The eclectic sound of Sparks

By David Bennun

The Seventies have been caricatured as a decade of flares, platform heels, jumpsuits, the Brotherhood of Man and Starsky & Hutch. But this is a false memory, one that rolled in on successive waves of nostalgia. More fascinating is what those waves have left behind. It is only lately that we have come to celebrate an aspect of the decade that was particularly evident in Britain: a popular taste for intelligent eccentricity. We have started to appreciate the Manchester quartet 10cc, recently the subject of a BBC documentary. And, at long last, due credit is being given to 10cc’s nearest American equivalent, the wonderfully odd and oddly wonderful Sparks.

Once described as the whitest band in music history, Sparks are most often thought of as an electro duo. At the end of the Seventies they teamed up with the producer Giorgio Moroder, the man behind Donna Summer’s hypnotic disco records. Together they created a template, with a quiet man behind a keyboard and an expressive singer up front, that would be used and adapted by a series of great British hitmakers: Yazoo, Erasure, Soft Cell, and, in a subtle variation on the theme (deadpan and deadpanner), Pet Shop Boys. But the work they did from the end of the decade onwards has obscured the work they did at the beginning. A new box set, “The Island Years”, which reissues on vinyl the four albums they recorded for Island Records, along with a drily retitled best-of collection, “The Rest of Sparks”, is a reminder of just how strange and invigorating that early work was.