SPARKS - Talent is an asset

Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Omnibus Press; 2nd edition edition
(15 Feb 2012)
Language English
ISBN-10: 1780381506
ISBN-13: 978-1780381503
Product Dimensions: 22.6 x 14.2 x 3 cm

It is always interesting, as far as I am concerned, when I get a biography of someone that I know absolutely nothing about. My knowledge of Sparks pretty well begins and ends in the summer and autumn of 1974, when I bought precisely one album and one single, and about thirty years later when I downloaded L'il Beethoven.

But their well crafted arty oddnes has always rather intrigued me. In fact, as I said to Rob Ayling yesterday, they are such an odd band that I am surprised that they never recorded for Gonzo.

So I sat down and read the book from cover to cover in a couple of sittings, and - yes - it is well written, and gives all the times, the dates, and the personell changes. This is pretty good, as far as it goes, becuause this particular rock historian has now got an invaluable new book for his library.

But in another way it is a crashing disappointment, because I wanted a book which let me into the peculiar world of the Mael Brothers. I want to get inside their heads, and find out intimate glimpses of their thought processes. But that, this book singularly fails to do? But is it a failure? Not at all.

The one thing that comes over above all others in this excellent book is that only two people inhabit Planet Mael, and that no-one else ever has, or ever will, be granted any degree of access there. To say that Ron and Russell are private people is a ridiculous understatement - I have been reading rock biographies for forty years, and writing about them for thirty. I have never come across anyone who guarded their privacy as diligently as these two. So as the book that I want to read will never be written (unless one of the two principals decides to write an autobiography) this is a pretty good substitute.