Sparks - Collaborations Don't Work, Do They?!

Brothers Ron and Russell Mael from Los Angeles, USA, have been making diverse music since 1969 under various incarnations of Sparks.

Known for their quirky songwriting, their music has evolved through glam rock, synth-pop, new wave, and art pop, keeping them relevant and influential for over five decades.

Bands like Depeche Mode, New Order, and The Human League have cited Sparks as a key influence.

Listening to Spark’s golden oldie “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us” recently it became very clear where Queen got their ideas for “Bohemian Rhapsody” from…

The first time I got aware of the ‘phenomenon’ called Sparks must have been in 1974 when they had a couple of TV appearances on the Dutch TV music program TOP POP.

If I remember correctly my whole family was watching their performance of ‘Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth’ and afterwards everyone agreed that it was quite weird, both musically and (perhaps even more) visually!

I certainly didn't feel any urge to run to a record shop and buy their singles and albums.

However over the years I kept 'bumping' into them and slowly but surely began to appreciate their work.

Also more than a few blogs were singing their praises which began to make more and more sense…

Any band that comes up with songs like “Your Call’s Very Important To Us. Please Hold.”, “Dick Around”, “I Can’t Believe That You Would Fall for All the Crap in This Song”, and “(Baby, Baby) Can I Invade Your Country”, already deserve an award for being cooler than cool.

Since then I have seen Sparks twice, in Utrecht (2023) and earlier this month in Hong Kong, both excellent shows, no such thing as going through the motions at all!

By now they've released an astonishing number of albums, 26 if I'm not mistaken, and there's a similar huge amount of compilations, unreal...

This begs a question though, what are Sparks doing here at JOKONKY?

Well, this was triggered by their last performance at Clockenflap where I hoped they'd join Franz Ferdinand on stage for at least 1 song, but alas, no such luck.

Reason is that they'd recorded a whole album together as FFS in 2015, which wasn't bad either.

One of that album's songs is “Collaborations Don't Work”, which got me thinking as Sparks have done all kinds of collaborations, and successfully too!

I started digging into their oeuvre and found plenty of 'team’ work evidence, both on their own albums (Annette Soundtrack, Indiscreet, & In Outer Space) and as guest performers on other artist/group albums (Gemma Ray, Gorillaz, Les Rita Mitsouko, Max Richter, Orbital, Pizzicato Five, SebastiAn, Simple Minds, Todd Rundgren, & Yoko Ono).

This resulted in a brand new JOKONKY special: Collaborations Don't Work, Do They?

As you will hear, collaborations can work sometimes, enjoy!