by Daryl Easlea
The album was certainly going to move people.
Lil’ Beethoven was released in October 2002 through John Lennard’s Artful/Fulfill label, in a white hardcover CD sleeve, featuring Dave Park’s illustration of the German composer in the bottom right-hand corner and nothing else apart from the simple wording: LIL’ BEETHOVEN An Album By SPARKS
For the first time since Gratuitous Sax…, the press was in raptures. “Time to give Sparks their due surely,” said Mojo. The now defunct Muzik magazine opined “We doubt whether they’ve ever made a better — or odder — record than this. A fanciful, Gilbert & Sullivan on Quaaludes disco-rock operetta, no less” before presciently suggesting that “commercial suicide has seldom sounded more joyous than it does here”. Ireland’s Hot Press described ‘Suburban Homeboy’ as “the kind of record that the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band would be making if they were still around”. In The Independent, Michael Bracewell called Lil’ Beethoven “A masterpiece of pop art — part manifesto, part, vitally, a critique of pop itself and sounding as though George Gershwin, Philip Glass and the Mothers of Invention had sat down with Tim Burton and decided to write a musical.” David Cheal proclaimed in The Telegraph that “[Sparks have] just made one of the most extraordinary albums of the year.”
For Uncut, writer Ian McDonald, who in 1974 had written so favourably in NME about Kimono My House, in one of his final reviews, wrote in August 2003, “It’s a bravely avant garde endeavour ameliorated by a continually dry irony that raises the occasional smile. Mostly, though, the results are mystifying. Be warned. It’s challenging stuff.” Long-time champion Martin Aston said in Q, “This is the first Teutonic glam-rock chamber-classical cabaret opus, and uniquely, brilliantly, Sparks.”
When first hearing Lil’ Beethoven, this author was as bewildered and delighted as the next reviewer. “It’s all a bit like Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’,” I wrote in Record Collector. “Brecht and Weill’s ‘The Threepenny Opera’, 10cc’s ‘Une Nuit A Paris’, the second side of Tubular Bells with vocals and the 1970 England World Cup Squad’s ‘Back Home’. Only, of course, it’s nothing like these reference points. At all.”
My contention at the time, and it still stands today, was that “If anyone else can give me evidence of a group 32 years into their career writing and performing an album as interesting, inventive and accomplished as Lil’ Beethoven, I will personally come down and buy them a very hearty luncheon.”
Lil’ Beethoven received its live premiere at London’s Royal Festival Hall on October 19, 2002. The souvenir programme explained the concept Ron and Russell had devised: of how the elusive musical prodigy Lil’ Beethoven — a descendant of the composer and the daughter of an ear doctor Beethoven used to frequent — lived in the town of Heidelberg, and had been approached by various musicians for years. He had always turned them away — until Sparks arrived, of course. The closing paragraph of the programme notes made many fans realise why there could be few groups as interesting and creative:
“Why Sparks? Perhaps it is their mutual love of language, of pushing boundaries of popular music, of experimenting in recording to bring new excitement to a moribund field. Perhaps it is Lil’ Beethoven’s love of 1970s Hollywood disaster movies, such as Towering Inferno, Earthquake and Rollercoaster, the film in which Sparks make a brief appearance (an appearance they have regretted for 25 years) — a film that Lil’ Beethoven has seen 127 times. Whatever the reason, the long awaited results of the meeting between Sparks and Lil’ Beethoven can be heard and seen this evening.”
It was as if the ghost of Joseph Fleury was hanging over the proceedings. It was pure drama. Whatever was to happen, people were not going to ignore this album.
To bring Lil’ Beethoven to the stage, the Maels realised they had to do something special. With the brothers facing the crowd and Menta and Glover away to the side, they created 50 minutes of pure theatre, playing the album in its entirety (the second half of the show was a greatest hits set), using the whole stage as a blank canvas to visualise these audacious pieces of music. For example, Ron wore false arms during ‘How Do I Get To Carnegie Hall?’ and strolled with a model in ‘Ugly Guys With Beautiful Girls’.
At year’s end Lil’ Beethoven ranked at number 25 in Uncut’s Best Of The Year’s Albums poll and in Record Collector’s Best New Albums of 2002 (“possibly the most exciting and interesting release ever from such a long established act”). However the album hadn’t received proper distribution through the tiny Fulfill label. As it was such a slow-burner, there was still plenty of work involved to make sure people were aware of its glory. For that, Ron and Russell began to rely heavily on Sue Harris, who, in 2003, became their sixth manager.
Although Eric Harle had done an incredible job of restoring Sparks’ reputation in the UK and Europe, by mutual consent, the agreement with DEF Management ended after the release of Balls. Harris, who like virtually all of Sparks’ UK supporters first became aware of them in May 1974 via their Top Of The Pops appearance, had trained as a nurse before moving into PR with the PWL stable in the Nineties. Her PR company, Republic Media, had been employed by Recognition, who distributed Balls.
Sue Harris: “We’d loosely kept in touch by email. [Sparks] had finished recording Lil’ Beethoven and had arranged the gig at the Royal Festival Hall to premiere it. They wanted some help to PR the gig. They didn’t have anyone representing them in any other way over here so over the next few months I started filling the management gaps.”
Harris was to oversee Sparks’ greatest period of consistency since the Seventies, and coming from a press background, made sure that no PR opportunity would be missed.
In March 2003, Sparks returned to London’s Royal Festival Hall to perform the album again. It was little short of a tour de force. Again, the first half was Lil’ Beethoven in its entirety, the second a sprightly jaunt through the catalogue including tracks from A Woofer In Tweeter’s Clothing (‘Here Comes Bob’) up to Balls (‘Aeroflot’). Their reputation found at least a dozen notable writers and editors of the UK music press — some of whom had even paid for their tickets — all standing for an ovation. The invention, the humour, the — in the words of Times writer and pop boffin Michael Bracewell — otherness of Sparks made them more than merely survivors — anyone can survive — but to still be leaders — albeit in a very defined niche — was truly something.
The hits half of the show had the audience on their feet and dancing. Simon Goddard, writing in Uncut, said, “From the first throb of ‘The Number One Song In Heaven’, bodies and bad hairdos of all shapes and sizes are a-bouncing, hands clapping above their heads ‘Radio Ga-Ga’ style to every metronomic beat. You could almost forget Sparks were ever a ‘rock’ band since this, ducky, is pure 21st century gay disco.”
As word of mouth about Lil’ Beethoven spread, there was no shortage of those who declared their love for it, including old cohorts. “I really love the album,” Tony Visconti says. “I think they’ve got a sense of what’s classic. They’ll never lose that — they can take a genre and make it their own. They can still sound like Sparks and the songs will still be completely further out than anyone else’s writing.”
“I really love Lil’ Beethoven,” David Kendrick says. “I’m so happy that came around, I thought it was one of their best albums ever.” Even John Hewlett thought it their best for years, saying the album was “a stroke of genius”.
Ironically, it was another name from Sparks’ past that was to provide a much-needed hand in pushing the album in their most problematic of territories, America. Since Chris Blackwell had sold Island Records to Polygram in the late Eighties, he had gone on to found Palm Pictures, a multimedia entertainment company. Blackwell had heard Lil’ Beethoven and, unlike his initial view towards the group in the Seventies, he absolutely loved it.
“We’ve just signed with Blackwell’s Palm label for the rest of the world,” Russell said in 2003. “A strange set of circumstances brought us together again. A friend was talking ab
out us to Chris. We spoke with him again and sent a copy of Lil’ Beethoven to him — within a couple of days we’d done a deal for the whole world. It reminded him of when he first heard Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’. He’s now really involved.”
Blackwell’s involvement was to be significant, as Palm Pictures were to market and distribute the album in America. “We can’t remember when there’s been so much interest in our stuff in the States,” Russell continued. “It’s ironic we’re all back together again.”
“The record to them is a challenge rather than a problem,” Ron said. “We’ve always had respect for these kinds of people. It’s an honour to be back with him [Blackwell] in a non-nostalgic kind of way.”
Released in America on July 8 Lil’ Beethoven attracted a string of positive reviews. Billboard called it “the best soundtrack to a film that does not exist”. David Fricke in Rolling Stone trumpeted its arrival: “Ron and Russell Mael, the brothers and brains of the eclectic, enduring Sparks, spare no buffoons or expense on Lil’ Beethoven: nine songs of lethal grandeur built from Ron’s swollen waves of strings and fistfuls of piano and Russell’s one-man operatic chorales. Ron fires up his ivories and piles on the orchestra like the real Beethoven running amok in the Brill Building, and Russell’s quivering tenor — a perfect cocktail of Noël Coward and Freddie Mercury — is a deadly thing.”
It was high praise indeed and there was no denying the support the album deserved. The group threw themselves — as always — enthusiastically onto the promotional treadmill. To cater for MTV a video for ‘The Rhythm Thief’ was shot by Olivier Kuntzel and Florence Deygas, with whom Sparks had worked on the 1999 short film A Cute Candidate. The brothers paid a visit to Tower Records in Manhattan, where Ron recited the album’s lyrics in front of the crowd, including all the repetitions. For the first occasion they had played the city in 20 years, in August, Sparks took the show to New York by way of a free concert in Central Park. Russell talked of the possibility of Lil’ Beethoven being turned into a film with Hollywood producer Don Murphy.
Unfortunately, despite the considerable buzz, the album simply didn’t ignite. It was odd enough for the European market, who were much more open to this kind of thing, but America? Weren’t Sparks that dance group?
Chris Blackwell: “Lil’ Beethoven was such a huge disappointment to me. I thought the record was such a masterpiece. I thought we would do so much better than we did. It was nothing to do with them — they’d done their work, the record was masterful. We just weren’t able to get it going.”
The year 2003 was a bad one for Palm; Blackwell was ill and the company was having financial problems. Blackwell also realised the music industry was now a world apart from the business he knew in the Sixties and Seventies. “The thing with Island, in the mid-Seventies when we first signed [Sparks], we had such great momentum that people would give us the benefit of the doubt if we released something a little left of centre; the label actually helped them. Later when we signed them, Palm didn’t have any of that kudos attached to being a respected brand. I was very disappointed. [The album] did nothing, nothing, nothing. We took ‘The Rhythm Thief’ everywhere that we could. I liked them a lot and we did what we could and we really tried to do whatever we could for them. It was different and so brilliant, it just didn’t fit anything.”
In the old days, Island could guarantee support from record shops. Now, in America especially, record shops were big boxes where you had to pay a fortune to get price and positioning. Lil’ Beethoven was simply not a Wal-Mart record and although it was making inroads, the digital revolution, lead by iTunes, had yet to fully take hold. With every will in the world, and high-powered support, America again didn’t seem to be interested.
After having a difficult time with Artful, the label that had originally put the album out in Britain, Sue Harris and the Maels set up Lil’ Beethoven Records after the UK rights reverted back to Ron and Russell. Immediately the white-sleeved hardback edition was removed in favour of a black-sleeved Deluxe Edition, released on March 15, 2004. Blackwell gave permission to use the Palm Pictures-funded ‘The Rhythm Thief’ video, and some other oddities — ‘The Legend Of Lil’ Beethoven’, ‘Wunderbar’ and an instrumental version of ‘The Rhythm Thief’ were added to make the show even more elaborate. To celebrate the new edition, the brothers played two nights at The Ocean, East London’s short-lived state of the art music venue in Hackney on March 20 and 21.
The band then went over to Stockholm for three nights, returning to the States for a gig on April 9 at the Independent in San Francisco and then, to bring Lil’ Beethoven home, at the 1,300-seater Henry Fonda Theater on Hollywood Boulevard the following night. However Sparks’ next major show gained them arguably the most publicity for a gig they had enjoyed in their entire career. The press hoo-hah surrounding Morrissey’s curation of the Meltdown Festival on London’s South Bank in June 2004 was hard to believe. For the preceding month, it seemed that every arts section and magazine pored over his choice of line-up, which included Sparks.
David Sefton had put together the first Meltdown Festival at London’s Royal Festival Hall in 1993. When he departed to take over the UCLA’s arts programme in 2000, his role was taken by Glen Max, who developed the idea further, making it a key event in the UK arts calendar. Each year a series of weekly events in June would be brought together by a certain individual in the arts. It quickly moved on from its classical and serious-minded origins until it became a badge of honour for every left-leaning musical name; Scott Walker, David Bowie, John Peel and Patti Smith would all get to ‘curate’ their own Meltdown. It also propelled the word ‘curator’ into the mainstream for any potential booker/organiser of events.
In 2004, it was the turn of one of pop’s most contrary individuals, who, as a teenager, wrote to the NME extolling the virtues of Kimono My House, to curate the festival. Having already set his sights (successfully) on persuading his beloved New York Dolls to reform (despite two key members being deceased) Morrissey approached Sparks to perform Kimono My House in its entirety. “All they could think was ‘Why?’” says Harris. “Why would a band that was making some of the best music of their career suddenly revisit an album from 1974, with no reference to the ‘now?’ ” When the invitation was met with a refusal, Morrissey, who was on record as saying the album was one of his most important influences, asked again.*
“It was agreed to add Lil’ Beethoven, and that made sense,” Harris continues. “It meant the show referenced the past, but was all about the present. They had revisited the past but it was always in context.”
There were those who suggested that Morrissey had played it safe with his line-up, which also included his LA neighbour Nancy Sinatra and Alan Bennett. The London Metro even considered that “pop enigma Sparks are the most avant-garde choice”.
On June 12, Sparks took the stage with a one-off line-up to play the album. Tammy Glover and Dean Menta were joined by Redd Kross’ bassist Steve McDonald and Jim Wilson, the sometime guitarist with Henry Rollins. Wilson’s path had crossed with the brothers after Tony Visconti invited the guitar player along to his birthday party to meet them, knowing he was a Sparks fan. Through a twisting chain of events, including making a copy of a Dean Young cartoon of Sparks that Wilson had bought at a convention and a further chance meeting in a Mexican restaurant, Wilson was in.
The Delaware-born Wilson told the brothers with only slight exaggeration that he had been rehearsing for the show since the age of 14. “I went to Russell’s house/studio and I plugged in and kind of just played through Kimono to the CD and he said ‘Wow, you really do know it’. I was a huge Sparks fan growing up,” Wilson says. “My Sparks infatuation began as a teenager when I first got into their music. I just kept getting deeper into the catalogue.” His love for the group was shared with Marcus Blake, his school-friend and future co-founder of Mother Superior.
The Royal Festival Hall, sometimes a difficult venue to set alight emotionally, went up in f
lames. It was an intense and remarkable evening. “It was so exciting,” Wilson recalls. “I was so nervous. We hadn’t played Kimono My House for anybody and didn’t know what the reaction was going to be.”
The band members dressed in matching red shirts and black ties with Glover dressed as a geisha. The reviews were unanimous in their acclaim. The author wrote in Record Collector that “by the time of ‘Suburban Homeboy’, the audience were on their feet and Ron’s heartfelt thanks for prolonged UK support brings the evening to a touching close. A memorable occasion.” In Mojo Keith Cameron compared Russell to a “dapper and talented version” of Bombardier Beaumont (played by Melvin Hayes) from Seventies UK TV show It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum and said that, “Separated by 20 years, neither set of songs sounds remotely precedented, nor wants anything for charm or pure excitement.” Ryan Gilbey in The Independent said there was no time to dwell on the past as “the vigour with which the songs are invested leaves no room for nostalgia. Who has time to reminisce about the 70s when the band’s drummer, Tammy Glover, is dolled up as a geisha, incongruously bashing her way through ‘Hasta Mañana Monsieur’ like Keith Moon in a black bob and lippy?”
The concert successfully showed that Sparks were about now as much as then. They continued to take the Lil’ Beethoven show around Europe, and the Stockholm show was filmed for a DVD released in August. David Buckley in Mojo said the concert showed that “Ron Mael is funny; his brother Russell’s live vocal is simply angelic”. It concluded two years of work that had repositioned Sparks less as novelty and more as high art.
Lil’ Beethoven had provided the fillip to the career Sparks had been carving over the past decade. Although it sold broadly in line with all of their other recent releases, what the album had done was spread the word. The group hadn’t really had a buzz on this scale since No. 1 in Heaven. While there had been a palpable sense of delight when Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins was released, as good as it was, the music was not ground-breaking. Lil’ Beethoven was ground-breaking and then some.
