For people of a certain age, Sparks will always be one of those weird bands who would show up on Top of the Pops in the seventies when eccentrically avant glitter-rock was at its peak. In fact, as I found, say to people you’re going to be seeing them live in 2012 and you’ll probably be met with a puzzled “Oh, are they still going?”, followed by a few words on how that bloke with the moustache used to really freak them out.
Truth is, Sparks never really went away and have spent forty years now releasing a seemingly endless string of albums ploughing their idiosyncratic art-pop trough, to almost routine acclaim.
But they do like to keep their audience waiting. Ninety minutes since the Picture House doors opened, without any support, and still the stage lies bare except for a rather forlorn looking keyboard. Finally, Ron Mael wanders on, almost diffidently, to wild applause from a hysterically enthusiastic crowd, and begins the evening with an instrumental overture on the keys, briefly referencing several Sparks hits.
When Ron’s brother Russell appears, the audience surge into full-blown religious rapture. It’s fair to say, Sparks fans are an evangelical bunch. And it’s not long before I start to understand why.
This is Sparks’ “Two Hands, One Mouth” tour, in which they strip their sounds down to the basic elements of Russell singing with Ron on keyboards (plus occasional arsenal of snyth effects). They are, in musical terms, pretty naked up there, but prove themselves as seasoned entertainers. Russell pirouettes around the stage, camp as a row of tents while vocally hitting some astonishing marks all the way up to falsetto.
Ron, on the other hand, inscrutable behind small spectacles and pencil-thin moustache, simply remains behind his keys, the slightest movement betraying the audience’s adoration of him. At one point he stands up to intone himself as Ingmar Bergman, a moment in which the crowd has a near collective fit.
High point of the show has to be the classic “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both of Us”, but throughout this near perfect ninety minute show, Sparks prove admirably that stagecraft and performance can be simply represented through impeccable musicianship, sheer charisma and a belter of a back catalogue.
At the end, as Ron and Russell stand on stage basking in a full five minutes worth of applause, Ron briefly takes the microphone (cue more audience hysteria) and, suddenly quite emotional, thanks us for our support tonight, and in the past, and in the future. “There is”, he tells us, “a future”.