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SPARKS
Discussions about the band SPARKS
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APOLLO74
Groupie
Joined: 03 May 2004
Posts: 154
Location: TORQUAY
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Eric Murray
Sparks Guru
Joined: 12 Jan 2002
Posts: 9454
Location: Kirkcaldy,Scotland
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 Posted: Tue Jan 20, 2015 4:06 pm Post subject: |
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| Was the review ever posted for non Times people ? |
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APOLLO74
Groupie
Joined: 03 May 2004
Posts: 154
Location: TORQUAY
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| Posted: Tue Jan 20, 2015 6:25 pm Post subject: |
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| Eric Murray wrote: | | Was the review ever posted for non Times people ? |
Here is a copy of The Times review Eric
Sparks at Barbican, EC2
Will Hodgkinson
Published at 12:01AM, December 22 2014
Rated to 4 stars
It’s commonplace for bands to perform their classic albums in full, but Sparks’s concert for Kimono my House was always going to be different. Anglophile brothers from California, Ron and Russell Mael were men out of time when Kimono my House came out in 1974: Ron, the musical mastermind, looked like a Weimar-era piano teacher with a Hitler moustache and Russell looked like an elfin man-boy. Forty years on they remain much unchanged. The original album was the work of a rock band, but for this concert the brothers hired the services of the Heritage Orchestra to bring the album alive. Out went electric guitars and in came brass, harp and woodwind, but the Maels’ eccentric vision was intact.
Coming to the stage in kimonos, the brothers began with their biggest hit: This Town ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us. It was the song that introduced the world to Russell’s hysterical falsetto and Ron’s distinct sensibility, a mix of musical theatre, British Invasion-era pop and camp humour. Ron was impassive behind his grand piano while Russell, a sprightly 66-year-old, hopped about and ensured that his falsetto reached the high notes on such Noël Coward-esque gems as Falling in Love With Myself Again and Thank God it’s not Christmas. There was a generous, celebratory mood to the whole affair: the brothers gave it their all, the orchestra was tightly rehearsed and the audience got behind it.
Russell inaugurated a singalong for Equator, the final song on Kimono my House. “Tempo, pitch,” he admonished, when the audience failed to meet Equator’s demands. The second half of the concert covered other sections of Sparks’s career: excerpts from their 2009 musical The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman, Rhythm Thief from their career-reviving 2002 album Lil’ Beethoven, and 1979’s uplifting disco classic Number One Song in Heaven, for which 69-year-old Ron Mael, scowling throughout, stepped away from the piano to loosen his tie and do a one-minute charleston before returning to his sedentary position. The concert was a consistent display of fully realised performance art, and inspiring with it.
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C'est la vie , c'est la mort , say no more , no no more ! |
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sjadey
Sparks Guru
Joined: 20 May 2008
Posts: 3736
Location: High Wycombe, Bucks., England
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| Posted: Tue Jan 20, 2015 8:03 pm Post subject: |
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So Ron and Russ are 69 and 66 years old respectively? There always seems to be some dispute about their actual ages, but I thought Ron was 6 years older than Russell.
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Gonna hang myself from my family tree. |
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Eric Murray
Sparks Guru
Joined: 12 Jan 2002
Posts: 9454
Location: Kirkcaldy,Scotland
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| Posted: Wed Jan 21, 2015 4:57 pm Post subject: |
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| @ Apollo - thank you |
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