Introduction
No Ulterior Motives?

Over its 40 year history, the flagship UK BBC TV music programme Top Of The Pops had its fair share of ‘moments’, when viewers experienced some sort of defining event. These usually coincided with a degree of early maturity and rebellion on the part of the observer. In some, this may have occurred in their early teens, some younger, watching pop as the twisted cartoon it often resembles.

While David Bowie hugging Mick Ronson during ‘Starman’ in 1972, or Johnny Rotten singing ‘Pretty Vacant’ in 1977 are often cited, this author had his moment when, on May 9, 1974, five quirky individuals seemed to leap through the screen singing ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us’.

On an edition of the show that also featured in the studio easy listening crooner Vince Hill, soft toys The Wombles and boogie labourers Status Quo, stock still in front of us was a man rolling his eyes, bolted to the ground, exaggeratedly hitting his electric keyboard. He had slicked-back hair and a moustache. To his side, there was another man who looked vaguely similar, with curly flowing hair and what looked like a short dress on. A kimono, perhaps. Behind them were a fairly standard team of players from the day with their wide lapels, centre partings and flares. But it wasn’t about them; it was all about the two men out front.

They looked like ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures of an American small-town accountant who could take it no longer and had dropped out. However it was the size of the keyboard player’s moustache that made it all the more noteworthy. Covering no more than an inch underneath his nose, this facial hair seemed exceptionally familiar to everyone who was watching. It had been seen somewhere before; some thought perhaps of Oliver Hardy or Charlie Chaplin, to whom it was intended as tribute. Some thought of Stephen Lewis, Inspector Blake from the recently finished yet still hugely popular ITV comedy series On The Buses. But most, if not all, people thought of one person only — Adolf Hitler.

And in 1974, the impact of the Second World War still cast something of a long shadow over Britain. Although it had been over for nearly 30 years, watching this spectacle was a generation whose parents had either fought in or had been born during the war. To find Hitler playing the piano on one of the BBC’s prominent programmes was enough to send some older viewers into apoplexy.

‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us’ became the soundtrack to that early summer and beyond; trips to the funfair, to town, to the park, presenting a macabre netherworld that stood apart from a chart that was frankly full of enough weirdos already. But even among the four-eyed vaudeville of Elton John, the mirrored-topper of Noddy Holder, the sinister Bacofoil of Gary Glitter and the androgyny of David Bowie, it still seemed bizarre. Ron Mael — the wearer of this moustache — looked something like the public information films warning of things youngsters did not yet quite understand: about men offering sweets and taking you for a ride in their cars.

And the other one, Ron’s younger brother, Russell, looked beautiful. It was as if he slept in a vat of moisturiser and lived a life being permanently startled in soft focus. Although it seemed nothing could be taken at face value; there was something about the speed of his delivery combined with a mixture of anxiety and supreme confidence that added to an overall unease.

It was about the clothes and the colour and the time. The taste of the exotic controlled and presented and beamed into the UK’s living rooms. That Sparks were at their zenith in a Britain recovering from three-day weeks and the unrelenting grimness and relative poverty of the mid-Seventies comes now as little surprise. Lives were enlivened and brightened by the peacock people who would appear in our homes once a week. Aspirational values, cheap tailoring and the bizarre mingled together.

The long backwash of the moon landing of 1969 and the space films that followed, combined with a full-scale embracing of retro with the popularity of movies such as American Graffiti and The Great Gatsby, produced a generation of men (and it was mainly men as performers) who dressed like the future yet sounded like the past. Sparks were faintly straight compared to some acts but they had a man who looked like Adolf Hitler playing the piano, they looked striking, unusual, frightening, and they had made an impression, having scored the biggest hit single of their career.

The more we learned about this group, the more we, if not liked them, were intrigued. Ron wrote the songs and Russell sang them; they’d been in a group called Sparks before, but not this one; the pair supposedly had all sorts of connections to the American aristocracy; the Kennedys were fans; the Rainiers let them use their holiday home in Monaco; they were indeed the children of Doris Day.

Many people had a similar moment: teenage fan John Taylor, who six years later would form his own group called Duran Duran, felt equally strongly: “Remember Bedazzled with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore? They’re on that Top Of The Pops-style programme and Moore as Stanley Moon comes out and says ‘I love you, I love you’, the crowd goes crazy and then Peter Cook as the devil comes out and goes ‘I hate you, I hate you’. Well, Sparks was like watching both characters at the same time. Russell is so seductive and upfront, while Ron is holding everything back. It’s a very strong presentation.”

This strong presentation became a national obsession over the summer of 1974. The duo’s performances were enough to get them on the radar of one of the groups they had so admired as teenagers in Los Angeles: The Beatles. Although it is highly unlikely that John Lennon ever said the oft-quoted ‘Christ! There’s Hitler on the telly!’ while watching the programme. Or if he even said it at all; Beatles experts Pete Nash and Mark Lewisohn both suggest that it is apocryphal. This was a yarn begun by Sparks’ first English bass player, Martin Gordon, while reviewing a later concert of theirs for Mojo magazine in 1995. Lennon would have been a US resident for three years by that point. However, it is wholly possible he may have caught Sparks on a US TV special in 1974 when they performed ‘Something For The Girl With Everything’. Introduced by Keith Moon with a little help from ex-Beatle Ringo Starr, Sparks definitely registered with Paul McCartney, who was sufficiently aware of the group’s existence and impact to dress up as Ron Mael for his 1980 video for ‘Coming Up’.

Sparks kept appearing on Top Of The Pops for the next 18 months. Further singles came and went and Ron Mael’s stare seemed to burn brighter and brighter into the telly. Then gradually, Sparks disappeared. When I finally picked up their first four British albums in 1978 in a record shop bargain bin, I might as well have been buying some big band swing as they were already long forgotten. But those records! They sounded fresh and very relevant to the current new wave scene.

And then, Sparks went disco. At a time when everyone from The Rolling Stones to Dolly Parton was sashaying down the nightclub, they produced an album called No. 1 In Heaven. Its lead single, ‘The Number One Song In Heaven’, saw them back on Top Of The Pops. They were now performing alongside artists such as The Damned and The Monks. Hitler now had a bit of a perm. It was delightful to have them back.

Apart from a period of British radio silence in the Eighties, Sparks continue to be a fixture on the scene. Since the mid-Nineties, Sparks have been regulars to the UK, culminating in their ground-breaking 21 Nights series of London shows in which they played all of their albums in chronological order over May and June of 2008.

When you look at Sparks’ peers from their 1974 breakthrough, they are either disgraced (Gary Glitter), discarded (The Rubettes), disbanded (Slade), dead (lead singers from Mud and Sweet), have become institutions (Elton John) or at a level where they no longer need to record (David Bowie). For an act still to be consistently making music — just listen to the otherworldliness of their 22nd album, The Seduction Of Ingmar Bergman, released in November 2009 — that sounds as strange and otherworldly while remaining often unashamedly commercial three decades on, is nothing short of remarkable. So let me remark upon it. At some length.

It is not that easy to try and find the true story of Sparks. Larry Dupont, a character who played a large role in their early career and remains a friend, is fully aware how protective Sparks are of their past. “I respect their desire to maintain their image but it’s a shame as their history is extraordinarily interesting. They had so much perseverance. That group was rejected so much in their early days, they stuck a big piece of paper on the wall of their rehearsal room and wrote every rejection on it. The list became so long but it never seemed to stop them from going out and getting another audition.” Sparks have had their share of dazzling moments and less than successful interludes, but one thing is very much certain: their tenacity, resilience and ability to capitalise on an opportunity is forever remarkable.

Simply put, Sparks are one of the most essential art-pop groups of all time. In fact, as time passes, they are almost the sole, long-lasting definers and purveyors of the genre. As Richard Cromelin wrote as early as 1975, “[they] continue to captivate fringe types of all ages”. Talent Is An Asset: The Story Of Sparks will dispel several myths that surround the group and bluntly not care very much about the others. Although there are those who fear it is likely to be a collection of half truths, quotes from folks that don’t know the brothers or their real history, and nonsense about their ages, sexuality and Doris Day, there are others who want to know the story, even if parts of it are well-trodden, because frankly, it is one of the most interesting in pop.

When Ron and Russell Mael relocated to Britain in 1973, they hit the pop world as Sparks and looked like oddballs, even in the context of the glam rock movement that welcomed them. Soon defined by their weird and wonderful 1974 number two single, ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us’, from the Kimono My House album, Sparks have gone on to release 22 albums over four decades, each record inhabiting a bizarre world of its own. Their songs are peppered with puns and pop culture nods, as well as nostalgia and jokey images, all mixed up in a kaleidoscope of musical references ranging from rock to glam to disco.

It’s all about context. Had Sparks come from New York or London, it may have made perfect sense. But they didn’t. They came from Los Angeles. And from a time when the love vibe was so strong and laid back, they cut the same, strange outsider figures that they remain over 40 years later.

The cowboy analogy of their greatest hit (and indeed a comparison they have returned to at various times over their career) is wholly appropriate. Ron and Russell Mael have lived on pop’s outskirts since the late Sixties; they may have occasionally made a foray into the centre of town, but that has usually been brief, often dazzling. But, this blaze of glory soon dies down and we are on to the next gunfight.

Although they have been a great influence on a generation of performers, Sparks’ impact has not struck a similar mass-appeal chord as fellow-travellers such as David Bowie or Roxy Music. Yet their first wave of success and the complete, discrete world they offered can be seen as feeding into punk. And 1974’s ‘Amateur Hour’, both in sound and ideology, seems to predict the movement by at least a couple of years.

Sparks’ Giorgio Moroder-produced phase can be seen as a direct precursor to the great UK synth duos and bands of the Eighties. By the 21st century, their music was so ornate and unusual that it seemed simply too ahead of itself to influence anyone.

Defy categorisation and you will always have a funny old time of it. “The missing link between the androgynous menace of The Rolling Stones and the cool histrionics of The Associates. The Archies meet Zappa via Crimson and Purple. Bubblegum metal with a dash of prog,” is author Paul Lester’s attempt. Sparks came and went in the world of mass appeal. “Maybe because it was such a complete world that once you had a couple of doses of it that was enough,” writer Jon Savage suggests. “And it would’ve been easier to see them as a novelty act.” Novelty is a strange word, yet very relevant to Sparks when considering the word’s definitions (see above). Their detractors could easily dismiss them as cheap and kitsch but Sparks constantly strive to remain intriguing and strange. They are archetypal old school pop stars, still awaiting their next break, the next curtain call.

Sparks have been there or thereabouts — Saturday Night Live, the Whisky A Go Go, Max’s Kansas City, the Marquee, and the El Mocambo. They have been known to the great and the good. For a group that appeared as if from nowhere in 1974, they had already worked with music industry legends such as Bob Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, Todd Rundgren, an Electric Prune (Jim Lowe), Derek Taylor and were managed by John Hewlett, an ex-member of John’s Children who had learned his craft from one of the most successful figures of British Sixties pop, Simon Napier-Bell. That they were signed to Island and produced by Muff Winwood, a man who had come from another brother act, The Spencer Davis Group, meant their pedigree was already pretty special.

Brothers in pop are a strange and mixed blessing. Ray and Dave Davies; Noel and Liam Gallagher — you do not think of happy campers when you think of them. “You wonder how you’d spend your entire life in the company of your brother,” writer Ira Robbins posits. “I know that doesn’t sound odd, but it’s like you’ve chosen to spend your entire professional existence reliant on somebody that you were raised with.”

It is the remarkable blend of two great eccentrics that makes Sparks’ pop so unpalatable for some: in a review I wrote in 2002 of Lil’ Beethoven, I used the expression “musical Marmite”. For those who love, it is an always-giving world of untold riches. Tony Visconti lays a lot of this at the door of Russell and his realisation of Ron’s concepts: “I’d never heard a lead singer sound like him before. It’s somewhere between Tiny Tim and Robert Plant. He’s got such an unusual voice. He’s got a real signature sound in his vocals but you wouldn’t hear any Americans with a guy like that in the group. There wouldn’t be a lead singer like that. He sounds like he comes from some upper-crust British family.”

Perhaps Sparks never got over their education: UCLA in the febrile Sixties, drinking in film studies instead of dope and booze, learning about French nouvelle vague. Film is very much part of Sparks’ make-up: it plays a huge role in everything they’ve done and film studies have coursed throughout their writing, most visibly on ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us’, based on the clichés spouted in a Western. The Lil’ Beethoven trilogy (Lil’ Beethoven, Hello Young Lovers and Exotic Creatures Of The Deep) are all mini-movies in themselves.

Sparks’ first radio drama is an imaginary visit to Hollywood by Ingmar Bergman, one of their all-time favourite directors. Russell is wearing a Hollywood T-shirt on the cover of their second album, A Woofer In Tweeter’s Clothing. Alain Delon, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Clint Eastwood, Donald Duck, Lassie, Mickey Mouse, Meryl Streep, Toshiro Mifune, Paul Newman, Grace Kelly, Roman Polanski, Ronald Colman, Sergei Eisentein, Tsui Hark and Warren Beatty all populate Ron Mael’s narrative. One of their great disappointments to date has been their failure to realise their ambitions to make a film, Mai The Psychic Girl.

Ron Mael was one of the first writers to develop proper irony in a pop song. Strange subjects of masculinity, white women, art galleries and things like this. There have always been many different meanings; Sparks were singing more songs about buildings and food while David Byrne was still at college.

Talent Is An Asset is an exploration of Sparks’ extraordinary career drawing on hours of new interviews and research. It comes as close as possible to pinning down the quicksilver nature of two gifted musicians who have gone out of their way to remain unpredictable and elusive, forever entrenched behind a glittering gallery of jokes, impersonations and musical eccentricities.

The duo are fiercely protective of their privacy; they tell all yet say little. They have a sort of southern gentleman air about them of incredible politeness and grace. Their inner circle also operates with a ring of politely tightly fitted steel — the very height of civility, but divulging very little. Like the inscrutable nature of Sparks’ music, this has attracted fans for years.

So, let us embark on this journey that takes us from the Los Angeles suburbs in the Fifties to Sweden in the Noughties, taking in several world capitals, 22 albums, 33 or so band members and at least six managers. We skirt on glam, punk, disco and we hardly stand still. Talent Is An Asset is a fascinating tale from a pair of fascinating Maels.

Chapter One
It’s A Sparks Show Tonight!

So much mystery surrounds Ron and Russell Mael’s upbringing that it is worth noting all the various possibilities that have been put forward over the years about their origins. It would, for example, be fascinating if their name was assumed. Or that they had been child models. Or actors. People who seek to correct these myths often carry a sanctimonious air that only they know the correct answers to the myriad web of questions that the brothers and their work seem to provoke.

The Maels’ ability to fox is well-known; one of the most enduring myths is that they are the children of Doris Day. This was a gag that originated in 1974 in Flashes, the Sparks fan club magazine, and perpetuated in the 2002 edition of The Encyclopaedia of Popular Music and included as fact in a 2003 Record Collector article by this author. That their name appears to subvert the masculine to misspell ‘Mael’ has also given writers an opportunity to discuss how the pair’s image toys with male stereotypes and manly American icons.

So let’s deal with the ‘D’ word straight away. To cope with the constant bombardment of similar questions presented by journalists over the years, “We started making up these … lies,” Ron Mael told The Times in 2003. “We’re Doris Day’s sons. That is hyperbole I guess,” Russell told Plan B magazine in 2007 in response to the question “Please quote your favourite hyperbole about your band.” Amusing because, of course, no one but themselves created it.

It would have been fascinating if Doris Day had been their mother, as it was an apposite choice for them to pick; an actress with a strong image, so widely associated with purity and chastity that people believed her public image was the reality and public image is always a very significant factor when looking at Sparks.

However, my apologies to all those who wish to trundle on the rumour mill; Mael is Ron and Russell’s family name and, let’s face it, it is a pretty unusual one, dating back to the fifth century and of Celtic origin. Once popular in Ireland and Wales, as well as Brittany, the name meant ‘king’, ‘chief’ or ‘prince’ and grew in usage after St. Mael, who accompanied St. Cadfan on his travels through Wales before reaching his destination on Bardsey Island off the Lleyn Peninsula, where he eked out his days living as a hermit.

Ronald David Mael was born on August 12, 1945 in Culver City, California to Meyer and Miriam Mael. Younger brother Russell Craig Mael arrived on October 5, 1948 in Santa Monica, California. The brothers are three years older than many of their biographies have suggested. Lying about your age is hardly a pop crime, and if ever a group were showbiz enough to have shaved off a few years, Sparks certainly qualified. For all their quirkiness and left-of-centre nature, Sparks are the epitome of showbiz.

The brothers grew up in the affluent, largely residential area of Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles. Located between Brentwood to the east, Malibu to the west and Santa Monica to the south east, ‘where the mountains meet the sea’, Pacific Palisades also contains the western end of Sunset Boulevard. The Maels first lived on Washington Boulevard before moving to a house on Galloway Street on a grid of streets off West Sunset Boulevard. The area has several popular culture references: its local high school was the setting of Brian De Palma’s 1976 chiller, Carrie, and the long-running James Garner TV detective vehicle, The Rockford Files, was filmed there.

The America the brothers grew up in was prosperous, triumphant, yet deeply troubled. It had recently successfully fought a war on two fronts and by ending a period of isolationism, had taken its place as a superpower in world hegemony. Less than five years later, the United States had seen the advance of Communism in Eastern Europe and China; the Soviets develop their own atomic weaponry; and was facing very real concerns about internal security. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy had sprung up to exploit the prevailing mood of fear and uncertainty with his activities on the House Un-American Activities Committee.

While the idyllic surroundings of Pacific Palisades shielded the Mael household from what was going on, the rampant imperialism of the US combined with a reinforcement of decent moral values would give the Maels both a reference point and source material across the years.

One of the Mael brothers’ earliest public appearances was captured in a newspaper cutting from 1954. It finds the brothers in Native American dress at the fourth annual Fiesta La Ballona festival in Culver City. Fiesta La Ballona days began in 1951 as a week-long celebration of the region’s early settlers. People would go to events dressed up as Native American Indians, rancheros, señoritas, cowboys and cowgirls. “Cowboy and Indian costumes held a bright spotlight in the Fiesta La Ballona Kiddies’ Parade,” the paper harks. “Winners in this division, left to right are: Russell Mael, 5; Ronnie Mael, 9.” Both in face paint and holding weaponry, the brothers are unmistakable and their enthusiastic participation demonstrates their early willingness to put on a show.

The story about being child models and actors was another product of the Mael spin. Or was it? Again, there are interviews suggesting they were in the Sears catalogue, and although the brothers denounced the tales to Michael Bracewell in The Times in 2003, they were still regaling journalists with stories of their modelling career in 2006.

“It wasn’t really child acting,” Ron told Record Collector in 2003. “We did some catalogue modelling things. It was more standing in front of a camera and smiling more than Shakespeare.”

“There’s nothing to show for our hard-earned hours spent out there,” Russell added. They have said that their mother was a “typical Hollywood mom” who pushed them into modelling, but that she was also a teacher and a librarian. Perhaps she was all three. What is indisputable is how big a fan Miriam was of her children (and remains to this day).

Music was already on the agenda in the Mael household. Ron took piano lessons from the age of six to nine, while their father was a keen follower of both film and popular music. “Our father bought us ‘Hound Dog’ by Elvis and ‘Long Tall Sally’ by Little Richard, so they were the first records we owned,” Ron told The Guardian in 2002. “I don’t know what his inspiration was for doing that … they weren’t the kind of records you usually bought as educational tools for your child.” Russell’s first record was ‘Breathless’ by Jerry Lee Lewis. “I thought [Jerry Lee] was amazing,” Russell said. “I still listen to that record now and I just get as big a buzz; it’s not nostalgic in the slightest.”

However, the Maels’ childhood idyll ended abruptly when Meyer, a painter and graphic designer for the Hollywood Citizen, died in February 1957 at the age of 40. “It was a heart condition,” Ron later told Mojo. “I was 11 when he died. It was very sudden and unexpected. There was no build up. He was so young and … it just wasn’t like what happened in movies or books. I really learned a big lesson, that things can happen totally out of the blue and there isn’t a rational order to things.”

Miriam did her best to cope. “She seemed to roll with it, as they say,” Russell said. “I guess because she had been married to an artist, she kind of understood what we were up to, having aspirations towards being musicians.” Miriam kept her children entertained not only by playing music, but by taking them to countless movie shows. A strong work ethic was instilled from an early age with Ron selling ice-cream to supplement his studies. “I know the two of them worked really hard,” future Urban Renewal Project member Ronna Frank says. “Their father died and their mother strove to put them through college. They were both really nice people.”

After a period of “rolling with it,” bringing up two boys single-handedly, Miriam remarried, but the bond that Ron and Russell had with their stepfather, Oscar ‘Rogie’ Rogenson, was variable. “They had this weird relationship; they treated him civilly but they never really were easy with [Rogie],” original Sparks bassist Jim Mankey recalls. “Maybe over time they found it easier but they were having that problem that many young people have when the father goes and the new one comes along. They liked the guy, they just didn’t really seem to accept him.”

“By the time I was on the scene, they already had a very long history with him and yet there was definitely a tension whenever [Rogie] was around,” Mankey continues. “It’s like an after-school special. ‘You must get over it, your father’s gone, your mother wants this new guy and it makes her happy and you guys can move on if you don’t like it.’ It undoubtedly shaped their lives.”

Despite such testimonies, there is little to suggest that the tension was too great. Rogie and Miriam doted on the boys, who became inseparable; Ronnie, as he was known (and still is by those close to him) kept a protective eye on his younger sibling and the two began to retreat into a world of art and dreams. “It’s common for mathematical geniuses’ creativity to flare up and it burns away at an early age,” Mankey recalls. “They were already old before their years when they started and they’ve still got it.”

The Rogenson family ran what at best could be called a head shop, or otherwise, a novelty shop in Pacific Palisades. The Gilded Prune was a small store with a huge glass window, whose stock would often overflow home.

“Their house was just full to the brim,” Mankey laughs. “It was stuffed full of weird items that made you laugh when you saw them: plastic rubber lips around; books full of fart jokes; kitchy-doodads. ‘Oh look a piece of soap that you sing into like a microphone’ — whatever! I think Rogie probably did sell some bongs and cigarette papers, too. As far as I know, he was the one that brought in all those novelty items, although possibly their mother had something to do with that. Miriam was a really funny person.”

It’s clear that the brothers’ strong sense of humour and warped way of looking at situations came from the sense of play infused in them by their mother. Future Sparks’ drummer Harley Feinstein remembers it with affection: “They had all kinds of crazy stuff in there. Their house was also full of newspapers stuffed halfway to the ceiling; they didn’t throw anything away.”

In a rare acknowledgment of his family, Ron Mael told Nick Kent in a 1974 NME interview that ‘Pop’ Mael was “one of them guys who hangs around Century City in the tall buildings there, importing garbage — posters, newer trendy stuff like you get from Habitat — nouveau semi riche, y’know?” Surrounded by oddities, it’s little wonder that the music that the Maels would go on to record became odd. A later picture of the group, taken by friend Larry Dupont in their Pacific Palisades living room, hints at the bric-a-brac filling their abode. To Ron’s left there is a bobbing head model of Paul McCartney, between his legs there is a plate with Franklin Delano Roosevelt on it. Figurines and cuddly toys abound.

However one should not get the wrong impression by such kitsch possessions as Miriam and Rogie were lovers of high culture too, a love they instilled in the boys and something that was to blossom further when, in 1964, Ron went from Palisades High School to one of the most prestigious universities in America, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), to study graphic design. One of the first friends Ron made at UCLA was industrial design student Larry Dupont. Their love of collecting gave them a strong bond.

“Ron is a collector like me,” Dupont says. “One of our professors, John Newhart, used to work for [designer] Charles Eames. Eames was an antique toy collector, and now he’s somewhat considered just a couple of steps away from Da Vinci. Because he worked on film, Newhart was an influence on us; he exposed me way back then to toys. Over a period of time we went crazy collecting stuff.” While Russell was often too busy playing sport, collecting obsessed Ron. “I collect things; it’s like a disease,” Ron said in 2003. “I collect sports figurines … Beatles trading cards. When I was little, I used to go to all the automobile shows because I loved cars. And so I’ve got a collection of all the new automobile launch brochures going right back.”

After finishing at Palisades High on Bowdoin Street, Russell followed Ron to UCLA in 1966 to study theatre, arts and film making. Unfortunately, the fruits of Russell’s labours were never to be seen, as he told Mark Leviton in 1983. “When I got to UCLA I was in theater arts, undergraduate film work. They flunked me on my first film, actually. One professor thought it was like early Polanski, but the rest gave me an ‘F.’ It’s the same old story as our musical career — we’re either considered brilliant or get an ‘F’ in work habits.”

The drive and ambition that Russell and his older brother shared was already apparent to Larry Dupont. “I think Ron was far more determined to make the thing work but you put the two of them together and they were both unwavering. I did an awful lot of stuff with Ron and Russ together. Ron and Russ always came as a package.”

Much has been made over the years of the fact that the Mael brothers have never wed; there have been relationships that simply got in the way of their principal concern — making music. “Neither of us is married — we’re too busy having a good time,” Russell said in BAM Magazine in 1983. “On the surface, maybe we look less ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ than the average group, but on the other hand we’re more ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ than those pictures of Led Zeppelin on the farm with their wives and kids, Rock ‘n’ roll lifestyles mean you have a wife and then cheat on her, so rather than do that, we’re honest and stay unmarried. I don’t know anybody in any other band who’s as un-tied down as the two of us. We dislike homey things — for ourselves anyway.”

“We have friends who have families,” Ron told The Word magazine in February 2006. “I get it vicariously; having a traditional family would be a real restriction on what we do.”

Like so many American teenagers of their generation, Ron and Russell were stopped in their tracks by The Beatles’ February 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. On August 20 that year, they saw The Beatles perform at the Las Vegas Convention Hall and the following year, Ron and Russell, accompanied by Miriam, saw the Fab Four at the Hollywood Bowl. Strongly influenced by music and popular culture, the brothers absorbed whatever they heard whether it be listening to Motown on Boss Radio KHJ and KRLA, watching The Supremes on The Ed Sullivan Show, or collecting singles from rock’n’roll through to surf music. They also strove to see as many shows as possible and can be clearly seen in the audience during The Ronettes’ appearance in The Big TNT Show, a prototype concert movie filmed in Los Angeles’ Moulin Rouge Club on November 29, 1965, featuring Ray Charles, Petula Clark and The Byrds among others.

Although the Maels had a shared love of The Beach Boys, it was British music that was to influence them most; as the Sixties progressed, their Anglophile tastes expanded into the sort of psychedelic-influenced mod pop that usurped Merseybeat. “‘Tattoo’ by The Who — we used to listen to that and think we wanted to be as cool as that,” Russell said in 2003. “‘Waterloo Sunset’ … not only did we like it musically, but it was speaking of this utopian England.” Within a matter of years the brothers would be in London. “We came over and went to Waterloo Bridge and Waterloo Station — it’s not quite as romantic as it was on the record!”

However there was one single, ‘Happenings Ten Years Time Ago’ by The Yardbirds, that really hit the spot. Produced by Simon Napier-Bell and released in October 1966, it was three minutes of surreal, psychedelic aural imagery. Ron and Russell would listen to it and marvel at its wonder and it was to become something of a touchstone for their early work.

The brothers would later become evangelical about their tastes and were happy to share them, as Jim Mankey recalls. “Ron and Russ were the equivalent of how The Beatles were in Liverpool; how they took the latest records from sailors that came in to port. In Ron and Russ’ case, it was all the freaks and disreputable types that they met in their stepfather’s shop who would share their musical desires.”

The exuberance and optimism of LA in the mid-Sixties has been well-documented. “LA was fun, full of music and clubs and also hopeful feelings,” Ronna Frank recalls. “UCLA was perfect for the Maels; it was a place where they could indulge their art and find other like-minded souls.”

Although they have since suggested that they were passing through university waiting for something better to come along, Ron and Russell threw themselves into college life and their cultural dabblings became grander. Later on, fellow travellers such as Harley Feinstein would benefit from their wisdom: “I was just starting off in college and I was looking for people to learn from. They were really up on new wave, European cinema, photographers like Diane Arbus. I had never been to Fellini and Godard movies. We went to see Bergman movies together; they introduced me to that whole world — a real cultural education.”

Ronna Meyer, a student at California State University of Northridge in the San Fernando Valley, was married to Ron’s best friend, Fred Frank. “It was great fun. Ron was a year ahead of me, and Russ was a year or two behind,” Ronna recalls. “I’d met Ron when I was at Fairfax High School through my husband. They were also in the same fraternity at UCLA, so I went to lots and lots of fraternity parties. We went on hayrides in West LA as part of the fraternity parties. Ron Mael was on the hay wagon, too.”

Ron, Fred and Ronna were inseparable during Ron’s early years at UCLA. Ron was best man at Fred and Ronna’s wedding in 1966 and nearly married Fred himself, as Ronna recalled. “At our wedding, the person who married us asked if Ron ‘Mael’ instead of Ronna ‘Meyer’ would take Fred to be their husband. Oops!”

Ronna also got to know Ron’s kid brother, whom she recalls as “poetic. His hairstyle and face resembled Jim Morrison.” She considered Ron to be the more serious of the two, very much into art, and heavily into silk-screening T-shirts.

With their shared tastes and loves, it was inevitable that the brothers, as most teenage Americans had done after seeing A Hard Day’s Night, should take the logical step from being music lovers to music makers and form a band. But right from their earliest recordings there seemed to be little straight pop in their repertoire. Although other names such as The Bel Air Blues Project, Moonbaker Abbey and Farmer’s Market have been mentioned, Ron and Russell Mael’s first proper group was called Urban Renewal Project, featuring Fred Frank on guitar and Ronna on drums.

“We used to practise in the gym at Palisades High School,” Frank, who had previously played in The Loafers, says. “In the later stages, there was a young boy, aged 13, who played drums. There was also a college-aged guy who played bass.” The group’s look, as future Sparks publicist, fan club chief and finally manager, Joseph Fleury, later described it, was “rather Beefheart in appearance — Ron with his vest and ten-gallon hat, while Russell donned short, ear-length hair.”

The closest Urban Renewal Project came to the big time was when they entered a couple of Battle Of The Bands competitions. The first was at the Los Angeles Sports Arena in 1967. Due to financial and technical constraints, Urban Renewal Project had to go through a single amplifier for the heats. “It was amazing,” Frank recalls. “The arena was filled with so much sound, you couldn’t hear anything specific. It was very exciting. We were very hopeful back then, and played Booker T and the MGs’ ‘Green Onions’, with me on snare drum.” The cacophony was fairly unpleasant and the band failed to progress any further. Reportedly, another act competing that day was Taj Mahal.

Another Battle Of The Bands occurred at the Hollywood Wilshire YMCA. This time, only two groups showed up, and the other outfit were not in sporting mode, “pulling out leads to the speakers”. Piqued by this display of bad form, Urban Renewal Project played, as Russell told Sounds in 1970, “our most obnoxious song in retaliation”. It was then they realised that the band members were all playing in different keys. “We played a lot of Rolling Stones stuff, and music from that era,” Frank recalls.

Although their music was not dissimilar to what thousands of other bands were into, there was a strong streak of individuality and darkness running through the brothers even then. A session at Fidelity Recording Studio at 6315Yucca, Hollywood, marked the recorded debut of the Maels.

Ronna Frank: “We recorded a song onto a 45 called ‘Computer Girl’ in a studio; Russ wrote lyrics and Ron wrote the music. Russ sang lead, I played piano, Fred played guitar, and I can’t remember what Ron actually did on it. My part was to say ‘This is a recording,’ throughout the piece.” Frank also recollects the four band members being in a small room facing the sound booth next to a grand piano.

A test acetate exists of ‘Computer Girl’, along with three other cuts — ‘A Quick Thought’, ‘The Windmill’ and ‘As You Like It’. ‘Computer Girl’, later given away with the superb Japanese volume, Sparks Guide Book, is quite remarkable and demonstrates how the brothers started as they meant to continue. Its subject matter was about a man who forms a relationship with a female who is a computer. Alongside Ronna Frank’s repeated ‘This is a recording’ intonations, reminiscent of later English eccentrics like the Flying Lizards, Russell sings about placing an IBM card in her stomach to get a date over Ronna’s snare, with her husband’s tremolo-laden guitar floating in the background. It’s all rather odd and the influence of The Velvet Underground is unmistakeable.

“We couldn’t figure out way back then that we were singing about computers, when there weren’t computers per se, so we can’t figure out how we got the metaphor of a ‘Computer Girl’ into a lyric,” Russell explained in the BBC documentary This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us — The Story Of Sparks in 2007. “There you go, ahead of the game again.”

The band’s third appearance — at an Industrial Design Conference at UCLA — was a less than illustrious proposition. The participants wanted something far more straight-ahead, and the only time the group could play was while the delegates were eating. It was not a huge success. “Anything they could do to make a buck, they were willing to do,” Larry Dupont recalls. “Someone got the band this job and it was the worst combination of venue and band you could possibly imagine.”

The spectre of being called up to fight in the Vietnam War would hang over the Mael brothers for the next few years. On June 23, 1967, the pair, along with Dupont and early friend and occasional band associate Harold Zellman, attended the 10,000-strong anti-war demonstration centred on the Century Plaza Hotel. US President Lyndon Johnson was attending a fundraising dinner for the Democratic Party when a coalition of groups opposing the war converged on Century City. Muhammad Ali delivered the gathering’s keynote speech.

“Everyone was there,” Dupont recalls. “It was one of the first decent sized anti-war demonstrations in Los Angeles. The kind of people who went out to protest were people coming out of work at the end of the day in business suits, and mothers with children. The protests hadn’t been taken over by the younger, more boisterous crowd yet.” The police, who had been anticipating a smaller crowd, did not have the event especially well-organised. The march came to a halt when some radicals began a sit-down protest in the road. “The crowd was strung out across this bridge with another major cross street underneath and it was going no place,” Dupont remembers. “We couldn’t tell what the hell was going on. I got on Ron’s shoulders; even though there was some guy up there with a bullhorn shouting into the crowd, we couldn’t hear a thing he was saying. The police tried to push the crowd back with half the people still moving forward. A riot broke out with the cops pounding people and everybody scattering in all directions.”

Johnson rarely campaigned publicly after this, and the demonstration could be seen as the first step on the route to his withdrawal from running for a second term of presidential office the following year. Although Zellman and Dupont went to further demonstrations, this was the only one at which the Maels were present.^*

Urban Renewal Project sputtered out, as Fred Frank was unable to dodge the draft.

Ronna Frank: “We kept playing together, and played around areas of Los Angeles at different clubs. Fred was drafted in 1968. We had already begun working to earn a living and Ron and Russ wanted to pursue just the band. So we drifted apart from the others.”

Things changed into a higher gear musically when the brothers met Earle Mankey. As Fleury said in the 1975 release 2 Originals Of Sparks, “The brothers placed a ‘guitarist wanted’ ad in a local music shop, and wound up with a rounded Gene Clark haircut and shades.” Which was cool, as Clark’s former group, The Byrds, were just about acceptable on the Mael radar. “We detested folk music because it was cerebral and sedate and we had no time for that,” Ron told The Guardian in 2002. “But The Byrds were OK because they electrified it and they had English hairstyles.”

Born in 1947, Washington native and UCLA engineering graduate Mankey was something of a whizz-kid. He was a technically accomplished guitarist and knew how the recording process worked. “Earle was really talented at recording — just on a reel-to-reel tape player,” Russell said in 2003. “He could do whatever you wanted; playing things backwards, speeding up vocals. It was a very different attitude to a lot of LA bands at that time. Mostly new bands went out and played their stuff in front of a public and assessed how it fared. We never went that route. It became almost the same issue as we are facing today — ‘How best do you present something that you’ve recorded?’ ”

“We were doing things like ‘sampling’ one note from a classical record — long before ‘sampling’ was even a term,” Ron added. “We didn’t have to worry about what anyone thought, because no one was hearing it. We were just doing things we thought sounded cool. We’ve been in that position a few times since — the first stuff was ‘pure studio’”

A new band, Halfnelson — named after a one-handed wrestling hold — was born. Larry Dupont, who had by now graduated and was working as a photographer at UCLA, was a constant presence, taping things on his recorder. He also inveigled the band into another art project.

Larry Dupont: “Halfnelson worked on the music for a 16mm film a friend and I were making in college about the Goodyear blimp. We went off and got all the gear and ultimately made a movie in a UCLA basement. My dark room became our editing room.” Although Halfnelson added the original music, the soundtrack expanded to something rather grander, as Dupont confirmed. “Eventually we discovered organs and symphony orchestras and used that. We showed the film to several people at various different stages.”