Photos by Hiroki Nishioka (Japan, 2017)

Sparks performing "Amateur Hour" on The Midnight Special, 11/15/74.

From “Sparks of whimsy” by Randy Lewis, published in the Los Angeles Times on 11/2/03. If there’s any live Sparks performance I wish I could go back in time to see… this is definitely one option I’d consider.

Sparks fans will talk about how talented and clever Ron Mael’s lyricism is and you look into it only to see shit like this

The Revenge Of Two Hands One Mouth - O2 Academy Bristol (November 27, 2013) by Adam Gasson

Sparks - Popularity (Revenge Of Two Hands One Mouth - 2013)

Wow I've never seen photos of the actual physical fanzines of the olden days! And in such good condition too!

There indeed are scans out there, thanks @parts-of-me-unravelling for having the link at the ready :D I'm pretty sure we have @votedmostlikelytofail to thank for these.

Also, for tumblr/reblog purposes: a lot of pages are already to be found on here :) If you're on desktop (or mobile browser), you can follow this link which will take you to september 2012 in the archives of @oldschoolsparks, where you can find the early-early 70's fanzines. And this link will take you to the archives of september & august 2012 on her other blog where she uploaded quite a lot of the fanzines that followed. (Honestly, give @votedmostlikelytofail a round of applause!)

Go take a look at this beautiful trove of old SparkSound magazines someone is selling on eBay. For the price they might as well be made out of gold, but the seller's been nice enough to take big, largely readable photos of so many of the issues. Is there a similar digital hoard of scanned versions? I'd love to see more! (I've seen photo pages in full but only snippets of the rest.) The absolute like... raw, sloppy, fanzine chaos of these as as official publications from a major label band is blowing my fucking mind, even if it is just for the fan club. It's literally their mom cutting and pasting and cramming mentions from both Melody Maker and TV Guide onto an A3 sheet of paper, layouts be damned. The apostrophe on her typewriter is broken for a couple issues but she carries on with an asterisk. She's also around 60 by this point and banging this out to an audience of hundreds or thousands like it's a local Kiwanis club newsletter. But she's doing it with gusto, by gum, and it's punk as hell. The best thing about it is that the lack of style is made up for by the absolute top-tier access to the band, and her being surprisingly on top of pertinent details.

For those of you who weren't in a fandom before the internet, those behind-the-scenes photos were like your favorite band's proof of life. There was no Instagram or Twitter, or anything that proved they existed between national TV appearances and touring in your area (besides those mentions in Melody Maker anyway). If you were lucky, your fandom had the capacity to trade videotapes and people in Scranton could see local TV appearances in Los Angeles and vice-versa. If you were really lucky they weren't all copies of copies with potato quality sound and video. Likewise, if you wanted the 12" extended European dance mix of a song with a B-side unavailable in the US, you had to either special order it somewhere and pay through the nose, hope it was in the imports section of a record store (and still pay through the nose), or you had to trade cassettes or burned CDs and hope the other person didn't flake on you. The fact that she's saying "Don't go running to the import section yet, the single will be out on ____ record label on this date with this track listing" is WAY more info than we usually got from our official sources. All "Mary Martin" needed to do for exclusive content was take pictures of her sons on vacation. On one page she's absolutely dunking on Russell them in wry cut-and-paste captions and on another she is the perfect hype man, telling people shows at The Greek Theater are gonna sell out so get your tickets early (but hold your horses on travelling- they're working on Japanese dates for September so you may not need to fly to the US). The personal thank-yous! The CARE! *slams fist on table* If any other band had their mom as the head of their fan club it'd be the most contrived shit in the universe, a complete lie, or both. I fucking love these guys.

allsparks.com (2008 - 2014)

Screen recording of what the website used to be like. Not everything loads the way it's supposed to anymore, and the recording is rather speedy. Every time you return to the home screen there would be a different lyric on the typewriter, which I thought was really fun, and I love the sound effects! Unfortunately the discography section doesn't work at all anymore though, that was one of my favourite parts. It used to have a carousel where you could flip through all the albums, you could read the lyrics and also play some of the songs.

The Revenge Of Two Hands One Mouth - O2 Academy Bristol (November 27, 2013) by Adam Gasson

After 11 years of not finding a single photo from this show, I found these yesterday! I can not begin to express what this means to me, I nearly cried and I couldn't sleep last night. I was still a rather new fan and this was my first time going to a show in the UK, the first show I went to see with a friend, and my first time meeting that friend, too. And these above photos are SO GOOD! Not much was preserved from this show at all, there was no recording allowed (no charcoal drawings either), and to my knowledge not even the full setlist for this specific show was preserved anywhere. So better late than never, but here's what I remember (with some help from these photos!) and the things I've puzzled back together:

If there was opening music or an opening act, i don't recall, but Russell entered the stage alone. It was dramatic and impactful, and it went quiet as he gave an intense stare into the audience and did a drawn out "ahhh" into the microphone. After a little moment of quiet, it turned out the microphone had been connected to a sequencer which now started repeating "ah ah ah ah ah ah". Suspense, excitement. Russell added: "Hold, hold, hold, hold". (...I was definitely freaking out.) While that started looping on top of the ah ah ah sequence, he made stop signs with his hand as we all listened. A few repeats passed. "I'm getting mixed signals, mixed signals - mixed, mixed, mixed signals".

^ the only seconds of this show I recorded as I didn't yet know it wasn't allowed - security signed at me and I put the camera away. It was fine. (Here's a recording of it made during the US tour later that year - recording seemed to be less frowned upon at that point.)

I don't recall when Ron entered the stage at this show, whether it was during the song or after, but what a way to open! And what an amazing song choice!

The performance that left the biggest impression on me at this show though was Nicotina. It was a choice I didn't see coming, but also the way Russell sang it! Falsetto heaven. (Sadly not a single video is to be found of Nicotina from this tour. But for your falsetto heaven needs, I hope you can find a video of Here In Heaven that they also performed on this tour, because that will also kill you.)

As everyone here probably knows I am quite big on Bergman, which at the time was heavily promoted during the tours, and, the excerpts they played on this tour were different from what they played during Two Hands One Mouth! They played "I Am Ingmar Bergman", The Studio Commissary (my favourite song on Bergman), Limo Driver (but sang by Russell, and HOW!) and "Oh My God". (Here's a video of it from one of the American shows. It's extremely good. People who've been around for a while have seen me lose it over this video many times.)

The most unexpected song choice was probably Katherine Hepburn. Me and my friend had been joking for absolute months that we were going to see Sparks and they'd play Katherine Hepburn (as if that would ever happen, we were obsessed with that song though!). And here we were, and they were playing Katherine Hepburn right in front of our eyes. (What is reality.)

Falling In Love With Myself Again had me losing it over the organ sounds, always a fan of Ron on organ, and I LOVE that song. Russell sang a line in my direction (I died), and he managed to throw another line at me during Those Mysteries ...I died a few times that night. As you might expect. That was kind of the whole THOM/TROTHOM experience anyway. Lots of dying. But the variety of dying where you end up in heaven. (You're at a Sparks show after all.)

They wrote a song especially for this tour, which was not released but only ever played live: Revenge Of Two Hands One Mouth. What a thing to experience! A very dark song, but wonderful. (REVENGE! REVENGE REVENGE!)

At the end of the show Ron took a photo of Russell with the audience. I don't really remember that happening, but the photo exists and it really was not a thing they did often back then. We had been a good audience :)

Here's all the songs that were probably played that night in random order:

Your Call's Very Important To Us. Please Hold., B.C., Good Morning, Here In Heaven, Academy Award Performance, Those Mysteries, Falling In Love With Myself Again, Big Boy, Nicotina, Popularity, This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us, excerpts from The Seduction Of Ingmar Bergman, Tryouts For The Human Race, Katherine Hepburn, Revenge Of Two Hands One Mouth. They likely also played The Number One Song in Heaven, When Do I Get To Sing 'My Way' and Suburban Homeboy. (I see mentions of How Are You Getting Home? and How Do I Get To Carnegie Hall? in setlists for this tour as well, which they very well might have played but I very sadly have zero memory of ever hearing those songs live.)

This tour had a real air of mystery, possibly even more so than Two Hands One Mouth, as the lack of existing footage definitely adds to it. But luckily some of it *is* out there, and I am so grateful for these photos :) On top of the songs I especially mentioned above, I would also advise people to look for recordings of Tryouts For The Human Race and Popularity from this tour, because the arrangements are probably not going to be the way you expect them to be. And as you might expect: B.C. is stunning live. (I could start a whole rant about Good Morning and Suburban Homeboy live but I think I sufficiently screamed about both in my personal notes on THOM the year prior.) Final note: I know Russell had some sort of dance move for Big Boy because me and another friend couldn't stop talking about it for months. I don't remember what he did, but both THOM and TROTHOM were wonderful for Russell dances <3

TODAYS RECORD: NO. 1 IN HEAVEN BY SPARKS (1979)

No. 1 in Heaven is the eighth studio album by American pop rock band Sparks. Known for their theatrical pop records that span genres, Sparks looked towards disco and electronica for their next record after years of indulging in all kinds of traditional rock music.

The album was produced by Italian producer Giorgio Moroder who caught Sparks attention when he produced Donna Summer's "I Feel Love." The sound of No. 1 in Heaven would become a staple of Moroder's future production; Layered sequencers and synthesizers, underpinned with layered drums, overdubbed vocals, and backing vocals.

Is this anything?

sparks propaganda: they literally have an album named propaganda with this as the cover

also here’s sparks in the 1980s

My Bloody Valentine vs. Sparks