This Town Is Big Enough For The Both Of Them

I was thirteen when I first heard Sparks, probably on Radio Luxembourg (Fab 208) who tended to play unknown new stuff ahead of the more reactive Ray-dee-oh One. Those were the days when an appearance on Top Of The Pops could make a career, and so it was for Sparks, whose wacky dashiness fizzed and popped onto my TV back in 1974. I was already massively over-investing in the significance of music in my life/the world and didn't really have any peers who watched TOTP with the same heightened excitement. Although it would have been talked about on the bus the next day, to most adolescent boys in the Welsh valleys Sparks were just another piece of glam fluff. However buried away inside the pages of the NME, consuming every word in the hope of being able to piece together my new world musical order I knew there was more going on here. Sparks, I read, were two American brothers who had tried and failed to get their band off the ground in the US, and thought they'd try their luck in the UK, seeing the British market as being more open to the camp and crazy. They were highly literate, archly cynical and knowing, post-modern before it had been properly invented, and with a sublime sense of what made a great pop tune. I was hooked, I bought the album 'Kimono My House', which contained their two hits: 'This Town Ain't Big Enough For The Both Of Us' and 'Amateur Hour' and listened to it incessantly. Listened in a way that was only possible at that impressionable age, I eventually lost the ability to play tracks over and over again, and still be thrilled by them, but during the summer of '74 I could stare in total fascination at the album cover, and inner sleeve for hours. I absorbed and memorised all of the lyrics, which I would quote verbatim to my poor, sweetly indulgent girlfriend of the time, in the foolish hope I was being cool.


I've had a soft spot for them ever since, and have been delighted that they've been able to eke out a pop career, with varying degrees of failure/success. The last decade has seen a mini-resurgence, feted by Blur at the height of Brit-Pop, featured by Morrisey in his South Bank Meltdown festival, their last two albums have been well received critically. And it was to hear them play their most recent album 'Hello Young Lovers' that I went along to The Forum on Saturday. It's an excellent format really, the show was divided in two, the first set was a straight run through of the new album, with some mildly amusing animated projections, the second half being a blasted out greatest hits set. So they get to promote the new album, and also please the long term fans. Which seemed to make up most of the audience, lots of sad middle aged gits like myself, the odd thirty-something couple, but no-one younger than that, and certainly no young lovers. The new album is very good in parts, showing they haven't lost their ear for catchy-to-the-point-of-irritating tunes, but is oddly repetitive in places. The song 'There's No Such Thing As Aliens' consists largely of just that line repeated 34 times in two minutes(I know I just counted them). I was delighted that they showed that they were capable of stepping down from their apolitical podium by changing the lyrics to '(Baby Baby) Can I Invade Your Country'. This is normally a clever piece of word play contrasting crass dating techniques with military invasion, but by singing the 'Star Spangled Banner' in place of the normal verses this became an incredibly potent piece of anti-war pop, far more effective than some blatant piece of angsty propaganda. The greatest hits section was a hoot, I'd shoved myself toward the front, and was soon proving I could still remember the words to songs I'd obsessed over thirty years previously, by singing tunelessly, and bouncing awkwardly along with the rest of the crowd. Pop Perfection.