SPARKS
too latte for good byes
IT’S BEEN A HELLUVA THREE YEARS FOR RON AND RUSSELL MAEL. FIRST THERE WAS THE SPARKS BROTHERS DOCUMENTARY. THEN CAME THEIR DEBUT FILM AS SCREENWRITERS, THE BIG-SCREEN MUSICAL ANNETTE. NOW THE DUO ARE BACK WITH THEIR 26TH STUDIO ALBUM, THE GIRL IS CRYING IN HER LATTE...
STEVE O’BRIEN
A grand documentary tribute with a cast of celeb devotees, a big-screen debut, and now the Maels return with a brand new LP
Sparks adore their coffee, so it was perhaps inevitable that one day they’d write their preferred caffeinebased beverage into one of their album titles. The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte is the brothers Mael’s 26th long-player and its lead-off single, their first ever coffee-based song.
“Latte’s not our favourite, though,” a fully coffee-d up Russell Mael tells Classic Pop over Zoom from his home in Los Angeles, “but ‘The Girl Is Crying In Her Soy Cappuccino’ didn’t have a good ring about it.”
It’s been three years since Ron and Russell Mael’s last album, A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip. A new Sparks LP is always a big deal, but this time it feels different. Not only is The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte the pair’s first album since the career-boosting The Sparks Brothers documentary, but it marks their return to Island Records for the first time since 1976’s Big Beat.
“We toured last year and the audiences were a lot bigger than they were in the past,” the ever-youthful looking Russell tells us. “We owe a lot of that to Edgar Wright’s documentary and the Annette movie [the big-screen musical starring Adam Driver they wrote and which came out in the US a few months after The Sparks Brothers]. It put Sparks on the map in areas that we wouldn’t have normally been able to reach. The combination of both those films has had a huge impact for us.”
With more eyes on Sparks than at any point since the 70s, what better time for the boys to reteam with the label that they enjoyed their biggest success with? The duo’s highest charting album to date, 1974’s Kimono My House (No.4 in the UK), was the first of their four records with Island and, and, who knows, maybe The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte, with that Edgar Wright fire behind it, will beat even that?