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Sparks
The Best of 2023
Two magnificent Mael specimens,examined by John Aizlewood.
You’ve got Mael: Sparks in 1977 – Russell (left) and Ron are now in their sixth decade of making music.
Camille Walsh
“The hits we know, but Sparks have always been an albums act.”
THEY’RE QUITE the pair, the Mael boys: Ron, 78, and his baby brother Russell, 75. Together as Sparks, they’re in their sixth decade of making albums. They’ve had their troughs, but those troughs have been commercial rather than artistic. Yet they’ve usually been popular somewhere: first the UK after 1974’s Kimono My House, then France, the US (West Coast only), Germany, the UK again and now seemingly ever ywhere from Austria to Australia.
Russell is Ron’s muse and Sparks’ producer since 1986’s Music That You Can Dance To. The songs are Ron’s. “I’m not a genius,” Russell readily admits, “but my brother is.”
The teetotal, drug-free Maels from Pacific Palisades have never married, although Russell has wed Jacqueline Kennedy, an unidentified Martian (“boy am I sorry”) and himself (“I’m very happy together”) in song.
From 1971’s self-titled Halfnelson (re-titled Sparks, as was the band, a year later) to this year’s The Girl Is
Crying In Her Latte, the pair have remained faithful to each other, even during the grim six-year hiatus between 1988’s much-underrated Interior Design and Gratuitous Sax &
Senseless Violins, the comeback which extended their lifespan by decades.
They’ve been less faithful to any musical style, lurching in and out of art rock, pop, synth rock, just rock and, of late, Sparksrock, an everevolving amalgam of the lot, with classical, hip-hop, Krautrock and avant-garde undertows.
Perhaps the first two albums of their 25 – and possibly 2000’s Balls and 2009’s musical The Seduction Of Ingmar Bergman – are not superlative, although many a Sparks maven would disagree, but the quality of their output has remained remarkably unwavering. The hits we know, but Sparks have always been an albums act.