Sparks Spectacular: Hello Young Lovers (2006)

Published on July 30th, 2008 in: Concert Reviews, Issues, Music, Reviews, Sparks Spectacular |

By Claire Schofield

Hello Young Lovers was part of my introduction to the wonderful world of Sparks and remains my favorite of their albums. Hence it seemed the logical choice for the single gig out of the twenty-one of the Sparks Spectacular shows that I was actually able to attend. (Damn you, university exams, etc.) Did that choice prove to be a good one? Hell yes, it did.

From the opening chorus of “Dick Around,” as the band fade in and out from behind mesh screens, the crowd is held rapt. It’s probably been said before, but the amount of energy Russell still displays as he bounds around the stage is frankly unbelievable, bordering on suspicious. They sail through the album, every track perfectly reproduced with that extra live bite. “Metaphor” is a highlight, Russell asking “who’s up for a metaphor?” and the crowd thundering the response back.

The trend of video animation accompanying songs, started with Lil’ Beethoven, is continued here to great effect. Ron battles a video version of himself throughout “The Very Next Fight;” an army composed entirely of the brothers Mael marches along to “(Baby, Baby) Can I Invade Your Country;” and a chorus of cats joins Russell for “Here Kitty.” It looks incredible, alternating wildly between witty and hypnotic.

Since this is a review, I should probably give a vague nod towards objectivity. So here we go. The nature of Hello Young Lovers, like much of Sparks’ later work, means that the live band is supported with a lot of pre-recorded strings and multi-tracked singing. But it doesn’t matter one bit (unless you’re one of those people overly concerned with authenticity, and in that case probably not a big Sparks fan). This is an album that is built on insane, bombastic arrangements, and the live venue only accentuates this. Particularly “Rock, Rock, Rock,” one of the weaker tracks on the album, finally reaches its potential as Ron acts rock god while guitars clash around him.

In the end, mere words cannot capture my love for this endearingly crazy band. It’s a bizarre but lovely feeling to discover a thirty-year-old back catalogue and to know that the people responsible are firstly, still putting out truly brilliant pop music and secondly, can put on a live show as thrilling as this.

The applause is rapturous and seemingly unending, with Russell and Ron becoming more and more happily embarrassed as it continues. They return for an encore of “Profile,” the last song they’ll play at the Carling Academy, and it soars as everything else has done. I leave on a somewhat ecstatic high, having decided to get hold of a ticket for Exotic Creatures of the Deep as soon as possible. University be damned; it’s clearly worth it.

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.

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 was, 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.

In what has to be one of Sparks’ greatest opening songs of all time, the overblown, quasi-operatic, rocking “Dick Around” blasted out first. Ron bashed his “Ronald” keyboard, while Russell prowled the stage and sung with all the dramatic license the song affords. “Perfume” followed, Russell clicked his fingers like a suave lothario as he reeled out the litany of women’s names and their purchased scents. . . but even though he remembers them all, they are in the past. . . and as the audience unanimously agreed, “Screw the past!” During the dark “The Very Next Fight,” a song all about self-lacerating ego and insecurity, Ron leaves the keyboard to stage a battle with a virtual Ron on the projection screen, landing a series of perfectly-timed punches until he aims the fatal blow that sends his alter ego flying. . . until the next time.

Like the stage show for Lil’ Beethoven, here the projection screen acts as an alternate world where Ron interacts with various projected media in a hyper-formalized style not unlike the silent screen comedians Charles Chaplin or Harold Lloyd—all of which adds a delightful but nonetheless unsettling element to these songs and highlights the intensely dark humor which has always been an integral part of Sparks’ music. A joyous send-up of macho and nationalist presumptions, “(Baby, Baby) Can I Invade Your Country?” is next, accompanied by a projected army of marching Russells.

The next song, “Rock, Rock, Rock,” is, for me, one of the night’s highlights. Ron straps on a guitar, leers menacingly, and throws various pseudo-rock star poses while the music mercilessly cranks out. Counterpointing this, Russell vows (scout’s honor) to “Rock! Rock! Rock!” then pleads “don’t leave me” and cradles himself “like a mother.” The song is all at once a damning indictment of conceding to the tide of soulless “rock” formulas and a genuine rock song that discovers its hardness through this very indictment. Two giant speakers are projected on screen, their brand names are “Russell” and “Ron” and, as the guitar screeches its feedback, the speakers shake and start to self-destruct.

“Metaphor” follows and, once again, Russell adopts the pose of a smooth lothario. “Chicks dig metaphors” you know? “Use them wisely use them well and you will never know the hell of loneliness.” The audience joins in and sings along at the key moments:

Russell asks: Who’s up for a metaphor?
We answer: We’re up for a metaphor!
Russell asks: Are you chicks up for a metaphor?
We (including all the men in the audience) answer: Yes, we’re up for a metaphor!

The wonderful “Waterproof” is next, with its erudite musical variations and witty lyrics, sung by Russell with such vigor that one can only remain in awe at his vocal abilities, which show no signs of flagging during the course of the 21 nights and which have only improved with age (whatever age he’s admitting to that is, as Ron wryly noted during the Exotic Creatures of the Deep show). “Here Kitty” follows, accompanied by projections of figures with the heads of cats and recorded meow loops. . . once again convincing me that this is one of Sparks’ creepiest songs. . . don’t ask my why. . . the answer is clearly too embedded in my unconscious mind for me to want to know the answer.

When “There’s No Such Thing As Aliens” begins I know it’s all nearly over. Perhaps this adds to the melancholy feeling the song has. . . especially when performed live with the projected images of Ron and Russell holding their hands out in front of them and slowly evolving into alien forms; an image that starkly contradicts the song’s lyrics which demand that dreamers stop dreaming and realize such otherworldly creatures do not exist.

The final song, “As I Sit Down To Play The Organ At The Notre Dame Cathedral,” is a fitting end to proceedings. Ron places himself in front of the projection screen and plays a virtual church organ. . . Russell paces back and forth. . . spitting out lyrics which (like Hello Young Lovers‘ predecessor, Lil’ Beethoven) turn mundane terms and trite interactions into operatic expressions, which through constant repetition become increasingly menacing: “bye bye bye my baby now it’s time time time for me to go to work work work so you might want make your way from here. . . “

The song then shifts onto another level as the harsh guitar sound of “Dick Around” insinuates itself into the rhythm. Doleful organ sounds then appear, followed by a madly frenetic organ arrangement not unlike something Lon Chaney might have cranked out as The Phantom of the Opera. Ron mimes this on the projected organ as it shakes and swells. . . and yes, the sexual innuendo does not go unmarked by the lyrics, which lament the confusion of religious faith with the organ player’s desire to impress a woman in the congregation. But his efforts seem futile. . . he knows he will be upstaged by HIM. At this moment Russell points to the sky. . . HIM is God. . . The religious ceremony is in fact a courting ritual, with God as the ultimate romantic rival. But having made his sexual conquest, our organ player has FAITH, a deep abiding faith. And the audience of Carling Academy responds with appropriate joy, “Hallelujah!

The night ends, as all of the previous 20 shows have, with an encore song that in some way merits as an obscurity. Although judging by most of the audience, there’s no such thing as an obscure Sparks song. Many of the encore songs were connected with the album featured that night, but this time around there was no connection. The song was “Profile,” the b-side to “Get In The Swing” from the album Indiscreet. And it was a cracking finish to a fantastic night and a perfect way to bid bon voyage to Carling Academy Islington. The fact that the song careened us all back to Sparks circa 1975 was an apt reminder of the musical innovation as well as longevity of the band.

As always, the night ended with Russell giving a well-deserved mention and thanks to the musicians: Steve McDonald, Steven Nistor, Jim Wilson, Tammy Glover, Marcus Blake, “and the principal songwriter, my brother, Ron Mael.” He also thanked the audience, “Thank you, thank you so much. Thanks for making this month something we are always going to remember.” We’ll always remember it, too. Thank you Sparks.