Credit: Found On Internet

The Forum
Islington, London
Saturday 30 September

Tonight’s gig by the Los Angeles duo Sparks has the feel of a homecoming put on for a select audience of maniacal life-long friends, which isn’t far from the truth. The brother-duo of Ron and Russell Mael relocated to London from LA in 1973 replacing an American public scratching their heads for swathes of British fans who seemed to instinctively ‘get’ the duo’s blithely peculiar music, then and now.

With London as their new home, Sparks continued to gravitate away from the mainstream universe offered by their single This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us, to a career of cultish, fanatical appreciation. Although tonight they may be preaching to the converted, Sparks are not simply here to lazily reminisce with old friends, playing the whole of their latest album Hello Young Lovers to begin with. As it turns out, the music is the best since they threatened to rule the airwaves in the early 1970s - in the tradition of their innovative past, but in no way dependent on it for validation.

Backed by a three-piece band, all placed behind a veil that cuts across the stage, the brothers Mael take us through the current single Dick Around, the gloriously impertinent and atypically political (Baby, Baby) Can I Invade Your Country and the modern classic Metaphor (“chicks dig, dig, D.I.G, dig, dig metaphors”). The band’s renaissance, set in motion with 2000’s Balls, shows no let up. Rock, Rock, Rock is the best, and possibly the only, three-minute deconstruction of rock music, with confessions of insecurities set against ludicrous braggadocio. “Don’t leave me,” coons Russell, “I can Rock, Rock, Rock (like a mother).” Elsewhere Sparks thread similarly intelligent and funny lyrics through a mesh of swing-style jazz, a cappella pieces and pure pop melodies.

The fixed point of this swirling mess of building chants and erratic, operatic musical scaling is Ron Mael. Dressed to the nines with Hitler-moustache glistening, he’s uncharacteristically mobile during the HYL set; interacting with images on a stage screen, one minute punching the head off a projection of himself, the next playing a pulsating cartoon organ. He’s the embodiment of his music, equal parts mind and emotion; his lyrics, all sung by Russell Mael, are humorously literate and his music free to explore the unashamedly sentimental; his slick upper body, belligerently, comically staring at the audience, is at odds with his hands as they furiously pump away at the keyboards, dictating the direction of the Sparks’ musical machine.