‘We have a hostility to being boring’: Sparks, still flying in their 70s

[Animous]

 

Their Adam Driver musical sent Cannes into raptures and Edgar Wright has made an all-star documentary about them. The Mael brothers explain why they’ll always be hopelessly in love with pop

by Daniel Dylan Wray

Fri 16 Jul 2021 06.00 BST

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In 1974, John Lennon was startled as he was watching Top of the Pops. He rang Ringo Starr. “You won’t believe what’s on television,” he reportedly said. “Marc Bolan is playing a song with Adolf Hitler.”

This was Sparks, performing their glorious pop opus This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us. “It was equidistant between the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and the Daleks on Doctor Who,” says Edgar Wright, the director of Baby Driver and Shaun of the Dead, and now a documentary about the duo, The Sparks Brothers. “Fifteen million people saw it. Think of the next generation of bands watching: the Sex Pistols, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Duran Duran, Joy Division, Squeeze, Vince Clarke. They’re all watching and they’re all thinking the same thing.”

The Bolan in the scenario was Russell Mael, a strutting falsetto singer with luscious locks of flowing curls. Next to him was his elder brother Ron, sporting a toothbrush moustache, sitting motionless behind his keyboard, deadpan expression but rolling his eyes with the air of a man forced on stage to be a mime as a form of punishment.

The performance turned the Los Angeles duo into a sensation in the UK. Hundreds of thousands of singles were sold – just missing out on No 1 – and soon mobs of screaming fans invaded stages at concerts, ripping the clothes from their scrawny bodies. In a more just world, the song that catapulted them there would possess the same ubiquity, and be sung with the same roaring drunken gusto in pubs and karaoke bars across the world as Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody (which followed a year later), but stratospheric stardom, Live Aid and an Oscar-winning biopic were not in Sparks’ trajectory.

However, after more than 50 years of unpredictable pop that has explored electronic, new wave, art rock, glam rock, neoclassical, opera and just about every other conceivable niche, 2021 may be the year of Sparks. As well as the documentary, they have a film, Annette, which opened this year’s Cannes film festival. The brothers have written the script and music for the experimental musical, directed by Leos Carax (Holy Motors), about an outspoken standup comedian, Henry, (Adam Driver) and his opera singer wife Ann (Marion Cotillard), and how their life is turned upside-down by the birth of their child, Annette, a mysterious girl with a unique gift.

Carax and Sparks connected at Cannes in 2013 but their relationship goes back to when the 14-year-old Carax spotted an LP featuring the brothers tied and gagged on a speedboat. “I stole a copy of Propaganda because I liked the cover,” he says. “They’ve been part of my life ever since. Their tracks are among the most joyous I know.”

They seemed oblivious to what else was going on, like space travellers with no idea what’s going on back home

Edgar Wright

“I guess sometimes crime does pay,” laughs Ron, speaking from Cannes after the premiere. “The reaction of films here can go sideways: they really make it known what they think, so to have a five-minute standing ovation was incredible, a really special moment.” Reviews have been varied, with some calling it a masterpiece while others are perplexed. “It’s provocative and completely uncompromising,” says Ron. “It’s the kind of film people will be passionate about one way or another.”

He is clearly elated. “It’s been unbelievable. Extraordinary and dreamlike. Also, we’re such geeks. so having Spike Lee being the head of the jury ... we’re just kids in this weird wonderland.”

“It couldn’t happen to two nicer guys,” says Wright. “I joke with them, saying: what if a time traveller came to 1975 and saw you guys all glum over the Jacques Tati film falling apart and said, ‘Don’t look so downhearted, wait 46 years and another French director is going to make good on this.’” The Tati film – which would have starred Sparks as American television execs trying to modernise a rural TV station in France – is one of two major film projects that fell through in their career. The other was adapting the Japanese manga Mai, the Psychic Girl into a musical with Tim Burton directing, before it collapsed.

So, did they expect more of the same? “In a naive way. we always assume something is going to happen,” says Ron, 75, when I speak to him and his brother prior to Cannes via video call. With his moustache and drawl, Ron is the more comically dry of the pair. “We decided the past was irrelevant. We may be foolish but we thought this would happen.” And now that it has? “We try not to be too self-satisfied but there is some vindication that after all this time it actually happened.”

This is the essence of Wright’s documentary on the eccentric, charming pair: a band who, despite moments of commercial success, always experiment and reinvent even if it results in indifference. “They always seemed ahead of the game,” says Wright. “Oblivious to what else was going on and just forging ahead – like space travellers who have no idea what’s going on back on their home planet.”

Sparks were made from a couple of pop-obsessed boys growing up in 1950s America. In love with AM radio, cinema, surfing and entertaining from an early age, a prepubescent Ron was already dazzling audiences in school talent competitions, wearing a bright pink suit.

They formed early bands – Urban Renewal Project in 1967, followed by Halfnelson in 1968 – and played gigs wherever they could, from dog shows to pizza parlours. They made demos but record labels expressed zero interest. However, Todd Rundgren saw something and offered to produce Halfnelson’s debut. They reissued it under their new name, Sparks, and it picked up a little steam, largely because of the infectious glam-pop single Wonder Girl.

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