Latest news with #RussellMael
Scottish Sun
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scottish Sun
Seventies rock legends spotted in major Scots city before sold out show
The US duo shared a picture with their Instagram followers ROCK ON! Seventies rock legends spotted in major Scots city before sold out show Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) A SEVENTIES rock band have been spotted in Scotland ahead of their sold out show. Sparks, comprising brothers Ron and Russell Mael, are playing the Edinburgh Playhouse. Sign up for the Entertainment newsletter Sign up 3 American rock stars Sparks were spotted at Edinburgh airport Credit: Instagram 3 The duo will take to the stage of the Edinburgh Playhouse Theatre Credit: Alamy And ahead of the gig, the American duo shared a picture with their 104,000 Instagram followers. They stopped for a picture at Edinburgh Airport and wrote: "Hi again Scotland." Fans rushed online to comment on the picture, one said: "Can't wait to see you." Another added: "Welcome to Scotland. "I'm driving down from Aberdeen this afternoon for tonight's gig." A third wrote: "Great place to see great music." One commented: "Looking forward to the show." The rockers, who formed in 1971, are famed for a string of hits including This Town Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us. Elsewhere noughties indie band has announced they're set to play an exciting gig in Glasgow. They're not the only stars to play the city this year with music legend Bob Dylan taking to the stage and Lewis Capaldi announcing an extra tour date. Elsewhere, Irish rappers Kneecap have announced an even bigger show in Scotland following their sold-out gig last week. And now another hugely popular band is set to entertain the masses nearly 20 years after releasing their most successful chart hit. Their 2006 banger Chelsea Dagger has become a nightclub staple and is often played at sporting events. The band behind the tune, The Fratellis, will play to their Glasgow home crowd in February.
Irish Independent
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Sparks on their enigmatic image: ‘There are no ghosts in the closet kept from everybody… and also, it's none of their business'
Russell Mael on releasing the band's 28th album MAD!, their spat with Morrissey, their 1979 record that became a blueprint for electronic duos and their delight at having a growing army of younger fans There is a song on Sparks' new album, MAD!, that sums up their ethos to a tee. The lyrics of Do Things My Own Way include 'Saw the Pope, told him, 'nope' / Gonna do things my own way' and 'My advice? No advice / Gonna do things my own way.' Sparks, aka brothers Ron and Russell Mael, have been doing things their own way for over half a century. Their 28th album – there have been soundtracks, operas and even a collaborative supergroup project with Franz Ferdinand in there, too – comes hot on the heels of their last studio album The Girl is Crying in Her Latte, suggesting that the creative well is bottomless, 54 years since releasing their debut in 1971.
Telegraph
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Sparks, Mad!, review: eccentric brilliance with pearls of wisdom
Since they first properly struck gold with 1974's piano-pounding art-glam romp, This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us, Ron and Russell Mael's 'band', Sparks (its personnel has long since consisted of just the two of them), has been an ever-present gold standard for left-field pop – perhaps the world's most successful cult act. High points along the way have included 1979's Giorgio Moroder -produced New Wave/disco hit machine No.1 In Heaven and 1994's synth-pop primer Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins, but perhaps the most extraordinary twist in the tale of this fraternal odd couple from Los Angeles, ever beloved in the UK, is that, now well into their late 70s, their last three non-conceptual studio albums – Hippopotamus (2017), A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip (2020) and 0223's The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte (2023) – all by some remarkable coincidence hit Number Seven on the British charts. They've remained furiously productive since the millennium, managing to squeeze in 2015's collaborative record with superfans Franz Ferdinand ('FFS'), a radio opera (2009's The Seduction Of Ingmar Bergman), a film musical (2021's Annette, which won them a César from Best Original Score), but this 28th studio album in their labyrinthine career surely delivers what most Sparks fans want from them most – a barrage of the kind of eccentric yet immediately connective synth-pop bangers, which only Chaplin-moustached keyboard maestro Ron Mael, now 79, seems capable of writing, and which Russell, 76, his sky-scraping high notes miraculously uneroded by passing time, delivers with characteristic theatrical gusto. If Mael Sr majors in operatic pop ditties with laugh-out-loud librettos of interpersonal observation and pop-cultural referencing, Mad! is veritably bulging at the seams with them. It opens with the pulsing electro assertion of Do Things My Own Way, a new anthem, perhaps, for Sparks's pathological idiosyncrasy. Further on, the glacially product-placing JanSport Backpack hilariously satirises our contemporary fixation with brand identity, often in preference over what's actually going on around us, or to us. More laughs beckon on Running Up A Tab At The Hotel For The Fab (oh, that craving to spend indiscriminately at a pricey boutique establishment!). Best of all, maybe, My Devotion offers a wonderfully goofy snapshot of unrequited love bordering on obsession: 'my devotion to you is all that I do,' gamely chirps Russell, over infectiously tootling synth lines, 'Got your name written on my shoe, and I'm thinkin' of getting' a tattoo!' He goes on, a tad creepily if he didn't sound so genuinely smitten: 'Through all the years/Rent in arrears/You never cared/Can't help but stare'! More relationship insecurity surfaces on In Daylight, which serves up the wisdom, doubtless accrued beneath unforgiving LA sunshine, 'Everybody looks great at night/Ain't no trick to look great at night', before our narrator approaches a radiant apparition to deliver the ultimate LA compliment, 'You were impressive in day light, I saw you/Sunlight oppressive, but it's working for you', then succumbs to a dose of 'we are not worthy': 'I can't approach you since daylight reveals me/So I'll just wait for the night to conceal me'. Like many of pop's greatest songsmiths, Ron Mael has a rare talent for writing lyrics which you instantly imagine applying or indeed singing in real-life conversations with fellow Mad! enthusiasts. Over circling psychodrama strings-synth, A Long Red Light, for example, brilliantly captures the stress of awaiting a change from those traffic signals which seem to be on a far more patient time-loop than all the others around town. I can just imagine singing this one to myself, the next time I'm stopped at a particular junction on my route back from Central London. For all their lifelong weirdness, Sparks are always real enough to invade your daily reality, as all great pop does, in singalongs of collectively amusing phraseology, set to memorable melodies. As such, another Number Seven, or higher, surely awaits. Best New Songs By Poppie Platt Cerrone x Christine and the Queens, Catching Feelings Following their performance at last summer's Paris Olympics, French drummer Cerrone and polymath Christine and the Queens reunite for a funky disco banger with emotional depth at its heart, as Christine (real name Rahim Redcar) sings: 'Let me be your man / Don't be afraid / Of catching feelings for me'. I-dle, Good Thing The superstar K-pop quintet return with a new name (they've dropped the precursory G) but more of the same sharply tailored, irresistibly catchy bubblegum pop. Robbie Williams featuring Tony Iommi, Rocket Perhaps the strangest duet of the year so far – in a good way. Pop's favourite bad boy teams up with the Black Sabbath axe-shredder for an energetic pop-punk anthem as far removed as his saccharine hits of yesteryear (Candy, here's looking at you) as you can imagine. Maybe Robbie will even show up as a surprise guest at July's mega-star Sabbath gig at Villa Park. Suede, Disintegrate The Britpop staples will take over the Southbank Centre with four special gigs in the autumn, showcasing tracks from their forthcoming tenth album, Antidepressants. Disintegrate offers a tantalising first taste of what to expect: Brett Anderson on typically sardonic form, howling about modern anxieties and disillusionment ('You hold your love like a weapon in your hand / You used to be alone but you're not alone / Watching from the outside') against a backdrop of moody riffs. Taylor Swift - Look What You Made Me Do (Taylor's Version) The biggest teaser yet for the album that will soon break the internet – the rerecording of Swift's 2017 revenge-epic Reputation – appeared in the most recent episode of Channel 4's The Handmaids Tale. Elisabeth Moss's quest to bring down Gilead makes Swift's battle with Kanye Swift (the original inspiration for Reputation) look tame, so it's a fitting union. White Lies, Nothing on Me
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Sparks Talk New Album ‘Mad!', Making a Movie Musical With John Woo & Noticing ‘Fewer' Visionaries in the Music Biz
So does Mad!, the title of Sparks' new and 26th studio album, refer to brothers Ron and Russell Mael's current temperament? Or is it simply a reference to their legendarily idiosyncratic creative comportment that's made the pair a cult darling for the past 54 years? 'Maybe a little of each,' Russell Mael tells Billboard as he travels from Philadelphia, where Sparks performed at NON-COMMvention the previous evening, to New York. 'There's the two general meanings of mad, being either angry or being crazy,' he says. 'Just the overall ambience of the whole album seemed to lend itself to that title. But then you can exact from it, too, that it also is reflective of the general zeitgeist now, with what's going on everywhere — in particular here (in the United States).' More from Billboard Tory Lanez Is Being Transferred to a New Prison After Being Stabbed, His Dad Says Aaron Paul Opens Up About Tracking Down Tour Managers to Get Bands to Perform in His Living Room Ye Claims He's 'Done With Antisemitism': 'Forgive Me for the Pain I've Caused' The 12-song set, produced by the Maels and recorded with their regular touring band, comes as part of a particularly prolific period in Sparks' career. It's the group's ninth studio album since the turn of the century and its third of the decade, directly following 2023's The Girl is Crying in Her Latte. It also comes in the wake of Edgar Wright's acclaimed 2021 documentary The Sparks Brothers and the 2021 release of the Maels' long-gestating film musical Annette, which produced not only a soundtrack album but also last year's Annette — An Opera by Sparks (The Original 2013 Recordings). All of that, along with touring, has kept Sparks' profile high, and there's an undeniably triumphant — as well as defiant — message conveyed as Sparks kicks into Mad! with the forceful opening track 'Do Things My Own Way.' 'You don't like to be heavy-handed with a message like that,' Russell explains, 'but it is kind of that statement, in a way. It kind of applies to how we think — from day one, even when we did our first album [1971's Halfnelson, also the band's name at the time] with Todd Rundgren (producing). He always encouraged us to keep the eccentricities that we just naturally had and to not smooth over the edges, don't lose your character and personality. Even on that first album, he thought we'd created our own universe he'd never heard before. He said it was something from somewhere else, which is a nice thing to say, especially with a band that was just a new group.' Sparks was celebrated last year with an outstanding contribution to music honor at the AIM Independent Music Awards. And though the group has only intersected with the pop mainstream on rare occasions — 'Cool Places' with Jane Wiedlin hit the Billboard Hot 100 in 1983, and 'When Do I Get to Sing 'My Way'' went top 10 on the Dance Club Songs chart in 1995 — the fact Sparks is still with us is proof that being a bit 'weird' is not a bad thing. 'Things are on the upswing for Sparks,' Mael says. 'I think there's been this — especially in the last few years, since the Edgar Wright documentary, and since the Annette movie — whole new audience, some of whom didn't even know the band at all but became aware of it through different channels than just us having our own album out. It's not the typical career trajectory.' Mad! was created in standard Sparks methodology, according to Mael, without a great deal of forethought — and, according to the vocalist, nothing held over from previous projects. 'Everything was done specifically for this album,' Mael says. 'It's a process where we're pretty free to work however we want. Sometimes we'll have a complete song that's fully formed…or we come in with nothing at all planned and just sit down and see if something can come up from nothing. Having our own studio, you're free to experiment in that way. We've been working together for so long now that we're able to read what each other's thoughts are regarding the songs or the recording process. That certainly makes it easier. It's not starting off with any questions marks.' The result on Mad! is unapologetically diverse — to its benefit. Musical and lyrical quirks about; 'JanSport Backpack' is about just that, for instance, while 'Running Up a Tab at the Hotel for the Fab' is a good-humored 'mini-movie,' and 'I-405 Rules' and 'A Long Red Light' show the Maels are well attuned to traffic patterns in their native Los Angeles. The range of sounds, meanwhile, runs from the aggressive attack of 'Hit Me, Baby' to the theatrical drama of 'Don't Dog It' to the string-fueled 'I-405 Rules,' while a great deal of melodic pop floats through 'A Little Bit of Light Banter,' 'My Devotion,' 'Drowned in a Sea of Tears' and the Mersey-meets-Bacharach majesty of 'Lord Have Mercy.' 'I think we both have the same goal in mind… to try to come up with fresh approaches to the universe that Sparks has and has had since the very beginning and try to stretch that, or try to find new angles to be able to do in three-and-a-half-minute songs,' Mael says. 'We both really like pop music, and we still feel there are ways to come up with stuff that will hopefully surprise a listener in this day and age. Pop music has been there a long time, so the trick is to see how you can take that form and still come up with something fresh — but not be weird just to be weird, or odd.' Mad! also finds Sparks with a new label, Transgressive Records, after working with Island on The Girl is Crying in Her Latte. 'Sometimes you just have to make moves,' Mael notes. 'Transgressive heard the album; even referring back to 'Do Things My Own Way,' they told us they thought that was really a kind of manifesto of their label. They've all been huge Sparks fans for a long time. They really wanted to be involved not only 'cause they like us as a group, but they responded to this album and really felt a kinship to it. We've been lucky enough to work with people like Chris Blackwell at Island in the '70s, even Richard Branson at Virgin and of course Albert Grossman with Bearsville Records when we first started. It seems like in today's musical climate there's fewer and fewer of those visionary types. Transgressive shares that same kind of spirit, so it's a good fit.' Mad! will send Sparks back on the road, beginning June 8 in Japan and followed by an early summer trek through Europe before returning to North America starting Sept. 5 in Atlanta, with dates booked through Sept. 30 at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, the Maels are also working on another movie musical that John Woo (Face/Off, Mission: Impossible 2, Silent Night) is on board to direct. 'We wanted to do another narrative project, 'cause we really liked the whole process with Annette so much, really working and channeling our music in other ways,' says Mael, who describes the new piece as 'really different in its approach than Annette.' The brothers read in an interview with Woo that he's long wanted to make a musical and invited him to their studio to hear what they had. 'He said, 'This is amazing, and I want to direct it,' so we've been working with him to refine the story elements. He's completely sold on the whole approach and all of the music. We have three really great producers now on the project; they're out there trying to get all the financing together so we can start the production. We think it's going to be something really amazing.' Best of Billboard Chart Rewind: In 1989, New Kids on the Block Were 'Hangin' Tough' at No. 1 Janet Jackson's Biggest Billboard Hot 100 Hits H.E.R. & Chris Brown 'Come Through' to No. 1 on Adult R&B Airplay Chart
Washington Post
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Sparks has been making music for more than half a century. They see no reason to retire
LOS ANGELES — They've spent more than half a century together as bandmates, putting out dozens of records. But brothers Ron and Russell Mael — the duo behind the art-pop band Sparks — have no intention of retiring anytime soon. The band's sound has been ever-evolving since its inception. Ron, 79, and Russell, 76, view resisting any impulse to remain the same or rest on a previous record's success as a central priority. Ahead of the release of 'Mad!,' their 28th studio album, on Friday, as well as an upcoming tour, the pair spoke with The Associated Press about why they keep working, not waiting for inspiration to strike and why it's been so meaningful for younger generations to find their music. The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
