by Daryl Easlea
Marcus Blake: “We’d get back to the flat, and that night into the early morning hours I would listen to the next night’s work to just refresh. We’d be getting back sort of midnight and I’d rehearse in my bedroom for the next night. It wasn’t torture, it was a pleasure.”
Blake was aware of stepping into his predecessors’ shoes: “Ian Hampton’s my favourite for sure. Martin Gordon set the precedent I think, so melodic. The notes didn’t exactly match up to each other but they would work harmonically together. Martin Gordon is similar to McCartney in that they’re both very melodic bass players. They don’t just play the root notes all the way through their song. If you single out their work, it could be a song on its own.”
The band would arrive at the venue at 2pm every day and soundcheck that night’s particular album.
Sue Harris: “Every single musician probably had moments of trepidation, but once they were committed to it, they were extraordinary. Every day of the ‘21 Nights’, they would come in, do a run-through and that was it — that was the production rehearsal, that was the refresher from the last time they played the album, perhaps weeks previously, and then, they played it that night.”
The shows also proved a challenge for the small stage team of lightning designer Paul Birks, Simon Higgs on monitors, sound engineer Cristiano Avigni, Robert Garnham on the backline as well as the logistical team of Harris and Lucy Wigginton. “The crew were amazing,” praises Harris. “They didn’t know what was going to happen day-to-day and there were no rehearsals. Plagiarism, for instance, had strings and a horn section as well as Jimmy Somerville. All on that tiny stage.”
Jim Wilson: “It was difficult and totally fulfilling. We all felt that there would be some lighter nights or nights that wouldn’t be as important or as well attended and we were wrong about that. There was obviously a difference in crowds and things but people were reacting just as strongly for, say, Pulling Rabbits Out Of A Hat as they were for other albums. We really got into those shows, too, because it felt good to bring those albums to life.”
There were never less than 500 in the venue during the run. The least attended was, as Wilson said, “either Pulling Rabbits Out Of A Hat or Music That You Can Dance To. Erm, maybe Interior Design might have been another light one.”
Marcus Blake: “There’s a gay pub across the street from the Academy. It just got overrun by Sparks fans. It became Sparks fan central for a month and we would occasionally pay a visit. Ron and Russell would never go but we did. It was cool, we got a lot of instant feedback and I was so impressed by their loyalty, especially the people who went to all ‘21 Nights’ and went to the pub every night and waited in line from like noon onwards. That’s dedicating your life to Sparks for a month.”
The support given was testament to how devoted Sparks fans are. Each had an opportunity to sponsor that evening’s show, and the souvenir programme included the names of each of those who had backed the relevant album/night.*
Sue Harris: “The most committed fan had to take a month off work, pay for accommodation for a month, some had the golden tickets for every show — it was a huge undertaking. Kimono My House and No. 1 In Heaven sold out very quickly. The attendance was still amazing for the lesser known albums — and the audience were there singing every word. It was so nice to be a part of it. There were lots of emotions on show — everyone was absolutely exhausted but this is something that will never be repeated. It’s one thing to have a catalogue that size, but more importantly to have the will to do it and not even for financial gain. You wouldn’t just do it for the sake of it, giving away six months of your life after spending a year recording your own album.”
There were many highlights. “At the first night, Russell introduced the gig saying ‘OK, my friends, number one,’” reported Andre Paine for the BBC. “In contrast to Russell, his brother Ron was a severe, slightly scary presence on keyboards who didn’t react to the chants of ‘Ron, Ron’ from the crowd.”
It was Wilson’s own favourite that provided his happiest moment of the month. “Indiscreet was a great night. We had to switch around so much for the instrumentation and we actually had horns and strings and stuff. I didn’t do anything on ‘Under The Table With Her’, so I went out to the front of the crowd and watched it and then I had to be back on stage for ‘How Are You Getting Home?’ It was too much, almost, I should’ve just stayed there! I got back on stage and it was so exciting, it’s hard to explain.”
It was often the nights with least expectation that delighted the most. Big Beat, Sparks’ 1976 flop, sounded as if it been recorded yesterday. Ron even stepped out from behind his keyboard to insist that ‘White Women’ should not be taken seriously. No. 1 In Heaven on Bank Holiday Sunday was as much of a jolt as the original album had been — the venue was seriously over-full, and being pinned into the back corner didn’t suit this writer’s dancing shoes. It sounded brilliant and the brothers appeared delighted at playing it live completely for the first time. Best of all was Ron’s tribute haircut — a direct reprise of his pre-Phil Oakey 1979Veronica Lake bubble perm. “When it came to that album,” Wilson says, laughing, “I said, ‘I don’t want to be the guy that plays guitar in No.1 In Heaven so I didn’t even play, I just sang.”
Watching the largely unloved Interior Design you knew you were among the most fervent of the hardcore. Hardly any of it had been played live before, and trimmed of its most Eighties excesses, it further proved that Ron is one of popular music’s most consistent writers.
Jim Wilson: “I’m just happy to be playing Ron Mael’s songs. That’s something that never slipped away. Sometimes I’d be on stage and I’d look over and be like ‘Ah man, I would be at this show if I wasn’t playing here.’ ”
However, all of this would amount to nothing without Russell’s delivery. His preening style, at once the very epitome and simultaneous deconstruction of a rock star, makes him as enduring as a Roger Daltrey or a Freddie Mercury. “Russell’s pretty amazing,” Wilson says. “I’ve never heard that guy have a bad voice night. Just an incredible singer, especially when you have to sing with him, you learn how much is actually going on.”
Jimmy Somerville’s appearance during the Plagiarism night, singing ‘The Number One Song In Heaven’ was described by Scotland On Sunday like “two men with their knackers in a vice trying to think of more pleasant things”.
The live show moved to Shepherd’s Bush Empire for the series finale of Exotic Creatures Of The Deep. The band arrived at the Empire at noon on June 13 and worked through solidly until seven o’clock, an hour before they were due on stage. For the second half, the B-sides set had still to be rehearsed.
Nistor provided an amusing blog for Billboard on the subject. “Of course, it turned into a pissing contest of who knew the most obscure Sparks songs, and we were to play them. We didn’t even know what the set was going to be until the day before the show, and even after that, there were additions and substitutions. I assumed we were going to go over them in soundcheck, at least, just to run them, but we rehearsed the new album right until the doors opened.” There was electricity in the air; a reunion of old friends combined with the meeting of new ones.
‘21 Nights’ was a remarkable undertaking, and one that will gain greater significance as time goes by. The exposure the shows gained for Sparks was phenomenal and while, like the best work in their career, it didn’t actually help shift many units, the impact was felt throughout the music business.
“Bands get kudos for their past careers, but Sparks are unique as they are still doing it and are doing it better than ever,” Harris points out. “We are all a bit obsessed with retrospectives in the UK — bands often play their album from 1960something but they haven’t done anything since. That’s fine, everyone has mortgages to pay, but Sparks are still making new and exciting music.”
21 Nights’ took the concept of the Don’t Look Back idea — artists playing a notable album from their catalogue onstage in its entirety — and pushed it to th
e nth degree. If Sparks take on something, there will always be an additional twist.
“It was one of their most brilliant ideas,” says John Hewlett. “That, to me, is genius. Trevor went, however, and he was disappointed.”
Trevor White: “I was supposed to meet them afterwards, but we were in such a hurry, we had to run out and catch our train. I was there with Ian Hampton and Joe Elliott from Def Leppard, who is a huge fan. I didn’t understand any of it.”
Russell reflected on the shows some months after they had finished: “It was extremely daunting. It took four months of rehearsal. Luckily we have a band that’s committed to those levels of preparation, and to the time we spent in London playing the show. We were pleasantly shocked that people gave up their time to come from all over the world.”
Jim Wilson: “It happened so fast and you had one shot to get it right. It wasn’t simple rock’n’roll songs like ‘Jumping Jack Flash’. The hardcore Sparks fans were watching our every move because everybody knows every little part.”
If anything, the release of Exotic Creatures Of The Deep was overshadowed by the hype for the live performances. Released on Lil’ Beethoven Records on May 19, 2008, it was put out by Universal’s distribution arm Arvato. The sleeve concept was again very strong — available in a Ron or a Russell sleeve, it featured Susie the chimpanzee. On Russell’s sleeve, she is playing the piano. On Ron’s, she is at the microphone.
After a most impressive first-day chart placing, which saw it heading toward the Top 20, the album stalled at 54 in the chart. As consolation, the tide of critical plaudits that Sparks had ridden since Lil’ Beethoven was ready to carry them away again: Rock n Reel said “Sparks are one of those delightful eddys in the cultural river, and they are a vital one.” Record Collector thought that, although two songs too long, “The glam of ‘I Can’t Believe That You Would Fall For All The Crap In This Song’ and Ron’s wordplay on ‘This Is The Renaissance’ demonstrate, once again, that for a veteran band [a description the brothers would surely detest] moving forward, they are simply without equal.”
Q suggested that the album was full of “elegiac and wry lyrics, durable tunes and unbridled adventurism”. The Word considered “the real joy… is the unadorned pleasure of hearing two misfits not fitting in, in the most stylish manner imaginable”. NME described the album as “a textbook example of the quirky falsetto disco that the Scissor Sisters would give their silver lamé leggings for”. Even the Daily Mirror called it “a toe-tapping, rib-tickling delight”. However, there were some dissenting voices; pitchforkmedia suggested that “This time, though, the premise has worn thin. Virtually every song enunciates its central joke, then repeats it and repeats it and repeats it. And repeats it. And repeats it. And so on, with the repeating. (And repeating.)”
Overall, the album maintained the standard of the previous two with ease. The synth glam of ‘I Can’t Believe That You Would Fall For All The Crap In This Song’ is an absolute standout, and possibly the only time that the group have dabbled in the musical style that they were accused of practising in the Seventies. ‘Let The Monkey Drive’ was singled out by Mojo as an “insidious gnomic joy, like The Goodies writing for Michael Nyman”. The highlight was certainly the album’s second single, ‘Lighten Up Morrissey’, a tale of a man whose girlfriend’s Morrissey obsession is driving him to the point of distraction.
“He [Morrissey] actually loves it!” Russell told various interviewers in August. “We played it for him — we wanted to make sure he heard it before it was out and someone told him about it. He said he adores it. Morrissey understood the sentiment of the song beyond face value. The title alone one might think would be a dig at him. It’s not at all, it’s a relationship song.”*
Exotic Creatures Of The Deep was led by the bright, buoyant single ‘Good Morning’, a real humdinger of an old-fashioned pop song about regrets after a one-night stand. However it only reached number 147, while ‘Lighten Up Morrissey’ didn’t make the Top 200. That didn’t stop them being great records. It was just that the brothers’ natural home, even for men now both in their sixties, was still the pop chart. “In their heart of hearts they’d love to be number one. I can’t ever see them doing it again, gaining that mass acceptance,” Ian Hampton says. “They put such decent records out but they are just not gaining airplay. ‘Good Morning’ was on the playlist on Radio 2 but only got played twice. [DJ Terry] Wogan used it as a jingle but it didn’t get any airplay.”
It’s a problem that many bands in a similar position face. “When I first heard Exotic Creatures I thought — ‘Great, they’ve given us some pop songs’,” says Harris. “‘Good Morning’ was such a great pop song but you discover that radio will simply play Mika instead. Well, we wouldn’t have artists like Mika if it wasn’t for Sparks. I’ve wondered whether we should do the sneaky and pretend it’s not Sparks but some indie band from Sheffield with bad haircuts to fool the little skinny-jeaned kids dictating what the world is going to listen to. If you just based it on the music, what would the reaction be? On radio it should all be about the song. Radio 2 is great because they don’t care about the press pack, they listen to it and they ask ‘Will our listeners like it?’ You go to Radio 1 or a commercial station and it’s all about ‘Do they think it would fit between Mika or Franz Ferdinand?’ Of course it would because they sound like Sparks, so it should be played. That’s the idealistic view, but it’s not like that.”
Soon after the close of ‘21 Nights’, Sparks played various festivals around the globe before returning in July to Japan, where they had solidly been building their fan base. “Japan’s really getting [Sparks] now,” says Harris. “They have a great label that completely understands and a great promoter, Smash. The label works hard, puts out back catalogue and, well, ‘gets it’.”*
On July 26, the band played the second night of Japan’s Fuji Rocks festival at Naeba, witnessed by an ebullient Harris. “At Fuji Rocks, Sparks were on the Orange Court Stage and took over all the projections and put on a full show — you looked out and there were thousands and thousands of young Japanese fans just going crazy. The stage was the far-end of the festival away from the main stage; there was a constant stream of kids pouring in and going mad. The feedback was that they were the buzz of the whole festival. Primal Scream, Kasabian were all there. And Japanese fans are supposed to be reserved. Not when Sparks play! There’s hysteria.”
A UCLA show in February 2009 was something of a coup. It was the brainchild of long-time Sparks fan David Sefton, UCLA’s Director of Programming, who was one of the many who sat transfixed as ‘Hitler’ entered his British living room at teatime in May 1974.
Liverpool-born Sefton had moved from the small Millfield Theatre in North London’s Edmonton to being the man who introduced the Meltdown Festival at the Royal Festival Hall. He had relocated to LA in 2000 to look after the arts programme at UCLA. “I was given a clean sheet and the basic brief — don’t burn the place down, don’t piss off too many old rich people; I came in with carte blanche. My major stipulation was that I was allowed to do what I wanted with the programming.”
Having been an admirer for decades, having seen Sparks at the Liverpool Empire in 1975, Sefton was determined to present Sparks at the university.
“Sparks was absolutely a personal thing for me. Since the big megaalbum thing in London, they had wanted to do something resonant of that here. Given that they are ex-UCLA students, there was an inevitability it would happen one day. The timing was perfect — they wanted to do something around Exotic Creatures Of The Deep, and I said that if you’re doing it, the other one has to be Kimono My House. This job is a bit like playing your own records at a party — you can stipulate.”
When first mentioning the idea, Sefton’s team were unsure. “Most of my staff had no idea who they were. There was a fairly comprehensive lack of recognition. It gave me an opportunity to be unbelievably smug and say ‘Don’t worry, this will sell’. When it sold out, I was enormously full of mysel
f! People were deeply sceptical about doing it in an 1,800-seat room; happily I was able to prove them wrong.”
Sefton understands why Sparks are not an easy option for America to accept. “Sparks were loved by the eyeliner crowd in Liverpool. It partly is that arty thing that makes Sparks unacceptable to most Americans. I was thinking about this in relation to Bowie; it wasn’t a slam dunk for Bowie when he first came out in the States, eventually it took off — the artier end of things struggles in this country. The UK embraces that ambiguity. How weird they seemed when they hit the charts but how weird must they have been when they started! That’s why they would have come to Britain as it was more disparate; it wasn’t about Woodstock.”
A traditional music venue, set in an idyllic, green location, Royce Hall — modelled on the Cathedral of St Ambrogio in Milan — is one of the oldest buildings not only on campus but in LA itself, being 80 years old. It was a memorable night, with the Maels right back where they started, a few hundred yards from where Russell was next door to Ron in theater arts and graphic design respectively.
David Sefton: “It was packed out. People came in from all over the States. One girl had even flown in from Scotland. She’d never been to the United States before and had just come in for the one night. The band could not have possibly wished for a greater response. I have my favourite moments but [Sparks] breaking into ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us’ [at Royce Hall] is definitely going to count among those moments. It was a real scene.”
It was good for Jim Wilson to be back on home turf: “It was just like every person I ever knew was there. It was a good night. It just went so smoothly. A Sparks show is not just going up and plugging in, there are sets and dancers and always something going on. I got to bring my own amplifier. It was amazing.”