Sparks discuss their magnum opus, working with Giorgio Moroder, and how they felt threatened by the very punk bands that loved them.
Ron and Russell Mael discuss their magnum opus, working with Giorgio Moroder, how they felt threatened by the very punk bands that loved them, and their production debut, Noel’sfor the first time, and it’s one that I am still discovering corners of that were once darkened by cultural and commercial obscurity. Recently, I’ve been listening to Visage’s early catalog and, a rag I interned at when I was a lowly college sophomore, named the band in their yearly “Most Interesting People” issue).
And that way ended up being synth-pop, and the versions of it closely derived from disco and club pop. The story has always been that the Maels heard Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” felt deeply moved by Giorgio Moroder’s four-on-the-floor, looping production and, after telling a German journalist about their affection towards the track, were able to get some time with the Italian producer.
It wasn’t just the Maels’ lyrics that were outside of Moroder’s comfort zone. Russell’s singing voice wasn’t like Summer’s at all, who’d been in Munich performing in the musicaland working as a session vocalist by the time she started working with the producer. They both had a certain requisite of flamboyancy that was perfect for Moroder’s synth-pop, but Summer’s discipline as a soloist was perpendicular to Russell’s as a vocalist.
Making the turn from glam-rock to synth-pop gave Ron more tools to arrange songs than he’d ever had before—which further vindicated their choice to abandon their band-format origins and the instrumental limitations of that circumstance. “Having worked with electronics, even though we haven’t stayed ‘pure’ in the way that it was with, we always have those tools available in any kind of context, even within a band context,” Ron says. “And that was something that was opened up at the time.
“It was a shock to us to hear Steve Jones being a fan of the band, when we felt incredibly threatened by and the power of it—not always just musically, but as a movement and a statement against a certain kind of thinking in bands,” Ron says. “We really loved that music but, even though there were elements of that in what we were —and we were playing songs faster than most bands when we first started—we weren’t punk in the sense of what our sound was.
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