In the age of the single download, Jeff Harford rediscovers the album.
Renamed Sparks, and with an all-British backline of Martin Gordon (bass), Adrian Fisher (guitar) and Norman ''Dinky'' Diamond (drums), the band soon found itself a Top of The Pops fixture on the back of two Top 10 singles and a Top 5 album.
Kimono My House (1974) scored with a teenage audience where the Maels' two previous albums had failed. Producer Muff Winwood had worked Sparks' theatrical glam rock into easily digestible slices of quirky pop, and a British audience primed on Bowie, Ferry and Eno was more welcoming of the band and its kooky look than its American counterpart had been, or would remain.
In Russell, Sparks had a beautiful, ringlet-haired frontman whose falsetto danced lightly across multiple octaves. In Ron, it had a stone-faced keyboard player whose toothbrush-moustached evocation of a Chaplin/Hitler was as frightening as it was funny. And with Ron finding his feet as the group's chief writer, the cards fell into place for the album to milk an emerging public fascination with eye-popping looks and challenging sounds.
On Kimono's lead single This Town Ain't Big Enough For The Both Of Us, rock meets Gilbert and Sullivan in a boisterous homage to exhilaration. Ron's clever and strange lyrics cast stampeding rhinos and khaki-coloured bombardiers into the same pot as the hormonally charged man on date night.
Second single Amateur Hour is another joyfully energetic tribute to sexual awakening, its memorable revolving guitar riff and precisely drawn lines foreshadowing the jerky new wave of British bands such as XTC.
There are other highlights, chief among the perfectly constructed pop-rocker Here In Heaven, in which Romeo is left stranded by Juliet's failure to stick to the plan, and grand epic Thank God It's Not Christmas, where our man seeks out distractions to assuage his fear of loneliness.
