Art rock's highway, revisited

Sparks have always been too avant-garde for nostalgia, so why a 21-gig retrospective of their back catalogue?

EVEN BACK IN THE 1970s THE cognoscenti clashed over Sparks. Were the band head-spinning, genre-jumping, hysterical art-rockers, or were they fools and novelty artists? Deceptively clever or just dumb? Avant-garde trendsetters or mere followers?

The debate surfaces again with their upcoming 21-date London residency, the Sparks Spectacular, a pop marathon in which Ron and Russell Mael will work their way through their entire album back catalogue, night by night, before launching their latest work, Exotic Creatures of the Deep, in June. It's a daunting task, especially for a pair of brothers who have traditionally been as allergic to nostalgia as Morrissey is to a nice bacon sandwich.

"Yes we do really hate to look back," confirms Ron, the band's chief composer. "But having made the commitment to do this, we have been pleasantly surprised. It's been like looking back though an old photo album – except I'm unrecognisable in a lot of the photos and I really have no memory of half these songs. That's not drug- related, it's just that most of them are songs we've never played live before. So it's been a bit of a relief to find ourselves going, 'Wow, that song's not bad.'"

Over the years, Sparks' musical inventory has been one that artists such as Björk, Morrissey, Erasure, Depeche Mode, Franz Ferdinand and Mika have all paid tribute to. Yet as with all bands, some Sparks albums are more loved than others. Kimono My House was the first of their gigs to sell out completely in London, quickly followed by Indiscreet and Propaganda, but do the Maels fret over the reception that may await Terminal Jive or Balls, or the series of 1980s albums that made them campus heroes in America but were barely released in the UK?

"Not at all," says Russell, who has had to memorise more than 250 lyrics since January. "This is really a conceptual project of all of our albums. We don't break it down in our minds into individual concerts and individual nights, and worry about good nights and less good nights. When they're done live the excitement level rises on everything anyway – and from a fan's perspective, it's something that they will never get an opportunity to see again because it's unlikely we'll do this ever again."

Even so, have they ever been tempted during rehearsal to tweak a line, or buff up a musical phrase? "Oh sure, there's a couple lyrics here and there," says Ron. "But I think that would be kind of cheating."

Sparks these days look almost exactly as they did in 1974 – the only thing about the restlessly inventive brothers that does seem a constant. Russell may have lost his bubbly 1970s footballer hairstyle but he's still a slight, handsome man who flits across a stage as if weightless. Ron's moustache has thinned out from its Germanic brush into a raffish South-American pencil affair but the trademark liquorice hair is still present and correct. Both of them are chirpy despite the fact that yet another day's rehearsal stretches ahead of them after our chat. It's not exactly a case of the Maels falling in love with themselves again, more a Sisyphean task of rehearsing an album for two or three days, then returning to it weeks later in the hope that they have retained the work.

"And the answer is – not always," says Russell, cheerfully. Have they sustained any repetitive strain injuries yet? "Just head injuries," says Ron. "And eye strain."

Sparks came to life in 1970 when the California-based duo were still students. Their quirky – albeit ignored or maligned – assault on the mainstream was initially called Halfnelson, blending Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and the Beach Boys. Todd Rundgren heard their demo and signed them to Bearsville Records, and they rechristened themselves Sparks.

"Rather than discouraging any kind of eccentricities in our music, Todd really encouraged it," recalls Russell. "We thought, 'This is amazing. Somebody's actually telling us to be more wild than what we're doing.' It was incredible what he did."

They soon moved to England, where they developed a campy, clever hard-rock, guitar-based sound. Fusing wry witticisms and double entendres with infectious pop, they hit big in 1974 with the breathtakingly busy single, This Town Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us.

Sparks were giddily inflated by Russell's helium vocals, but they also had dark, paranoid undercurrents in the shape of Ron. Disdaining the Rick Wakeman school of cheeky-chappy keyboard showmanship, Ron had his long hair cut just before their first Top of the Pops appearance, slicked it back in the style of a 1930s dad and spent Sparks' three minutes of screen time gazing sternly at the camera.

It set a benchmark for the show's youngest fans, who had previously encountered nothing more terrifying than Terry Jack's version of Seasons in the Sun. Even adults found it intimidating; the next day, when the band went into Woolworths to buy some sweets, the cashier recognised Ron and immediately ran off screaming.

The French were even more spooked. Assuming Ron's toothbrush was some sort of glam endorsement of Hitler, they banned Sparks from the country for a year. "It sounds disingenuous but I was really naïve to what the moustache is supposed to be," recalls Ron. "At the time I was really thinking of Charlie Chaplin, and the strong reaction I was getting really wasn't wanted. Eventually it got to the point where I altered the shaving patterns." Says Russell: "We hadn't thought of it as a joke, just a real contrast."

Their contrasts remain intact. Sparks have flirted with styles and sounds from Lennon and McCartney to Gilbert and Sullivan, glam metal to electropop. In the late 1970s, after their album Indiscreet and hits such as Something for the Girl with Everything, Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth and Get in the Swing, Sparks fired their band and embraced synth-based dance music on the No 1 in Heaven album.

"It was initially spurred when we heard Donna Summer's I Feel Love and just loved the way that sounded, with an edgy singer over a real driving computer beat," reflects Russell. "So we approached Giorgio Moroder. We also felt we had gone as far as we could go with a band format at that time. When we came back to England, our album was slammed by the critics for us moving into disco. Over the years, that whole style has become accepted. But at that time, it was a pretty lonely place to be."

The upcoming retrospective of Sparks' intricate musical designs built on rock foundations is essentially a prelude to Exotic Creatures. With titles like I Can't Believe That You Would Fall for All the Crap in This Song, it is perhaps more aggressive than any of their recent output, but traditional Sparks themes are still present: lyrics that sometimes jar with the mood of the song, and cultural references that seldom find their way into pop songs elsewhere, such as the melancholic Photoshop.

The very first song, Good Morning, establishes Sparks at their jauntiest, with a droll paean to a one-night stand. ("While I fix you breakfast/I hope it's just your laugh that is infectious"), while Lighten Up, Morrissey has already caused angst among the faithful followers of La Moz. In fact, rather than a pot shot, the track turns out to be a fizzy piece of retro-glam where Russell complains that his girlfriend keeps unfavourably comparing him to the former Smith.

Morrissey, himself a Sparks fan since he wrote a letter to the NME in his teens praising their first UK album, Kimono My House, has already had a preview of the finished song. "He was the only person we cared about and he immediately got what it was about," says Ron. "And he says it's going to be a huge hit," blushes Russell.

Favoured by the critics, though not always commercially successful, Sparks' idiosyncratic style has been both their strength and a stumbling block over the decades. While the quirkiness of their material holds the allure of the unusual, their brand of oddness has an elfin and intellectual flavour that has often generated misunderstanding and even hostility.

Writing in the New Yorker, novelist and music journalist Nick Hornby contended that the Maels' pop sensibility was acutely unfashionable. Ron responded that pop music was "every bit as substantial a musical form as classical music or jazz". He also took exception to Hornby's view that Sparks are "slightly annoying", replying that "I've always felt that we were extremely annoying."

On the evening of 25 May, Sparks will launch themselves into the set of the No 1 Song in Heaven, kicking off with Beat the Clock and its fraught sentiments about trying to achieve as much as possible, and the perils of being too early, as well as too late. The Maels themselves, however, show no sign of having run out of time. They're still driven, musically and creatively, and still mordantly self-deprecating. "I suppose it's good for both of us that things have worked out in music," reflects Ron. "Because quite honestly I don't know if we'd be very skilled at anything else."

• The Sparks Spectacular, featuring the band's back catalogue from Halfnelson/Sparks (1971/1972) to Hello Young Lovers (2006) is at the Carling Academy, Islington, London, 16 May to 11 June. The band will perform their new album Exotic Creatures of the Deep, which is released on 19 May, at Shepherds Bush Empire, London, on 13 June.