Sparks Rock Connect

Sunday Herald raves about Sparks at Connect Festival:

SPARKS How strange that it should take the two oldest men on any of the stages today to inject Hydro Connect with the youthful energy that has sometimes been lacking on the musical front. At 58 (or as close as biographical estimates have it), Russell Mael of Sparks gives it his all in the Unknown Pleasures tent for the full hour up to midnight. He has come prepared for a festival in a humid forest setting by the side of a Scottish loch, and soon is wiping sweat mixed with midge repellent from his eyes.

Throughout the set, his elder brother Ron sits stone-faced at a bank of keyboards at the front of the stage, or wanders around, interacting with the background projections, unsettling the audience with his unblinking stare. With his trousers hitched too high and his disapproving mouth drawn in tight, he's the most frightening maths teacher you never had. Like Bez of Happy Mondays, he can become the band's sole focal point even when he's contributing nothing specific to the music of the moment.

Truly, the Mael brothers are the Gilbert and George of pop music. They deliver the highlight show of day one, a theatrical slice of performance art that's crammed with fabulous musical hooks. Most of the crowd doesn't recognise the majority of songs that make up the set, but they're transfixed by every single note. When Sparks do play a big hit – This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us or a high-energy version of Number One Song All Over Heaven – it's as if the three decades between the songs' creation and their performance tonight have evaporated; they're fresh, vital and utterly brilliant.

It would be impossible to describe what Sparks sound like to anyone who hasn't heard them before. They're Sparks crossed with Sparks, with a bit of Sparks thrown in for good measure. Russell Mael's voice soars up and down into falsetto register with the smooth ease of a kid on a playpark swing, while his backing band skip from Weimar cabaret to 1970s disco to thrash metal in the blink of an eye. Strange Animal, second song in, is magnificent, with its spooky film backdrops of black-and-white tree-lined avenues and Nosferatu shadows. But it's Dick Around that has become the anthem of the day: “The sun goes up/The moon goes down/And all I do is dick around” – a festival itinerary for each and every one of us.