The song that reinvented Sparks: “It just sounded so amazing”
Jack Antonoff, famed producer of Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, and Lorde, once said that “all pop music is re-arranged Vince Clarke [of Erasure] and Sparks”.
It’s a great compliment, but it also gives the impression that Erasure and Sparks are instantly identifiable bedrocks with a certain style or approach, when in fact, particularly in the latter’s case, they were often great because they were undefinable.
Had Sparks maintained the sound and sensibility of their 1974 breakout album Kimono My House, they’d probably still have a solid following today. They became the quintessential ‘cult’ band of their generation, however, because they essentially broke containment and removed themselves from the restrictions of expectation. Nobody, including their biggest fans, could predict or explain what the Mael brothers were doing or what they’d be doing next, but those who stuck around increasingly appreciated the ride.
Arguably, the defining pivot point for Sparks was their eighth album, 1979’s No 1 in Heaven. By now, they’d already shed a good portion of their original audience, as their previous two albums, 1976’s Big Beat and 1977’s ironically titled Introducing Sparks, had both failed to chart in the US or UK. On first listen, No 1 in Heaven might have seemed like a moment of desperation, a once proud rock band fully surrendering to the tides of disco in order to resurrect their flagging career, which is certainly what some critics thought, particularly in their own homeland of America, where the album failed to chart yet again.
However, while Ron Mael doesn’t deny that Sparks were, indeed, looking for a new . . . bolt of energy, their turn to disco hadn’t been remotely cynical or financially conceived.
“Russell and I were at a period where we were trying to find a different way of doing things, but within the same sensibility of what we are,” Ron told The Quietus in 2025, “And we heard [Donna Summer’s] ‘I Feel Love’ on the radio. It just sounded so amazing to have that kind of cold, electronic background, but with a singer that was really not robotic at all, but very much a singer… We thought maybe it would be a really good way for us to go.”
Specifically, the Maels wanted to work with Summer’s producer Giorgio Moroder, the grand poobah of Italian disco, but the problem, as ever, was that Sparks were largely detached from the mainstream pipeline of pop music dealmakers, and thus had no way to follow through on their idea. Moroder wasn’t necessarily unattainable; they just had no idea how to contact him. The solution, in classic Mael fashion, was to spin a yarn and see where it got them.
“So we did an interview with a German journalist,” Ron recalled, “And we told her, ‘Oh yeah, we’re going to be working on our next record with Giorgio Moroder’, but we hadn’t made any contact with him at all… So the journalist said, ‘Oh, I’m good friends with Giorgio’. She introduced us to him, and he was interested in working with a band. In a way, we were kind of the perfect band for him.”
No 1 in Heaven, and its standout single ‘The Number One Song in Heaven’, weren’t exactly monstrous successes commercially, but they did put Sparks back on the radar for a lot of people who’d lost track of them in the mid-70s. Over time, the album also grew in significance for its clear influence on New Wave synth pop of the ‘80s, with Sparks having established a blueprint for how the electronic sounds of Italian disco could find a footing in the rock ‘n’ roll band format.
