Talent Is an Asset- The Story of Sparks

by Daryl Easlea

  Visconti brought all of his production values with him. “Whenever I make an album, I’m always aware that my contribution to culture has to be a high one and has to endure. I always try to do that with every artist I work with. For me, it was so rewarding to be given permission to do that. The [Maels] didn’t have an idea of how to write for strings but they knew the sound that they wanted. They would describe the sound very well to me. With ‘Under The Table With Her’ they said it’s got to be a Mozart string arrangement. I took my cues from them.”

  The album, recorded at Ramport and AIR as well as Visconti’s studio, had been largely demoed by Ron first, with Visconti working with fully sketched-out material. “We never took a lot of time in the studio because we always went in with the songs,” Ron said. “The ones that sound complicated, like ‘Get In The Swing’ or ‘Looks Looks Looks’, were just Tony writing out charts.”

  Indiscreet was recorded at the absolute summit of Sparks’ commerciality hence Island indulged the extravagant budget involved.

  Tony Visconti: “We hired a lot of session musicians, which was very expensive. A majority of the tracks on the album had some extra musician from the outside; either the string section or a big band just for ‘Looks Looks Looks’.” Normal Seventies studio procedure would have been to maximise the use of these external players on a variety of the sessions. Not so with Indiscreet. Says Visconti, “You could have made an entire pop album in those days for what ‘Get In The Swing’ and ‘Looks, Looks, Looks’ cost.”

  It would be the final time the brothers were given carte blanche in the studio until they built their own in the 80s. There is a picture taken at AIR of Ron and Russell, both wearing fetching knitwear, deep in the process of recording. “I would say that Russell and Ron were enjoying themselves immensely,” Visconti says. “They were smiling all the time. They were longing to make this art-pop kind of album. We would just inspire each other and often they would produce me and I would be playing recorders or the stylophone. We just had a good time. They were so happy and so thrilled to even just have someone write those notes for them.

  “There was a bass line to ‘Hospitality On Parade’. It started out as just the bass setting on the stylophone. We were using every trick that we could think of to make an artistically very creative, different album. There was never really a bad day.”

  John Hewlett was around, allowing his charges their head, keeping out of Visconti’s way. Similarly, in his A&R role, and as previous producer, Muff Winwood kept a distant yet watchful eye on proceedings.

  Tony Visconti: “Muff was amazingly supportive. He just stayed away and listened to [the album]. He corrected it when it was finished. We thought we went a little too far but he could see that it had a few hits.”

  White, Hampton and Diamond were not so sure about the prevailing mood of creativity. In a 1991 interview Russell said, “On Indiscreet, we wanted to allow each song’s instrumentation and arrangement to be dictated by the song rather than our obligation to use a four-piece rock band just because we had a four-piece rock band.”

  Ian Hampton: “Indiscreet was a different kettle of fish from Propaganda. Tony’s input to that was very powerful. It started to feel a bit like the brothers and the band. There were several tunes we had absolutely nothing to do with. There was just no place for bass guitar and drums. Visconti was a revelation, he was so clever. I mean, ‘Looks Looks Looks’, he heard it a couple of times, went off and scored all the parts overnight, got the orchestra in the next morning and bang, it was down.”

  Trevor White: “Tony’s really affable — the combination of Ron and Russell meeting him was when it went off the wall a bit. We were no longer as necessary as we were before. It didn’t really require a rock band; it could have all been done with studio musicians … I wasn’t too keen on a lot of it. When you are very involved you get to like a lot of it, but I did think it was too much of a jump from Propaganda. A lot of Indiscreet was simply off the wall. It was very experimental. Tony Visconti was there to do what the [Maels] wanted and gave them a free hand. Lots of people like it — it was just a bit too quick for me.”

  Dinky Diamond was the most discontented: “He was a great guy but he wasn’t happy,”Visconti says. “He was like a straight-up rock drummer and he wanted it to be more of a rock album. ‘Looks Looks Looks’ was the first time he didn’t play drums on an Island Sparks record. That was a real insult to him. But we needed that arrangement, so it really made sense to hire these old British jazz musicians to emulate the Count Basie style. I don’t think Dinky could’ve pulled it off but he was not too pleased. The other two were fine with it, they just went along with the ride.”

  The lack of contributions from the other members has been a little overplayed. They are there, on the majority of the album, although Indiscreet is certainly the start of the path that ultimately led to 1977’s Introducing, featuring just Ron and Russell and session men. What is missing is any conventional soloing, but a traditional rock thrust propels the majority of the album.

  Tony Visconti: “It’s not a straight-up rock album but when it goes rock, I made those guys shine. They really played very well.”

  It’s been said that Dinky took it upon himself to complain to Winwood that Indiscreet did not sound like a Sparks album — that it was too far out, not rock’n’roll enough, something that Hampton refutes.

  During the sessions, there was a lack of socialising. A lot of this was to do with Ron and Russell’s eating habits — or lack of them. “You couldn’t really have dinner with them,” says Visconti, laughing. “They only took one meal a day and it was kind of fetish food, it had a theme. They don’t eat rice, they don’t eat breakfast or lunch, so a lot of time on Indiscreet we might get some sandwiches and Russell and Ron wouldn’t have anything. I wouldn’t mind having a bag of chips and a pint with the band, but you’d never see Russell and Ron do that. They’d have to have a menu out of a restaurant picked from the Egon Ronay book. It was very funny.”

  Visconti was impressed with Ron’s ability to visualise an idea: “I think it’s a shame Ron never properly studied music, because he could probably be a killer string arranger. I felt I had the kind of relationship with the [brothers] that I also established with Bowie. Bowie loves to throw anything at me and asks for the sound he hears in his head. I used to take it for granted in the Seventies that there were a lot of people like that to work with. Sadly that kind of genius, I would say British (and I class the Maels in that) genius, has gone. Nobody thinks at that level any more.”

  With the music sounding grandiose and different, the album sleeve would need to maintain the exacting standards set by Kimono My House and Propaganda and be, naturally, high concept. This would take not one, but two photographers. For the front sleeve, Richard Creamer, who had worked with Sparks on tour, realised the witty image of the brothers escaping from the wreckage of a light aircraft on a suburban street.

  “There’s a small airport in Burbank, Los Angeles,” Russell explained in 2008, “and, at least at the time, they had an area where they stored planes that had been in mishaps, so somebody contacted them and we set up a sort of fake suburbia.” (Creamer also took the inside sleeve shot.)

  The back cover picture was taken by Gered Mankowitz. “I was a little upset that I didn’t do the front shot and Richard Creamer was pretty pissed off he didn’t get asked to do the back cover,” Mankowitz says today. “I loved the idea of the front cover. Everything about it was funny; a great image for the title, and that Russell would survive an airplane crash with just a sore leg.”

  The son of author and screenwriter Wolf Mankowitz, by the mid-Seventies Gered was one of the most well-known names in UK rock photography. Described as “expensive and a little artsy-fartsy but he’s good” by Mickie Most, he’d worked as a freelance from the mid-Sixties and his pictures of The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix in his military uniform were already iconic. Mankowitz had a long association with Island Records. “I started working with Island in 1
963. I did a lot of stuff for Chris Blackwell: Millie, Owen Gray, Jackie Edwards and The Spencer Davis Group. The relationship with Island was one I valued greatly.”

  In May 1975, Mankowitz was in LA shooting for AGI, a manufacturer of album covers. He found Sparks a barn-like studio in Hollywood in which to take stills. The background — of a swimming pool and outbuildings — was from a company that rented scenery to movie studios. The whole session took an afternoon, and Mankowitz was impressed by the band’s professionalism and just how seriously the Maels treated their visual side.

  Gered Mankowitz: “When you work with inspired people you suddenly realise you can go off on a tangent and people will consider it and think how it can be made to work. We really did — no pun intended — spark off each other. I loved their wit. They wanted a complementary image that featured the entire band.”

  In another iconic image, Russell as the country gentleman on horseback is being escorted by his servant (Ron) to a swimming pool party. Although Russell was somewhat apprehensive of being on horseback, he treated the job like the possible former child model he may have been.

  Gered Mankowitz: “My assistant Frances found the horse. It was fully trained. The trainer was just off camera and his job was to make sure the horse’s ears were pricked up and that it didn’t look like a nag.”

  This wasn’t the only shot Mankowitz took that day; there is an amusing out-take of the group all dressed as LAPD officers, save for Russell, who is sitting on his horse, smirking. “The police outfits were really cool. I think the police image would have ultimately been better on the back as it was more American,” muses Hewlett, who’d worked with Mankowitz coincidentally while in John’s Children, “and that, after all, was what we were supposed to be going for.”

  The sleeves for the first three Island albums are witty, stylised and suited the times perfectly. They have many admirers. “They’re great album covers,” says Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes. “That was the other thing that appealed to me about Sparks. They had their visuals together. A lot of things from that period have dated in a bizarre and sometimes unkind way — theirs haven’t. The sleeves still look fantastic.”

  With the Indiscreet sessions completed, the album was slated for an autumn release.* Conscious that half a year had passed since the last Sparks releases (and bearing in mind that, back then, that was a lifetime in pop), Island readied the single ‘Get In The Swing’ for July release.

  ‘Hospitality On Parade’, a fantastic tale of American imperialism on the eve of the bicentennial, is one of the great opening songs of the Seventies. Containing a genuine swing and punch, especially when the band kicks in, Russell’s vocal inflection on the word ‘king’ is possibly the singer’s greatest moment in a career of show-stopping vocals. Even when too stylised, the album is not without charm — ‘Happy Hunting Ground’ marries fabulous synths with muscular rock, while on ‘Without Using Hands’ — a tale that brings together lecherous men, naughty school boys and terrorism, culminating in a Pythonesque joke — Visconti’s unparalleled studio prowess comes to the fore.

  ‘Pineapple’ is another song that wouldn’t be out of place in Cabaret, one of the very few that praises, um, pineapple. It is Russell’s favourite self-written song. “After all these years, to my knowledge no one else has come up with a better song extolling the virtues of the tropical fruit he says.” If ‘It Ain’t 1918’ is just over the top, ‘T*ts’ is superb.

  “We were sure the English store chain WH Smith would ban ‘Tits’,” Russell said. “They would ban something with the word ‘drat’ in the title. So we called it ‘T*ts’ — real hard to figure out.” The tale of a man driven to drink by the fact that his wife’s breasts were no longer his sole preserve demonstrates how Ron’s writing was far outside the pop milieu.

  So for all that expensive studio time, high-class artwork, laminated gatefold sleeve and considerable press push, what is there for the listener? If it’s doo-wop, brass-driven glam you’re after, then you’re OK. If it’s something more in step with Sparks’ previous releases, you’re probably not. A flawed masterpiece would be the politest way to describe it. It’s undeniable that the Maels and Visconti went to town with a stylistic toolbox; scooting from the chamber music of ‘Under The Table With Her’ to the stomp of ‘How Are You Getting Home’.

  Indiscreet drew decidedly mixed reviews: Chas De Whalley, writing in the NME (dated October 11, 1975) called it “one of the worst albums I have heard in a long, long time” and that “The Maels and their travelling circus are doing more than anyone else towards stripping rock ‘n’ roll of what is left of its meaning and thus turning it into an empty image of itself.”

  Richard Cromelin in Phonograph jecord was more approving, suggesting that, “Thanks to a production approach which digs a wide gulf between it and previous Sparks albums, [Indiscreet] could well win over some new fans for the band, in that their frantic roller-coaster style has given way to a more spacious, sedate and generally palatable sound.”

  Jon Savage, who’d been a huge fan of the previous two albums, was not enamoured: “Maybe because they had created such a complete world that once you had a couple of doses of it that was enough.”

  Bob Stanley, music journalist and Saint Etienne musician, said that, “With Indiscreet, the wheels fell off as the Maels delved into Gilbert and Sullivan and flapper ditties a little too deeply. The kids didn’t need another Hinge and Bracket.”

  Despite such opinions Indiscreet is an album that begs repeated listening, reinforcing the great (‘Hospitality On Parade,’ ‘Get In The Swing’) and making the challenging moments (‘It Ain’t 1918’, ‘Under The Table With Her’) more so. With the next listen it will change again. For all its faults — and there are several — Indiscreet is a cornucopia of ever-giving pleasure that is one of the brothers’ most grandiose statements.

  But, to its detractors, it did seem that Sparks were creating a musical edifice as wafer-thin as the studio scenery they stood in front of.

  One known Sparks supporter was delighted by the album however. “I worked with Morrissey in 2005 in Rome,” Tony Visconti says. “We were talking about Indiscreet. He asked me loads of questions about it. It’s one of his favourite albums and he said that he’d lost his copy years previously. I was walking through Rome next day and bought him a copy. He was almost in tears and said ‘I haven’t had my own copy for so long’.”

  Morrissey later expounded on his love for the record in the foreword to Visconti’s book, The Brooklyn Boy.

  “Either the Maels, or Tony Visconti, were asking: ‘What can we show them that is new?” he wrote. “From a tipsy teatime waltz to unstoppable violins, the pace pulverised the listener, and Russell’s mouth seemed unable to close. There are so many latitude and longitude instrumental textures that the masterstroke was just almost overcooked.”

  The album’s rich nature would also provide a huge inspiration to future Sparks members: “I love Indiscreet,” guitarist Jim Wilson exclaims. “As much as I love the edge of the two previous albums they just went crazy with orchestration and took the songwriting to another level. It’s real inventive — ‘Without Using Hands’ and ‘How Are You Getting Home’, I’ve got so many different favourites. It’s like The Beatles’ ‘White Album’.”

  Much later, Mojo magazine’s website posted this assessment: “Ron Mael proves himself one of the most overlooked lyricists in rock, falling somewhere between the narrative style of Ray Davies and the mordant wit of Cole Porter; in fact… [it] could even be Noël Coward if it weren’t for the bit where the hotel manager’s hands are blown off in a bomb attack. In Ron’s world, everyday scenarios and facets of the human condition are played out in a surreal, disturbingly comic fashion. Indiscreet? Perhaps. Audacious? Absolutely.”

  With all its fanfare, the album reached number 18 in the UK album listings and spent just four weeks on the charts. Unlike its predecessor, it failed to reach the US chart at all.

  David Betteridge: “I didn’t get invol
ved — they had Muff and John there, so I stood well back. I think by that time, we’d seen there were a few problems. We’d had a couple of good albums and as Sparks weren’t really an Island act in the real sense, we started to feel we may have had our run with that one. I don’t think we said it out loud; they’d lost the flush of success and that was that. I thought they went off on a path that probably the punter that was buying their records couldn’t see.”

  Russell’s summation of the album on its 2006 reissue demonstrates how close the brothers are to their work, especially those they deem especially important: “Oddly there were one or two criticisms along the lines of ‘self-indulgent’. In our world you, as an artist, indulge yourself. We would say ‘Yes, it’s very self-indulgent! Thank you for noticing.’ ”

  Although Island was starting to look at the law of diminishing returns, there was another substantial tour to support the album; after a short Scandinavian jaunt, the trek began in the UK on October 15 in Newcastle, ending at Croydon’s Fairfield Halls on November 9 — the last time the UK was to see this version of Sparks.

  Throughout the tour the same divide was seen between the ‘heads’ and the ‘screamers’ in the audience that Ian Hampton had previously identified. “It was really weird; the disparity between the lyrics we were singing and the young girls who were throwing themselves at us,” Russell said in 2003. “The lyrics of teeny bands were not usually as substantive as ours — singing about Einstein — there was a lot of stuff going on lyrically. There’s a great old video shot at our gig at Croydon — the stage was inundated by girls in a rugby scrum — I’m singing something like ‘Talent Is An Asset’ and there’s 10 girls on top of me who are not really getting what we’re on about.” In the film, a palpably nervous Russell’s calls for calm (“OK, we’ll do one more tune for you, OK, but, but… for everyone’s safety I think we should have a little restraint in the hall, OK”) and vocal dropouts while being attacked give the listener some idea of the chaos of a British Sparks show at this time.