Talent Is an Asset- The Story of Sparks

by Daryl Easlea

  Among the night’s surprises was an invitation to none other than estranged Sparks bassist Martin Gordon who, of course, had bigger issues on his mind. “I actually tried to address the legal thing in 1994 when they played at the Empire and somehow weirdly, when we were not yet on completely non-speaking terms, I received an invite,” Gordon recalls. “I went to the after-show too. Then we sat down and I thought ‘This is now 20 years later almost to the day. What a good opportunity to try and discuss something on an adult level’ and proposed a deal, whereupon they both stood up and said, ‘We’re really sorry, we have to go now. We have to go back to the hotel’. I wasn’t very impressed by that. That was the last time we met.”

  Gordon decided to write a review for Mojo. “The following day, I then devised a method of revenge. I pitched my review of the show, which pleased me. I mean, it wasn’t any more vitriolic than was appropriate but I felt better for having written it certainly.”

  The review — which was published in the February 1995 edition — was jammed with Gordon’s scabrous wit, overpraising the Kimono My House material (“I should, however, declare an interest as I played bass on the thing, arranged it and was rewarded with a tiny black and white picture on the back, nicely balancing the brothers’ expansive full-colour two-shot. But I digress into bitchiness”) and remaining cool about the remainder. “The brothers performed to a relentless, computer-driven backing that [it must be said] became rather colourless over time.” Of the role reversal they performed onstage during this tour, Gordon asked whether they were “post-modern or pissed, guru or gaga? No-one knew for sure. At the reception afterwards, an outwardly-normal landscape gardener from Jersey told me this event was a lifetime ambition achieved, as he went off to get a telephone directory autographed by one brother or the other.”

  Although his tongue may have been firmly lodged in his cheek, Gordon was being unfair as the set list was an incredibly well-balanced mixture of hits and album tracks from across the years.

  The letters page in the following month’s Mojo edition carried the following riposte from one Richard Banham. “Whose idea was it to get a sad, bitter old sideman like Martin Gordon to review Sparks?. Ron & Russell continue to make marvellous records. They deserve more than these embittered ramblings.” Gordon’s embittered ramblings would find much more of an audience as the internet culture was about to explode.

  Gratuitous Sax… got lost during the Christmas rush in the UK but, unlike previous record companies, Logic was committed to its act and had a proper campaign planned, with subsequent single releases, expensive video promos and European touring. After the tour, some specially selected festival appearances could be planned. The brothers threw themselves onto the treadmill again; they arrived back in the UK on February 1 and stayed in Europe for two months. They did all the things necessary: German promo, Canadian phone-ins, shot electronic press kits and rehearsed at Nomis Studios on London’s Sinclair Road. The duo were on BBC’s Live And Kicking on February 25, and appeared on Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast with Paul Ross and Zig and Zag, where Ron paraded his collection of snow domes.

  Logic was rewarded with a series of Top 40 placings, Sparks’ greatest consistency since 1979. There were the obligatory part-work releases — ‘When I Kiss You (I Hear Charlie Parker Playing)’ was released on February 27, 1995 with another Sophie Muller video and mixes by Red Jerry, Oliver Lieb and The Beatmasters; other editions had an acoustic piano version of ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us’ and a remix by Bernard Butler. The single received a mixed reception. “It’s just Euro-techno, which I’m not into,” said future collaborator Jimmy Somerville in Top Of The Pops magazine. “Sounds like the Pet Shop Boys after a helium binge,” scoffed Time Out.

  A six-date tour was scheduled to tie in with the new single, commencing in Wolverhampton on March 18 and concluding at London’s The Forum on March 25, while the album itself was re-released on March 20. The shows were rapturously received; if anything, the reception at Wolverhampton Civic was more uproarious than the previous November’s show at Shepherd’s Bush.

  David Cameron-Pryde from the band Eskimos and Egypt saw how well the new arrangement was working when he went for a Chinese meal with the Maels, along with Eric Harle, after the brothers’ Manchester Academy show on March 22.

  “It was a very odd evening for me as someone who watched Sparks do ‘Beat The Clock’ on Top Of The Pops,” Cameron-Pryde recalls. “First of all Ron was very reminiscent in both looks and dress style of my deceased father — who was very dapper and always dressed like a well-to-do gent.”

  The evening was somewhat slow starting. “I thought I’d break the ice so proceeded to tell them about a recent one-caption joke that I had seen in an edition of Viz, the adult cartoon rag,” Cameron-Pryde continues. “It was set at an airport and showed a taxi on the tarmac with a plane in the background ready to take off. The driver is pulling a suitcase from the boot and Ron and Russ are standing watching him lift it out.”

  The table was now enthralled. “The caption underneath read … ‘When this comes out, Sparks will fly’. Their very polite laughter afterwards was totally to spare my blushes.”

  It was easy to see why the brothers may have been somewhat nonplussed at this gag, as virtually every article on the group had, at some point, used the line ‘Sparks Will Fly’. As this tour was seen as a comeback, they were getting asked the same questions over and over. It was almost time to start telling stories about their mum, Doris Day, again. On March 30, after the tour had concluded, the Logic press office issued a press release entitled ‘Mael Out’ showing how writers were actively encouraged to use terrible puns in the name of promotion. The ‘Just For Fun Pun Top 10’ was full of ‘Sparks Fly Again’, ‘Sparks Plug’, ‘Bright Sparks’, ‘Vital Sparks’, ‘Sparks of Inspiration’. They had all been used; and in the case of ‘Sparks Will Fly’ overused. This sense of fun showed how far everyone was working together to make this a success.

  “If we’re a novelty act then we’re one of the longest-running novelty acts in the business,” Ron said to Keyboard Review in February 1995. “That’s one area of the British music industry that we like in a detached way, the fact that things can happen very quickly. What we were doing in the beginning was so stylised, with our offbeat image and everything, and there were people who thought we were a novelty act and a one-line joke. There is humour attached to our music but we never considered it one dimensional because we always like to have different layers beneath the obvious humour.”

  Humour aside, one thing that was making them angry were the continual comparisons to the Pet Shop Boys that seemed to follow them around Britain. “Especially when we had ‘When Do I Get To Sing “My Way.” When the song was first heard by radio, they all said it was like the Pet Shop Boys, which blew us through the roof, for obvious reasons,” Russell stated.

  It certainly sounds like both duos influenced the other — Sparks, obviously, on the Pet Shop Boys, but through similar technology, wit and songcraft, the Pet Shop Boys had also had some effect on the new Sparks, subliminal as it may have been. Listen to ‘Being Boring’ from the Pet Shop Boys’ 1990 album Behaviour, which sounds like Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins. But then ‘Just Got Back From Heaven’ from 1988 sounds like a dry run of ‘Being Boring’. *

  After a brief sojourn back in LA, the brothers returned to Europe for a German tour, which began on May 5. Whereas England fell in the Seventies, and France in the Eighties, the next country on Sparks’ slow-rolling conquest of Europe was to be Germany, where ‘When Do I Get To Sing “My Way” ‘ sold over 650,000 copies.

  “It was our biggest single to date in Germany where we hadn’t had much success before,” Russell said in 2008. “We started getting really young audiences again, like we had in the States in the early Eighties and in Britain in the early Seventies. So we’re arguably pop history’s longest-running teenybop idols.”

  “They’ve sort of stayed between 30 and 40,” ex-bass player Ian H
ampton, who saw the London shows, recalled. “They’ve stood still. I took my son to see them at Shepherd’s Bush Empire. He thought Russell looked like Tim Henman only with more energy. His energy is incredible. I wish I had half of that.”

  On June 17 1995, Sparks were on the bill at one of the most defining gigs of the era: Blur’s concert at Mile End Stadium in east London. To tie in with the shows, ‘When Do I Get To Sing “My Way” ‘ was re-released with new mixes, to see if it would fare any better than its number 38 placing from the previous year. It got six places higher. Unfortunately due to new rules with Top Of The Pops and the volume of new entries, the UK charts at this time were all about the first week placing. With all the hard work everyone was putting in, Ron and Russell unfortunately didn’t make it back onto their old stamping ground.

  The Blur gig coincided with the crest of Britpop, a short-lived phenomenon that celebrated bands such as The Kinks, The Who and especially The Beatles, whom Sparks had once worshipped from afar. A Beatles v Stones war had broken out between Oasis, the Manchester-based working-class terrace boys who made obvious anthemic music that was obsessed with mid-period Beatles, and Blur who were southern, middle class, arty, educated. Blur Leader Damon Albarn loved being a cultural dilettante and their current look was a swirl of ironic shell suits. In Parklife, Blur had released one of the great albums of the Nineties.

  Sparks had a big crowd to entertain and torrential rain to contend with. Sparks’ set was a brief selection of present and past hits with an album track or two thrown in and, as from the onset of their career, the group could split a crowd. Ryan Gilbey, writing in The Independent, said: “The synth duo Sparks brightened matters when Ron Mael, a man so square and sinister you imagine he’d do your accounts then murder your pets, broke into an incongruous tap-dance. But their pulsing pleasures were lost on all but a crazed ginger backpacker who was either on acid or bad tofu.”

  The audience were really only there to see one act and none of the other supports — John Shuttleworth, The Cardiacs, Dodgy or The Boo Radleys — fared a great deal better. Everett True in Melody Maker wrote, “Ten out of 10 for panache, wrinklies” but NME countered “There is doubtless a time and a place for tap dance routines and techno versions of The Sound Of Music’s ‘Do-Re-Mi’ (a pile of Von Trapp, as they say round these parts) but this, quite frankly, is not it, and no, I am not making this up.”

  Andy Ross, Blur’s co-manager and the head of Food Records, remembers the Mile End gig as an extravagance, most probably on his part. “I was once a badge-carrying member of the Sparks fan club and, in the mid-Eighties, I co-interviewed them with Stephen ‘Tin-Tin’ Duffy at Fortnum & Masons. I’m not sure how Sparks ended up on the Mile End bill, but I was a strident Sparks flag waver at the time. I actually considered trying to sign them to Food and met with them with that purpose in mind at a cafe near the BBC in Portland Place. I resisted that Alan McGee-esque conceit of vanity signing and did not pursue the deal.

  “The Mile End show connection was one of those indulgences where the show was a sell-out from the minute tickets went on sale,” he continues, “so the support acts were a bit of an indulgence/representation of how Blur chose to be perceived. Sparks went down like a lead balloon and the weather was awful.”

  Sparks received greater acclaim for their performance at Pride, back when it was still called Gay Pride. On June 24, Sparks played the festival at Victoria Park in east London, where it was reported that they upstaged Erasure. NME were far kinder here, saying that “the camptastic Sparks are dramatically, gloriously, silly.” They may not have been able to win over the Britpop crowd, but the more open-minded Pride audiences loved them.

  The year ended with a concert at London’s Forum on December 20. Logic/Arista really did keep everything afloat — the album’s third single, ‘Now That I Own The BBC’, was released in February 1996, 16 months since the first release of ‘When Do I Get To Sing “My Way”.’ Unlike the previous three releases, it only reached number 60. Whatever was said, the album had truly been worked by the record company. This time mixers such as Motiv 8 had been brought in but no matter how hard they tried, the album resolutely failed to enter the UK Top 75.

  Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins was released in the US in January 1996. The LA Times said that it contained “clever eye-winking words … warbled with a cooing falsetto over a festive trance carpeted hi-NRG groove”. The New York Post passed an offhand compliment by saying “if you’re going to dance, or do aerobics for that matter, this is a fine collection”. Cashbox said that “the duo have given a valiant comeback effort”. America Online accurately assessed, “After reconquering Europe, their US success was limited to their most loyal outlet, the nightclubs. It deserves another shot.” ‘When Do I Get To Sing “My Way” ‘ even rekindled interest in the group in their traditionally indifferent home country, after it reached number nine on the Billboard Hot Dance Music/Club Play Chart. However, although valiant attempts were made to break the album in the US, America was again resistant to Sparks’ charms.

  * The other 10 were: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nick Rhodes, Modern Art 1918–1939, Roxy Music, the Burschenschaften, Andy Warhol, Rasputin, Under The Cherry Moon, Kraftwerk and Quentin Crisp.

  * Coincidentally Behaviour was produced by Harold Faltermeyer, who, after producing Sparks, had gone on to have a worldwide hit with ‘Axel F’ from Beverly Hills Cop.

  Chapter Sixteen

  So Close, So Real; The Look, The Feel Plagiarism and Balls

  “We were never comfortable with the general direction.”

  Russell Mael, 2003

  “Our problem’s always been we’ve had a foot in both the pop and experimental camps, so we just end up annoying both parties.”

  Ron Mael, 2003

  For the third time in their career, Sparks had new ears eagerly awaiting their next work. Logic/Arista could sense there was a fresh audience waiting to embrace Sparks, who had absolutely no idea of the breadth and depth of the band’s past. As Russell said in 2008, “We’d had this big success with Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins, and a lot of the audience, especially on the continent, thought we were a new band.”

  The mid-Nineties was the age of the tribute album and for their 17th album, Sparks would be their own tribute act. As all the interviews since 1993 had banged on about who they were supposed to sound like, the ultimate concept was to pay tribute to themselves if po-face duos like Pet Shop Boys weren’t going to do it officially. And like all tribute albums of that era, some of Plagiarism works, some of it doesn’t.

  “We were really opposed to the idea of doing that album as we’d opened up this whole new audience — especially in Germany,” Russell said in 2003. “It was suggested to bring these people up to speed. Although we were initially ambivalent, we were excited to be working with Tony Visconti again. We were never comfortable with the general direction.”

  Plagiarism was the first album since Interior Design that was partially recorded away from Sparks’ studio. Recording at Russell’s house was supplemented with sessions in San Francisco and London — the first time the group had recorded in the capital since 1975 with Indiscreet, coincidentally produced by Visconti who, instead of producing, looked after the orchestral and choral arrangements.

  Tony Visconti: “I went to Russell’s home in Los Angles and we worked on Plagiarism for a bit in their home studio. I was used on about six titles and it took me ages to write them. We spent a long time discussing what they wanted. The concept was amazing. It was wonderful to work with them at this level.”

  The Maels’ main proviso to Visconti was that the songs were not to sound like the originals. It was to be “drastically different versions of our songs,” Russell said. “For ‘This Town’ he [Visconti] came up with these aggressive small-string arrangements. And he did a version of ‘Change’ that had a Threepenny Opera sort of arrangement with a pit band” Visconti went back to Stan Getz’ album Focus, with its pared-down string sections, for inspiration for his arra
ngements.

  Tony Visconti: “The version of ‘Something For The Girl With Everything’ that I orchestrated is my favourite track on Plagiarism. I did that in the style of Scott Bradley, the guy who used to write for Tom And Jerry cartoons. In the middle part you can actually see Tom and Jerry being chased around the studio — that was my image for that. It nearly crippled the string players!”

  Visconti was again astounded by Ron’s abilities: “Ron wouldn’t say really what he studied, he might say Gilbert and Sullivan. I wouldn’t put it past him if he studied every one of their operettas. It’s definitely in ‘Pulling Rabbits Out Of A Hat’. We did it flat-out Gilbert and Sullivan. He never told me what his sources were!”

  The level of collaboration was high. While Ron and Russell threw in ever more ambitious ideas to Visconti, they also drew up a list of potential collaborators. Admirers like Erasure and Jimmy Somerville were approached and were delighted to join in. There was only one problem — the budget was tight.

  Tony Visconti: “I was only allowed 16 string players, which wasn’t quite the right size. The engineer, Chris Dibble, would say that we needed more cellos, but that was all we could afford.”

  Once again there was a sense of what might have been, but there is still plenty to revel in on Plagiarism. Unsurprisingly, the tracks that come out the best are the ones originally recorded in the Eighties, when the machines had been out in force. ‘Change’ was turned into an incredible slice of woozy, big-band circus music without a Fairlight in sight. ‘Funny Face’ was reworked as a tender ballad (albeit about someone who has an accident in order to have reconstructive surgery so that they no longer look beautiful). The orchestral introduction of the long version of ‘The Number One Song In Heaven’, complete with celestial choir, is simply remarkable, while the strings on opening track ‘Pulling Rabbits Out Of A Hat’ point towards what would later burst into flower on Lil’ Beethoven.