by Clayton Hayes, Staff Writer

I love the band Sparks. They quickly became a favorite of mine after I first came across the album Kimono My House in 2008. They are a force of pop music genius existing in a world that does not realize how much it owes them. I’m laying my cards on the table here, letting everyone know where my loyalties lie. I’m writing from a place of intense bias in favor of anything Sparks-related. I just want to be sure we’re on the same page going in.

Who are Sparks, you might be asking? I suppose it isn’t surprising if you are. Maybe you haven’t seen Edgar Wright’s recent documentary, The Sparks Brothers. Maybe you wondered who those two non-famous people were in the studio scene at the beginning of Annette, singing next to Marion Cotillard and Adam Driver. Maybe, despite a career spanning 50 years and 25 studio albums, Sparks has never really been on your radar. It is for you that Wright led off his doc with the question “What is Sparks?”

Sparks is a collaboration between brothers Ron and Russell Mael, occasionally involving others. Despite breakout success in the UK with Kimono My House in 1974, they’ve managed to remain pretty esoteric through their continuing (and very active) career, especially in the US. That’s part of why it was so strange to grapple with getting not one but two fairly big-name Sparks features in 2021: Wright’s The Sparks Brothers and Leos Carax’s Annette. They’ve been perennial underdogs for the half-century since they first formed but now we’ve somehow gotten two Sparks films?

It’s no coincidence that they’re both primarily international productions. Sparks have found most of their success outside of the US despite being based here. It’s a running theme in Wright’s doc that British fans were consistently surprised to find out that Sparks was not a British band, that Ron and Russell are more or less lifelong residents of Los Angeles. I think this is mostly down to the wonderfully dry sense of humor that runs through almost all of their work, something I really latched on to.

I’d already been getting into British television at the time: things like Father Ted and The IT Crowd (both terrific shows as long as you forget who created them) or the pseudo-quiz show QI, hosted at the time by the lovely Stephen Fry. In other words I was primed for anything with a similar sort of sensibility. It’s unsurprising that the second Sparks album I got into, the one that really hooked me, was 1982’s Angst in My Pants. Aside from the title track (which is about exactly what it sounds like), it features songs about mustaches, a sentient cigarette, unflattering romantic comparisons to Sherlock Holmes, and an incredibly catchy anthem titled “Sextown U.S.A.” It’s silly, incisive, and sarcastic songwriting at its best, and never makes the mistake of taking itself too seriously.

It’s a sense of humor that extended to their music videos and promotional appearances. The video for “All You Ever Think About Is Sex” off of 1983’s In Outer Space is a great example:

Ron and Russell are just such immediately engaging characters, so seemingly at odds with their surroundings, that it’s hard not to be drawn in. Another moment that’s stuck in my mind for years, and which Wright featured in The Sparks Brothers, is from a few years later. Ron and Russell on a British chat show supporting their 1985 single “Change,” which would appear on their album Music That You Can Dance To the next year. Instead of a music video, which their label had refused to pay for, Ron holds a cardboard cutout of a TV screen in front of Russell as Russell mimes a performance of the song (in front of Downtown Julie Brown and Thomas Dolby, no less).

It’s such a perfect moment and I was really happy to see Wright had included it. He’s a director whose films I really appreciate, in no small part because of how music is handled in his films. 2017’s Baby Driver is perhaps the best example of this, where just about all of the onscreen action syncs up with the beat of the soundtrack. I understand the difficulties surrounding licensed music in film and why it’s rare for a production to be able to incorporate its soundtrack the way Wright’s have, but he’s just so good at it that I can’t help but love it. I was really looking forward to The Sparks Brothers because of this and, even as an established Sparks fan, I got a lot out of it. Their albums, which I had come to in a scattershot order, were placed in context while tracing the iterations of a band I had only really ever known as Ron and Russell.

I was also surprised to find out how important cinema was to the development of Sparks, and how close they had come to working on multiple films over the years. I had seen some glimmers on my own, like their appearance in the 1977 James Goldstone disaster thriller Rollercoaster and their featuring on the soundtrack to one of my favorite films, Fright Night (Tom Holland, 1985). That “Armies of the Night” is not on the US release of Music That You Can Dance To remains a source of frustration for me. Even their 2009 album/radio opera The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman, about an imagined visit by the Swedish director to Hollywood, wasn’t quite enough to tip me off. To me it was just another unexpected move in a career full of them.

I hadn’t realized one of their earliest influences was French new wave cinema, nor that they both studied film in the 60s at UCLA. It’s incredible then that they’d been in talks with Jacques Tati about collaborating in the 1970s and it must have been incredibly frustrating that it did not work out. Finding out they’d almost made a musical based on the manga Mai, the Psychic Girl with Tim Burton in the late 1980s was another surprise. (That I’m not in the habit of researching bands I like should come as no surprise.) There were even rumors of renewed interest in a Mai adaptation after the success of Sparks’ Bergman project. The sheer improbability of a musical written by Sparks being made and released in 2021 is just mind-boggling.

And finding out how Annette happened doesn’t make it seem any more likely! French director Leos Carax had used the track “How Are You Getting Home?” off Sparks’ 1975 album Indiscreet in his 2012 cult hit Holy Motors and met the band at its Cannes premier. Sometime later, Sparks sent Carax their idea for a musical called Annette (originally planned as a concept album like Bergman) and Carax decided he wanted it to be his next film. It’s somehow both incredibly unlikely and perfectly apt that Carax (who seems pretty content to pick and choose his projects these days) should make his first film in nearly a decade with a band that grew out of a shared love of French cinema. And so, instead of a concept album for three voices, we got a full two-and-a-half-hour musical.

Annette is at times beautiful, strange, funny, disturbing, and (to me at least) completely fascinating as a work of art. There has never been another film like it and I’m willing to bet there never will be, even if Sparks is involved in another film (which I would love to see happen). The one consistent feature of the band’s creative path is that they’re always trying something new, trying to push the envelope. Sparks has a back catalog of hundreds of songs spanning a half a century and only four were referenced in the soundtrack for Annette. That’s not something you do if your creativity is on the wane. 2021 was the year of Sparks, and I can’t wait to see what they do next.