Talent Is an Asset- The Story of Sparks

by Daryl Easlea

  When the mixing was nearly complete, the Maels and Winwood were having issues with the sound of Gordon’s bass on ‘Amateur Hour’. “They asked me to replace the bass part playing Ian Hampton’s Fender instead of my Rickenbacker, which was my signature sound,” Gordon continues. “I was extremely uncooperative and did it with as much bad grace as I could muster. You could see the secretaries in the office through this glass door from the studio at Basing Street. I turned my back on the band and played the entire thing looking out and waving to them to make the point that I wasn’t amused. That probably, more than comments about inaudible details, sealed my fate.”

  It was only afterwards that Gordon twigged how Hampton’s bass kept popping up everywhere — at the rehearsal rooms, in the studio. At the time, “because he was in Jook and also managed by John, they were all basically around and we used to cross over at rehearsals. I should’ve thought, when his bass was about, that there was more going on than met the eye but I didn’t.”

  Once the album was completed, Hewlett immediately got the band in to rehearse for live performances. Sensing that he might just have a phenomenon on his hands, Hewlett booked the cinema on Fulham Road that Emerson, Lake and Palmer had turned into Manticore Studios, part-owned by Chris Blackwell. To flesh out the live sound, a second keyboard player was required, and so another specific advert was placed in Melody Maker: “Organist required by major label recording band — image extremely important (no beards or bulges).”

  Peter Oxendale answered the ad and an audition took place on February 16 at The Furniture Cave at 533 King’s Road. Oxendale’s tenure was brief, but long enough for him to be immortalised in Joseph Fleury’s Sparks Flashes magazine, which came out just ahead of the release of Kimono My House. Being frightfully well bred, unlike the rest of the band, he was quickly anointed ‘Sir’ by Adrian Fisher. Years later, Oxendale went on to be a music litigation specialist after working for Chris de Burgh for many years. “Peter Oxendale should never have been in there,” Hewlett says, laughing. “But he could play. He delves into piracy these days. He was very, very good at what he did. God knows why he was there.”

  Sparks rehearsed for about a week at Manticore with Oxendale on organ. Rehearsals continued through to March, by which time the band heard the early radio plays of LP taster single ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us’. It was during these rehearsals that the resentments between the Maels and Gordon reached a pitch.

  Martin Gordon: “One day, I made the enormous, grievous mistake of suggesting that I had a song which I felt was appropriate for what we were doing. I think you could’ve heard another pin drop. This was not me even suggesting a song to record, we were just looking for material for live dates. That was the moment probably when the red flag went up. I would’ve played it on a cassette or something but we didn’t get that far.” The song, ‘Cover Girl’, became one of the staples of Gordon’s subsequent act, Jet.

  Hampton’s Fender bass reappeared and Gordon was again asked to play it. “It was weird to me as it wasn’t the bass itself. It can be a very defining instrument but actually it’s based on what it plays rather than the sound of what it plays. What I was doing in musical terms was completely acceptable in terms of notation, if you consider they were objecting to the bass rather than just me. It was a very strange idea to think that if you change the sound of the bass then everything would be OK.”

  This all seemed to mask that Ron and Russell were not happy with Gordon. “John later said to me that they were, in his words ‘frightened by me and the angle I was taking’, so it’s the whole thing I guess. I wanted to keep the bass as a very dominating instrument.”

  Music aside, the band was simply not gelling as a solid unit: “There were a few social occasions and they were really excruciating,” Gordon says with a grimace. “We went to the Hard Rock Cafe in Green Park once and the tension didn’t come from previous arguments or disagreements, it was just there. The two Americans were not the kind of people with whom I, at any rate, could strike up any kind of meaningful relationship for whatever reason.”

  There was something Gordon did admire that Ron wrote for Sparks Flashes. “It was kind of a list of ‘things to do’ musically — how to make things better’. It was very tongue-in-cheek musicality done in a popular manner. I remember being quite impressed by that, even though I’ve not followed any single one of those recommendations!”

  Entitled ‘Jam Proof Your Composition (It’s The Same Old Song, But Only Shorter)’, the list was hilarious, giving 10 bullet points to achieve well-written songs, although to be honest, it was akin to Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies cards, which appeared a year later. The Mael checklist included: ‘Avoid the key of E. Avoid the key of A’; ‘Never use A major or minor, when an augmented or diminished will do just as well’; ‘A good rule of thumb is ‘when a solo soon will grate, modulate;” and two that Sparks have continued to follow — ‘Save your cleverest lyrics for those long passages in one chord’ and ‘Whenever possible, all solos should be restricted to the final passage of a song where they can be quickly and cleanly faded.’

  ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us’ was released as a single on March 22. It was a bold choice at the time. “It was so wacky,” says Winwood. “We knew there was something about this, but although on the one hand it seemed obvious, on the other I wondered if it could possibly be a hit. It was so different from anything else that there was in the charts.”

  The song received its first play on Nicky Horne’s Capital Radio show on March 11 and it soon won Capital Radio’s People Choice slot, comfortably beating new releases from Martha Reeves (‘Power Of Love’), Harry Chapin (‘WOLD’) and Charlie Rich (‘Behind Closed Doors’). At the BBC, John Peel supported it on his popular, taste-making Radio 1 show, as he had done with some of Sparks’ previous Bearsville sides. Of Peel’s fellow DJs at the Beeb, Anne Nightingale championed the single on Radio 1, while on Emperor Rosko’s Roundtable, Elton John dubbed it “a smash”. Fellow guest and co-writer Bernie Taupin mentioned that he had seen Sparks at the Whisky in LA the previous year (so it was he alongside those waitresses). However, the single did not immediately explode commercially. Thanks to Tim Clark and the Island marketing team keeping the pressure on, however, by the start of May it had started to climb the charts.

  The world of The Rubettes, Ray Stevens and Abba, the Swedish winners of the Eurovision Song Contest, was the musical milieu into which Sparks were launched in the UK. The sleeve notes for the 1990 Island Records CD Mael Intuition, by Gummo Mael (a nom de plume for writer Paul Morley) aptly describes ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us’ as “a startled, shiny/matt, smooth/rough, opaque/ translucent, thick/thin collision and bruise song, a crammed scam through the imagined Mael world of inzany pressure and emotional crack. It was a bit of heart beating shock to a tamed pop system, and shot them into the charts, just like that.”

  ‘This Town…’ was one of those records. As Richard Williams describes in the Island 50 celebratory volume, Keep On Running, it was “wonderfully camp and melodramatically multi-faceted”. Chris Blackwell put aside his previous reservations and learned to love it: “It had this syncopation. It wasn’t like a regular song that would have a beginning, middle and end, it just had all these complex arrangements and different sounds.”

  ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us’ created a huge splurge. From its initial piano fade-in of advancing menace, it is one of the strongest, most striking singles of the Seventies, or any decade for that matter. As Joseph Fleury wrote in Sparks Flashes, “if only ONE John Wayne movie was one tenth as exciting as this track, we could forgive him his expanding paunch. Powerful stuff.”

  One of the great tales propagated by the Maels was that Elton John bet against the record being a hit. Although Winwood had ultimately plumped for it as the leading single, he had expressed his doubts as to its commerciality to Elton who, being a neighbour, used to pop round to Winwood’s house in Pinner t
o play table football.

  Muff Winwood: “I knew Elton and Bernie Taupin very well. One night they were over and I played it to them. Elton thought it was fantastic. It was the other way around [to what the Mael brothers claimed]. Elton said to me, ‘Listen, I’ll bet you a hundred quid that that makes the Top 3’.” Winwood’s wife agreed that it would be a smash, and Sparks’ producer’s doubts were assuaged.*

  “I know that it didn’t take us very long to realise that we had a huge hit on our hands,” Tim Clark says. And he was spot on. The single’s momentum arrived as Britain was recovering from the three day week, and had three television channels featuring precious little pop music. There were occasional pop guest turns on The Des O’Connor Show, slots on The Golden Shot, The Mike and Bernie Winters Show, Presenting Nana Mouskouri and magician David Nixon’s show, but all eyes were on the weekly Thursday-night pop fix, Top Of The Pops on BBC1.

  Sparks should have first appeared on the show on May 2. However, the Musician’s Union dispute from the end of the previous year reared its head again.

  Martin Gordon: “I was quite excited. I realised that Top Of The Pops was kind of defining the real market by that point and I thought ‘Ah ha, OK, I’m going to make it.’ We went to the studios and we got kicked out. We weren’t allowed to ‘perform’ because they had no work visas and Hewlett, in his managerial efficiency, hadn’t realised that because they were Americans, they needed a work visa to do Top Of The Pops. The producer, Robin Nash, said ‘Come back next week’.” Martin Gordon turned 20 the following day and did not achieve his dream of being on the show as a teenager.

  Sparks were replaced by The Rubettes, whose single ‘Sugar Baby Love’ had been stuck at number 51, as their guitarist Tony J Thorpe commented. “We were very lucky to get on Top Of The Pops; the work permits for Sparks fell through at the last minute and we got on in their place. Our hats became bigger than the band.”

  Sparks got their chance again a week later. On the day that the Watergate hearings began in Washington and a New Jersey singer-songwriter played a concert in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that made rock critic Jon Landau write, “I saw rock and roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen,” the band appeared on a Top Of The Pops bill that included UK talent show Opportunity Knocks winners Paper Lace singing their future US chart-topper ‘The Night Chicago Died’. Overnight, Sparks became a huge talking point.

  “It was one of those songs that one had to have immediately,” future Duran Duran bassist John Taylor, then a 13-year-old in Birmingham, says. “It’s a great song, it’s a great production. Every Friday morning you were talking about somebody — I remember seeing Cockney Rebel for the first time; David Bowie for the first time. Queen had their TOTP moment with ‘Seven Seas Of Rhye’. For some artists it was just the beginning but with Sparks that song is still the one.”

  Another viewer was Taylor’s future Duran Duran bandmate Nick Rhodes. “That period in pop was one of the most golden. Every week on Top Of The Pops there was a new treasure unveiled and Sparks were right in the middle of that with ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us’. I saw the Mael brothers and thought that I’d never seen anything like this in my life. You instantly knew that there was something about them that was very different. I was immediately fascinated with that song. The arrangement is pretty extraordinary, the lyric surreal — unlike anything else out there at that time. The physical sound of it and the use of the gunshot, the guitar break, that voice!”

  This TOTP performance was to become the stuff of legend. It was a striking, stunning performance. Arriving for most people out of the blue with no recourse to the band’s history, it seemed so assured, as if (which was indeed true) the viewer had arrived in the middle of something that had already been in place for a considerable period.

  There the Maels were in all their glory, with the act honed from the ‘Doggie Bed Factory’, through Max’s, The Marquee and The Pheasantry, played out on prime-time TV. Ron remembers the performance with tremendous affection: “That level of notoriety was something — all of a sudden you’ve gone from playing to six people at the Whisky to being on Top Of The Pops — where 25% of the country saw you!”

  The image was something that struck future punk chronicler Jon Savage: “[Sparks] certainly enlivened Top Of The Pops, with their great brother double act. Russell wearing women’s jackets was a big thing with the padded shoulders. It was a bit androgynous as well, which is a good thing. Then there was Ron Mael’s look, capturing the mood of austerity with the sort of tie that Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren were selling in their shop, Let It Rock.”

  John Hewlett: “I was sick of blue jeans and rock’n’roll dress. I was all for the mod-eqsue sharpness, a bit cleaner.” There was certainly a link between the look and sound of Hewlett’s former group, John’s Children, and Sparks — an incredible edge to their look and an economy in their grooves. As well as the Sixties, the Thirties had become fashionable again with films such as The Great Gatsby and Cabaret presenting definite looks of the decade that were distinct from the war and the depression. Art deco had become a popular collectors’ item and flea markets were popular. “There was really the idea of a kind of ‘pop culture/retro’ going on,” Savage continues. “And a looking back to the Sixties with the compilations Hard Up Heroes and Nuggets, which were available on import. I was the only person at university who had the original singles.”

  Savage, who would buy his singles on London’s Golborne Road, points out that a lot of the people who were involved in pop in 1974 had been involved on the fringes of the Sixties beat scene. “You had this link between that weird psycho hard mod of 1966 and suddenly it cropped up in 1974. Sparks are not mellow in any way. They were an important preparation for punk.” Looking and sounding like nothing else around at that point, Sparks became a national pop talking point.

  A seldom-seen promotional film, directed by Rosie Samwell-Smith, then wife of former Yardbirds man Paul Samwell-Smith, was shot for ‘This Town…’ at Lord Montague’s Car Museum in Beaulieu in the New Forest. It was never seen at the time as there were too few outlets for promo clips then. In it, Gordon shoots Russell with a double-barrelled shotgun. A prescient image …

  With the release of the album due, and the single climbing the charts, John Hewlett realised he would need support. His first port of call was Larry Dupont. However, a year was a long time and Dupont had been hanging out, skiing, while putting his life back together after an intensive year with Sparks.

  Larry Dupont: “John was great. He’d taken what Island wanted and produced something that was finally successful. He remembered our time together in London and he asked me to continue working with the group.” However, as they spoke, Hewlett could hear how settled Larry was. “John said ‘You’re saying you’re really happy now. What would you rather have — happiness or excitement?’ It was a very eloquent way of putting it. I said ‘Happiness’. John is the kind of person who would’ve opted for excitement.” Dupont did not rejoin the operation.

  Joseph Fleury, the wordsmith and Sparks fan from New York, was next on Hewlett’s list for assistance. “Ron and Russell told me this guy was really a fan and really good,” said Hewlett. “It was such a good move; Joseph loved the stuff I hated — the press, promo. I couldn’t stand it as I like to get on quietly. The combination was really good. Joseph was wonderful.”

  Martin Gordon: “Joe was a lovely guy, very open and very approachable. It was actually fun to be with him. He just appeared. He’d be the guy who would make the calls and tell us when rehearsals were, so maybe he was actually kind of understudying John in a way.”

  With Fleury on board, the support team was completed by Lee Packham, Muff Winwood’s PA at Island, who would assist with the paperwork and shipping of equipment. “It was a wonderful team,” Hewlett says. “Muff, Joseph, Lee and myself, with David Betteridge at the record company, it was really cool.” Adding Fred Cantrell in Island sales and Dave Domleo, the label’s promotion guy, the tea
m were ready to sell Sparks.

  Having no British origins for people to relate to, Sparks could be as enigmatic as they liked, adding to their novelty as Americans in England — and the UK was receptive to something exotic and mysterious as an antidote to the grimness of Britain in 1974. With Fleury at the helm, Sparks’ communications with the outside world took on a deceptive, yet hilarious sheen. In a world today inured by spin, back then it was all old-fashioned huckstering. Working with Brian Blevins in the Island press office, Fleury, with not inconsiderable help from the Maels and Hewlett, went into overdrive, planting Sparks fables in the media.

  The global village in 1974 was tiny. There wasn’t scope for verifying ‘facts’, and with the brothers’ sense of the absurd, coupled with their overall drollness, an incredibly gullible audience was prepared to take these tales at face value. Why would they not be true?

  The propaganda machine went into overdrive, spinning a web of elaborate exaggeration and fantasy to complement their image. In Sparks Flashes they were the children of Doris Day, the Kennedys had somehow been involved, they were living in David Bowie’s old flat in Beckenham, and they were about to write a cookbook.

  Spinning such yarns was straight out of an old-school Hollywood publicity department. “Making a cookbook was a fun idea,” says Hewlett. “The Kennedy thing, the Doris Day stuff was a typical Joseph or Ron and Russell scam. Joseph loved all that. I think it was actually quite destructive over time as it is a lie: even something put out in pure fun permeates and it causes confusion. At that time it did add some mystique.”

  And what did they look like? With Bowie talking of his sexuality and nobody being quite sure what Brian Eno was, there were, of course, mutterings about Russell’s androgyny and the brothers’ sexuality. It was all extremely good for business. “Pop has to be an area of play,” says Jon Savage. “It’s not classical music. A lot of people are really afraid of playing. Just because you wear a woman’s jacket, it doesn’t mean you’re gay, and if you are, what the hell? If you want to mince about, mince about. I don’t have a problem with straight boys pretending to be gay. Gay people get terribly fundamentalist about all this stuff. It is pop; entertainment. Music in context of time and place, it was great fun.”