Mael Art With Sparks by Ryan Crabbe
Witty, innovative and highly influential, musical mavericks Ron
and Russell Mael threw away the rulebook with 'Lil' Beethoven',
to create an uncompromising pop masterpiece.
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Sparks was where
my enduring love affair with decidedly odd, off-kilter pop
all began, and I was privileged to meet Ron and Russell Mael
recently, at the launch party for their new concert
DVD, 'Lil' Beethoven Live in Stockholm', where I was able
to ask them whether they considered their 200? Album Lil'
Beethoven to be their masterpiece.
Ron: We really do. After you finish an album you always
regard it as your precious little baby, but as time goes
by you put it in perspective. But this one has been around
long enough now for it to still seem like something really
special to us. What we set out to do, was to produce something
distinct from what we'd done before and something apart from
what we'd consider to be orthodox pop music.
But in bidding 'goodbye to the beat', weren't they concerned
about alienating fans more used to the more dance-friendly
rhythms of previous albums.
Ron: That fear of alienating fans was there. We actually
had an album recorded of songs which were much more in line with
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style of the previous
album, Balls, but ultimately when you're on your nineteenth album,
you have to do things in an attention-grabbing kind of way. We decided
to chuck out traditional song structures and generally try to reform
what a pop song could be. We wanted to push the boundaries... it was
really important for us to make a statement, and I think with Lil'
Beethoven, we've really done that.
And given that Sparks practically invented leftfield electronic
dance-pop (more recently known as electroclash) with their 1979
album 'No 1 Song in Heaven', I wondered whether Lil' Beethoven
was deliberately intended as a way of giving their many imitators
the slip.
Ron: It really wasn't
so much a case of us trying to do an album so that nobody would
sound like us, but more to do an album that doesn't sound like
other people. There's really not much you can do about other
artists doing stuff in the style of what you've already done,
and there's a certain degree of flattery within that. However,
I think there's a real lack of ambition within popular music
right now; a lack of people out there willing to throw away
the rule book in order to create something really important
sounding.
Russell: Also, the record industry, radio and television is
a lot more conservative these days, to the extent that I doubt
something like "This Town Ain't Big Enough..." would get the
same kind of support now as it did in the Seventies.'
Which of course, also means you'll be as unlikely to hear
anything quite so radical as Lil' Beethoven on your radio.
But enough of the muso talk already; one thing I really wanted
to know was how come the Maels don't fight like other musical
siblings such as the Davies brothers or the Gallaghers? |
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Russell: Perhaps, we ought to have had a fight
on stage. I guess we've always had such a common vision about what
Sparks should be about and what it should represent and so, our
working relationship down the years has been relatively harmonious -- 'relatively'
being the key word of course!
Extracted from a longer article which appeared in issue 4 of Nude
(Sept/ Oct 2004)
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