by Daryl Easlea
After a period of three albums on one label — their greatest stability since Island — the group again found themselves label-less. “The thing I remember at one point was realising that between them and Graham Parker they’d been on every single record label that had ever existed,” Ira Robbins says. “They reached a point somewhere in the Eighties where they had been on something like seven or eight labels, which is kind of unthinkable, especially given that Warner Brothers when they started had been a label that people were born and died on”.
* By now Sparks had had nine different producers and five different record labels, which, quite frankly, was going some.
* In all probability most of Mothersbaugh’s comments were made tongue-in-cheek as their paths have crossed over the years and Kendrick would later go on to drum with Devo.
* In 1982 Ron and Russell provided lyrics for Telex’s Sex (Birds And Bees) album.
Chapter Fourteen
A Rainbow Over The Freeway — The Path To Retirement
“This is where the brothers do the bulk of their work nowadays, enabled by new technology to bypass the expensive recording studios of yore, another factor contributing to their survival. The downside: they have to halt work on Thursday mornings when a neighbor’s gardeners fire up the leaf blowers.”
The LA Times, 1988
With all the success they had been enjoying in America, Sparks had all but disappeared from their core market, the UK. “We didn’t intentionally leave the British music scene, it was just circumstances,” Russell said in 1986. “One of the problems was that we were with an international record company that had no personal enthusiasm to champion Sparks in the UK.”
It was time to rectify that situation. After leaving Atlantic, the brothers looked to find a deal for the new material they had been working on in Belgium. Working again with Dan Lacksman of Telex, they’d written a song called ‘Change’ — one of their best to date, and a marked swing away from the heavily manufactured beats of the last two albums.
Sparks were a group who embraced transformation. It may have meant that a lot of their releases sounded different but, admirably, they understood the need to keep moving forward. As a result, the aptly named ‘Change’ represents a watershed in Sparks’ career and their best release of the Eighties. For the first time ever, Russell sounds weary. Half spoken/half sung with a sparing use of falsetto, ostensibly it is a break-up song. However, the passing of Paradise, Greece and Rome, the old west and vaudeville are discussed, with an unerring belief that golden days still lie ahead.
It was a prophetic moment as Ron and Russell had already seen more changes in the group’s 15-year career-span than most. It was almost a biography in song, with implied acknowledgement of all the people that had passed through the group and the considerable twists and turns of their saga to this point. It also showed how accomplished Ron Mael was as a songwriter. It has long been one of Russell’s favourites. “We wanted to try something that was epic in scope; something that was really involved,” he has said. “The lyrical spirit of everything we had done to this point was probably better connected by Ron in this one song than in anything else we had done. And from a sonic standpoint, we couldn’t do any better than the instrumental passage in the middle of this song. We’re especially proud of it.”
‘Change’ was a mighty track — big and bold, updating all the grandiosity of the past by giving it a definite mid-Eighties feel. Although it bears a lot of the hallmarks of that era’s production, it emphasises Les Boehm’s bass and Bob Haag’s treated acoustic guitar before Ron’s Fairlight stabs appear. The basic song had been written before going into the studio, where much time was spent refining the arrangement. (The band also recorded ‘The Scene’ at these Belgian sessions.)
After the disappointment that had been Pulling Rabbits Out Of A Hat, ‘Change’ was a grown-up record that found the Maels not wanting to be wacky Californians, but relaxing back into their occasional role as old world aesthetes.
In June 1985, ‘Change’ was released in the UK as a one-off single as part of a new deal with London Records; their seventh label, backed with an acoustic version of ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us’. Ron and Russell, accompanied by Kendrick and Fleury, did a European promotional tour. With their by now familiar understanding of how these things work, the brothers subjected themselves to the interview and lip-sync treadmill. In early July, they appeared on Terry Wogan’s prime-time early evening chat show — the first time that they had appeared live on the BBC since ‘Tryouts For The Human Race’ in November 1979. It was a wonderful performance, with Russell and Ron going head to head on the timpani breakdown and then Ron introducing his dancing on British television.
They next appeared on TV AM, where presenter Julie Brown, sitting next to an amused Thomas Dolby on the sofa, read out the opening verse of ‘Change’ to Ron and Russell, asking for clarification. Ron replied with, “It’s a lot of the usual pseudo-intellectual garbage.” He then went on to say that London had allegedly signed them for £500,000, which all went on the recording of the song, leaving a tight budget for the video. Ron then holds up a cut-out of a TV screen to Russell, who performs the 50p version of the promo.
Although London Records put a great deal of marketing muscle behind it, the single stalled at number 85, lost in all the global hoo-hah for Live Aid. What ‘Change’ did do, however, was to establish the kernel of the musical direction and ideas that would ultimately become Lil’ Beethoven, 17 years later.
After the artistic triumph of ‘Change’, Ron and Russell again repaired to Synsound, and called on their supporting team of players when the need arose. Boehm, Kendrick and Haag were involved for what would be their final recording with the group, along with John Thomas and, on their spirited cover of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Fingertips’, the former Swinging Madisons’ guitarist, Robert Mache. Music That You Can Dance To was recorded in Brussels over 1985 and 1986. “We spent longer on the recording of this LP than we had done on any previous one,” Russell said. “It was a great luxury for us to be extravagant with studio time, and so far from home.”
London Records suggested that the brothers give the public something that was a little more danceable. The idea was that they could then add ‘Change’ and — presto — an album would be made. “As it happens,” Russell said, “we had written quite a lot of dancey new tunes, including a song called ‘Music That You Can Dance To’.” However, it did not go down well with the record company. “When we took it along to play it to them,” Ron said, “they thought we were making fun of them.”
For the seventh time thus far in their career, the brothers were without a label. In the end, the album was picked up by Curb Records, run by the charismatic Mike Curb, the former MGM executive who had sung in The Mike Curb Congregation before producing The Osmonds and getting involved in Republican politics.
Music That You Can Dance To finally appeared in November 1986. Although it was ultimately flawed, the album established the template for Sparks’ next phase as a duo, and has a lively, sprightly sound that is the epitome of ‘86. On ‘Music You Can Dance To’, a Fairlight replicates the sound of a saxophone just like the mellotron had done 12 years previously on ‘Equator’. Same idea, different technology.* Released as a single in February 1987, ‘Rosebud’ sounds like a hundred other ballads that were released around the same time (although it owes something melodically to Talking Heads’ ‘Life During Wartime’ from 1979). Its reliance on the noises a machine could produce would be overpowering were it not for the fact that Ron and Russell had actually written a really good tune and performance. At least they were trying to move out of the completely homogenised sound that dogged Pulling Rabbits Out Of A Hat.
Although the cover of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Fingertips’ was largely pointless, it’s great to hear the band stretching out with a less-than-obvious cover version. The rest of the album, including a duet of sorts between Ron and Russell on ‘The Shopping Mall Of Love’ and a reworking of ‘Mod
esty Plays’, which the band had first attempted at the time of Angst In My Pants, brings invention back into the Sparks mix.
“Music That You Can Dance To was dance music for people that don’t like dancing,” Russell said in 2008. “The title track was really popular in the underground clubs. But we were more interested in the sound, the electronics. We thought that the combination of that and my singing and Ron’s lyrical slight would be interesting.”
“It’s got more depth than other records with that sort of sound,” Ron said in a Record Mirror interview. “Compared to Bananarama’s ‘Venus’, for example.” Had it been recorded a decade earlier or later, it could have been one of Sparks’ very best albums. As it is, its clanks, crashes and whirrs leave the listener somewhat numb, but always engaged. The main disappointment lay in this most visual of groups’ latest cover. Rocky Schenck photographed the band extensively, and ended up using a drab silhouette as the front sleeve.
Music That You Can Dance To had a muted reception, limping out without making any significant commercial inroads. Record Mirror called the album “one of the freshest I’ve heard all year. It’s punk disco but with melody. There’s an underlying horror beneath the deadpan seriousness of it all.”
After Music That You Can Dance To, Sparks stopped being a band altogether. “‘Change’ had a little bit of success but they tried more of a dancey tack,” Kendricks recalled. “The whole record had a stamp of Sparks as much as some of the early ones from my time. Honestly, when they stopped having guitar live and more people were in it, I thought it definitely lost a little bit of its energy.”
After four years of relative stability, Sparks were once again at a crossroads. Gleaming Spires began to split apart behind the band: Leslie Boehm went off to Hollywood to become a scriptwriter. Bob Haag moved back to the desert and disappeared. Jim Goodwin worked occasionally in TV. David Kendrick, who at that point was the longest serving non-Mael Spark, saw it was time to move on.
“They were really getting a little more insular, the two of them wanted to kind of just be doing more or less everything themselves. So when the live thing stopped, even a couple of years before any records came out, they tried to get involved in doing music on film projects.”
Kendrick gained an impressive resumé, going on to play in Devo and Wall Of Voodoo. “I had quite a good run,” he says today. “Ron and Russell were at my wedding and they’ve met my son, so we keep up. I’m very pleased I was involved with them because being part of Sparks’ story is a worthwhile part of rock history.”
Although they could not seem to achieve hits at the time, Ron and Russell’s location on the cultural radar was still gently blipping away. In February 1987, Siouxsie & The Banshees released Through The Looking Glass, an album of covers that had influenced them over the years. The opening track was a cover of ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us’. It was also around this time that the Maels realised that Morrissey, the lead singer of The Smiths, had been a huge Sparks fan of old. Long-term admirer Martin Gore of Depeche Mode released a solo album of cover versions called Counterfeit, on which was a touching rendition of ‘Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth’.
A few years later, as Island Records embarked on its Island Masters CD series, a new 20-track overview of Sparks’ mid-Seventies career was released. Mael Intuition: The Best Of Sparks Î974-Î976, It’s A Mael Mael Mael Mael World (to give it its full title) has been a strong seller ever since. Designed garishly by Trevor Wyatt, it had sleeve notes by Gummo Mael, a knowing pseudonym for UK writer Paul Morley.*
The most significant step forward in Sparks’ career came with the final installation of the studio at Russell’s cottage in Coldwater Canyon initially affectionately dubbed ‘The Pentagon’ by the brothers. John Thomas, their most recent keyboard player, was on hand throughout the build and took up his role as studio engineer. The relief of having their own place was palpable. Working without needing record company permission was possibly the best thing that could ever happen to the brothers. Separated from the bureaucracy of a record company, they could work up songs at their own leisure. It also suited the brothers’ work ethic. Except when they were on the road, Ron would travel from his nearby apartment to set about the daily work at Russell’s studio.
“We have finally put together our own studio after always having been at the mercy of record company-imposed recording budgets to determine when and for how long we would be allowed to record,” Russell enthused. As an article in the LA Times was to say, “This is where the brothers do the bulk of their work nowadays, enabled by new technology to bypass the expensive recording studios of yore, another factor contributing to their survival. The downside: they have to halt work on Thursday mornings when a neighbor’s gardeners fire up the leaf blowers.”
The leaf blowers couldn’t stop Interior Design being the first Sparks album to be recorded at The Pentagon and the second to be self-produced. With help from guitarist Spencer Sercombe and Pamela Stonebrook adding vocals to ‘Just Got Back From Heaven’, it is in many respects a dry run for Gratuitous Sax And Senseless Violins in 1994, but with more primitive instrumentation. It is a whirring, clanking and very late-Eighties record with that clunky synth bass that was preserved on every single record of the period.
After the deal with Curb had lapsed, Fine Art Records, a subsidiary of Rhino Records, picked up Interior Design for US and UK release, and it was trailed by the single ‘So Important’. Although the album can be viewed in some respects as an experiment with new equipment, fine writing is still to be found and a unified sound that has light and shade, not simply the monotony of droning machines. There’s “walking, talking holy grail” on the anthemic ‘Lots Of Reasons’; Russell still wishing to hang round with ‘The Toughest Girl In Town’; and ‘Madonna’ about a man picked up for a night of love with Madonna. ‘Let’s Make Love’ is touching in its twinkly Eighties way, while ‘Just Got Back From Heaven’ is probably the most successful tune, a gorgeous, luxuriant recording, with all the rattles and clanks in the right place. Its sound certainly was reminiscent of Pet Shop Boys, the most recent group in Britain to sound ‘a bit like Sparks’. By the time of Sparks’ next public appearances, these similarities would become a frequent talking point.
The New York Times suggested that “Sparks makes entertaining, danceable and very clever music… these guys from Pacific Palisades are back with a record that is so much fun that it would be easy to take for granted the originality at work in the music. Intelligent dance music is not exactly a crowded field and this disc is the best we have.” Goldmine said, “Who even knew these guys were still together and working? Well, they are, and this recording is superb.”
In its retro sleeve (a hark back to the first Halfnelson album), photographed by future Sparks drummer Christie Haydon, Interior Design was released without fanfare to a modest response. Some 14 albums on, perhaps it was time to take a break from being Sparks.
However, there was simply too much to do to retire completely. Sparks found that they had big fans in the Parisian art-pop double act Catherine Ringer and Fred Chichin, alias Les Rita Mitsouko. Russell was flattered when he heard that their name was chosen with the “same spirit of mind as the title of our album Kimono My House”. After meeting in LA, a call came through to collaborate, and Ron and Russell, ever the Francophiles, warmly embraced the opportunity to decamp to Paris as, for once in their career, they had no firm plans. Ringer and Chichin appeared with Sparks on French TV miming the guitar and drum parts to ‘So Important’, while Sparks returned the favour, playing on three tracks for Les Rita Mitsouko’s album Marc et Robert.
Ringer and Chichin happened to be working with an old friend of the Maels, Tony Visconti. “I had no idea that Ron and Russell and Les Rita were friends with each other,” says Visconti. “Russell spoke the language fluently as he learnt it from a girlfriend. I thought he’d gone to university as his French is so good. It was great hanging out with them; I actually got to socialise more with Russell and
Ron when they were in Paris than we did in 1975.”
The brothers, Les Rita Mitsoukos and Visconti spent three days together working on the songs, including the Maels-composed ‘Singing In The Shower’, which became a European hit.
What Visconti truly got to appreciate this time around was Ron’s love of wordplay: “He would joke with us, using language that Les Rita Mitsoukos couldn’t understand. Their English is really good but he was doing this high-browed stuff that was going over my head, let alone theirs. I had to rewind a bit and realise he just said something incredibly funny but it was all punning metaphor.” Perhaps this wordplay could be better used in film as there seemed to be little call for it in music at that time.
With a career now approaching two decades and with no recording commitments, Ron became obsessed with cinema and reportedly returned to film study. The medium of film had always played a strong role in Sparks’ career, and, in the Eighties, there had been several opportunities to hear their work used in a variety of films; ‘Singing In The Shower’ featured in Black Rain; ‘Mini-Skirted’ was in Where The Boys Are; Heavenly Bodies had ‘Breaking Out Of Prison’; while ‘The Armies Of The Night’ played in Fright Night.
A project that came to dominate the brothers’ attentions during this juncture was a film of Japanese manga comic Mai The Psychic Girl. Written by Kazuya Kudo and illustrated by Ryoichi Ikegami, Mai The Psychic Girl was about a 14-year-old girl with extraordinary extrasensory skills, on the run from an organisation that strives to control the world. The film was to be produced by Beetlejuice and Addams Family writer Larry Wilson and Walter Hill and co-written by Caroline Thompson.
Various directors were linked to the assignment, most notably Tim Burton, whom the brothers had met in a restaurant and invited back to Russell’s studio to listen to the music they’d been working on for the film. Burton loved it but lost interest over time.