Review (25 October 2002): The Independent

The Independent 25 October 2002 Bright Sparks Sparks have come up with the perfect antidote to bland and pointless pop. But, asks Michael Bracewell, can their epic of non-conformism ever make the breakthrough? Ron and Russell Mael, the brothers from Los Angeles better known as the pop duo Sparks, appear not to have aged since about 1974, when they first hit the British charts with their blistering Top Five single “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us”. Back then, in the damp and dingy days of the early Seventies, the Mael brothers were possessed of an exotic sound pitched half-way between pop vaudeville and rock operetta. Russell, the singer, was Puck-like and boundlessly energetic, delivering the machine-gun patter of the vocals in a stylised counter-tenor; Ron came across as a spooky grandpa – your shotgun-shack paranoid, locked into his keyboard with an unblinking sideways stare that was, frankly, frightening. Nearly 30 years and the attainment of iconic status later, with a string of acclaimed and eclectic recordings behind them, Sparks are sitting in the lounge of a Kensington hotel, seemingly unchanged. As individuals, they are charm itself: Ron’s stage persona is exchanged for a quiet courtesy and good humour; with his slicked-back hair and Harold Lloyd glasses, he could be a visiting academic from Princeton. Russell remains a kind of sun child, with one of those enviable Californian accents that manage to sound simultaneously laid-back and razor-sharp. The brothers are here not only to promote their new album, Lil’ Beethoven, but to perform the whole of it – as a single piece – to an audience most of whom will not have heard a note of it. Such a performance may sound a high-risk proposition, but for those of us who have been lucky enough to hear an advance copy of Lil’ Beethoven, it makes total sense: for Lil’ Beethoven is not simply another Sparks album; it is 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. “Aw stop, you’ll make me cry,” says Ron, beaming at the comparisons but patting his knees with a nervousness which articulates how much energy, passion and belief went into making the album. “The idea was to abandon all of the things which were the basis of how we’ve worked before,” he explains. “Which meant that the traditional idea of songs, structure and so forth were all dropped. This is a concept album in the sense that we had the concept of throwing away 12 perfectly good songs that we had written, and making this instead. So it was a king of frightening experience as it turned out. There was no map.” “Even as we were making the record, we were wondering whether it was the right move,” Russell adds. “Particularly in these days when everything is so conservative and totally bland. But then we thought, no, that’s exactly the reason why we should be doing this album. It would have been so easy for us to just put out a traditional album of songs – there was even the temptation to put in the one cop-out track with a dance beat or whatever, but we resisted.” When the opening track of Lil’ Beethoven begins to work its coercive magic on the listener – a truly Gothic overture, with triumphal strings reminiscent of Vivaldi’s “Gloria” overlaid with a Guys And Dolls chorus of ‘Oh no where did the beat go?” – you begin to understand why Sparks are so committed to presenting this piece of work as a single entity. In the face of a contemporary music scene they find weighed down with pointless, format-designed acts – the kooky singer-songwriters and the grungy metal bands every bit as manufactured as the pre-teen dance groups – the brothers Mael have made an epic of non-conformism, every track of which lingers in the mind. But what are the chances of such a project breaking through – despite the sheer exuberance of the “finale” track, “I’m A Suburban Home-Boy” (“And I say ‘yo dog’ and I mean it, by God!”) ? “The people you mentioned,” says Ron. “Gershwin, for instance, I admire for the fact that you can’t pigeon-hole their talent as either that of a serious composer or a writer of popular songs. I’m definitely not going to make any judgments of quality, but the experience of working in an area where you’re not sure if you fit in – that we can relate to. So this new album is not going to be easy for some people, especially when people want to know right off the bat where you’re going.” “We love the idea of aggressive pop music,” says Russell. “But these days some groups just feel obliged to act the bad boy and kick over a drum kit or something. That was good when the Who did it, but today? To get a ‘wow’ nowadays it’s not by bashing your equipment, it’s got to be by doing something different.” Sparks, of course, are no strangers to swimming against the current. Their unique blend of cartoon, Americana and a somewhat European eccentricity has taken them in and out of fashion on a regular basis, before finally raising them above the whims of fashion completely. On successive albums, not least when working with Giorgio Moroder, they have created Sparks as a theatre of ideas with a particular sensibility – conjuring up a world as rich and strange as the best of American pop art. “Our fashionability depends on what movement has just happened, and where you happen to be in the world at any given moment,” says Russell. “For instance, we made six albums in the 1980s, which did very well in America but are hardly known here in Europe. Then again, in America they don’t know ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough…’; also, we’re credited with being the ‘godfathers’ of various genres – electro-clash, for example. We’ve been offered a lot of money to go on one of those sad ‘Bands from the Seventies’ tours, but we’d never do it.” They promise the staging of Lil’ Beethoven to be a unique visual production, making more use of Ron than in their previous shows. But with a leading Hollywood producer currently converting Lil’ Beethoven into a major motion picture – and the record cries out to wholly reinvent that debased term “pop musical” – Ron and Russell Mael appear to have risen above their reputation as legendary pop outsiders, and become something closer to important contemporary American composers. “We aren’t interested in winning lifetime-achievement awards,” says Ron. “We’re interested in this new record, and how best to see it through as something very special for us, and, we hope, the audience. There’s no going back, now, for us.”