This town’s still big enough for the both of them!
Sparks A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip (BMG) ★★★★★
While Bowie was Ziggying and Slade were slaying ’em in the early 1970s, Sparks were making glam rock danceable, incorporating classical music and lending it a sly wit.
The LA duo’s first chart hit This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us and their appearance on Top Of The
Pops in 1974 caused a stir even by the standards of the day.
Russell Mael’s operatic falsetto, androgynous look and Ron Mael’s thousand yard stare, Hitler haircut and moustache were so unusual that even Paul McCartney parodied them in the video for his 1980 hit Coming Up.
Bands as diverse as Duran Duran, Nirvana, The Smiths and Franz Ferdinand have cited them as an influence. They teamed up with the latter in a surprisingly successful merging as FFS in 2015 for a tour and album of that name.
They went back into the UK top ten on their own with their last album Hippopotamus in 2017.
After over 50 years together, they can be forgiven for being reflective. On the opener
All That, 71-year-old Russell sings of ‘All that we’ve done, we’ve lost, we’ve won, all that and more’ over pumped up acoustic guitars and tambourines sounding like Blur’s Tender. I’m Toast’s grunge influenced verses give way to an almost prim pop chorus. Not too many acts would sing of the joy that a lawnmower brings, but Sparks do it with straight faces. Elsewhere, ‘the Pope in is on the floor laughing’ because Sainthood Is Not In
Your Future. They’ve never been knowingly undersold in
the camp department and Stravinsky’s
Only Hit is a particularly fruity variety of orchestral pop.
They present a potted biography of the Russian composer’s triumphs wondering how he would find an audience in 2020. SelfEffacing’s examination of modern celebrity doesn’t sound like the tut-tutting of a septuagenarian. The premise of iPhone – what if smart phones were around at history’s defining moments – has Abraham Lincoln, for example, saying ‘put your f ***** g iPhone down and listen to me,’ at Gettysburg. But it never seems as if they are attempting to prove their continuing relevance, they were outsiders and innovators in the 1970s and are still sparking vibrantly in their seventies.