Sparks Spectacular: Hello Young Lovers
Posted in Concert Reviews, Music, Reviews, Sparks Spectacular |By Elizabeth McCarthy
“Night Twenty! Can You Believe It?”
“We’ve got this far and it’s incredible. . . and it’s sad, this is the last night in Islington,” says Russell Mael during the performance of Sparks’ 20th album, Hello Young Lovers. And indeed it was kind of sad. Many of us had started to look upon the Carling Academy in Islington as a home away from home, a place where for an hour or so you could be transported to Sparks heaven. But this night we knew the dream was rapidly coming to an end.
Myself and two fellow Sparkophiles had booked ourselves on a plane from our native Dublin to London to see four of the shows Sparks would perform in their 21-night Spectacular. . . A Woofer In Tweeter’s Clothing, Kimono My House, Propaganda, and Indiscreet. Then we saw the light and hurriedly booked ourselves up for another three nights. . . Lil’ Beethoven, Hello Young Lovers, and the premiere performance of Exotic Creatures of the Deep.
The first four nights we attended were utterly fantastic. I’d never seen Sparks perform live and was completely unprepared for the sheer energy and excitement of the shows. As innumerable people who have attended any of the shows have mentioned, these great albums gained even more in a live setting. . . like cleaning an old oil painting and discovering once again the vibrancy and brilliance that lay there all along. As a Sparks fan who enjoys the band’s more recent music at least as much as anything they have done over their astounding 30-year career, I awaited the last three concerts, as the saying goes, with heated anticipation.
Photo © Daniel Gray @Dead By Sunrise
I was not disappointed. These last few shows were very special. Not only because sadly, it was all coming to an end, but because they very much catalogue Sparks’ most recent musical reincarnation. . . vital, dramatic, poignant, sardonic, overblown, subtle, cynical, intelligent, angry, and funny. The Lil’ Beethoven show witnessed the audience’s most euphoric response to any one song, when “My Baby’s Taking Me Home” received a deafening ovation that seemed to last forever. Hello Young Lovers marked the second stage of Sparks’ “genre-defying opus.” Like Lil’ Beethoven, this show also marked a striking change in the band’s live show, with dramatic interactive projections and spatial demarcation of the stage.
On a stage that could just about enable you to swing the proverbial kitty, Sparks managed to reproduce Hello Young Lovers in all of its glory: the “intimate” setting only adding to the intensity and drama of the performance. The stage was essentially cut in half; the back was taken up with a large projection screen, either side of which were Sparks’ great musicians, garbed in black, behind a black mesh screen. In the front half of the stage there was a keyboard and the brothers Ron and Russell Mael. There was a poignancy to the stark, almost lonely, figures that the brothers cut out front on that stage. It brought home just who Sparks are and have been and how two people can work together over the decades and create something that touches people so profoundly.
The audience were, as they have been on all the nights I attended, an integral part of what made the Sparks Spectacular such a unique live experience. The concept of performing 21 albums on 21 nights is admittedly nuts and Sparks fans, being Sparks fans, embraced that nuttiness wholeheartedly. There was so much—dare I use the word? Yes, I dare—love projected from that audience it was truly amazing, and something I have never experienced before in all my gig-going days and nights. The Spectacular was, in part, a band statement—”Here’s who we are and how we got here”—and those attending celebrated that statement with unflagging joy and appreciation. But anyone expecting an easy ride through nostalgia-laden memory lanes had another thing coming. Hello Young Lovers proved that irrefutably.
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Claire Schofield’s review