The Sparks Brothers
Take a musical odyssey through five weird and wonderful decades with brothers Ron & Russell Mael, celebrating the inspiring legacy of Sparks: your favorite band’s favorite band.
- Released: 2021-06-18
- Runtime: 140 minutes
- Genre: Documentaries, Music
- Stars: Ron Mael, Russell Mael, Beck, Gary Stewart, Mike Berns, Jane Wiedlin, Sal Maida, Christi Haydon, Dean Menta, Harley Feinstein, Tony Visconti, Mike Myers, Fred Armisen, Tammy Glover, John Hewlett, Giorgio Moroder, 'Weird Al' Yankovic, Muff Winwood, Nick Rhodes, John Taylor, Todd Rundgren, Flea, Hilly Michaels, Jason Schwartzman, Jonathan Ross, Amy Sherman-Palladino, Dan Palladino, Mark Crowther, Vera Hegarty, Neil Gaiman, Stephen Morris, Gillian Gilbert, Katie Puckrik, Patton Oswalt, Steve Jones, James Lowe, Bernard Butler, Scott Aukerman, David Kendrick, Stevie Nistor, Chris Difford, Martyn Ware, Alex Kapranos, Paul Morley, Julia Marcus, Pamela Des Barres, Roddy Bottum, Les Bohem, April Richardson, Lance Robertson, Jack Antonoff, John Congleton, Earle Mankey, Larry DuPont, Patricia Lowe, Vince Clarke, Andy Bell, Björk, Mark Gatiss, Richard Coble, Nick Heyward, Ian Hampton, Thurston Moore, Peter Knego, Michael Silverblatt, Adam Buxton, Tosh Berman, Edgar Wright, Rusty Egan, Jake Fogelnest, Dave Weigel, Madeline Bocchiaro, Sue Harris, Ben House, Evan Weiss, Alex Casnoff, Patrick Kelly, Eli Pearl, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Leos Carax, Adam Driver, Daniel Palladino
- Director: Edgar Wright
Comments
- kevin_s-15449 - 11 August 2022
Sparkling
A weird and wonderful look into their work and legacy.
Everything else aside, the story of how a band can pull a rug from under it's own feet when approaching any kind of summit.
The story of Sparks. - crumpytv - 31 January 2022
Excellent
A fascinating look into the career of Sparks, a band (?) many people will never have heard of, so it almost fulfils the idea of making a documentary of a fictitious band, a la, Spinal Tap.
Only, they are very real and it is in interesting trip through their career.
It is particularly interesting seeing the true character of the enigmatic Ron Mael.
The thing that struck me most was the devotion between the brothers.
70+ years is a long time, good on them. - cappiethadog - 2 October 2021
We're an american band
Was Sparks the original inspiration for David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel, and Derek Smalls?
Some people thought Spinal Tap was a real band, those audiences who saw Rob Reiner's "This is Spinal Tap" during its original theatrical run in 1984. Nobody knew what a "mockumentary" was. People, especially non-music fans, took the film at face value. "This is Spinal Tap" opens with Reiner, playing filmmaker Marti DeBergi, talking directly to the camera about a UK band called Spinal Tap, which should have tipped everybody off because a work of filmic non-fiction would have used the then-actor's real name. But what if you never saw "All in the Family"? Or failed to recognize Reiner with a baseball cap, hiding his Michael McDonald hair? Since "This is Spinal Tap" adheres strictly to the form and content of a proper documentary film, you accept Marti DeBergi as a real person, and Spinal Tap, a real band. It also helped that Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer, despite having television and film credits to their names. Weren't so famous that they would break the illusion of put-upon reality. People who weren't in on the joke may have presumed, oh, we never heard of them because they're from England.
Sparks never had a song that charted stateside. "Cool Places", a duet with Jane Wiedlin came close. But not even a cute Go-Go could push these art school weirdos into the top 40. Alas, Ron and Russell Mael never got to hear Casey Kasem say their name. Sparks, however, were superstars for a brief period in the mid-seventies. "This Town Ain't Big Enough For the Both of Us", from their third album "Kimono My House", reached #2 in the UK. For this reason, despite both brothers being California-born, many fans contemporaneous of their fame, thought they were from England. For a modern audience, "The Sparks Brothers", directed by Edgar Wright, the confusion about their homeland will be lost on them, because for most people, this unlikely documentary is an introduction to Ron and Russell Mael, whose career spans five decades, yet remains, by design, as it turns out, largely under the radar. For rock and roll aficionados, regular folks and stars(such as Beck, Todd Rundgren, and other luminaries) alike, it's a bit of an inside joke. Sparks could be a fictitious band. As the old maxim goes: "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" Across the Atlantic, "This Town Ain't Big Enough For the Both of Us" landed Sparks on "Top of the Pops", but here in North America, it didn't make a dent in the Billboard Pop/Rock 100. The filmmaker, with methodical, almost perverse rigor that outs him as a diehard fan, "The Sparks Brothers" covers all twenty-five studio albums. Success and failure; it's all relative. Sparks' story is a foreign one. Taking its cues from Floria Sigismondi's "The Runaways", the rags to riches story arc, so typical of music biopics, takes the same circuitous route to justify the subject's worthiness for a feature-length film. Like Ron and Russell Mael, The Runaways were big in Japan, too. And like the fictitious Spinal Tap, they hopped from genre to genre.
"He wrote this," David St. Hubbins(Michael McKean) announces to the sparsely-attended audience, as Derek Smalls(Harry Shearer) unleashes "Jazz Odyssey", when Spinal Tap, primarily a heavy metal outfit, transitions into free form jazz, after lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel(Christopher Guest) walks off the stage during mid-performance. This time, albeit by default, Spinal Tap isn't chasing the hottest trend. At best, a midlevel band, Spinal Tap broke into the music biz by jumping on the psychedelic bandwagon. "Listen to the Flower People" was their first chart success. They were hacks. When heavy metal became a commercially-viable genre, the band traded in their paisley threads for leather ones. Spinal Tap were shrewd careerists, pale imitations of superior musical artists, pleasing crowds until the crowds started to wise up. To nobody's surprise except Derek, "Jazz Odyssey" is roundly-booed by the festival crowd. They paid good money to hear "Big Bottom" and "Sex Farm"; the hits. For the first time in their topsy-turvy career, the band alienates their fans, and expects them to follow along, no matter the musical direction of their own choosing.
Sparks was comfortable The second single, "Amateur Hour", also reached the top ten, nestling comfortably at #7, and the numerous singles off the follow-ups to "Kimono My House", albeit not smashes, also landed in the UK charts, led by the oft-covered "Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth"(#13) from "Propaganda". It's a sensitive turn by the band, which recalls, in "This is Spinal Tap", the soft piano ballad that Nigel plays for the filmmaker in the rehearsal room; the ballad with the decidedly rude name. The Mael brothers' obsession with eclecticism wasn't obvious at the time. Career sabotage wasn't in the cards. "Indiscreet", while not glam, had tunes that people could still hum: "Get in the Swing" and "Looks, Looks, Looks", both reached the middle rungs of the singles chart, #27 and #26 respectively. It was a baby step, this shift from glam to power pop. But the next album, Sparks' foray into hard rock, not only failed to produce a hit, the album itself failed to chart on both sides of the Atlantic; it was Ron Mael's "Jazz Odyssey".
Russell Mael was a high school quarterback, a popular kid; a jock. Conversely, Jane Wiedlin's formative years were spent in the dive bars of Los Angeles; an outsider, a punk. This incongruity of their respective places on the high school hierarchy, perhaps, explains how "Cool Places", a staple of the synth-pop genre, wasn't a bigger hit than it should have been. Wiedlin's band The Go-Go's were a global phenomena, whereas Sparks was "Big in Japan", but seemingly nowhere else on the planet. Ironically, at long last, they were a local favorite, after years of being confused for being British. As a teen, Jane Wiedlin was a Sparks fan club president. In this context, "Cool Places", in essence, plays like "A Star is Born" as a short-form music video; the proverbial student becomes the teacher scenario in day-glo colors. "Cool Places" would have made more sense with Belinda Carlisle as Russell Mael's partner-in-crime, since The Go-Go's frontwoman was herself a former cheerleader, a pairing that was more in simpatico with their former lives, which could have pushed the song into the chart's upper reaches where it belongs. Arguably, the backstory for "Cool Places", despite not detectable to the listener, caused it to stall inexplicably at #49.
The Runaways were even less successful than Sparks. Many music fans, male music fans, dismissed an all-girl band as being a novelty. But a film was made about these trailblazers because of who they influenced. Primarily, one of the talking heads in "The Sparks Brothers". A commercial and critical failure at the time, the Giorgio Moroder-produced "No. 1 in Heaven" is credited with setting the synth-pop template. Representatives from Duran Duran(Nick Rhodes), Erasure(Andy Bell) and Depeche Mode(Vince Clarke) are all here to testify. A song such as "Beat the Clock" married dance music with a pop sensibility. In a nutshell, that's The Pet Shop Boys.
Meta happened when Spinal Tap, who started out as a faux-metal English band, began to tour and produce albums that people bought. Suddenly, "Big Bottom" was no longer a novelty song. Maybe that's why Sparks' 18th album is titled "Balls", which could be construed as a reference to the Tap-like song "Big Balls", an AC/DC classic. "Balls", both song and album, comes across as a coded protest about the double standard. Flea, and many other commenters in "The Sparks Brothers", agree that Ron and Russell Mael's lack of domestic commercial success has a lot to do with their comic sensibility. People confused Sparks for a novelty act. Ironically, America started to take Spinal Tap seriously.
Hopefully, America will do so likewise after watching "The Sparks Brothers".
They're really funny. And talented.
Seriously talented.
