SPARKS – LIVE: REVIEW
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- 3 min read
SPARKS
Sydney Opera House, May 25
Vivid Live
ARTIFICE AND SHOWINESS are not just perfectly fine but loads of fun, as more than 50 years of Sparks can attest. And I don’t just mean Ron Mael, dressed in voluminous Japanese robe-like suit, sat impossibly stony-faced at his keyboard and little brother Russell – who has a similar policy on hair colouring to Nick Cave – bouncing around in a polka dot suit over a skivvy that matches perfectly his hot pink trainers. Though that seemingly never grows old as we who are watching grow old.
Nor even is this limited to the fact their three-piece band seemingly is augmented by tapes and presets allowing guitarist Eli Pearl (a man who can rock a big collar, alongside drummer Darren Weiss and Max Whipple on bass) to occasionally interrupt his playing with some delightfully loose and louche hip waggling. Or that what you hear as a new wave stomper in Whippings And Apologies, the kind of thing you imagine was once delivered by skinny jean-wearing, just-out-of-punk-leering boys, actually pre-dates new wave by a good five or six years – because the Maels always ran ahead of the pack.
In a room full of devotees not debutants, grafting Gilbert & Sullivan onto glam pop – like art school students fresh from Strawberry studios preparing for Top Of The Pops – as happened with Reinforcements, or going full pomp rock with Mickey Mouse, and then ramping up the stentorian with Running Up A Tab At The Hotel For The Fab (helpfully trampling on what had been the bit leaden Sherlock Holmes preceding them), is more surreal than real, and right in tune.
And we haven’t even got to the marvellously Wagnerian This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us. Or, indeed, that this was a room not just coasting on old fan enthusiasm but an equally passionate cohort of disgustingly young people who dance better and look healthier.
But sometimes, confounding gives way to giving us exactly what it says on the tin, and nothing feels better. As when Music You Can Dance To was just that: spinning electronics, thumping bottom and a Blitz Club mini-frenzy offstage. Some people foolishly sat down at song’s end, unaware that When Do I Get To Sing My Way? was going to Giorgio Moroder its way to another dancefloor, but they wised up and stayed up, ready to cavort, as Number One Song In Heaven gave Russell’s upper register vibrato a good workout and offered Ron – who had emerged from behind his synth earlier for some droll talk/singing, and even more droll dance steps in Let’s Get Funky - an excuse to bust some incongruously wild-arse moves.
Across the 100 minutes, in what was a pretty good attempt to cover a good swathe of their 28-album catalogue alongside five from their most recent – and ridiculously fresh-sounding - albums, the Maels didn’t get everything quite right.
Ending the main set with the sing it to the bleacher, quasi-power balladry of My Devotion, after the energising peak of Whippings And Apologies, and repeating the pattern in the encore, with the communal rather than explosive All That sending us home when we’d just had the charging cavalry Celtic rock of (Baby Baby) Can I Invade Your Country and the proper electro-fuzz hoot that is The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte – sadly not featuring a cameo from the star of the video, Cate Blanchett – made for warm rather than exhilarating climaxes.
But then, what do I know when they’ve been doing this almost as long as I’ve been on this earth? I should shut up and accept the wisdom of Porcupine, about a woman “gruffer than the folks in France”, who declares “I respect the choices that you’ve made, in return, accept the ones I’ve made”. True dat Ron and Russell, true dat.