Bright Sparks

I've loved the music of Sparks since I was about fourteen. I had the glorious peak period top-of-their game albums on pre-recorded cassette, Kimono My House/Propaganda/Indiscreet, and some others, and then on record and then on CD, and now on a Spotify playlist, and I've never stopped listening to them. They're that band for me, the one to fall back on, a whole lifetime of knowing that there's music that will always lift. I suppose everyone's got one, I hope they have. I hope you have.

I never really knew that much about them. I don't think I know what everyone else knows, at least. I still couldn't tell you, without looking it up, which one is Ron and which is Russell. I've never seen them. I know they're American but I don't know where they're from. Obviously I realise they're brothers. However, I do know that the cover and some promo (reaches for CD cover) for Propaganda was shot in Littlehampton (West Beach, the river) and in Worthing (the old Heron Garage - Grand Avenue?). I know that the bass player on those albums went on to be in the Radio Stars. At drama school Virginia Bigwood told me she saw the singer carrying a handbag on West Beach. And so on.

What I never really appreciated was the lyrics, until recently. That's because (definitely looking it up now) Russell sings in a mangled accent like a Frenchman with a mouthful of escargots, and an octave higher than a five year old, and you can't really make out what he's on about. But I have enjoyed the little revelations of coherence, like chinks of light, and extrapolating the sense of what they're on about. Listening to the albums once again though, I watched the lyrics scroll along to the music on Spotify (musiXmatch, must have been struggling for a unique name) and finally understood what some of them are about. So when I get to a song that, as a tune, I might have been tempted to skip, reading along with the words lets me enjoy it in a different way. They're laugh out loud funny, often, and coming as a revelation nearly forty years later more telling for all that. Of course I knew that 'Here in Heaven' was somehow about Romeo and Juliet, but only now does it dawn on me that Romeo is in heaven, talking to the mortal Juliet. "Juliet, you broke our little pact". Can't imagine any more what I thought those lyrics actually were. 'Amateur Hour': "Girls grow tops to go topless in, while we sit and count the hairs that blossom from our chins. Our voices change at a rapid pace - I could start a song a tenor and end up a bass".

Another thing - as a songwriter, there's a comfortable distance between Sparks and me. I could never write a Sparks song. Listen to Oasis, easy songs. Easy chords, nursery rhyme singalong lyrics, easy. Ask me and I'll show you. Sparks? No way. No one has ever come close. Not for more than one song. It's difficult even to cover them. Do you do the accent? Sing clearly? Change key? Octave lower or falsetto? 

So other bands and songs came along and were and still are favourites, from the Clash to the Killers, but those Sparks records have always been dependable. They're mine, the associated memories belong to me, before I ended up belonging to other people. I don't have to share, I don't really know any others who feel the same. Mine.