live review – Daily Telegraph

[b]Watching Sparks fly[/b] (Filed: 15/06/2004) David Cheal reviews Sparks at Meltdown, Festival Hall Meltdown 2004 gallery Those who saw it will never forget it: 30 years ago, two brothers from the west coast of America, Ron and Russell Mael, appeared on Top of the Pops performing their single, This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us. Sparks fly The song itself was extraordinary enough, a mad, breathless epic with big chords, thundering drums, gunshots and peculiar lyrics about “elephants and tacky tigers”, but Sparks themselves were also a bizarre sight – mop-topped singer Russell prancing like a pixie, Ron sitting impassively behind his keyboard, twitching his Hitler moustache and raising the occasional deeply ironic eyebrow. They’ve never made another record quite like it, but their performance on the second night of Morrissey’s Meltdown season on the South Bank gave their legions of loyal fans a chance, as Russell said, to “compare and contrast” then with now: their show consisted, quite simply, of two albums played from start to finish – the first, 1974’s Kimono My House (plus a couple of “bonus track” B-sides), the second, their most recent, Lil’ Beethoven. An interval gave the audience a chance to break off into discussion groups. The verdict? Well, first, that Kimono My House sounds as fresh today as it did 30 years ago. There really isn’t a duff song on it, and here the Maels – ably supported by a bassist, two guitarists, and their longstanding and impossibly glamorous drummer, Tammy Glover – rolled back the years and kicked out an unstoppable sequence of songs. We all knew that the show would begin with This Town, it being the opening track on the album, but it still sounded almost shockingly original. Of the tracks that followed, Falling in Love with Myself Again (which found an echo in the second half in Lil’ Beethoven’s I Married Myself) and Equator were particularly stunning, with Russell’s voice apparently untouched by the passage of time. The second part of the verdict is that Lil’ Beethoven is easily the equal of Kimono My House, and surpasses it in terms of sheer invention. With the opening track, The Rhythm Thief, signalling their abandonment of the electronic beats that had propelled much of Sparks’s music for the past 20 years, Lil’ Beethoven is a strange and beautiful piece of work that owes as much to neo-classical orchestral music as it does to pop, rock and dance. This presentation, which relied heavily on backing tapes of Mael’s multitracked vocals, was enhanced by snappy visuals; the result was funny, sad, moving, thrilling, and at times – especially on the hypnotic My Baby’s Taking Me Home – quite compelling. No encores followed; just a thoroughly deserved standing ovation. [url=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/06/15/bmelt15.xml]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/06/15/bmelt15.xml[/url]