« BACK TO NEWS

Review: The Daily Telegraph

Brothers of reinvention 17 October 2002 After 30 years, Sparks have made their most remarkable album yet. They talk to Andrew Perry It’s a very rare thing that, after 30 years in the business, a pop band should come out with what must rank as their most challenging work. All the great survivors from the 1960s and 1970s, such as the Rolling Stones, certainly haven’t chosen to do so. It’s hard to imagine that, come the year 2030, the likes of Eminem or Will Young will do so either. Sparks, on the other hand, have selected this advanced point in their career to deliver Lil’ Beethoven, an album whose aim is to overturn not only the style and creative methods of their own music, but those of all pop music. “I can’t think of an equivalent band,” ponders Ron Mael, the instantly recognizable, moustachioed half of the duo, as he and his singing younger brother Russell sip herbal tea in the lounge at London’s Royal Garden Hotel. “I can’t think of a band that has made 19 albums, and hasn’t either moved into what I call the manor class, or disappeared, or else is just doing things that are a very mellow version of what they’ve always done.” The mellow peril, it seems, was what the Mael brothers were at pains to combat with Lil’ Beethoven. They had been settling into a certain dancefloor groove ever since the late 1970s, when they made hits such as Beat the Clock and The Number One Song in Heaven with legendary disco producer Giorgio Moroder. Along the way, they provided the blueprint for synth duos such as Pet Shop Boys, Erasure and Soft Cell, and found a new generation of fans through the explosion of house clubs at the beginning of the 1990s. They subsequently enjoyed occasional success in different countries around the world, and could have continued regurgitating this formula until they felt like hanging up their disco knickers and retiring. “There are all these safety nets in pop music,” says Russell. “With us, we’d maybe get a good rhythm or drum loop, and frame things around that. There you have a start, but we suddenly said to ourselves, we’re bored with the clichés of dance music and all the traditional elements that make up pop music. We wanted to do something that couldn’t be pigeonholed.” So they began constructing songs without a conventional beat, making rhythm and structure out of layers and layers of orchestral strings, piano, and Russell’s high-pitched vocals which they laboriously built up over months in the studio. The opening track, The Rhythm Thief, explicitly introduces their new beat-free sound, and asks the poignant question, “Where did the groove go?” What follows is a remarkable record, which owes less to contemporary pop than to classical music or opera, as suggested in the title. “Lil’ Beethoven is this character we’ve invented, who’s like the creator of the record,” Russell continues. “His great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was Beethoven. A lot of people wanted to work with him, from the Dixie Chicks to Branford Marsalis, because of his musical heritage. He always turned them all down, but Sparks sought him out in Heidelberg, and he consented to work with us on this project.” A bizarre conceit, and one they were prepared to take the whole way by removing their own name from the album’s artwork and crediting it to their reclusive alter ego. Their record company talked them out this act of career suicide. It’s all very unusual behaviour for such seasoned pop practitioners, now in their fifties, but then Sparks have never been the most conformist of acts. Born and raised in Southern California, they started out on the early 1970s experimental rock scene in Los Angeles, where they never really fitted in. They relocated to London, to the home of heroes such as the Who and the Kinks. Their theatrical form of guitar-based rock soon dovetailed into the tail end of glam with This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us. I tell them that my father was so enraged by their fantastically melodramatic performance of the song on Top of the Pops that he hurled his slippers at the television. They laugh like the proverbial drains, but what really established them was their striking image – Russell, wide-eyed and dancing, and Ron, standing behind his keyboard in shirt and tie, stony-faced and twitching his toothbrush moustache (since replaced with a pencil-thin number). “It wasn’t like we were concocting, ‘What can he do to shock people?’ ” Russell claims. “It just worked out that I was the more stereotypical lead singer, versus his more stoic thing. He felt more natural being the anti-rock persona.” “We were really fortunate,” adds Ron, “that what we were doing happened to work on television.” A few years later, after hearing Donna Summer’s I Feel Love, they were inspired to abandon their more traditional rock-band format and move to Munich to record with that song’s producer, Giorgio Moroder. The resulting Number One In Heaven album yielded some of their biggest hits, although Russell remembers that this lost them respect with the critical fraternity. “We were this evil thing disco. Now, 20 years later, disco is seen as kinda cool. In retrospect, they look back on that album as like the bible of electronic pop music.” So Lil’ Beethoven is a radical move for Sparks, right at a time when groups such as Fischerspooner – an arty American techno duo – have been plundering their showy take on electronica and making it hip all over again. The brothers say that what drove them to change was the parlous state of today’s pop music. “You have to have an enemy to react against,” says Ron. “We think it’s important to have a sort of us-versus-them situation. We’re not trying to be esoteric. There is that about what we do, but we like to be there at the table with everybody else, commercially speaking. We are irate about the state of things in pop music, though. There’s nothing for us to rip off. So in a modest sort of way, we’re trying to invent another way of doing things.”