Sparks’ Ron Mael: "Public Enemy were my favourites. Chuck D is a wise man and a couple of their albums were Sgt. Pepper’s worthy”

As a serious music journalist, one should at all times maintain an air of professional detachment and not fanboy/girl over the artist you’re intervie... oh, bollocks to that!

The first thing I tell Ron Mael, the eldest of the Sparks brothers, when he invites me into his L.A. home is how their 1974 Kimono My House album blew my teenage mind as comprehensively as Bolan Boogie and the Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust did.

“Thank you, as fellow music obsessives we really appreciate when people say how much Sparks has meant to them at various points in their life,” Ron beams, not thinking I’m a psycho stalker. At all.

While most of the bands they appeared alongside on Top of the Pops are now long gone, Sparks are as busy recording and touring now as they have been at any point in their career.

Before we talk ace new album MAD!, I’m curious about all the trainers in zip-lock plastic bags that Ron has on display in his man cave. Does he get through a lot of footwear?

“Wearing no, buying yes,” he laughs. “I started collecting them probably thirty years ago. I was a big fan of Michael Jordan and also of the confluence of sports, design and fashion. I’ve got some Air Jordan 1s here including a pair from when we got together with Spike Lee. He sent us each a pair of autographed Air Jordans which you can see there behind my head. Those are the best!”

What is Spike, who’s at the top of my interview bucket-list, like?

“He gives off this amazing energy – obviously as a filmmaker but also as a person,” Ron enthuses. “You get the sense that if he was a plumber, he’d be one of the best plumbers in the world. He has such high standards.”

The same can be said of Sparks who, in a 54 year/28 album career, have never let the quality control dip through all of their reinventions. With those records, do they sit down and decide, “Right, let’s go in this direction next” or does it happen more organically?

“It’s generally the latter,” Ron says. “In the case of No. 1 In Heaven and, to a certain extent Little Beethoven, we did map out a plan but with MAD! and other albums recently, we’ve let the material shape the instrumentation. Having worked with electronics, as a more conventional band and with strings, there’s lots we can draw on when we start to work on a song.

“What emerged on this record, is that everything has a certain immediacy and strength. We didn’t want it to be mellow.”

And it isn’t! Returning to people I’d love to have a chinwag with, after dancing her way through the video for Sparks’ 2023 ‘The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte’ single, Cate Blanchett reprised her role when they performed at Glastonbury.

“Obviously as an actor Cate’s supreme, but as a person… wow!” Ron enthuses. “We were blown away when she agreed to appear in the video at a time when she was incredibly busy – and even more blown away when she consented to recreate that incredible performance live at Glastonbury. She was great as were the crowd who gave us such a warm reception.”

Having won a coveted César Award for the 2021 French film, Annette, which they wrote and soundtracked, the Maels have been working on a new musical, X Crucior, with Hong Kong action director John Woo. What, ahem, sparked the collaboration?

“We’ve always been fans of his work and then Russell saw an interview with John in the L.A. Times where he said that the one thing he hasn’t done, and would really like to do, is a movie musical,” Ron explains. “He lives now in Los Angeles, so we invited him over to Russell’s studio and played him the songs which weren’t fully finished but beyond the demo stage. He sat there taking it all in and then said, ‘This is amazing, I’d really like to direct the movie.’

“We’ve spent about a year now working with John on some revisions. Every director wants to input their sensibility into a film and he’s come up with some very clever visual ideas. It’s such a collaborative process but if you go in understanding that and it’s with people you trust and admire, it’s a really amazing experience.”

Unlike an album that can be dashed out in a few months, filmmaking tends to be an agonisingly slow and expensive process.

“The thing that always slows this sort of project down is the financing because everybody now is so cautious,” Ron notes. “If it’s not a franchise, the tide is pushing against you. Luckily, John’s agent introduced us to the producer Frank Marshall who’s usually involved in Jurassic Park type things. He thinks the project is special and that it could also be commercial, so in both a morale boosting way and a practical sense, that’s really helped us.”

Sparks. Photo: Anna Webber

Quick pop quiz: Ron’s favourite musicals as a kid?

“I was probably a bit more than a kid, but I loved The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg, which Jacques Demy wrote and directed and has music by Michel Legrand,” he shoots back. “It’s all singing, no exposition and has that classic French sensibility which really appeals to us. That said, I also like Singing In The Rain and Gershwin’s An American In Paris.”

The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg was released in 1964 just months before Ron got the rock ‘n’ roll thrill of his life seeing The Beatles in the Hollywood Bowl.

“It was 18,000 people just screaming, so you couldn’t really hear the band,” he recalls. “It was also incredibly short – less than half-an-hour long. There was no P.A. to speak of, so most of what you could hear was probably coming direct from the amps. None of that mattered, though, because it was The Beatles!

“I don’t mean to get nostalgic but around that time we also saw The Rolling Stones, The Who and The Move – all of them early inspirations. The Move aren’t mentioned in the top tier but they should be because they were really something.”

Agreed. The postscript to all of this being that in July 2023 Sparks finally got to play the Hollywood Bowl themselves.

“It was such an emotional day,” he notes. “The Hollywood Bowl is symbolic to everyone in Los Angeles, to us even more so because of what we were just talking about. I try not to get separated from what we’re doing on stage, but there were several moments when I was thinking, ‘This is extraordinary!’ The teenage me was pretty happy too.”

The last time we spoke in 2023, Ron told me how he was able to separate art from the artist – he cited Phil Spector as an example – which is presumably why Kanye’s Yeezus recently made it onto a list of his favourite albums. Is he a big hip hop fan?

“I’m more into earlier hip hop,” he reveals. “Y’know, the ‘80s stuff that was denser and before the crackdown on using samples. Public Enemy were my favourites. Chuck D is a wise man and a couple of their albums were Sgt. Pepper’s worthy.”

Is Ron excited by any newer acts?

“There are a lot of interesting things coming out of Japan, like this girl group Atarashii Gakko! who I like a lot,” he says. “Russell’s also really into his K-Pop.”

How is their hometown recovering after the awful wildfires which destroyed 43,000 acres of land, claimed thirty lives and cost the City of Angles an estimated $131 billion?

“It’s going to take at least a decade to fix things in the areas that were hit,” Ron rues. “That’s down to not only the extent of the damage, but also because they can’t agree whether to rebuild them as was, or in some kind of new form. Thankfully, we were both okay. Russell’s place is more in the Canyon so other than spending one or two nights in a hotel, he wasn’t effected. The way it was going, though, you never knew where was going to be next. Places like the Pacific Palisades and out in the San Fernando Valley were devastated. People there lost literally everything.”

Finally – and perhaps most importantly – there are Sparks gigs to look forward to on July 15 and 16 in the National Stadium. Never ones for Stalinist revisionism, you’ll be getting all the classics plus the pick of the MAD! newbies.

“We’re really looking forward to it,” Ron concludes. “The travelling isn’t something you look forward to every day, but the shows are still a really, really big thrill for us. Just to see the feedback and that there’s a younger contingent as well as people like yourself who’ve been with us for the entire journey. It feels very regenerative.”

MAD! is out now. They play the National Stadium, Dublin on July 15 & 16.