘Girls, Girls, Girls’.

  Rupert Holmes: “Sailor was certainly nothing like Sparks, but I venture that the hammering rhythm and oom-pah bass of ‘A Glass of Champagne’ as well as the slightly-skiffled swing of ‘Girls, Girls, Girls’ would not have seemed at all out of place on a Sparks album of that period. You can actually imagine Russell’s voice singing the opening verses of either song.”

  Holmes and Lesser were asked by CBS and Don Ellis (whose name appears in the ‘Special Thanks’ on Big Beat) to produce Sparks. Holmes was aware of Sparks, but only from his time in the UK. “I lived in London and Oxfordshire for extended periods of time while producing Sailor and Strawbs, and so I caught Sparks on the telly more than once. I was very much aware of their cleverly titled albums and songs, their unique look, and Ron’s sublimely ironic lyrics. I was, of course, also fascinated by Ron’s wonderful ‘act’ at the keyboard, which I came to believe was a cleverly inventive guise used to mask his innate shyness.”

  The first thing the new team were asked to handle was, ironically in Holmes’ case, a lush production of The Beatles’ ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, which Russell wanted to record as a duet with Marianne Faithfull. It was intended to be a single, released on Island in the UK and a first CBS Sparks release in the US, after which the rest of the album would be recorded.

  Rupert Holmes: “My memory of who initiated the idea of this duet with this particular song is dim. I thought it was Ron and Russell, or perhaps Russell and Marianne, although it might have been someone at Island Records, or maybe even Don Ellis. I know I inherited it as a fait accompli. Russ and Marianne. ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand.’ Big orchestra. And since Sparks’ were enthused about such a lavish widescreen arrangement for the duet, featuring molto strings and brass, and my ability to score and conduct such grand orchestrations, my prior Streisand credits were a further plus in terms of working with the group.

  “Russell in particular said he wanted the single to be big and glossy and hyper-arranged. I recall asking him if he wanted it to be ‘movie big’ (as in a James Bond film) or ‘Broadway big,’ and I believe he leaned towards the latter. Thus, I gave the chart an opening flourish somewhat in the style of a theatrical overture.”

  The brothers were keen to record a whole album with Faithfull. However, the pairing was hampered with problems right from the start, with Faithfull eventually withdrawing from the project.

  Rupert Holmes: “Jeffrey and I never got to meet with [Marianne] or speak with her… As I started to write the chart, it was my understanding that she was going to sing it, and I wrote it with a harmony part in mind for her. By the time I finished the chart, the word was that we should do it as a solo for Russell.”*

  “We met with [Marianne] over a period of months,” Russell said in 1982. “She was into the idea, it was
a question of finding the song. She thought it was going to be one of Ron’s songs, but we thought of doing ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ as a real schmaltzy ballad with us alternating verses. Rupert loved the idea. He did a score he was really excited about, but Marianne decided she didn’t want to do a Beatles song because it was too close to the era she was a part of — too many bad connotations for her. Rupert liked it so much he suggested that instead of it being a Russell Mael solo project, just call it Sparks.”

  Marianne’s former manager and lifelong confidante, Tony Calder, recalls the week in 1975 when “Marianne came in one day and said that Sparks wanted to record her. I thought it sounded interesting, so I went along to their hotel in Kensington to meet them with her. It was all a bit strange. We had some dinner and I encouraged her to do it. They had a piano in their room; Russell started singing songs. I wasn’t really into it, so I left them and Marianne to get on with it. I got that ‘Darling, don’t leave me’ look and I told her that she’d be fine, she was a big girl.

  “When I next saw her, it was one of those ‘I’m waiting for them to get back to me’ moments. She’d obviously got the hump and walked out!”

  Despite the partnership failing to happen, Calder, who has worked with a number of industry heavyweights over the years, remembers the Maels fondly. “I was amused by them. I didn’t believe they were brothers because they were so different. Not just as people, but musically. When listening to the music, Ron kept saying that space was needed — I had great respect for him because he knew all about space. For me, American records have space whereas English records don’t.”

  As well as Holmes supplementing Ron’s piano work, session drummer Alan Schwartzberg was a noticeable presence at the session, adding a solid rock impact to the otherwise lush arrangement. Holmes also enlisted Wilbur Bascomb, a particular favourite of his, whose electric bass glides around the dreamy bridge. Vincent Bell, with a unique array of foot pedals, provided guitar, Margaret Ross was on harp, and Maretha Stewart, Vivian Cherry, Cissy Houston and Tasha Thomas added the swelling backing chorus.