by Daryl Easlea
Steven Nistor: “The band was on fire by this point. It was fantastic. We have this mutual respect. I mean, after rehearsing as much as we have, especially after the 21 Nights thing, we feel sort of invincible up there. I think that event really made us ‘a band’.”
Marcus Blake: “I felt so good for them as it sold out because of word of mouth. Americans had never seen Kimono My House in its entirety. The album seems to have recently caught on there. It was good to see how well they took to Exotic Creatures Of The Deep too.”
In attendance were a few special guests from the distant past — namely James Lowe and Harley Feinstein, who had reunited a few years previously when Feinstein played drums on several cuts on the reformed Electric Prunes album, Feedback. “Harley and I saw Sparks at UCLA recently and they were amazing. Not a move you could predict. I mean who has a monkey in the show? I guess they couldn’t afford a kid,” says Lowe, recalling the 14-year old Kip Tulin from A Woofer In Tweeter’s Clothing. It had been a long journey.
The Exotic Creatures Creatures Of The Deep tour moved to London in March, for a rerun of the two biggest-selling nights from the Sparks spectacular — Kimono My House and No. 1 In Heaven — with Exotic Creatures Of The Deep taking up the first half of each night. Nistor, Blake and Wilson were match fit and blasted through the material. Wilson recalled how nervous he’d been for the first play-through of Kimono My House back in 2004 at Meltdown, when now it was all rather straightforward in light of all the events of the past year. The tableau of dancing ladies during ‘This Is A Renaissance’ was a sight to behold and for the final three shows in Japan in April, a local agency provided six dancing geishas.
For the celebrations surrounding the 50th anniversary of Island Records, Ron and Russell were approached to play the week-long series of gigs at Shepherd’s Bush Empire at the end of May.* The show on the 27th would have had them playing with The Fratellis in a series of gigs that saw players as diverse as Ernest Ranglin, Grace Jones, Paul Weller, Cat Stevens, Tom Tom Club, Spooky Tooth and U2 take to the stage. After careful consideration, the Maels turned the opportunity down, as their next project was taking shape.
* Ron and Russell dedicated all 21 Nights to their oldest fan, mother Miriam, who was name-checked under her Mary Martin nom de Spark in the programme.
* The relationship between Morrissey and the Maels is still strong. When invited to play his favourite bands on KCRW’s Guest DJ Project in August 2008, Morrissey chose the old A Woofer In A Tweeter’s Clothing standard ‘Moon Over Kentucky’.
* This has further been demonstrated by the remarkable reissues in paper sleeves of the albums between Introducing Sparks and Sparks In Outer Space in 2009.
* Kimono My House was selected as one of Island’s 50 albums of all time, and it received not only a vinyl reissue but the 21st Century Edition, released in 2006, was reissued in Japan in a full CD replica edition.
Chapter Twenty
Talent + Invention + Mystery × Fanbase = Longevity
“Not since eighties King Crimson has anyone made a trio of LPs so perfect they should use them in music schools around the world to educate young people to what real pop rock should sound like. Lil’ Beethoven, Hello Young Lovers, Exotic Creatures Of The Deep please look these up and save your ears today and the other 18 albums too!”
Juicyjesus99, YouTube
“There are actually no creeps in the music business. We’re just one happy family. Everybody’s in it for the love of music and art.”
Russell Mael, 1995
“They’ve really been a fringe operation who once struck it big.”
John Taylor, 2009
“Sparks are still a new band as well.”
Jim Wilson, 2009
When questioned about the future by BBC Scotland after their performance at the Hydro Connect Festival on August 29, 2008, Ron came out with the prescient statement, “Every time you finish you think there is nowhere else to go, but we have such drive that I think that’s what propels us and puts us in the position of trying to top each thing we’ve done.”
Now with advances in technology and being proprietors of their own label, Ron and Russell can really be Sparks full-time, beavering away on the next project, not waiting simply for a record company to deem it possible. And their studio is, of course, Russell’s house, where they go every single day to work.
The latest example of this is their Swedish Radio drama, The Seduction Of Ingmar Bergman, premiered on Sveriges Radio on August 14, 2000 (two days after Ron’s 64th birthday).
Sue Harris explains the idea’s genesis. “Sparks have played in Sweden a few times recently and they’ve had a nice relationship with the media there since Lil’ Beethoven. Swedish Radio contacted them direct and asked them to write an hour show with Swedish content and lyrics.”
The title itself is another Sparks movie in-joke, as it nods to the 1971 Swedish softcore film The Seduction Of Inga. This move into, for want of a better word, musicals has gone some way to scratching the itch that began right back with the Maels scoring Larry Dupont’s film about the Goodyear blimp at UCLA, through Confusion and Mai The Psychic Girl. This was to take them into a different realm altogether. Being Sparks, it couldn’t be straightforward.
“When Sveriges Radio approached us with the idea of creating our own musical for the radio,” Russell said, “we were excited about the prospect yet hesitant at trying to figure a way to successfully fulfil their only restrictions with the project: that it incorporates the Swedish language in some manner. Once we came up with the idea of placing one of the ultimate Swedish icons and one of our favourite film directors, Ingmar Bergman, in a fantasy setting, we became extremely excited about this musical and knew we were on to something special.”
Although there is still a strong tradition of radio drama in the UK, Ron was happy to resurrect a dormant form for Sparks’ next work. “As Americans we have almost abandoned radio drama,” he said, “and it was truly exhilarating for us to work in a medium where the imagination of the listener is so integral a part of the work. Aside from our love of Bergman, we have a love of Orson Welles and his use of the medium of radio was something that inspired us in this work.” The story was a tale of the battle for artistic integrity against the demands of commerce that every great artist has to face at some juncture in their career, set in an imaginary time when the legendary Swedish director was being courted by Hollywood in 1956. It ends with his meeting Greta Garbo, who is sent as a messenger from God to help him return to Sweden.
David Sefton: “I went round to Russell’s studio to hear the Ingmar Bergman project in its entirety… It’s off the wall, but only in the way you’d want and expect. The hardcore Sparks fans are going to adore it. It’s a singular piece of work. Only the [Maels] could come up with something like that.”
The similarities between Bergman’s pet subjects — “matters of death, faith, God’s existence, and the struggle to find love and meaning in our lives” — and Ron’s lyrics are easy to spot.
Both Jim Wilson and Marcus Blake were involved in the recording: “Russ was singing and he explained to us what it was going to be, we didn’t see any lyrics or anything. Marcus and I sang almost two full songs as autograph hunters.” Wilson and Blake also demoed the roles of the two policemen who try to capture Bergman towards the end of the play, but the recording was revoiced by Russell.
The mixture of song and dialogue has several familiar Mael traits. “The songs are so cool,” Wilson says. “This is really intense stuff. There’s some rock ones too. I’ve played on recordings with them before, but this is the first time that we were singing parts. We were listening to Russell’s guide vocal and we were kind of replacing that but it still sounds strange to hear your voice singing a Ron Mael melody.”
The listener also gets to hear, for the first time, Ron’s vocals as a limo driver and Hollywood tour driver.
Jim Wilson: “When we first heard about it a couple of months ago, Ron said he had to start thinking about new s
ongs. You just think that as it’s not really a new album and it’s just going to be broadcast on Swedish radio that he might not put that much into it, but when you hear it, it’s like ‘Wow, you’ve made a little movie.’ It’s like a story and it’s the perfect follow-up for them because it’s kind of the new Sparks album, and, at the same time, it kind of isn’t.
“They didn’t have to come up with ten funny song titles or whatever to make another Lil’ Beethoven. It’s something that’s really different again and it fits into the Sparks mould because it’s really heavily keyboard written, so the melodies are really fast.”
Recorded on the soundstages of Hollywood-American Studios, California and at the Radio Drama Studio, Stockholm, The Seduction Of Ingmar Bergman was released in November 2009 on double vinyl and download in a variety of collector’s formats including a box with Swedish and English versions. To coincide, a special preview, taped on October 28 at BBC Broadcasting House and including an interview and audience Q & A with Ron and Russell, premiered in the UK on Stuart Maconie’s Freakzone BBC 6 radio show on November 8.
The Seduction Of Ingmar Bergman is a 64-minute opera, song cycle, whatever you want to call it. It is grand, late-period Sparks. It’s esoteric in subject matter, but then so was Evita when it first appeared. It doesn’t have a ‘Don’t Cry For Me Argentina’ or even an ‘Oh What A Circus’ but it does have a surfeit of imagination and left-field delights. There are all the customary Mael tricks and devices on ‘Mr Bergman, How Are You’, an effective piece of heavy metal, fully utilising the band, and a duet between Russell as the studio chief and Swedish actress Saskia Husberg as Bergman’s interpreter. ‘The Studio Commissary’ is Sparks in overdrive as they finally marry their love of Hollywood, European cinema and pop music in one song. Set in a studio canteen, it is a roll call of all Hollywood émigré directors, from Alfred Hitchcock to Jacques Tourneur, deliciously delivered by Russell, as if his whole life had been leading to this moment.
Obscure, of course, delightfully warm, naturally, The Seduction Of Ingmar Bergman underlines Sparks’ greatness and importance. With a vocal cast of 13, and the extended version of the band — Glover, Menta, Wilson, Blake and Nistor — it has all the craft and tension of a Sparks work, naturally coming alive when Russell as the studio chief sings. Swedish actor Jonas Malmsjö plays Bergman with all the appropriate detached paranoia. Only the final song, ‘He’s Home’, seems conventional.
Record Collector gave the work five stars and concluded “This review could read like one of those YES/NO flow diagrams. Did you love Lil’Beethoven? If YES — you will love this. If NO, return to Kimono My House.” Martin Aston wrote in Mojo that the album “plays to Sparks’ strengths, finding that unique spot between artful kitsch and camp lunacy.” For the first time since Balls, however, the praise was not unanimous. The Observer Music Monthly labelled the recording “strange,” and Stephen Trousse in Uncut suggested that the album was “strangely unseductive: Ingmar’s own horrified flight from Hollywood reflects the brother’s own retreat from pop into something more sophisticated. But a lot less fun.”
The Seduction Of Ingmar Bergman deals with the issue of providing a follow-up to three of Sparks most satisfying works to date. “There is always a ‘what next’ moment,” says Harris. “I have confidence in them that they will go into the studio and come out with something incredible. They keep outdoing themselves. As [The Seduction Of Ingmar Bergman] took shape it seemed to be more than a musical for Swedish radio and so it was fortuitous that it came at the time that the band would be thinking about their next record.
“What form it takes in the future only time will tell. It could go on to be a stage musical around the world. They may initially be in it, but ultimately a good musical production can be put on by any theatre company.”
At the time of writing, the next step will be live performances in 2010. Ron and Russell have been talking to David Sefton about the possibility of more shows. Although undecided in November 2009, Sefton thinks, “I would turn it into a concert with knobs on with some visuals but quite minimal. Maybe it will be their great breakthrough moment.” Canadian director Guy Maddin has also shown great interest in the work. Maybe the Maels will enter their sixth decade working together finally making the film they have always wanted.
Sparks have been in business now for over 40 years. It’s one thing for artists with similar or higher tallies of studio albums — The Fall or Peter Hammill, for example — to have perennially inhabited the margins, but for a group that, in the UK at least, were borne from teenybop screams to be producing their best work 30 years later is unparalleled.
There is little shortage of theories about their longevity, from former band members to others whose paths the Maels have crossed. “They have held true to their concept all these years yet they keep coming up with something different,” James Lowe says. “They are able to morph and change with the times. And their smart humour. These are some of the funniest records I have ever heard.”
“They are a couple of talented artists, and it is impossible to compare them to an ordinary rock band,” Harley Feinstein posits. “They tell their narrative well. Back when I met them, it was already in place; the intent was very interesting and intelligent. They are very astute from the point of view of art. I’d never heard about new wave cinema. Ron pretty much predicted MTV years before it happened; astute, culturally and artistically.”
Brothers in bands are not normally noted in pop for lasting the distance in harmonious fashion. “The fact that they’re brothers makes the likelihood of that taking place almost impossible,” Ira Robbins suggests. “If you look at the stories and examples of brothers in pop music, there’s very few that have lasted very long. Certainly Ray and Dave Davies and the Gallaghers — it just goes wrong down the line. Maybe the Allmans would’ve stuck it out if Duane hadn’t died.”
Jim Mankey has long worked out the formula: “They managed to get along. Almost everyone else in the music business would get into big arguments and get in a huff and break up. Ron and Russ worked out all their personal animosities while they were 12 years old.”
The dynamic of the brothers’ personalities remains the tightly knit mystery that it has done since 1970. Their singularity and determination constantly sees them producing high-quality work.
Larry Dupont: “They still want it. It is a passion. It is who they are. They aren’t going to quit.”
Sue Harris: “They go into their Sparks world, their vacuum and create. They never stop being Sparks. For over two-thirds of their lives they have been Sparks. I’m not sure how often they are not together creating. It’s a unique relationship.”
Gered Mankowitz: “It’s a combination of things; because they work so well together, they clearly are incredibly bonded. Importantly, there is enough work to keep them together. Look at these dreadful Seventies revival tours that go round the summer seasons — you see people who are close to being desperate playing on an oldies platform. Sparks have always maintained a high originality and they have always been able to hold on to a very devout fan base; they have some very major records that have a huge impact on a lot of people and they have kept it up.”
Ian Hampton: “They have a very loyal fan base who are always pushing them for more. More changes of direction, more innovation and they get very encouraged by the fans and take heed of what they are saying. They are streetwise, very literate, extremely well read. Ron is without question one of the greatest lyricists of his time. I think he’s probably the most uniquely overlooked writer in the past four or five decades. He gets critically acclaimed, sure, but nothing mass.”
Tony Visconti: “I think back in the day, everyone had a soft spot for Sparks, they were kind of revolutionary and ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us’ was one of the greatest British singles ever made. I think the world of them. I always considered Ron Mael to be, besides a great musician, also a great poet. The lyrics are just unbelievably funny.”
Rupert Holmes: �
��I have such tremendous admiration for how they’ve continued their artistry over the ensuing decades. I know how hard it is to sustain that creativity, and yet their releases up to the present always seem vital, fresh and absolutely original. It’s a remarkable achievement for which, as a fan and listener, I’m also very grateful.”
‘Artist’ is a word that keeps recurring. Chris Blackwell, a man who has worked with some of the greatest names in music, says this of the Maels: “I liked them because they are artists in the real sense. I am a big fan of talent and when you never know what an artist is going to do next, that’s literally music to my ears. Sometimes you have a better record than others, but that’s the main thing, you have a long career. They would not be able to live if they weren’t able to do what they are doing — they are true artists.”
“Their entire world is their music, that’s what they care about to the exclusivity of everything else,” Tammy Glover told the BBC in 2007. “The only thing that gives them a buzz is music. I mean, girls and cars to some extent, but it pales in comparison to playing music, composing music and contributing to a body of work that is unique, edgy and genre-defying.”
Steven Nistor: “They’re really of the same mind. Maybe two different halves of the same brain would be a better way to put it. If you look at Sparks’ entire catalogue they are impossible to nail down. They’ve covered a lot of stylistic ground”
Although not claiming to have followed their entire oeuvre, Duran Duran’s John Taylor still regards the group with high affection: “They have a big enough reputation and there will always be an audience for them. There’s this artistic side to them; although they did their amazing 21-night thing, they are not hung up on Kimono My House. They seem quite self-aware to be artists. They can be philosophical about the curve they are on. They’ve always been quite left-field really. It’s almost like their pop moment was the exception — there’s always been a whiff of Zappa about them. They’ve really been a fringe operation who once struck it big.”