THE SPARKS BROTHERS
EDGAR WRIGHT’S SMASH-HIT DOCUMENTARY THE SPARKS BROTHERS IS THE PERFECT MATCH OF FILMMAKER AND SUBJECT – FIZZY AND FUNNY. TOTAL FILM MEETS WITH THE DIRECTOR AND THE BROTHERS TO LEARN ALL ABOUT THE GREATEST BAND YOU’VE MAYBE NEVER HEARD OF…
Let Edgar Wright spark your interest in the best band you might not know.
Edgar Wright was five years old when Sparks first blipped on his radar. “Top Of The Pops and Doctor Who were the two shows I watched a lot,” he grins on Zoom, not needing a Tardis to travel back in time to the living room of his family home in Somerset, in 1979. “I remember the image of [brothers] Ron and Russell [Mael] on Top Of The Pops because they had three singles out that year, so they probably did four or five appearances. That was at the point where they stripped down to being just Ron on synths and Russell singing, and maybe sometimes with a drummer on stage. It essentially became the template for so many ’80s acts – Soft Cell, Pet Shop Boys, Yazoo. I remember the image very, very well. And then separately from that, I’d occasionally get these chart-compilation albums. I remember, one came free with a pair of jeans. It had Sparks’ ‘Beat The Clock’ on it. I really, really liked it.”
Wright’s Tardis-like mind is now spinning him forward to 1994. “‘When Do I Get To Sing My Way’ was their sort of comeback single,” he says. “The video was on everywhere. And I’m watching it at home, thinking, “Wait – Sparks? ‘Beat The Clock’ Sparks? Where have they been for 15 years? What’s going on?’”
There’s no stopping this tumbling journey down memory lane. Now it’s 2017… “Eventually, at a Sparks gig in LA, after I’d finished doing the Baby Driver tour, I said to Phil Lord, who also loves Sparks: ‘The only thing stopping Sparks being as big as they could be is that somebody’s got to make a documentary about them.’” It wasn’t the first time Wright had voiced this thought – he’d been saying it for a few years by then. But Lord, the bright mind behind The Lego Movie, the Jump Street movies and Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, was the first to reply: “You should do it.” If Wright was taken aback, it was only for a moment. “I was like, ‘Oh, yeah. I will.’ And then, that night, me and Phil went to say hi to them backstage, and I said, ‘Hey, I’ve got an idea of something I want to talk to you about.’ And as soon as I said it out loud, without any idea of who would finance this movie” – he chuckles – “basically it was a vocal contract to them. That was four years ago.”
LIGHTING THE FUSE
The documentary that was promised and is now being delivered into cinemas after winning rave reviews at the Sundance Film Festival and South by Southwest is The Sparks Brothers. It’s two hours and 20 minutes long, but zips by in the blink of an eye, providing a whistle-stop tour through Sparks’ 25 albums (to date) over a 54-year career that has seen them constantly rejig, reinvent and rejuvenate, trying their hands at glam rock, prog rock, New Wave, proto-punk, electro, disco and techno. Chances are you’ve never heard of them, but that’s OK: there will be songs you recognise (‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us’, ‘Girl From Germany’) and bands you love who are deeply influenced by them. Sparks are often dubbed as the ‘musicians’ musicians’, and the likes of Franz Ferdinand, Duran Duran, New Order, Erasure and Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers are among the 80 or so talking heads that pop up to wax lyrical in Wright’s dazzling doc, along with leftfield uber-fans such as Mike Myers, Mark Gatiss and Neil Gaiman. “I felt that more people needed to know who they were,” says Wright, and this doc will no doubt result in tens of thousands stampeding to Spotify and iTunes.
Watching The Sparks Brothers’ hyperkinetic mix of archival footage, interviews, recreations and 2D and stop-motion animation, it is immediately apparent that Wright is the perfect director to corral the story of this particular band. His films, like Sparks’ music, blend genres and embrace humour. The brothers agree.
“We had been hesitating when asked about doing a documentary, because you feel that if it’s in the wrong hands, it can be like writing the obituary of a band as opposed to celebrating what the band has been, and also what the band is now doing,” starts Russell. At 72 years of age, he radiates infectious energy on
Zoom. “We thought that if anybody was going to do a good job of this thing, then Edgar could do it. There seemed to be a similar sensibility to his films and our music.”
Ron, 75, nods. He looks imposingly serious, sitting stock still in his Zoom frame while his younger brother chats. But when he talks, the corners of his lips curl up on either side of the narrow moustache that’s earned him comparisons to Chaplin and Hitler throughout his career. His smile is effervescent. “Also, there’s a highenergy, kinetic nature to his films,” he says. “He was able to impose that energy on the documentary. That was something that we were really hoping for. We didn’t want this to be an outlier. But it obviously has his stamp all over it.”
For Wright, you might have thought it would be a challenge making his first documentary, perhaps even a headache. For while it sure is fun following one of your favourite bands around the world to capture concerts performed in London, Japan, Mexico City and Los Angeles, how do you even begin to sift through 50 years’ worth of archive footage?
“The archive stuff is a gift, really,” he insists. “Ron and Russell are really good at archiving their own stuff, just in their house. And we sourced stuff from the fans. We put the word out on social media, and got a massive influx of photos and footage from gigs. It’s more about trying to fashion the story. They don’t have a ‘rise and fall and rise’ structure. It’s like this all the way through.” His index finger draws a jagged line of countless peaks and troughs in the air, like some crazy ECG reading. “As Ron and Russell point out, most music documentaries have some kind of end-of-act-two tragedy – like, somebody dies, or there’s an accident, or there’s drug addiction. The thing with Ron and Russell is that it’s more like watching the tortoise and the hare. What I want people to feel by the end of the documentary is that you’re totally on the journey with them. It’s these two guys who’ve scratching this itch for 50 years.”
There is, perhaps, a different documentary that could have been made on Sparks. For while we learn that the brothers are from California (they’re often mistaken as English) and are not the sons of Doris Day (a rogue rumour that’s persisted for years), The Sparks Brothers chooses to preserve much of the mystique that is very much part of the band’s brand. There’s even a segment where Ron and Russell look straight to camera and share 20 little-known facts about themselves – all of them outrageous and obviously made up.
“The only thing off the table was that they didn’t really want to talk about relationships,” says Wright. “In the film, there are a couple of times it comes up organically, when they can’t help but talk about the situation with ex-girlfriends. But for the most part, that was something that they asked for. And I totally understand it. Sparks have existed for a long time with a sort of curious enigma about them. It’s one of the reasons that people still love the band. So then it becomes a balancing act. How can you tell the whole Sparks story, and yet let them retain a bit of mystique?”
The brothers are not about to spill any secrets now. “Well, I mean, the important thing is that we have a really good relationship creatively,” starts Ron when TF enquires if they ever fall out when the cameras are off. “There’s no possible way that we would have been able to do 25 albums in a continuous fashion without being brothers, I think. It obviously works as a hindrance to [some] other brother bands, but in our case, it’s one of the keys to the longevity of the band, and also the sustenance of a certain level of quality. It isn’t that we need to get along, and go, ‘Hey, let’s go out for brunch’ or something.”
Wright points out the lack of personal drama that has allowed the brothers to keep plugging away through the fallow years. They saved for the rainy days – or rather years – if you will. “They would say, ‘Are we too boring in our private lives to have a documentary about us?’ I was like, ‘No, I find that part the most inspiring part, that you keep your overheads low…’ You know, not having a big coke habit, or blowing their advance on expensive cars. It’s the
‘THERE’S NO POSSIBLE WAY WE WOULD HAVE BEEN ABLE TO DO 25 ALBUMS WITHOUT BEING BROTHERS ’
RON MAEL
thing that’s afforded them the opportunity to almost be gymnastic in their pursuit of Sparks.”
“When we see each other, we’re almost always in a working situation,” continues Ron. “At this point, so much can be non-verbal, because we know what each other is about. Also, we know musically what we want to do, without having to have these big board meetings. Both of us have a passion for pop music. We think that pop music [has] an amazing set of rules, in a way, and we want to see how far we can work within those fixtures but kind of get away with a lot of things.”
READY FOR THEIR CLOSEUP
The Sparks Brothers makes it abundantly clear that Ron and Russell will never stop pushing. Whereas bands like The Rolling Stones and The Who are content to play their greatest hits to packed-out stadiums, the Sparks, on tour in 2008, played a different album in its entirety night after night after night, meaning they had to master 300 songs. Throughout their career, whenever their tastes have fleetingly aligned with the general public’s to produce a hit, they’ve executed a breakneck change of direction, daring fans to keep up. In 2015, they released an album with Franz Ferdinand after forming supergroup FFS. And never mind they are now septuagenarians – they have a new album lined up and a tour to follow early next year. Who knows, perhaps they have another 25 albums in them. “With advances in medical science,” says Ron, stone-faced, on the doc.
They also have musical-drama Annette scheduled to open this year’s Cannes Film Festival, should it go ahead. It is the tale of a stand-up comedian (Adam Driver), his operasinger wife (Marion Cotillard) and their two-year-old daughter with a surprising gift, and it is directed by French auteur Leos Carax (Holy Motors, Pola X). Ron and Russell wrote the screenplay and the music, and their joy – not to mention relief – is palpable, for they are cinephiles who once almost made a Monsieur Hulot film with Jacques Tati, and an anime musical with Tim Burton.
“We could never have imagined not only having a really great documentary, but also a feature film we had initiated and written entirely ourselves,” says Russell, whose favourite filmmakers are Welles, Bergman, Ozu, Mizoguchi and the French New Wave directors of the ’50s and ’60s. Naturally, Ron agrees
with all of his choices, and his lips again curl up to frame his ’tache as he talks fondly of Annette. “It is beyond what we expected,” he says. “I think this project is really special, both from our point of view, but within film musicals as well. We’re really excited for people to see the film. We’re film buffs in an intense way. The Cannes Film Festival is the Holy Land for us. And so for the film to be the opening film there, it’s just unbelievable.”
Given Sparks’ raison d’être is to reinvent and stay fresh, they must be excited that Annette and Wright’s documentary will introduce a lot more people to their work. Especially a younger audience.
“We really hope so,” says Russell, and Ron nods along. “From the few film festivals where The Sparks Brothers has been at so far, the reaction already has been amazing. And even when the trailer was released, there was tonnes of really positive feedback – obviously from hardcore Sparks fans, but also from new people. We’ve found there’s people going, ‘I know so much about music. Why have I never heard of Sparks?’ And they have taken the next step and said, ‘I’ve gone and listened to your catalogue. It’s astounding. I can’t believe I didn’t know about you.’”
As for Wright, one of the rewards of working with Sparks is to draw inspiration from their bottomless well of creativity. “Look at someone like George Miller doing Fury Road,” he says. “A man who’s 71, he comes back, and makes a movie that wipes the floor with every other director living. That’s extraordinary. With things like Fury Road or Sparks’ career, it’s just an example that you should never count anybody out because of their age. Sparks have been smart. They almost have this wilful obtuseness of switching it up. It’s admirable. You shouldn’t give in to what you think you ought to do, or what people want to see. That’s why I’ve never caved to a Shaun Of The Dead sequel or a Hot Fuzz sequel. It’s like, ‘I know you think you want it, but unless we’ve got a really good idea, I don’t think you need it.’”
You might say The Sparks Brothers is just the opposite – the film you didn’t know you needed, but really do.
THE SPARKS BROTHERS IS IN CINEMAS FROM 30 JULY, WITH A SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL: LONDON SCREENING AND LIVE SATELLITE Q&A WITH EDGAR WRIGHT IN CINEMAS ON 29 JULY.