MAKING SPARKS FLY

Rip It Up, Issue 5, 1 October 1977, Page 4

MAKING SPARKS FLY

William Dart

Rock MCisic has almost got itself into the same state that German music had been reduced to by the end of the nineteenth century. Richard Wagner and his disciples (remember Lisztomania?) had written ultra-tricky harmonies, endless flowing melodies, all written for gigantic orchestras. Musicians started to feel that nothing else could be done without some radical break from this tradition and this is where Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Bartok and the rest come in.

Rock has led a very eclectic existence in the last ten years its postPepper period. Everyone has just had such a wealth of styles and material to

borrow from or be influenced by. Faced with such temptations, Handel wouldn’t have written one note of his own music.

Musicians today can borrow anything from mediaeval music (Gryphon) to Stravinsky (Alice Coltrane, Zappa), from Bach (Nice, Focus) to Bartok (Blood Sweat and Tears) or from Liszt (Rick Wakeman) to Wagner (Andy Mackay). Thus producing musical cocktails of varying degrees of potency.

The only ‘original’ thing that has eventuated recently seems to be punk-rock and even that is hardly innovation of a high order. Although one

can understand the premises behind its crudity, it is a crudity that is very limiting. Perhaps it is meant as something akin to Stravinsky's antiromantic period. During these years Stravinsky wrote deliberately aggressive, dissonant and harsh music to escape from the lushness of some of his earlier ballet scores.

I’d swap a whole padded cell full of Stranglers, Damned and Sex Pistols for one Sparks album. Now there's a clever group, Virginia. Their first album just bristles with

“production” and the second, A Woofer in Tweeter’s Clothing has some lovely jokes, musical and otherwise: a frenetic electric version of the same “Do-re-mi” that made Julie Andrews notorious before she gained family approval as a continuing guest on the Alice Ghostley show. There’s a little song about the Louvre, as well as one which advocates bashing your car into buses for a bit of the old group sex.

Sparks’ third and fourth albums, produced in England, showed a much simpler approach, and they even started having popular singles, such as “Hasta Manana” (nothing to do with the Clearasil Quartet). The 1975 album, Indiscreet showed the group slipping back to their earlier style, although the songs were far more catchy than their American releases. Musical styles range from classical chamber music approach (“Underthe Table”) throuih 1940’s Big Band Jazz ("Looks Looks Looks”) to a sort of country/Cajun-type number ("It ain’t 1918 ”). The newest Sparks’ album, Big Beat, shows the group facing the same problem that the punk groups are presumably trying to solve. That is, how to get your style stripped down so that it is not aesthetically flabby a lean and economic musical approach. The group still keep some of their characteristically twee lyrics. The rather tongue-in-cheek suggestiveness of "Big Boy" or "White Women”, the song most likely to offend every liberal: I’ve tried most every‘package, From Peking to Berdoo I’m sticking with a brand name I’m sticking with you Because you’re a white woman, so very fair. Or "Throw Her Away”, the song next most likely to 0.e.1.:

Just like everything else in t iis world Time wreaks havoc on every girl What do you do? Throw her away and get a raw one.

Well, of course they’re ironical, but irony is not always a sense that is well developed in yon armchair liberals. And irony is as much a part of Sparks’ armoury as it is Randy Newman. Musically, the songs in Big Beat are stripped to essentials. They just use a straight rock group in all except one song, and any other influences (e.g. the Spanish touches in "Confusion”) do not get out of control within this basic group sound. But the reason for Spark’s success is the care they take with the sound. Music has textural qualities like painting, and these qualities are very much tied up with the quality of the sound. There is variety, or attack and respite if you wish. Not just noise non-stop for three minutes at a time.

We tend to classify rock music by its sound, talking of the Tamla-Motown sound, the Philadelphia sound and so on. Sound equals style. Therefore a limited sound such as that of Punk rock must mean a limited style. My God, buy a copy of Big Beat before it’s too late.