by Daryl Easlea
Like Martin Gordon’s experience, Fisher was not getting along with Ron and Russell, largely due to lifestyle and musical differences. “Anything I played [that I thought] was any good ended up on the floor in my absence,” the guitarist told Finnish Sparks fan Petteri Aro in 1997.
John Hewlett: “The brothers didn’t like Adrian, as he represented something they were against. He played the blues, and that would piss them off. That was their petty posing. They disregarded Adrian and his brilliance.”
Trevor White: “I don’t think Adrian deliberately played the blues, he just played what he thought was right. I don’t think he went out to antagonise anybody, he just realised during Propaganda that it wasn’t for him.”
This led to some resentment, and also some highjinks. One night, Fisher watched Russell storm out of the studio. Thinking that he was going into an adjoining office, the singer had chosen a soundproofed store room that couldn’t be opened from the inside. The guitarist knew where he had gone, but neglected to mention it to anyone. An hour and a half later he was found, suitably distraught. “I think he thought it was a lift or something,” White says diplomatically today.
After the album was completed, Fisher was next to go. “Adrian left before he was pushed,” says White. “He didn’t feel appreciated. It wasn’t his sort of music, but he played it really well.”
Fisher came to an agreement with Ron, Russell and Hewlett to take a fee for the album, not wanting to be involved afterwards. As a result, White played rhythm, and Fisher came in when asked to do a guitar part.
“The [Maels] blew it big-time by dumping Martin and Adrian,” Hewlett reflects. “Adrian was pure rock ‘n’ roll. He was all the things that Ron and Russell posed to be, but Adrian was it.” After the first tour and album that they had done as a six-piece, the band went down to five. Ever the diplomat, Russell told Rock and Folk magazine in 1974 that “Adrian Fisher was a great guitar talent and expert blues player… although his playing was perfect for our previous album, we want a different style for the following album and we needed someone who was prepared to move in the same direction as us.”
Fisher went on to join Mike Patto’s Boxer and played a variety of sessions before relocating to Thailand, where he died in March 2000 of a heart attack.*
Toying with a replacement, the brothers considered Ian North from Milk’n’Cookies but rejected him. Hewlett also approached Bill Nelson from Be-Bop Deluxe. At the same time, Ron and Russell had been keeping an eye on the band they had met back in 1972. By now Queen had released two well-respected albums (Queen I and Queen II) and Brian May had quickly established himself as a very competent and stylish player, with a manner that was quite unlike any other guitarist.
“John approached Brian May, which I knew was going to be a no-hoper,” says White. While recording Queen’s third album, Sheer Heart Attack, May was ill in bed when he received a call asking if he would like to join them. Contacted for this book, May confirmed: “Yes, they did offer me a job, but, although I thought Sparks were nice guys and the band was interesting, I never gave it a moment’s serious consideration.”
Ultimately, Trevor White continued alone. “I think it was Dinky who suggested that I could play the parts and why were we looking elsewhere.”
The lead single from the album was the eco-friendly and forward-thinking ‘Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth’ (with the early Kimono My House demo track, ‘Alabamy Right’, on the flip), which the band duly plugged via Top Of The Pops on October 24 and then again on November 7, pushing the single to number 13.
Ian Hampton: “Top Of The Pops was great — it was an honour to be on it, a privilege — as a vehicle for the Top 40 it was unassailable. There were a lot of dropped jaws. Russell carried it off and Ron just scared the hell out of everyone.”
“Our new single is different from our last two,” Russell said. “It’s a bit slower, and it’s now a rock band playing with greater use of the studio. Singles a lot of times are musically stronger than albums. There’s no room for padding in a three-minute framework.” It was a great single, richly autumnal and sweetly melancholic, if slightly wrong-footing their new legion of fans. The brothers’ teenage hero Ray Davies reviewed it on BBC Roundtable and accused the group of taking a hippy earth-child approach.
On October 26, Mirabelle was offering an opportunity to win a date with their cover stars “Russ and Ron”. While teens and pre-teens were filling in their competition forms, Propaganda was about to be released in time for the Christmas market. The album drew largely favourable responses and went on to reach number nine in the UK chart.
In many ways, Propaganda is tremendously accomplished. Not as good a record as Kimono My House, but pretty damn close — the sound inside the Sparks bubble, at the peak of their UK fame, and it showed how accomplished Ron Mael had become as a songwriter.
“Propaganda was more an evolution than a change of direction,” Russell told Record Collector in 2008.
The opening a cappella ‘Propaganda’ gives continuity from the last remnants of the previous album’s ‘Equator’ before charging into the sinister ‘At Home, At Work, At Play’.
“One of the elements we thought could make it more grandiose was the singing,” Ron said in 1982. “The song ‘Propaganda’ was originally an acoustic guitar thing; we just kept recording voices. It was a lot easier to do things with the vocals than to figure out extra guitar parts. I think that vocal style was really influential to some big English bands that have since done pretentious albums.” *
‘Reinforcements’ was either another example of the brothers’ Weimar Germany fixation or an offcut from The Producers. ‘B.C.’, about a man dumped by his wife and child, is perhaps a little too clever for its own good, while ‘Thanks But No Thanks’ takes a child’s eye view of parental authority. ‘Don’t Leave Me Alone With Her’ was one of Russell’s favourite tracks on the album.
“I try to avoid clichés musically, or to use clichés in ways that haven’t been used before, which makes things more interesting,” he told Martin Aston in 2005. “It’s the same with romantic situations. Love songs are generally either happy or sad, but there are so many ways to talk about relationships and put them in a new context. ‘Don’t Leave Me Alone With Her’ takes the opposite tack to most guy’s wishes.”
‘Something For The Girl With Everything’, another blaster in the mode of ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us’, sounds as if it starts during its middle. ‘Achoo’ is probably the only song ever to feature a sneezing solo, which replaced a removed Adrian Fisher guitar solo — too bluesy, perhaps.
The grinding propulsive guitar at the close of ‘Who Don’t Like Kids’, played by White and Fisher, recalls what Gordon had done with ‘Barbecutie’ earlier in the year, creating a noise that sounded exactly like punk some 18 months ahead of time. The album closes with ‘Bon Voyage’, which is reminiscent of ‘Slowboat’ from Sparks. There is simplicity to a great deal of Winwood’s arrangements on Propaganda, and his work on this track, along with Fisher’s lead playing, makes it one of the most satisfying run-outs in Sparks’ career, perilously close to a wig-out.
“The sound of Sparks is… intriguing and imaginative,” Melody Maker wrote. “They blend early production techniques and tricks that worked well to make the records of the ‘50s and ‘60s so successful. The band rely on dynamics and rhythmic changes to carry their tunes rather than depend on one basic melody line.”
Phonograph Record said that “Sparks aren’t going back to the ’60’s — it’s to the 40’s. Nazis, Jews, troops, the military, and the ever present war between men and women.” Rolling Stone was undecided. “In some ways Sparks seems one of the most fascinating bands of the ’70’s,” wrote Ken Barnes, “in other ways they’re a difficult listening experience… it’s likely that some listeners will love them, some will hate them and large numbers will remain ambivalent.”
Martin Gordon subscribed to at least one of those categories. “If one listens to the next r
ecord [Propaganda], I find all the things that began to irritate me. I can’t hear unanimity. I can hear people doing what they’re told.”
Although an unsurprising viewpoint from the ousted bassist, there is a kernel of truth in his comments. Apart from ‘Something For The Girl With Everything’, ‘Bon Voyage’ and ‘Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth’ the album lacks the sonic blast of Kimono My House, though the writing is just as strong. Whatever, it made a worthy successor to its predecessor and ensured that Sparks retained their presence in the UK albums chart over the Christmas period. To support the album’s release, the brothers were interviewed on Sally James’ Saturday Superstore, where they summed up their success: “We came to your country. It sold. That’s the history of Sparks.”
Carrying on the bold statement made on Kimono My House, the cover concept for Propaganda, devised by Ron and photographer Monty Coles, was striking, This time Ron and Russell were on the front of the sleeve, with the rest of the band relegated to the back. However, this wasn’t to be a cheesecake pose — the brothers were bound and gagged on the back of a speedboat. A sticker in the top right corner identified it as the new Sparks album and not one of the real-life crime journals that were so popular back then.
The back cover found the pair tied up in the back of a car, with the band, sans Fisher, standing outside, looking very much as if they were going to take the pair away for a little roughing up. Sparks’ road manager, Richard Coble, can be seen under the bonnet of the Humber dressed as a garage forecourt attendant. The sleeve was perhaps in grim taste as kidnappings, like hijackings, had become dismally fashionable by the mid Seventies, with arguably the highest profile incident happening earlier that year when newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was snatched by the Symbionese Liberation Army
The sleeve locations were taken on the same day at Littlehampton, Sussex and a petrol station near Island Records in Westbourne Grove, west London.
Ian Hampton: “The front cover wasn’t so much fun as it was a really stormy day. The terror on the guy’s faces was genuine. We all went on the boat for a while, but that was the picture that stuck.”
Trevor White: “We spent the whole day on a beach in a gale-force wind being blasted by sand as we’d been waiting for Ron and Russell who’d been out on the boat. We were hanging around. The original idea was to have a picnic on the beach but the weather was so horrendous.”
John Hewlett: “I loved it. Freezing cold, good idea, good concept. The band was a little bit abandoned, but it worked. It was all good.”
It provided another iconic image for Sparks. “The artwork for Propaganda provides another twist, creating these weird personas,” Jon Savage comments. “You’ve got this kind of bondage thing going on and when you look at it, you are immediately drawn to the story: how did they get there? Who are these people? It’s a terrific image: they’re both really skinny, they are both wearing really weird clothes; Ron’s got these flared trousers, pullover and great sunglasses and Russell’s got this weird kind of allure. And that’s before we get to the back! Something is clearly wrong; the rather hard-looking band, the Humber car, the clothes, the concept; absolutely unbelievable.” *
Ira Robbins, founder of Trouser Press, was one of Sparks’ long-time American supporters: “They just struck me as a band that had all the right attributes for making great music and the fact that they went to England and became British pop stars was just a little extra icing for my taste.”
Trouser Press was extremely supportive of British acts and owed a great deal to Melody Maker. “We used to read Melody Maker all the time,” says Robbins, “and yeah, Sparks and T-Rex and Slade and Mud were all we cared about. That was our emerging culture, because there was nothing in America that really did anything for us so we were very aware of Sparks’ success.”
In the autumn the band returned to America for a great deal of promo. On October 8, they taped a showcase on the ABC TV special Wide World In Concert (broadcast a month later), introduced by two of Ron and Russell’s heroes, Keith Moon and Ringo Starr. In New York, Sparks’ US launch occurred the following year at Burger King on 58th Street in Manhattan.
Ira Robbins: “It was the kind of exotic, over-the-top record company party of which there are no more. We were given free rein of the place. It was just a remarkable idea. We would go up to the counter and demand more cheeseburgers and more milkshakes and more fries and it seems incredibly bizarre, although now that I recount it, it sounds pathetically normal. At the time it was a big deal. It was a very big event in New York circles. There was a theme in New York that Sparks fitted comfortably into, which The New York Dolls had started.
“From [the American] experience, it’s a little hard to characterise because the glam-rock era in Britain seems, at least from this remove, to have been a very consistent and well developed phenomenon. In the States, it arrived as a very odd bunch of radar blips. You know Roxy Music and Slade and a few other acts, they were all kind of separate in America; they weren’t on the charts so they weren’t on television every day and they weren’t on the cover of all the papers, so it was a very different phenomenon. But Sparks were welcomed by the same club of 200-300 people in New York that liked the Dolls and that liked Bowie and Lou Reed.
“They were kind of building their own sort of cultural lifestyle out of artists that made sense then. Sparks walked right into the middle of that, even though they were from California, which was a large and very suspicious place for New Yorkers. Yet they just seemed smarter and funnier, sharper and more sardonic than anybody else around and so we pretty much welcomed them with open arms.
“They were really interesting guys,” Robbins assesses. “They were absolutely delightful and exactly what you’d imagine them to be — smart, funny, charming, clever and self-aware. It was really reassuring to know that.”
Unlike their UK counterparts, American audiences saw that this was tricky, intelligent and grown-up music, which, although using the pop form, wasn’t a million miles away ideologically from Zappa or Beefheart.
Trevor White: “It was very different. We went from teenybop mania to respectful silence and we were quite disturbed. When we finished there was loads of applause. It was such a novelty for people — it went down really well.”
In Los Angeles, writer Harvey Kubernik caught up with the brothers at the Continental Hyatt House where the group pondered on their past and present. Ron also gave an insight into his songwriting techniques. “Rock is always bravado. I like using the little guy approach. I like to go at it in a half-serious way to bring out the point sometimes. I don’t write funny songs, I like things where it’s really blurred, and you can’t tell if it’s funny or not funny. I think mystery is a good thing.”
The persistence with the US paid off, and Propaganda became the group’s greatest success there to date, peaking at number 63 in 1975 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Ira Robbins: “There was a brief period in the Seventies when glam rock and glitter got a look-in on American television because of the colour and the costumes and the sensationalism. There were these concert shows on American television that hadn’t existed before, like Midnight Special and ABC’s In Concert, which started putting on bands like Sensational Alex Harvey Band and Slade and, of course, Sparks. The bands that were coming from England that had cool clothes and great stage shows, got a look-in but it didn’t necessarily translate to acceptance or record sales, but they suddenly became part of the culture. Circus magazine was very mainstream-oriented and eventually became very devoted to bands like Kiss. Colourfulness was in and Sparks got swept into that a bit, which was nice. It was cool to turn on the TV and see them on there.”
Mainstream America, however, remained largely impervious to their charms, as Robbins confirms: “I don’t think Sparks ever became competitive for the American record buyer along the lines of the BTOs and Lynyrd Skynyrds — the simple, obvious, party bands that were popular at the time.”
The Maels’ British success began to filter back to
the original band members. “I had no way of knowing what they were up to,” says Harley Feinstein. “This was before Myspace. I’d forgotten about them. One day an envelope arrived at my house — and then out pours a bunch of clippings from Melody Maker and it showed that they had become big stars. It was a total and utter shock to me.”
The cut and thrust of Sparks’ new line-up created havoc on a British tour starting at York University on November 2, closing in Dunstable on the 28th. The 20-date tour included Swansea, Stoke-on-Trent and Southport with a show at Hammersmith Odeon on November 11.
Ian Hampton: “I loved it. I didn’t think the art was being compromised. There were two camps. There were the heads and the screamers; never the twain met. It was great fun. It got kind of dangerous at times, kids pulling Russell off the stage. The teenyboppers were there for all of us, but mostly for Russell.”
Nick Rhodes saw them on November 27. “We were very lucky in Birmingham as the Town Hall was a great venue to see people. It was exciting, it was vibrant. There were lots of screaming girls. The band didn’t have spectacular visuals, it was all about the songs and the delivery, but yeah the audience was pretty crazy.”
A short European tour followed that saw an incredible performance at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw. NME witnessed the show and noted how tight the band had become: “This version of ‘In My Family’ dispels any crap that Sparks are a “cute” band, as Trevor’s lead rips into a savage burst of feedback that sends the crowd bananas”
