live review – Guardian

[b]review of the Sparks show at Meltdown[/b] Royal Festival Hall, London David Peschek Wednesday June 16, 2004 You wonder what Ron and Russell Mael were like as children. Specifically, you wonder at what age the roles in their indefatigable double act were first delineated. Ron: comically dour, formally dressed, with a tiny Hitler moustache – like one of the Nazi caricatures in Springtime for Hitler from Mel Brooks’s The Producers. Russell: rakish, energetic, part Bryan Ferry, part Tigger. Though Sparks have often been a band they remain, after more than 30 years and 19 albums, pop’s archetypal duo; the model, particularly, for the Pet Shop Boys’ fop and heavy act. Tonight, at Morrissey’s invitation, they play the whole of their 1974 album, Kimono My House, in sequence. It contains their biggest hit, This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us. Like much of the album, it seems composed of an avalanche of unresolved crescendos – breathlessly exciting yet somehow oddly tense. You can hear echoes, perhaps, in Queen and, 10 years later, the Associates, but these songs are like little else. Various LA rock refugees (erstwhile members of Faith No More, the Rollins Band and Redd Kross) flesh out the band. Ron sits, near motionless, at his keyboard. He has more to do in the second half when they play L’il Beethoven, their most recent album, which, in total contrast, is a wry exercise in minimalism and repetition – systems music with gags, if you will. It’s a celebration of all that’s fake in pop. Much of the music is on tape, often what’s left of the band mime exaggeratedly, and at one point Ron pretends to play keyboards with 6ft-long arms. Songs such as Your Call Is Very Important to Us are built around a few simple lines repeated and shuffled. True, they don’t have the abandon of the Kimono songs, but this is clever, artful music that manages also to be big, dumb and shiny. Musicians are generally herd animals, but Sparks are still out on their own. http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/reviews/story/0,11712,1239622,00.html