by Daryl Easlea
While Winwood set about finding a suitable candidate as producer, Hewlett put an advert in Melody Maker in July 1973 looking for musicians. One of the first applicants was a young, classically trained bass player, Martin Gordon, who was working as a technical author for a shipping company. He had taken the job for the simple reason he could sit by a telephone and try for better things.
“Oh yes, I was desperately in love with maritime engineering and oil tankers,” Gordon laughs. “My parents were technophobes and they had no telephone. The only way I could see of getting into the world of professional music was via the back of the Melody Maker and you’d need a phone for that. There you’d see that King Crimson needed a lead vocalist or Supertramp needed a bass player. I saw that Sparks and Roxy Music needed bassists and I figured out that as this thing was all done over the telephone, the only way to do it was to look for a local job that would give me a desk with a fixed phone line. The only thing I could find was this maritime engineering company and I bluffed my way in at the age of 18.”
Ipswich-born Gordon had been in his job for about nine months when he saw the advert for Sparks. “I rang the ad because I remembered that Bob Harris was extremely snotty about them on The Old Grey Whistle Test. There must’ve been something in it. I wasn’t particularly impressed with the singer but I went to the local record store and listened to some tunes — I didn’t buy them, I stress — but I listened to them and then when I saw the ad in the paper I thought, I don’t mind if that pans out.”
Gordon had little grasp of popular music, and had seen and heard only glimpses. “There were no radios tuned to pop music stations in my house and I didn’t see it on TV. If it wasn’t written down in the Daily Telegraph, where was I going to see it?”
In August, Gordon went to audition at Hewlett’s house in Purley for the Maels, with his friend, drummer Bob Sturt. The duo made the tortuous pre-M25 journey from Hitchin, Hertfordshire in the drummer’s battered Jaguar. Gordon’s first impressions of the Mael brothers were clear. “I can only talk about it from my perspective of today — I didn’t have the tools and vocabulary in those days. I see now that they were extremely introverted and probably very uncomfortable for whatever reason. I always felt that it was pretty much impossible to make any personal connection.”
Although it was clear that Sturt was not what they were looking for, they chatted with Gordon. At this meeting, the kernel of an idea was placed in the bass player’s head, that of being a collaborator with Russell and Ron. “John asked me what I wanted from being in a group,” Gordon explains. “I replied being able to contribute ideas. I asked Ron what he was looking for from the person who was to join his band, and he replied ‘A Lennon for my McCartney’. It sounded kind of OK. It certainly gave me the impression that this was a cooperative venture, at least to some extent, which suited me fine.”
Hewlett says that initially, he saw it as “there was always an opening for other people to write, but it always had to be acceptable to Ron and Russell. At that early stage it wasn’t acceptable, but later on it could have been like George Harrison in The Beatles. He didn’t write early on but later wrote some fantastic stuff; even Ringo did.” Although the audition had gone cordially, Gordon returned to Hitchin and heard nothing.
Hewlett eventually called Gordon again, and invited him for another audition at the Friern Barnet Cricket Club, equidistant between Hitchin and Croydon. Gordon played this time with Jook guitarist Trevor White and drummer Chris Townson. “Chris used to live in Friern Barnet and the cricket club was at the bottom of his garden,” Gordon recalls. “That’s where he used to practise.
“In the intervening time, I had all my hair cut. Previously I’d had traditional college student, shoulder-length hair when I’d been down to Purley to meet them. I’d thought ‘Sod it, this isn’t going to happen’ and suddenly went and got all my hair cut off. They took this to be an enormous improvement.”
Liking what they saw, the players rehearsed their way through old Sparks favourites, the ‘girl’ trilogy ‘Wonder Girl’, ‘I Like Girls’ and ‘Girl From Germany’.
Martin Gordon: “Then Ron gave me £10, which was a huge amount of money then and he said, ‘This is for you and this is going to cover your expenses next time you come down.’ From that, I understood that I was in the band and I thought that maybe you could make a living being a musician.”
Gordon was the first member of the new Sparks; White and Townson were too involved with Jook at this juncture to make any permanent commitment to Hewlett’s new charges. Gordon was recalled to Basing Street studios in Notting Hill for a further run through of some new material. Original demos were made with sometime Roxy Music bassist John Porter, who would have made the connection between the two groups even more implicit, and also ex-Pink Fairies guitarist Paul Rudolph.
Throughout October, the group auditioned again. Witty adverts were placed in the wanted section of Melody Maker — “drummer — must be an exciting, inventive drummer with a really good face that isn’t covered with a beard”. Lead guitarist — “must be incredible looking and an exciting, accomplished guitarist”. And so, an exciting, inventive drummer and an incredible-looking guitarist were eventually located.
The first recruit was the self-taught Norman ‘Dinky’ Diamond on drums. Almost as much of a selling point in the UK line-up as the Maels, Aldershot-born Diamond had been playing in local bands while working in electrical distribution, influenced by then-recently deceased UK jazz drummer Phil Seaman. His mixture of aggression and finesse produced, as Trevor White was later to describe, a player who was a cross between Keith Moon and Ringo Starr.
Guitarist Adrian Fisher was the last to join. He had the most experience of the new players, having been in ex-Free bassist Andy Fraser’s shortlived Toby, and had played with the young Gary Moore in Skid Row. With his music-business knowledge, he was not willing to sign anything until his lawyer had been consulted.
Fisher added a considerable amount of grit to proceedings; as he said, his ambition for the band was to “butch things up a bit and get a blues lick in everything”.
John Hewlett: “Adrian slayed them all. He was the best. He was the business. He was one of the greatest guitarists that I’ve ever heard, a fucking brilliant player. The band was definitely Ron and Russell’s choice, and they were good choices. It was a real rock band.”
It has long been reported that there was talk of Roy Wood, formerly of The Move and ELO and then enjoying chart success with Wizzard, producing Sparks for their Island debut. However, Muff Winwood suggests that it was actually Wood’s former Move and ELO cohort, Jeff Lynne, that the group wanted.
Muff Winwood: “I had this brilliant idea that Jeff would be the perfect producer. Because of his strong musical thing and the fact he’d been in bands that had very weird ways about them and he was a very strong musician. I thought he’d be ideal. I remember taking it to him and he loved it, but ultimately he turned it down and my whole brilliant idea of how this was going to work fell to the ground.”
Lynne at this point was intent on breaking ELO in the US market, something that he, along with manager Don Arden, set about doing with élan in the mid Seventies.
Winwood decided to keep rehearsing Sparks until they were ready for a name producer to come in and be impressed enough to work with the band on the spot. It was during this further period of making demos that the perfect choice was staring them in the face. “We were at the rehearsal studios and I set about doing things with the band,” Winwood laughs, “and I was kind of directing them in many ways and Hewlett said to me, ‘Why don’t you do it?’ and it hadn’t really crossed my mind so I said ‘I’ll go in and we’ll do a couple of tracks and see how it goes’.”
Although Winwood had produced several acts, such as Patto, the thought hadn’t occurred to him as he had been spending so much time overseeing Island’s Basing Street division.
From a modern vantage point, Hewlett thinks Winwood is being a tad disingenuous: “When Muff ca
me to rehearsal, you could see his jaw drop. Maybe he didn’t want to produce it, but I don’t believe a word of that! It worked very well, as he was the in-house A&R guy for Island. Muff wanted to produce it the moment he saw it. He walked in the rehearsal room, and how could you not want to produce it? It was a great band with Martin in it; you could see it was going to work.”
As the band rehearsed in Clapham, there was a feeling of optimism, as Gordon confirms: “There was certainly the feeling in rehearsal that this was amazing. We would play something to the point where things were all prepared and the thing would kind of manifest itself in the room. I had no idea whether it was going to be a hit or not, but how we sounded was enough of a result. Anything further would be icing on the cake.”
As a band the early Sparks were simply sensational. The song ‘Barbecutie’ was one of the first things that they played, and there was talk about it being Sparks’ debut British single. Listening to the track now, it demonstrates just why Gordon was invited to join the group, with his aggressive bass playing well up in the mix. As the album took shape, ‘Barbecutie’ was considered out-of-step and was left off the running order to be issued as the B-side to the first single.
Hewlett observed how the three new players really unlocked the Maels’ writing and performing. What before had been over-mannered and gimmicky now began to rock. It was like some good old British power pop and hard rock had slipped into the mix, ratcheting up Ron’s writing and Russell’s performance. “I loved that full in-your-face stuff,” Hewlett says, “but you have to have melody; songs are the root of it all.” And Ron was certainly bringing songs to the table.
Studio time was booked at The Who’s south London facility, Ramport, in Battersea.
Muff Winwood: “It was reasonably cheap in there so we went in and we planned to cut this record. I tried to keep the band good and rocky, some good hard guitar parts in it to try and anchor down the very high-pitched Ron and Russell stuff. That was the basic idea and it seemed to work really well.”
Although, thanks to constant rehearsals, the band was very tight by this point, Sparks would never be a ‘group’. It was always the Maels and the three other players. “I don’t think they ever really clicked,” Winwood continues. “They were John’s mates really and Ron and Russell accepted them early on because they didn’t know anybody better. There was never a close relationship really. It was very much a put together kind of a group but it worked well live. Everything got them to the position that when the records eventually happened, they were ready for the off.”
Gordon remembered Hewlett and Mael’s “Lennon to my McCartney” discussion, but was content to sit tight at this juncture.
Martin Gordon: “The album took quite some time to prepare. We began in late summer and it was finished in January. It took a big chunk of time and I wasn’t so bold as to immediately charge in and say ‘OK, well I’ve got 15 songs, why don’t we rehearse them?’ But I was quite happy to do my arranging and collaborative thing on a secondary level.”
Through Gordon’s classical background and also his time in the National Jazz Youth Orchestra, he was able to assist with the arrangements, and he acknowledges that there was a fruitful period of cooperation. Fisher and Gordon became close: “I related to Adrian because he had something to say for himself. I got the impression that Dinky’s main goal was to have a job. I don’t know if he was particularly interested in music; he may have been, but we didn’t communicate on that level.”
Muff Winwood was the glue to the recordings, shaping the sound, working closely with engineers Richard Digby-Smith and Tony Platt.
Martin Gordon: “Muff was a hands-on producer in the old school sense. He isn’t an engineer/producer. He was very good at looking at the bigger picture: he suggested, and I knew that I would never have thought of it, the coda in ‘Hasta Mañana, Monsieur’, where it stops and comes back in again. He’d come up with great ideas — such as making things a little faster. He was very good at ‘big picture’ ideas but the extremely competent engineers looked after the minutiae.”
One person who definitely wasn’t contributing musical advice was Hewlett, as Gordon says good-naturedly. “John Hewlett is completely and utterly clueless as a musician, so he was looking after managerial things and not musical things.”
One track kept resurfacing during the sessions called ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us’. Originally titled ‘Too Hot To Handle’, it had been written by Ron on a piano at his parents’ house in Clapham. It was a grand cinematic subversion on the classic love song, based on Ron trying to master Bach’s etudes. As his practising became more frenzied, the song started to take shape and as he started to put a lyric to it, the idea hung around the ultimate movie showdown, the challenge from one gunfighter to another. In his excitement to finish, Ron hadn’t realised he’d written it in a key higher than the one in which Russell usually sang.
Muff Winwood: “I can remember cutting ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both of Us’ and engineer Richard Digby-Smith coming up with the wacky idea of putting gunshots on it. I often get credited with that idea. It was his. We’d cut the track and then had a lunch break. When Ron and I and a couple of the others got back, Richard said, ‘Here, listen to this.’ He’d found a BBC Sound Effects record in the studio with the gunshots on it. He played the track with the effects over and that was it. It just sounded fantastic. At least the rest of us were smart enough to realise it was good.”
David Betteridge kept an eye on proceedings in the studio: “I was hands-on in the sense I made the decision how much money was going to be spent. I’d drop into the studio out of courtesy, but not to get involved. Muff was a very competent head of A&R. Artists liked him because he’d been an artist himself, he was a calm sort of character, good with money and good to talk to. I totally supported what he wanted. I thought Sparks were great; they were very poppy for Island Records. They were considered an oddity but you have to remember that at the time Roxy Music, now everyone’s seminal band, were seen as very poppy.”
The Island boss was conspicuous by his absence. “He never appeared,” says Gordon. “I understood that Chris Blackwell disapproved of us highly, which you can imagine as it’s not really Blackwell’s sort of thing. He left it all to Muff. David Betteridge was very personable but it was hard to tell whether anybody actually thought it was any good or not.”
The contract between Sparks and Island Records was signed by Betteridge, the Maels, Diamond, Fisher and Gordon on November 22, 1973. The deal was for four long-playing albums.
Martin Gordon: “With it being my first band, I took John Hewlett’s advice at face value. Here was somebody who had been doing it for donkey’s years, at least as far as I was concerned. I didn’t know the first thing about PRS or anything at all and if he said in his infinite wisdom, ‘This is how it works’, then I had no information to contradict it. Adrian got a very good deal because he had obviously been in other bands. I remember at the time we were rehearsing in Clapham and the Island deal was ready to be signed. Adrian held the whole proceedings up because he kept saying ‘No no, I’ve still got to talk to my lawyers about this and there are some things which we have to work out’, and of course the entire band and John Hewlett were mad about this, myself included, because I felt he was jeopardising the whole thing when in fact he was just being very sensible.”
Hewlett also had the not inconsiderable matter of getting the Mael brothers into the British Musician’s Union. Hewlett sent a letter to the organisation on December 4, pleading with the Union to accept the brothers. On December 17, they were again rejected. Bernard Parris, the Central London Branch Secretary, replied, “I am sure you will appreciate that in London the problem of foreign musicians is a very real one and the Committee feel that they are serving the best interests of members by seeking to restrict the influx of foreign musicians as far as possible.”
This red tape was to prove a considerable stumbling block the following year.
C
hapter Five
“Christ! There’s Hitler On The Telly”
“SHEESH! One way or another, 1974’s turning out to be quite a year for rock ‘n’ roll.”
Ian Macdonald, NME, May 1974.
“It’s got the musical extravagance of Wizzard, the sophisticated feel of Roxy and the menacing power of the Third Reich.”
Sounds, 1974
David Bowie and Roxy Music had made it clear that there was room in the mixed up, disposable teeny world for literate, considered, ironic pop. By 1974 these characters had finished their first cycle at the summit and the pop world was ready for fresh blood: Cockney Rebel were evidently the new Bowie; Sparks were to become, initially, the new Roxy Music. Mixed with vaudeville. And a moustache.
After stints at Ramport, AIR and Wessex studios, the final stage of recording the album — now titled Kimono My House, a pun on the Rosemary Clooney hit ‘Come On-A My House’ * — took place at Island’s Basing Street studio. The sound the group made was dizzying, intense; a rush of ornate glam, hard mod and power pop, topped off with Russell’s striking delivery. Winwood and Hewlett were exhilarated.
It was during these final sessions that two points of disagreement developed with Martin Gordon: “I still thought my ideas were welcome, but we — the English lot — were excluded from the entire mixing process. We were summoned after the mixes were done. There was one thing which I thought was really wrong, a break in ‘Falling In Love With Myself Again’ where the guitar was clearly inaudible. I remember pointing this out. It was a ‘pin-drop’ moment.”
