Sparks - New Music For Amnesiacs (2013)

If there’s a band that’s a larger conundrum than Sparks, I challenge you to name them.

There’s a reason to say this without equivocation because, honestly, my own experience and grasp of the Mael brothers and their oeuvre has always remained just beyond my reach to express. I’ve interviewed the gnomic siblings from Los Angeles at least four times, and only once (when commissioned to write the sleeve notes for their third Island label album, Indiscrete) did I feel I got anywhere near the real soul of the pair. Usually the questions which I thought so incisive and understanding of their frankly unclassifiable music, bounced off them like golf balls flung at some cultural Godzilla.

During one email Q&A I was asked whether I’d even unwrapped the new CD and listened to it (I had: about 20 times. And there aren’t many bands I would ever do that for). Sent their last album (the live Two Hands One Mouth) I got about two-thirds through a review and just gave up.

The problem is not only that absolutely no one else sounds like Sparks, it’s that even they, throughout their 40-year plus career, haven’t sounded like themselves, constantly shifting, reinventing and morphing into something entirely different. A bit like David Bowie split into two, and with a better sense of humour.

If you WERE to try and identify their consistent elements it would, of course, be the moustache of Ron Mael, the falsetto of Russell Mael, the sardonic, ironic, witty (no, HILARIOUS) and uber intelligent lyrics… And the great tunes. Beyond that, it all depends on which point of their existence you joined the Sparks train ride: the glam punch of their earliest albums; the proto techno of their Giorgio Moroder phase; the minimal classicism of the last decade? It all bears repeated scrutiny and luckily for me (otherwise why would I even be bothering here) it’s all contained in their new compilation, about to be unleashed for the Xmas market: New Music For Amnesiacs.

Following the release of their hefty box of the ENTIRE back catalogue, Music For Amnesiacs, this ‘greatest hits’ (or, more accurately Biggest Hits from an Alternative Universe) cherry picks obvious highlights (ie: the actual hits – possibly more than you remember or know about) while presenting any listener with the almost impossible job of reconciling such an odd, disjointed collection as coming from the minds of the same two men.

Sure, as stated, we have the wit and that voice to remind us that it could only be Sparks, but still…

So, which Sparks floats your boat? Most people know the timeless classics of their first chart assailment. I was a teenager when I first saw the band (at that point a five piece) destroy all comers on Top Of The Pops with ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us’. In a golden age when most weeks could unwrap some new transgression from the world of pop they still stood out, if only for Ron’s Hitleresque upper lip and his creepy stare, counterpointing Russell’s curly-headed boyishness.

But that single (and its parent album, Kimono My House) burst at the seams with musical difference. Staccato electric piano that faded in from nowhere, razor sharp timing and lyrics that ran counter to anything offered by Slade or The Sweet. This wasn’t androgyny, it was perversion. And the follow–up, ‘Amateur Hour,’ really spelled that out (if you were grown up enough to work it out. Like Steely Dan, they make you work for your laughs).

Raised in the seedier, more worldly environs of Hollywood, the brothers knew exactly how to be louche and dangerous without ever sacrificing themselves entirely to the heathen god of rock ‘n’ roll in a way that Bowie or Alice Cooper would. There was something strangely sophisticated and, well, European, about the Mael brothers. Which is why they undoubtedly appealed to the man who first discovered them in their original guides as a band called Halfnelson: Todd Rundgren.

While Todd’s efforts to produce the band were not entirely successful, you could tell that his own knowledge of British and European culture allowed him to glimpse their qualities long before the rest of the Western world caught on.  In fact, it took a move to England to really see them get their just rewards, being paired first with Muff Winwood and then the great Tony Visconti as the producers who oversaw their maturation.

This doesn’t mean that after their shock tactics on TOTP they went on to unmitigated success. Such a rarified treat was always going to keep them at arm’s length from the crowd. More hits followed (all here: ‘Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth’;  ‘Something For The Girl With Everything’ etc.) but such sardonic smarts made them more cult than teen smashes. For a GREAT example of this I recommend that you check out their Youtube clip of their appearance on the Bay City Rollers Show performing ‘Get In The Swing’: Russell in the shortest shorts known to man. It’s the very definition of incongruous (it looks as if it’s been removed, but the clip here of them on TOTP is equally odd). God knows how the Roller’s pubescent female fanbase reacted to it. The album that it was taken from (the one I wrote the notes for) is simply stunning. By this point they wrote songs about breasts and betrayal, pineapples, childhood sexuality and terrible pick up lines.

Such intelligence demands change, and the pretence at Glam rock was stripped away to make way for a series of stylistic and locational changes that won them a truly hardcore following but lost them widespread acceptance. And thank God for that… Sparks never really made a terrible album, no matter how badly some of them sold. They just kept working.

It wasn’t until the pair teamed with the aforementioned Moroder that they swam back into view. And again, beneath the glorious, dizzy disco electronica of ‘The Number One Song In Heaven’ and ‘Beat The Clock’ were dark hearts beating with thoughts of mass consumption and child prodigies (a theme that pops up a LOT in the boys’ repertoire – which is hardly surprising).

Fifteen years later and they were now being name-checked by Morrissey (although, to be fair, he’d also written to the NME when 15 to praise Kimono…) and making darker, even MORE sardonic records based on Reichian repetition* and the deconstruction of popular music itself. Songs like ‘The Rhythm Thief’ (from the utterly brilliant Lil’ Beethoven) and ‘Perfume’  (from its follow-up, Hello Young Lovers) used a wholly unique template of hypnotic loops and classical tropes, while their stage craft now had advanced to an amazing degree. Shows were multimedia extravaganzas that were self-mocking and warm towards their loyal fanbase (how many bands can you name that start their shows with a song about the fact that it’s a show by them?). And they were still laugh-your-ass-off funny. Critical plaudits were finally cemented.

And still they continue. They performed all 21 of their albums to date in one residency in London. And following the equally hilarious Exotic Creatures of The Deep they made the typically odd concept album/musical The Seduction Of Ingmar Bergman (about the director’s adventures in Hollywood). Never let it be said that they lacked ambition.

So here it is: distilled into one baffling smorgasbord of cunning and contradiction. And still I don’t feel like I’ve done them justice.

Sparks, I give up. You just ARE…

*To clarify: In my original review of this album I state that ‘The banality of repetition is like Steve Reich in a fever' dream' - I still stand by this statement. It's a remarkable record.

Sparks - New Music For Amnesiacs: The Essential Collection is released on December 2nd.

Nous Sommes Du Soleil: Drowning in the Topographic Ocean

About six months ago I wrote an introduction to what was going to be a book on Yes' greatest folly (if you discount anything they did after about 1978): Tales From Topographic Oceans: an album that to this day divides most of western civilization. The introduction was part of a pitch for the prestigious 33 1/3 series on notable albums.

The idiots rejected the proposal for what would undoubtedly have been a keystone of any cultural history of the second half of the 20th century (maybe). But being the caring and sharing sort, I thought I'd reversion the piece for public consumption. So here's my initial thoughts on Tales... Enjoy!

Tales From Topographic Oceans: An introduction


‘I know when I started I would have been happy to sound like the Beatles or Joe Tex or whoever. You want to sound like most bands, you want to sound like their records and that's how you learn your chops.’ - Jon Anderson

1973 was a turning point; not only in the history and development of what was known as ‘progressive rock’, but in popular music in its entirety. This was a world where glam was already fading fast, 60s veterans were either in disarray, dead or becoming bloated with their own legendary status and disco and punk lurked around the corner. It was a world where some mythical ideal of ability seemed to have replaced the normal value system of teen thrills, danceability or as an accompaniment to love’s first fumblings. In short, prog was briefly KING.

This was (thankfully) not to last. From its first stirrings in the loftier ideals of late psychedelic groups such as Procol Harum and The Moody Blues, to the knotty and often impenetrable work of its main proponents, this was always a sub set of popular music that had its card marked. And Tales From Topographic Oceans is remarkable, not for its content or artistic value, but as a representative of the point where hubris outstripped ability, and ridicule was waiting in the wings.

The story of Tales From Topographic Oceans is the story of how the ideals of the young northern author of the quote above became so unrecognisably warped as to give us a double album with a mere four songs, each one clocking up a concentration-sapping 20 plus minutes.

Like their equally serious peers and contemporaries, Yes were a band with easily identifiable roots in the beat boom, in love with the Beatles, Motown and the 5th Dimension. Their earlier works had displayed a snappier dynamic, albeit one increasingly stretched and complicated until, with their previous opus (and they would have loved to think of it as such), Close To The Edge, they’d reduced the ‘album’ form to three songs. One a whole side’s worth. The next step HAD to be bigger, weightier and ‘difficult’. Tales… delivered this in spades.

I can merely attempt to contextualise Tales… within the zeitgeist from which it sprang as well as the worldview of a wide-eyed 13-year old who unwrapped a copy of this album on Christmas day of that year. Yes, I was a fan at an early and important stage of my musical life. My heroes (as odd as it may seem now) were both Yes AND David Bowie. And I spent a good deal of that afternoon (and weeks to come) musing over a piece of music based on the writings of an Eastern yogi.

Let’s examine that last statement. Should the inexperienced reader doubt size of the band’s ambition it’s always useful to refer to the very sleeve notes by Jon Anderson which possibly did most to sink the project before it had time to flourish in the eyes of a public waiting for the next revelation:

‘We were in Tokyo on tour, and I had a few minutes to myself in the hotel room before the evening's concert. Leafing through Paramhansa Yoganada's "Autiobiography Of A Yogi" I got caught up in the lengthy footnote on page 83. It described the four part shastric scriptures which cover all aspects of religion and social life as well as fields like medicine and music, art and architecture.’

So, no pressure there, then: Just a work that addresses ‘all aspects of religion and social life as well as fields like medicine and music, art and architecture’.

To be clear about this, Yes were, by no means, the first to try such things. Other bands had attempted to raise their game in this way many times before. The Moody Blues had made an orchestral album about an entire day (Days Of Future Passed) while side two of Procol Harum’s Shine On Brightly had contained a suite about life, death and reincarnation ('In Held ‘Twas In I'). And in the hipper corners of the contemporary music press the whole idea of ‘progressive rock’ and the concept album was already seen as somewhat passé. No real new ground was being broken here, but by the close of 1973, with the UK heading into recession this was perhaps not the time to be rolling out such high-minded stuff.

Tales… not only tipped the genre into ridicule but also simultaneously proved to ardent believers that their path towards greater dexterity, trickier (and longer) arrangements and weightier subject matters than young love was the true path. This may seem wrong-headed today, and the album may have turned away the hipper cognoscenti, but it still backed a hugely successful world tour and sold in healthy quantities.

The first question with Yes’ Tales… should not be why? But how? How did a record so weighed down by its own self-importance reach the shelves?

And as to whether it’s any good? Frankly that, dear reader, is entirely up to you. It’s safe to say that, for me, Tales… is both musically fascinating and wonderfully, fabulously silly. By its own creators’ admission (notably Rick Wakeman and Chris Squire, who were far less involved in its genesis than Jon Anderson and guitarist Steve Howe), Tales… is a step too far. It’s too lacking in the democratic methods of composition that the band had previously employed (which ironically had driven out former drummer Bill Bruford; exasperated by the painstakingly slow process of recording) and has, in several major sections, a tendency to wander and procrastinate: almost another candidate for George Martin’s famous observation about the Beatles' White Album: it would have made a great single album.

But there’s far more to be extrapolated from this record. Tales… becomes a perfect starting point for unwrapping the whole wonderfully silly and simultaneously majestic story of ‘rock’. The Tales… do indeed tell a tale. To fully understand the very existence of such a thing is to understand a cultural knot so dense and indigestible that it’s become a byword for the worst excesses of the time: not drugs, not groupies but SHOWING OFF.

To modern ears (and eyes… ouch, those clothes) prog has become synonymous with egotism and a wilful desire to drive away musical tourists. Snobbism in 12’’ form. Only to a minority does the term still hold artistic credibility, making it one more ghettoised genre with its own uniform and codes of conduct. But another look at that quote above gives a lie to that fallacy. In 1973 prog wasn’t elitist, it was actually thought of as a bold way of ‘developing’ our musical evolution. And these bands sold out wherever they played.

Everything about Tales… can teach us about how the business of making music worked at that point in time, from the choice of studio and the amount of time spent working on the album’s creation to the design of the sleeve and the famously elaborate supporting tour’s stage design (both by prog’s in-house designer of choice, Roger Dean): it is at once terrible and still makes one breezily nostalgic for more innocent times.

In short: there’s an argument that any study of Tales… will tell you all you need to know not only about the state of popular music in 1973 but also how, a mere four years later, that landscape had changed so drastically. Yes, King Crimson, Genesis: all of these bands still had something to give, despite the oft-repeated slur of being branded dinosaurs by their younger siblings. But for anyone who still wonders where it all went wrong (and, more importantly, why if you mention progressive rock people have a tendency to snigger at you), the year 1973 holds the key.