The 1970s band are thrilling in concert in their late seventies
For those of us plagued by doubt about the purpose of human existence once we’re entrenched in middle age (quite the columnar Mrs Mopp, am I not?), an antidote is discovered.
His name may be unfamiliar to you. But you may well recall the judder of astonishment occasioned by first exposure to him.
It was so long ago that even this precocious little bleeder, whose midlife crisis struck at 19, hadn’t succumbed to age-related existential Weltschmerz.
One Thursday evening in 1974, at glam rock’s high tide, John Peel introduced perhaps the most singular band ever to grace Top of the Pops.
The camera panned between an unfeasibly pretty, curly-haired lead singer and the keyboard player beside him. The latter sat behind his instrument, wholly static but for the movement of his fingers and a sporadic sideways flick of the eyes to flash a Hitlerian death stare at his partner.
Within moments, so legend relates, John Lennon was dialling a former colleague. ‘You won’t believe what’s on the television,’ he reportedly told Ringo Starr. ‘Marc Bolan is playing a song with Adolf Hitler.’
If the penny is still in flight, let it be stated that the band was Sparks (Californian by birth and present residence, but unmistakably British in tone and sensibilities).
The record was the thrillingly cod- operatic ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us’, the pretty boy singer Russell Mael, and the unnerving doppelgänger at his side his elder brother, Ron.
None who saw it will have forgotten the shock expressed in that inter-Beatle phone call. Encountering the Führer on TOTP? Even John Lennon hadn’t imagined that.
More than half a century on, Sparks not only are still going, but are every inch as good, at least, as ever they were. Their latest record, Mad!, reached number two in the UK, the highest of any of their now 28 studio albums. And not long ago, my cousin Nick, a man of unimpeachable musical taste, kindly treated me to a gig in front of 3,500 worshippers in Hammersmith.
They were magnificent by any standard. But, without my wishing to patronise the elderly – hardly a smart move in this of all journals – given their ages, they were astounding.
Russell is a spry 76, while on 12th August – the glorious 12th, indeed – Ron turns 80. The toothbrush ’tache has thinned and receded so that you couldn’t confuse a Sparks gig with a Nuremberg rally now. The talent has not.
Of course other, and older, titans are still strutting their stuff.
Jagger at 81 looks as if he keeps one of those rejuvenating alien pods from the movie Cocoon in his pool. But he doesn’t write songs the way he did (and hasn’t since the seventies).
Elton is 78, and still belting out the classics with brio. But as an artist he peaked in the ’70s, during that golden early spell with lyricist Bernie Taupin.
Rod Stewart’s fantastic rock voice went some time ago, as his recent Glastonbury turn confirmed. Paul McCartney’s unquestioned genius as both singer and songwriter is also long faded.
Yet here was Russell still nailing every falsetto note with undiminished power. And here is Ron still writing glorious tracks – always witty and seductively ccentric; sometimes wonderfully poignant – at a prodigious rate.
They played all the hits, none better than 1979’s ‘The Number One Song in Heaven’, their mammothly influential synth-disco masterpiece (and a certain pick should a nuclear holocaust reduce global candidates for Desert Island Discs to one person).
Yet the adoration sweeping from crowd to stage was barely less tangible with the newer stuff. Age cannot wither Russell Mael’s voice, nor custom stale Ron’s infinite lyrical variety. Time hasn’t laid a glove on them.
Apart, perhaps, from Philip Roth, whose second coming produced several mighty novels late in his life, Ron is the only soul I can think of whose artistic energy and brilliance has survived the passage of the decades so undimmed.
How these guys kept going during the various droughts when no recording label would touch them must bewilder those of us whose reflex is to raise the white flag at the first reverse.
I would say it defies explanation, were it not beautifully explained in the documentary film, The Sparks Brothers, directed by Edgar Wright, a superfan, a few years ago. Their passion for music never waned an iota.
One of their British hits was ‘Beat the Clock’, in which, as so often, Ron was way ahead of his time with a sharp satire on the crushing franticness of modern life: ‘Entered school when I was two... Got divorced when I was four...’
Compared with the present insanity, 1979 might have been life in a Dorset village in the cottage next to Thomas Hardy.
But today the title has a different resonance. They have beaten, defied and obliterated the clock, these glimmering beacons of hope for the defeatist old timer, and may the mightiest hand spare them from hearing the number-one song in heaven for eons to come.
