Talent Is an Asset- The Story of Sparks

by Daryl Easlea

  The brothers spent around five-and-a-half years trying to get the project commissioned with potential names such as Francis Ford Coppola and Tsui Hark in the frame to direct. Trying to get the $15 million raised for a real-life manga adventure proved difficult. “We actually found a business that is more disgusting than the music industry,” Ron commented in 1993.

  Although Wilson optioned the rights to the comic book, the final nail in its coffin was when Carolco, the company that was to fund the enterprise, foundered after the 1995 release of the Renny Harlin-directed, Geena Davis-starring Cutthroat Island. At the time, it was the biggest flop in the history of cinema. Apart from a mooted collaboration on a stage version of the Fifties cult film The Amazing Colossal Man, it was another moment when Sparks got close but yet so far from realising their Hollywood aspirations. Still, there was always Rollercoaster to fall back on.

  On March 2, 1991 Joseph Fleury died of an AIDS-related illness at the age of 37. As their original supporter, fan-club runner and manager for the best part of a decade (as well as being John Hewlett’s assistant for the years preceding), his death was greatly felt.

  One of his last tasks had been to oversee Profile: The Ultimate Sparks Collection, a 40-track double-disc set compiled by Warner staffer (and Sparks fan) Gary Stewart, coordinated by Fleury and released by Rhino. For the first time, curios such as the Bearsville version of ‘I Like Girls’ were heard on a career-spanning journey that went from ‘Wonder Girl’ to ‘So Important’ (from Interior Design). Released within a month of Fleury’s death, the already printed sleeve contained the legend in block capitals, “A VERY SPECIAL THANKS TO JOSEPH FLEURY FOR BEING THERE FROM THE BEGINNING”.

  John Hewlett: “I spoke to him in the months prior to his death. I called him to put matters to rest. We fell out because I hadn’t paid a bill and he got ousted from the house that we had been sharing in the late Seventies … It was good to talk but he was pretty much in denial about his illness.”

  Fleury’s panache with words and his ability to create dreams and smokescreens around the brothers was absolutely central to their success. In losing him, Ron and Russell lost an unerring supporter. What he may have lacked in business acumen was more than compensated for by his friendship and putting the brothers’ needs first at all times.

  Ironically Fleury’s passing occurred when Sparks’ influence was being acutely felt. The Pet Shop Boys went on to be one the biggest pop groups the UK had produced, working with Sixties diva Dusty Springfield arguably in the same way Sparks had wanted to work with Marianne Faithfull. From America, They Might Be Giants certainly would not have looked too out of place at a Sparks convention. In the much-vaunted NME Christmas edition of 1991, fondly remembered Manchester act Intastella dressed as Ron and Russell re-enacting the sleeve of Kimono My House. Spencer Birtwistle (later of The Fall) dressed as Russell and leader/singer Stella Grundy dressed as Ron. “In many ways, the spirit of Sparks is alive in what we do. They were smart, they were fun and they were a little bit strange.”

  There was vague talk of the Maels and Morrissey, who had recently relocated to LA, working together, but Morrissey thought that Russell was singing better than ever and should sing the songs that Ron had proposed for collaboration. The three met when Morrissey played LA’s Great Western Forum in June 1991. They also met David Bowie who got up to duet with Morrissey on Marc Bolan’s ‘Cosmic Dancer’. “Someone else, Morrissey’s biggest influence, wasn’t invited on stage,” Russell wryly told Q in 1993, “but we’re just being bitchy now.”

  With this new-found respect, it was somewhat inevitable that not all would be so reverential. In the updated 1992 Rolling Stone Album Guide (at this point, only Music That You Can Dance To and Profile were available in the States) Mark Coleman wrote: “Does the following prospect sound enticing? A long-running cult band that combines Bryan Ferry at his most adenoidal — make that a falsetto Bryan Ferry — with the music hall indulgences of Queen at its most rococo, a group whose career spans more than half-a-dozen record labels and more than a dozen [deleted] albums. Well, brothers Ron and Russell Mael are your men.”

  Coleman concluded with the amusing line, “Docked a notch for inspiring the grossest excesses of both the late Seventies skinny-tie newwave movement and the early Eighties haircut pop movements. Talk about a double whammy!”

  In 1993, further Sparks’ retrospectives appeared with the Heaven and Hell collections. These compilations, which originated from France, were designed to show the band’s commercial work on one disc with out-takes and oddities on the other. Legendary sound engineer Bruce Swedien, who had worked extensively with Quincy Jones (and therefore Michael Jackson), was enlisted to work on some mixes for the Hell disc.

  “Those guys! They were nuts, and they were great!” Swedien recalls. “I remember them so well… I have an unlisted phone number and I am very difficult to find. But they found me. We had a ball… Really good though — I made it sound like music, that’s really what I do. Oh yes, they were very good at what they did.”

  Sparks were very good at what they did. So, towards the end of 1993, they reappeared. It was Scottish dance band Finitribe that sought the Maels out and effectively ended the longest hiatus in their career. Finitribe initially wanted to cover ‘When I’m With You’, which came to the attention of the brothers. Soon, the two groups had made contact and it was decided to make a new record together.

  “We just liked the spirit of what they were doing musically,” Russell said in 1993, “the entrepreneurial spirit of having a record company that is not like a record company.”

  Sparks sent over a DAT of the raw elements of a new song. Finitribe then sampled and reconstructed it. ‘National Crime Awareness Week’ is the tale of a criminal who derives pleasure from seeing his name in the papers after his latest exploits, thinking that a week that is supposed to make people vigilant will actually act as an advert for himself.

  In November the first new Sparks recording since 1988 was released. The spoken word-meeting-rave nature of ‘National Crime Awareness Week’ located Sparks again on the edge of a relevant underground. Sampling Dick Dastardly’s laugh, the mixes of the single were incredibly a la mode. The record gained positive reviews: The Face said Sparks “were back with a track so weird it’s almost normal”. Record Mirror compared the heaven mix to the then-current touchstone in techno, ‘Rez’ by Underworld. Time Out said “better looking than Peters and Lee, funnier than Wham!, the brothers Mael have been the best double act in pop for 20 years. Go on, make it number one.”

  The brothers were interviewed by Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan on ITV’s This Morning, and talked about how British bands would look them up in LA. “We had only done that single with Finitribe, ‘National Crime Awareness Week’,” Ron said in 2003. “We were bowled over by the reaction it received — it was hugely inspiring — and finally, we had a way to seamlessly mix the old and the new material.”

  It was enough to bring the brothers back over to the UK for their first promotional visit since the Eighties. They found that there was still a great deal of love for them and also a whole slew of acts, many of whom were now well established, who had been influenced by them but had perhaps not paid enough lip service. Feathers were ruffled as Ron and Russell suggested a little too heavily that the Pet Shop Boys and in fact all the synth duos owed them rather a lot. “Tell them we’re really pissed off,” Russell said, half-jokingly. “We’ve got our lawyers on the case.”

  The prevailing feeling that Sparks had somehow constantly been usurped floated to the surface. “We’re supposed to be flattered,” Ron told Q magazine. “But you’re in a band and therefore an egotist, so when you see people taking our surface element and — because they are not so stylised — selling more records, you get pissed off. Especially when you know how difficult it is to sustain a career. It’s hard to talk about because you don’t want to come across as bitchy, but I think we’ve written a lot of Pet Shop Boys tunes. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ really pissed m
e off because we’d had ‘Get In The Swing’. Look at Cheap Trick — two wacky guys, two pretty guys.”

  Rudderless since Fleury passed away two years previously, Sparks found themselves a manager in German-born Londoner Eric Harle at DEF Management. The Maels had originally approached Harle, who was a huge Sparks fan and had all of their work, to see if one of his acts, The Progress, would do some remixes for them.

  “Suddenly I ended up with their management too,” Harle told Music And Media in 1994. They had asked to set up a label, but as Harle was a manager not a label owner, he went out to broker a deal for them. Harle approached Achim Fehlau from Frankfurt-based Logic Records and publisher Beate Geibel for support. After hearing six tracks that Ron and Russell had been working on at home, the trio, led by Harle, got behind them. Advances in technology meant that if Sparks were to return to the stage they could put on a proper Sparks show with all eras being represented.

  “We detest nostalgia,” Ron told Melody Maker in November 1993. “For us to re-emerge now with something which wasn’t vital and relevant would be pointless. The only thing that interests us is trying to do something that doesn’t fit in”

  * The song was featured in the 1986 Hal Needham film about BMX banditry, Rad.

  * Morley reprinted the essay in full in his 2005 book, Words And Music, as an example of one of his best. And it is. The affection and knowledge are there for all to see.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Not So Senseless, But Quite Gratuitous — Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins

  “Sparks are still big. It’s the world that got small.”

  Melody Maker, 1994

  “If we’re a novelty act then we’re one of the longest-standing novelty acts in history.”

  Ron Mael, 1995

  And so, it was time to come back. It was as if Britain had completely abandoned Sparks. “The irony! It was probably our most successful period in the States, the whole Eighties, it’s practically unknown over here,” Russell told the author in 2002. “When we played here at the time of Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins, all the questions were ‘Where have you been?’ They had simply missed an entire swathe of our output. For reasons we still don’t know, it didn’t translate and there seemed to be no communication between the UK and the US record people. We even started doing well in LA — we thought it’s working somewhere, so we were content to go with that.”

  There would be no such issues with Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins, which was released on BMG through the German company Logic. The team of Eric Harle and Achim Fehlau added additional production and remixes to the tracks Sparks had worked on.

  Eric Harle: “In a way, they were the first electro dance outfit, a fact for which they have always been credited by New Order and Depeche Mode. Embracing modern technology is their second nature, so they had no problems updating their music.”

  The management hooked the brothers up with Mark Stagg, who had mixed Björk and Linus Burdick, who was later to co-write Sonique’s global hit ‘It Feels So Good’, to give half of the album a contemporary sheen.

  Realising the way of the current market, the lead track ‘When Do I Get To Sing “My Way” ’ — originally titled ‘The Punch And Judy Show’ — was given a makeover by Sparks fan Vince Clarke from Erasure and The Grid, the latter outfit featuring Dave Ball from Soft Cell — one of the Eighties synth duos erroneously said to have been influenced by Sparks. “Yes, we had a flamboyant frontman and I stood motionless behind a keyboard with my moustache, but we were much more influenced by Suicide and northern soul,” Ball told the author in August 2009.

  On October 17, 1994 ‘When Do I Get To Sing “My Way” ’ was released. It was exactly the right calling card for the group, with all the wit and texture of recent dance acts taken on board, yet remaining resolutely Sparks, showing that although two decades had passed since Kimono My House, the band were moving forward, forging a sound that was a perfect fit for the mid-Nineties. The video, which parodied and homaged Hollywood simultaneously, was directed by Sophie Muller and produced by Rob Small of Oil Factory. By the end of the month, the single was number 38 in the UK chart, Sparks’ first Top 40 placing for 15 years. An aggressive regional radio campaign saw the single played through-out the UK and northern Europe. BMG, the parent company of Logic, put money behind the album and indulged in some aggressive co-op spending with retailers. This was proper support at last for a new Sparks album.

  On November 7, Sparks emerged from their temporary retirement with the release of Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins. By consciously playing themselves as a synthesiser duo, the Maels were able to reclaim some of the ground the Pet Shop Boys had made their own.

  Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins is an accomplished piece of work and the first real moment in Sparks’ long career when their past caught up with their future and present. The new recordings were sleek and minimalist with enough flourishes to sound like the best of the most recent electro-pop. Few acts could disappear for quite so long and return with such a potent brew of material. As a result, the record was little short of a triumph. The former Melody Maker ‘Best Newcomers of 1974’ produced a work that was full of their trademark melody, hooks and irony, yet was still completely fresh and different. The album is rich with references, reflecting the Maels’ cinematic and popular cultural obsessions — there can be few albums that namecheck Frank Sinatra, Sid Vicious, Charlie Parker, Gone With The Wind, Ted Turner, Tsui Hark, Liberace, Hillary Clinton, Madame Mao, Richard Wagner and William Shakespeare, and do so with such élan.

  The album is chock full of highlights, with the a cappella overture evoking Propaganda, the celestial introduction of ‘When Do I Get To Sing “My Way” ‘ being pure No. 1 In Heaven, the Depeche Mode-Violator styling of ‘Frankly Scarlett, I Don’t Give A Damn’ and the amusing high energy of ‘(When I Kiss You) I Hear Charlie Parker Playing’. The filmic nature of the material is highlighted by ‘Tsui Hark’, where director Hark — dubbed ‘the Stephen Spielberg of Asia’ — reads through a list of his credits over a sliver of mesmeric trance played by Ron. This track at once encapsulates the group’s irony, cleverness, intelligence and simplicity and is one of the album’s standouts. For the first time since No.1 In Heaven they sounded effortlessly contemporary.

  Gratuitous Sax… also had another great sleeve, their first classic since Sparks In Outer Space. Designed by Louis Flanigan, Alexandra Jugovic and Eilke König, it was the first to fully utilise the CD format as opposed to shrinking a traditional LP 12″ × 12″ image to fit. With photography by German fashion photographer Dieter Eikelpoth, it re-created a National Enquirer scandal sheet, capturing the brothers in a variety of poses as if shot by paparazzi. The pictures were supplemented with headlines such as ‘The lowdown on the lyrics you’ll never hear!’, ‘Are those break-up rumours true?’ and ‘EXCLUSIVE! Room service cover-up!’ It was hot but it wasn’t on the menu.’

  The album was well received by the UK press: The Face heralded “a glorious return;” Q gave it four stars and called it “a triumph;” NME said “Plug in. You might just get a nice shock;” while Time Out was probably the most explicit saying, “You can keep your cardboard cutouts, your Pet Shop Boys, the real thing is back.” Select demonstrated their arch approach by saying that “they invented the novelty record and 14 years later are still doing that old trick wherein John Waters invites Bob Stanley round to DJ at his Casio-sponsored PWL convention”

  As had happened with Kimono My House, No. 1 In Heaven and Angst In My Pants, the Maels were having fun while breaking new ground. Their timing seemed to be right — Melody Maker was desperate to try and get Romo, the music paper’s attempt at reviving new romanticism, off the ground. (There would be better luck when electroclash bubbled up in the early 21st century.) Sparks were, of course, one of the 11 things that were chosen in the November 1995 piece Synthetic Culture — The Iconography And Ideal Of Romo-ism, published in the paper.*

  Although Romo was clearly manufactured and got seen through
almost immediately, the list description of Sparks, a band virtually every journalist wished to paint a picture of, was suitably florid. It said that Sparks “believed firmly in the blessed, redeeming qualities of disorientation and lively deadpan absurdity. Laughing Dada. American and heterosexual, they somehow tapped into what had been previously an exclusively gay, European aesthetic, and in doing so, blurred borders, defied orders and hauled ‘over the top’ overground”

  Sparks toured to support the album, receiving rapturous receptions wherever they went. Technology had finally caught up with Sparks, and Island, even Bearsville, material could be placed next to Moroder-era or the new album — it now all sounded as one. The tour and the album’s success proved that Sparks could always remain contemporary, even if a huge section of the audience hadn’t bought a Sparks record since 1979.

  With Christie Haydon as their new drummer, Ron and Russell played their first UK comeback gig at Shepherd’s Bush Empire on November 17. For the encores, the UK’s then-hottest guitarist, Bernard Butler, of Suede fame, came on to play. In a largely positive review, the NME’s Johnny Dee suggested that “Their electro pomp preceded the new romantics, their deadpan stage act a direct prototype of Pulp, their image was very Mute Records, the Freddie Mercury meets Dame Bowie, a bit Suede even.” Commenting that they now looked younger than when Tony Blackburn introduced them on Top Of The Pops in the Seventies, the article was one of the first to point out that the group had, by now, acquired a huge gay following.

  When Ron and Russell walked into the after-show party, they were greeted as if they were returning heroes. Long-time supporter John Aizlewood listed it in Q as being among the Top 100 Greatest Ever Gigs: “Strangers hugged each other, howling with excitement and relief. The sound was that of gods. They played everything and Bernard Butler’s cameo was the best thing he’s ever done. I’ve never felt so emotional at a concert.”