by Daryl Easlea
The model of the synth duo so appropriated in Britain at the start of the Eighties can certainly be traced in part back to No. 1 In Heaven. Aside from the four-piece Kraftwerk, who at that precise moment were seen as a novelty, the only other precedent was the New York-based synth duo Suicide. Within two years, thanks largely to the advent of cheap technology, synthesisers and synthesiser duos seemed to be everywhere. Sparks also went on to influence a whole wave of future bands, showing them the possibilities that electronic music could offer to people who’d previously only thought in terms of guitar, bass and drums.
Having been formed in 1978 by John Taylor and Nick Rhodes, the nascent Duran Duran were certainly big fans of No. 1 In Heaven — Taylor calling it “the most important album of Sparks for me… Duran Duran nicked quite a bit from that album’s aesthetic. Keith Forsey’s live drums really stick out for me. It was the first time I’d heard the Moroder sound with live drums. Moroder created this world and we all just went in — [it had an] emotionally dry, St Tropez nightclub, cocaine/nostalgic type feeling about it.
“Looking back, [the album] was such an incredibly successful concept. It was marketed very strongly,” Taylor continues. “The picture disc middle singles; there was this vaguely sexy packaging — the cover reminds me of those nurse paintings by Richard Prince. After having defined themselves with the super-tricky rock-pop of Kimono My House, Sparks had to get that sound with the notes that all have to be programmed. But it does sound like a Sparks album, it’s got everything that they had before in terms of quirkiness and cleverness and mood — it’s just a little less obvious.
“It had a massive influence on us. We were listening to things like [Moroder’s soundtrack to] Midnight Express so when Sparks came out with that sound, it was a real humdinger. It wouldn’t have mattered who it was, it was such a great sound. Having said that, had it not been Sparks I probably wouldn’t have heard it. They had the promotion behind them; you didn’t have to go to a club to hear them. It was a marketing campaign you couldn’t ignore.”
Nick Rhodes: “No.1 In Heaven was a revelation. There were a lot of people incorporating disco into their material but Sparks actually just went out there and made a whole album of it. No.1 In Heaven was a very brave record to make to just try something completely different. It’s their adaptability that I’ve always admired. I was hugely into the Moroder sound, as well. And this fitted into his canon just after Donna Summer and Midnight Express.”
No.1 In Heaven was a pleasant and ultimately highly influential surprise, and remains so many years later. A six-track album at a time when that length was merely reserved for either prog rock or disco delicacy was really something else. The UK, with warm memories of the Sparks of five years earlier still very much in the collective psyche, welcomed the brothers back and lapped up this change of direction. Well, those who were not horrified at the proposition of a white rock act turning ‘disco’.
“I like the album a lot,” Ron said. “I think it has an atmosphere that isn’t in any of our other albums, and isn’t in anybody else’s albums. It was a one-of-a-kind situation: people from different areas not having a clue how it was going to turn out … I think it’s influenced people in terms of the way of working — how a band could be a project in a certain kind of way.”
“Not only was it redefining our sound, we were redefining what a band could be. Ten years later, every duo or electronic band worked like that,” Russell added. “The odd thing is we get accused of stealing from people that came after us — which is a little irksome.”
* Hewlett is currently writing and recording, and remains close friends with Trevor White.
* Mael studio activity for the Virgin label during this time was producing the skittish Adrian Munsey 12″, ‘C’est Sheep’ — a parody of Chic’s ‘Le Freak’ — and on a more serious note, French chanteuse Noel on the album Is There More To Life Than Dancing?
* A video for the single was filmed at Shepperton Studios where the brothers were transformed into werewolves.
* Island took the opportunity to toast the boys’ success — 1977’s The Best Of Sparks was repromoted, alongside a reissue of ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us’ in September 1979.
Chapter Twelve
Noisy Boys Are Happy Boys? Terminal Jive
“I just wanted to get through it. The recording process was so distant from me.”
Ron Mael, 2003
By the start of 1980, Sparks were an important pop force again — in the UK, at least. They had appeared alongside Blondie, David Bowie and Frank Zappa in Paula Yates’ comic, controversial coffee-table book, Rock Stars In Their Underpants, and featured in a new teen-pop weekly magazine, Smash Hits, written by people who had been Sparks fans first time round. To underline how deep they ran in the psyche, Paul McCartney affectionately acknowledged Sparks in the video that accompanied his latest single, ‘Coming Up’. Thanks to the video techniques of the day, McCartney played a variety of characters from pop’s past as his backing band, The Plastic Macs. Among others, he dressed as Hank Marvin, Ginger Baker, Ritchie Blackmore and himself as a young mop-topped Beatle. And, dressed in a white shirt with black tie, McCartney stood behind an electric piano as Seventies pop culture icon Ron Mael. A frequent shot was ‘Ron’ glowering while ‘Beatle Paul’ shook his mane and did a trademark ‘ooooh’.
“That was really strange for me,” Ron later told Sparks guitarist Jim Wilson on Wilson’s Mother Superior website. “The oddest thing was going into a dry-cleaner the day after they showed the ‘Coming Up’ video on Saturday Night Live and the guy who was working there said, ‘Hey, I saw you on television last night’ and I was like, ‘Oh, yeah’. It was really flattering because it was McCartney and also because of the other people who he had chosen to pay homage to in the video. It was pretty amazing.”
“To have a Beatle acknowledging your existence,” Russell said in 1995 to Happening magazine, “is the goal of any musician.”
Given the coverage their comeback had enjoyed, Sparks’ next release was as important as Propaganda had been in following up Kimono My House. Initial meetings for what was to become Terminal Jive took place in summer 1979 in LA before Ron and Russell started recording. Given his rush to produce them and the subsequent ousting of John Hewlett, Giorgio Moroder appeared to have lost interest in working directly with Sparks, as he brought in one of his production team, Harold Faltermeyer, to co-produce the album. The Munich-born, classically trained pianist had first worked with Moroder on the ground-breaking Midnight Express soundtrack and, like Moroder, had strong musical views that often sidelined the Maels.
As had happened with No.1 In Heaven, virtually all of Ron’s songs were rejected by Moroder and, as a result, only one of the album’s tracks, ‘When I’m With You’, was written beforehand. If Moroder had largely removed himself from the proceedings, unfortunately he’d largely removed Sparks as well. They became like session players on their own record.
“[Terminal Jive] was a lot less fun to record,” Ron told the author in 2003. “Even though Giorgio was overseeing it, he didn’t produce it. The special fun had gone. It was like the electro version of Introducing Sparks, more distant from us and more processed.”
Being micromanaged did not suit Ron and Russell, but that didn’t stop them coming up with hook-laden pop songs that seemed perfect for the current market. However the market had shifted in the space of the nine months separating No.1 In Heaven and Terminal Jive. In the US, disco had now fallen out of favour and only a handful of acts that rode its wave of popularity would see their sales continue. In Britain, the new electronica that Sparks had presaged in 1979 had a new figurehead in Gary Numan, and the 2-Tone craze and mod revival seemed to be every teenage boy’s obsession. What was so in step last year now seemed frankly dated. As a consequence, Terminal Jive sank without trace.
Terminal Jive has little in the way of personality; a robust album of bargain basement disco. Whereas ‘I Feel Love’, Kraftwerks The Man Machi
ne and No.1 In Heaven had located the soul of the genre, Terminal Jive is a case of disco for disco’s sake and, ultimately, a missed opportunity. Its eight tracks are all pleasing, well-written and commercial, they’re just not right. Somehow working with Moroder had made Sparks lose their sense of flair and lyrical exploration. It is hard to believe that these are the same people who wrote Indiscreet. Repetition has always been the backbone of the group, but outside a couple of the songs, every track builds to multiple repeats of the song’s title.
Ron has said of Terminal Jive that “everything was sucked out of it,” all except one thing, the majesty of its lead single, ‘When I’m With You’, one of the best things that Sparks have ever recorded. Both Ron’s music and Ron and Russell’s lyrics are simply touching. It’s one of the few direct love songs in Sparks’ catalogue — a lush, warm, emotional record amid all the synthetics. The reference to the “pressure being on” to “say something special” was possibly a reference to the fact that Moroder had made Ron rewrite the middle eight.
The Sounds review of Terminal Jive noted the importance of this track to the album. “‘When I’m With You’ is the major work. It possesses a hookline reminiscent of an airline jingle with swooshing synth to match; the instrumental, though, is sublime. Multi-layered, perfectly constructed, with the ever present thumping drums.”
The rest of the album struggles to recover from the greatness of ‘When I’m With You’, especially as an instrumental reprise of it closes the first side, as if to reinforce its importance. The amusing ‘Rock’n’Roll People In A Disco World’ is the closest they get to finding their funny bone, as they put into song Russell’s sentiment from the previous year’s Melody Maker interview about rock bands. It also has an ironic bent, as the brothers were fully aware of their own position in all this.
Despite Russell’s recent comments in interviews, guitars were back on a Sparks record. LA session man ‘Snuffy’ Walden, who had recently worked with the band Brooklyn Dreams, provided the power chords that so defined the album’s second side. Walden’s grinding rock guitar chords on ‘Just Because You Love Me’ predict the entire Eighties sound. ‘Noisy Boys’ and ‘The Greatest Show On Earth’ have a decent choppy swagger, while ‘Stereo’ sounds like something from the fourth side of Donna Summer’s Bad Girls album.
‘Young Girls’ can be argued as putting Nabokov’s Lolita in song, and lusting after teenage girls is nothing new in pop music. However, its explicit nature here makes it awkward listening, and distasteful to the modern ear. Russell wrote in his sleeve notes for The Heaven Collection, “Yes your honour, it is a song about being a dirty old man.” It is nothing to be proud of, however ironic the song may purport to be.
The sleeve was rather odd as well. Although a successful attempt at Eighties modernism by recently reacquainted friend and photographer Gered Mankowitz, it didn’t scream “this is a new Sparks album”.
Gered Mankowitz: “During the second half of 1979, I’d met them again and we had dinner a couple of times and hung out the teeniest bit, but they were always working. I asked if they would like to do a photo session for syndication, which we did that August. We got some nice press pictures. They came to my studio in Great Windmill Street and we did four or five different set-ups. They responded very well — I had the idea of them holding flash guns and illuminating each other. They really liked that idea.”
The brothers were taken back to their roots as fans of rock’n’roll and at break times asked Mankowitz to reminisce: “My association with the Stones and Hendrix in the Sixties is always a major topic when people find out about it. Because I had a foot in the door, they were eager for tales and stories with a cup of tea.”
The cover shots for Terminal Jive were taken in two sessions, on October 22 and December 6, at locations across west London. For a photographer so associated with well-prepared studio shots, Mankowitz’s sleeve was what might now be described as ‘guerrilla photography’.
Gered Mankowitz: “I was first choice for Terminal Jive by them and art director Pearce Marchbank. Pearce is an extraordinarily creative art director. Not only does he have a vision, but he can get the most out of you. He is infuriating, incredibly demanding, but he gets the best out of you. It’s fulfilling and demanding, even if it’s exhausting.”
Together Mankowitz, Marchbank and the Maels came up with a concept in the documentary/reportage style of New York crime and street scene photographer Arthur Felig, known to the world as Weegee. The four took to the streets.
Gered Mankowitz: “We wanted to be lean and mobile. Pearce freed me up a lot by saying he wasn’t worried about the reflections of the flash or technical error. When you are relieved of that sort of concern, you can be a lot looser. I did it on my Hasselblad as I wanted to get the quality.”
The team moved between Victoria mainline and underground stations and the Safeway supermarket on Chelsea’s King’s Road. “Ron was up for anything,” said Mankowitz, “he just relished the grotesquery and Russell loved this style. They worked beautifully together — they were so visual, such fun, so inspiring.”
It was literally shoot and run: “We got thrown out of everywhere; in those days it took people a lot longer to suss out what was going on,” Mankowitz continues. “By the time they’d cottoned on to us, I’d taken a couple of rolls of film; they’d established we didn’t have any permits, but we were gone. We had fun in Harrods with Ron coming out of the lift; there’s one in the piano department and a strange one in the book department where Ron was about to devour a little old lady before we got turfed out on our ear.”
Possibly the most memorable shots were at Victoria station. “Ron didn’t mind what he did. He lay down on the platform; the famous one of him in the terminus with an old tramp pointing at him. The tramp is basically saying that [Ron’s] laying down in his spot. None of the crowd quite knew what was going on; some of them may have known who the guys were, but it was guerrilla photography.”
The cover is strange and unsettling. Standing on the pavement outside the supermarket window, Ron dressed in his black suit and black loafers with white socks, his hands over his ears and his face contorted as if hearing a loud noise. Russell, inside the store, looks out at Ron, concerned. Perhaps he had heard the album.
Released in January 1980, Terminal Jive received a mixed press. Melody Maker loved it: “Still obsessed with adolescence, Ron and Russell emerge with a series of memorable pop tunes, any of which would make fine singles,” while Betty Page in Sounds saw through it. Awarding two stars out of five, she concluded. “Oh, for the wit and sparkle of the classic ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For ‘The Both Of Us’, or even the genuine experimentation apparent on No 1 In Heaven. Four good tracks doth not a good album make.” The Rock Year Book for 1981 described it as “cartoon pop with the tap your feet dance beat. Even if it goes in one ear and out the other, you can’t fail to enjoy it. A commercial flop of some note, it also highlights the Mael Brothers’ dilemma of now being ‘Rock’n’Roll People In A Disco World.’ ”
The album did nothing chart-wise in the UK, neither did its two singles, ‘When I’m With You’ and ‘Young Girls’. Just a year after No.1 In Heaven Sparks had been abandoned by the UK. Again.
The album didn’t even receive a release in the US. The disco backlash certainly had something to do with it. Perhaps it would have been better if they had made the same record twice; but that wasn’t Sparks.
“Compared to No. 1 in Heaven, this is less spacey and more down-to-earth — without much character at all,” Russell said.
Ron has never disguised his contempt for Terminal Jive: “It was the only album where I wasn’t allowed to play keyboards,” he told Mixmag in 1995, “and as I’ve always seen myself as the keyboard player in Sparks, it was a little rough.”
The real irony is that Terminal Jive is possibly Sparks’ most prescient album. By the mid Eighties, due in part to Keith Forsey’s drum sound and Harold Faltermeyer’s production work for other artists and how it
was subsequently emulated, most pop records actually sounded like it.
As before, Sparks headed to where the work was and the critical glare shone brightest. ‘When I’m With You’ gained a life of its own in France and Ron and Russell relocated there for the rest of 1980. “The video [for the single] was shown to death in France,” Russell later said. “As a result, we could walk into virtually any couscous restaurant in Paris and get the best table in the house.”
The witty clip depicted Russell as Ron’s ventriloquist puppet — a wry joke given that Ron wrote around 95% of what his younger brother sang. The single went to the top of the French charts, going on to sell around 700,000 units. As a result, further singles, ‘Young Girls’ and ‘Rock’n’Roll People In A Disco World’, were subsequent chart hits there.
During their prolonged stay in France, offers were put together for Sparks to play live. The simple problem was that they hadn’t toured since 1976, and they didn’t have a band. “We had seen a band in Los Angeles called Bates Motel that we thought would be compatible with us,” Russell said in 1982. “They were all really good musicians and we thought it would be ideal to take the whole band intact and have them be Sparks’ band.”
Taking their name from the notorious motel in Hitchcock’s Psycho, Bates Motel was a proper band: bassist Leslie Boehm, guitarist Bob Haag and drummer David Kendrick. Kendrick was born in Chicago, where he began playing in local bands in his teenage years, including one that Kendrick unbelievably persuaded to cover ‘Talent Is An Asset’ from Kimono My House. And that wasn’t a Fleury/Mael scam. Kendrick relocated to LA in the mid-Seventies to play in Venus and the Razorblades, a band put together by scenester Kim Fowley, who was then running high on the success of The Runaways. After leaving Venus, Kendrick got himself a gig with Continental Miniatures, who were signed by London Records. Soon, Bates Motel followed.
