I know next to nothing about the band Sparks. My mother played This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us once, and Weird Al Yankovic did a style parody of them with Virus Alert off of Straight Outta Lynwood (incidentally my favourite Weird Al album); that’s pretty much it. But knowing that director Edgar Wright has already got a winner this year in Last Night In Soho, and his ingrained fandom sensibilities certainly make him a good fit for this kind of documentary, I’m certainly interested in learning more. I mean, I’m basically the kind of filmgoer this was seemingly designed for: A casual observer who might have heard about the band before, but probably doesn’t realise just how much influence Ron and Russell Mael have had on the music landscape worldwide. And while it definitely does its job, that comes with a few caveats.
With the tagline “Your favourite band’s favourite band”, Wright doesn’t fuck around with that idea as he brings in an enormous collection of interviewees to give their own thoughts on the band’s work, as well as anchoring the film with extensive footage of the Maels themselves. Duran Duran, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Joy Division, Sex Pistols, Erasure, Sonic Youth, Bjรถrk, not to mention Weird Al as well; this is quite extensive at showing just how adored this band’s discography has been for the last half-century among those in the business.
From that springboard, the film essentially goes through the band’s entire career to date, punctuated by the rare moments when they got proper mainstream attention. And over the course of watching this, it helped make a lot more sense out of what little I had heard of them going into this. Relistening to Virus Alert, while it certainly carries Weird Al’s sense of humour, it not only sounds nothing like anything else he’s made, it sounds like nothing I have ever heard before or since. And that is very much their aesthetic: Always experimenting, always reinventing, always making the public come to them and not the other way around. Hell, the sheer mindfrag I experienced upon hearing Music That You Can Dance To and Dick Around in-film and realising, holy shit, I know these songs, on its own made this worthwhile for me.
However, the problem that Edgar Wright runs into is, oddly enough, a problem that Sparks themselves ran into during their own career: Trying to contextualise an impressively lengthy discography to make it fit with a single band. My personal favourite bit of the timeline presented here is when Sparks did a show where they played their entire discography, one album a night, for an entire month. It’s way too easy to sympathise with the other band members talking about how difficult it was to both rehearse all those songs and then remember that they had rehearsed those songs when it came time to perform them.
And in the case of this documentary, it runs into a similar problem because it tries to encapsulate everything about the band’s legacy, making it sag in a few too many places. It doesn’t help that Wright’s fan-first-filmmaker-second approach to things means that, over the course of many, many interviews, the audience definitely gets the sensation that this band is beloved and influential and worth celebrating… but it doesn’t feel like we get a clear-enough picture of the Mael brothers themselves. It’s almost like Wright wanted to maintain the weirder-than-life energy of the duo, the flamboyant singer and the extra-in-a-Dieter-SNL-sketch keyboardist (that description would make sense as to why Mike Myers is also in attendance here), and so didn’t want to dig too deep into their personal lives. On one level, I get that impulse, especially coming from him, but in terms of the production and its pacing, it feels like it isn’t making the most of its run time (for context, this is nearly half-an-hour longer than Last Night In Soho).
But even with that said, while I did feel like I was being dragged through parts of it, never once did I feel like I was wasting my time by continuing to watch the whole thing. It’s a fascinating look at an equally fascinating pop duo (if such a simplistic label is even close to accurate for a group this eclectic) that, while a bit exhausting in how comprehensive it is, definitely left me with the feeling that I learned a lot more about a musical act that… well, I had heard more of beforehand than I realised.
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