Punk set out to shock the ’70s rock establishment, but disco did a far better job. Safety pins and ironic swastikas had nothing on one-piece jumpsuits and boogie shoes. After all, no one ever hosted a baseball-stadium rally to detonate a bunch of Sex Pistols records, a fate that befell a pile of Saturday Night Fever soundtracks at Chicago’s infamous Disco Demolition Night on July 12, 1979. As some noted at the time, and many more have since, it’s evident that coded racism and homophobia were fuelling that event more than a simple distaste for 4/4 grooves and syrupy strings. But perhaps the most ridiculous thing about the sight of young men storming the field at Comiskey Park to defend rock’s honor was that many of their heroes were looking to get on the Studio 54 guest list themselves.
By 1979, pretty much every rock act of note—the Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, KISS—was making a beeline to the dancefloor, and if others like Pink Floyd, the Eagles, and Lynyrd Skynyrd harbored no explicit desire to get in on the 12" market, they were at least absorbing some of disco’s polish and finesse. For many of these artists, disco proved to be more of a one-night stand than a serious commitment, a fleeting concession they could make to the pop marketplace while reassuring the Disco Sucks crowd it was all just some cocaine-addled mistake. No rock band would be crazy enough to actually completely reinvent itself as a full-on disco act and seek out one of the genre’s key architects for guidance. But then no rock band is quite like Sparks. For them, disco wasn’t simply some bandwagon to jump on—it was the career-saving life force that transformed them from glam-rock has-beens to future-pop prophets.
When you consider the story of Sparks, nothing really makes sense; everything about their narrative is just a bit off. For over 50 years now, brothers Russell and Ron Mael have enjoyed a telepathic creative partnership that’s yielded several hit singles—yet rarely in a row, rarely in the same country, and rarely in the same style. Their career has been a never-ending roller-coaster ride, but the Maels always manage to correct course when it appears they’re flying off the rails. They pick up fans in one territory as they shed them in another; they’ve alienated old followers with their wild aesthetic shifts while endearing themselves to new niches.
Even at the height of their commercial success, Sparks were never an easy sell. Founded in Los Angeles, the group first gained notoriety by crashing the UK glitter-rock scene with their violently theatrical 1974 hit single “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us.” But their look was as glum as it was glam: in contrast to Russell’s pretty-boy preening, Ron adopted a stern, professorial look, topped with a Charlie Chaplin-inspired toothbrush moustache that many interpreted as creepy Hitler cosplay (a confusion compounded by the fact the Maels are Jewish).
That contrarian streak would only become more deeply entrenched over the coming decades. Over the course of 25 albums, Sparks have left no genre—operatic art-rock, new wave, house music, classical, metal—uncorrupted. But their catalog is unified by a singular crass’n’classy spirit that’s made them the only band to appear on the soundtracks to both the Jean Claude Van Damme bloodbath Knock Off and Leos Carax’s arthouse mindfuck Holy Motors. (Their love affair with the latter filmmaker will intensify this summer with the release of Carax’s Sparks-scored musical Annette, starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard.) As confirmed by director Edgar Wright’s recent star-studded documentary/fan letter, The Sparks Brothers, the Maels are beloved by many infinitely more famous artists—from Beck and Björk to Flea and Jack Antonoff—for their brazen nonconformity and derring-do. But there was a time when those qualities were more liabilities than assets.
As glam rock degenerated into punk in the mid-’70s, Sparks found themselves in an awkward position. While first-wavers like the Sex Pistols, Ramones, and Siouxsie Sioux admired the Maels for their disruptive presence, the actual music Sparks were making at the time—the carnivalesque art-pop of Indiscreet, the butt-rock raunch of Big Beat, and the Beach Boys-inspired fantasias of Introducing Sparks—represented precisely the sort of spectacular excess that punk sought to extinguish. What’s more, those records were commercial disappointments—even in the UK, Sparks’ most reliable market. But instead of trying to rehabilitate their image by making a play for the pogo pit, the Maels were more keen on joining the other revolution happening at the time.
Released in July 1977, Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” was the Star Wars of disco singles—the sort of blockbuster event that makes everything that came before it seem obsolete and inadequate. The song originally appeared as the final track on Summer’s album I Remember Yesterday, a conceptual record that explored different eras of music from the ’40s up to disco. “I Feel Love” was a late-addition lark that imagined the sound of the future, one where live instrumentation would be replaced by oscillating synth patterns and traditional song structures would dissolve into hypnotic mantras. But the song proved to be less fantasy than prophecy, signaling disco’s shift from a sleek variant of funk into the foundation of electronic dance music.
It was “I Feel Love” that forever changed the name of its producer, Giorgio Moroder, into an adjective. Once a purveyor of piano-tinkled bubblegum pop and funkified Moody Blues covers, by 1977, Moroder had (alongside his silent production partner, Pete Bellotte) become a genre unto himself. His landmark solo album, From Here to Eternity, extended the electronic explorations he began with Summer over the course of an entire record, while his synth-driven, Oscar-winning score for Midnight Express the following year further tightened his stranglehold on the pop zeitgeist. Moroder’s rise happened to coincide with the Maels’ growing disillusionment with rock music, which portended their dismantling of Sparks from a five-piece band down to the core fraternal duo.
Among all the rock acts of their vintage, Sparks were the ideal candidates for a disco makeover. Raised on a steady diet of Saturday matinees and Sgt. Pepper’s, the Maels approached music as a form of roleplay, inhabiting their satirical songs like characters in an absurdist sketch show. Unlike many other bands of brothers, they avoided typical sibling-rivalry sensationalism and flipped the fraternal-jealousy cliché into their stage schtick, with the buttoned-up Ron shooting death stares at the coquettish Russell as if he were silently hatching a plot to destroy him. In their ’70s glam-rock prime, Sparks didn’t have to put on lipstick, dresses, or feather boas; for the Maels, rock’n’roll was the costume, the vehicle that allowed them to act out their most ridiculous flights of fancy. And it was a costume they could easily throw off once it had outlived its usefulness.
As they tell it, Sparks’ dancefloor pivot wasn’t so much an act of trendspotting opportunism as just another new experiment in playing dress-up. “We were feeling that we had been taking a band format as far as we could go,” Ron recounted in a 2020 interview. “We heard ‘I Feel Love’ on the radio [and] we thought it could be interesting if Russell was singing on that kind of cold electronic background.” But without access to that sort of gear, all they could do at the time was put the idea out to the universe. At one point in the late ’70s, a German music journalist asked the Maels if they had any new music on the horizon; the brothers responded that they were working with Moroder. It was purely jokey wishful thinking, but like the futurist premise of “I Feel Love” itself, their dream eventually became a reality. The journalist happened to be a friend of Moroder’s, and before long, the Maels were hunkering down in the producer’s Musicland Studios in Munich, toying with the furniture-sized synths and sequencers that would shape the sound of their 1979 album, No. 1 in Heaven.
From its dewy opening synth droplets, No. 1 in Heaven doesn’t simply expand the Maels’ musical horizons, it exists on another planet entirely. That feeling that grows even more pronounced once a throbbing “I Feel Love” pulse sets “Tryouts for the Human Race” in motion. Where even Sparks’ most accessible songs can dart around like a pinball, Moroder keeps the Maels on a linear ascent, with the producer’s trusty session drummer, Keith Forsey, serving as the Mercedes-grade pace car. When Russell’s hair-raising voice enters the mix, you’re treated to the thrilling spectacle of the most restlessly rhapsodic singer in rock reborn as a natural disco diva.
Sparks, of course, weren’t the only rock-oriented artists tooling around with electronics in the late ’70s. But in contrast to Kraftwerk, or Bowie, or Tubeway Army, the Maels weren’t so much embracing the sci-fi qualities of the synthesizer as using it to heighten the ever-present tension between Russell’s vamping vocals and Ron’s withering lyrics. In true Sparks fashion, No. 1 in Heaven isn’t just a disco album; it’s an album about disco, drawing narrative inspiration from the genre’s underlying motifs and energies and filtering it through their own uniquely peculiar perspective. Ironically, by completely overhauling their aesthetic, Sparks never sounded more Sparksian, probing a culture obsessed with lust, vanity, and materialism as eagerly as Kraftwerk celebrated European public-transit efficiency.
So where Summer treated disco as a conduit for orgasmic ecstasy, Russell sings “Tryouts for the Human Race” from the perspective of actual sperm gunning for their one-in-a-million shot at being a fertilizing hero. (“One of us might make it through/The rest will disappear like dew!”) Emerging from a blizzard of sparkling synth tones, the giddy “Academy Award Performance” bounds down the red carpet like a young starlet greeting the paparazzi pit, but the song’s exhortations (“Play the shark! Play the bride! Joan of Arc! Mrs. Hyde!”) could just as easily describe the plight of any woman who has to put on many different faces in order to satisfy the patriarchy. The proudly Eurotrashy “La Dolce Vita” sounds tailor-made for the sort of Mediterranean nightclubs where Moroder’s music reigned supreme, but it’s more interested in examining the characters who frequent such establishments—namely, the young gigolos serving as bored arm candy for older rich socialites. And with the ebullient “Beat the Clock,” the Maels use disco’s relentless, sweat-soaked rhythms as a metaphor for a nascent computer-age culture on the cusp of accelerating out of control, presenting a highly prescient portrait of a young busybody eager to cross off his bucket list—getting a PhD, traveling, sleeping with Liz Taylor—before he reaches adulthood.
But for all its craven characters and dry-ice decadence, No. 1 in Heaven ultimately leads to a moment of soul-purifying rapture. When Sparks began working on the record, they had seemingly lost the ability to write a hit song—so the most they could do was dream of one. The album’s quasi-title-track closer, “The Number One Song in Heaven,” is the ultimate manifestation of the question that hovers over Sparks’ entire career: Are they being ironic or not? Certainly, the very concept of a chart-topping song written by God fits right into the Maels’ meta-humor wheelhouse. And yet, the song’s belief in disco’s unifying power and out-of-body transcendence is 100 percent genuine. Beginning with a slow-motion opening tract that appears like a bright Biblical light beaming down from the clouds, the song suddenly shifts into an exhilarating second act that makes it feel like you’re being rocketed into the stratosphere. If “I Feel Love” was Moroder’s attempt to imagine the future, “The Number One Song in Heaven” is his vision of the afterlife: electronic disco reborn as a spiritual experience.
While it’s impossible to confirm if No. 1 in Heaven was indeed a hit among the Pearly Gates cognoscenti, the song did return Sparks to the Top 20 in the UK, and the album accrued enough pop-cultural cachet to prompt Paul McCartney to adopt Ron’s signature look and mannerisms in the video for his 1980 single “Coming Up.” (“Beat the Clock” further infiltrated the mainstream when it was quoted on the chart-topping novelty disco-Beatles medley “Stars on 45.”) But those Top of the Pops appearances and rock-star acknowledgements were just the first ripples of this album’s outsized impact.
For the first post-punk generation—the teens caught between punk’s cynicism and disco’s celebratory energy—No. 1 in Heaven showed how you could succumb to the allure of the dancefloor without sacrificing your subversive spirit. In its fusion of flamboyance and frigidity, No. 1 in Heaven effectively shaped the neon-tinted sound and arch sensibility of ’80s synth-pop as we know it—in Wright’s documentary, members of Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, Erasure, Visage, and New Order all profess as much. (The latter’s Stephen Morris also admits he cribbed the drumbeat from “The Number One Song in Heaven” for Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”) The album’s influence only continued to reverberate across the decades: In the vocoderized vistas of “My Other Voice,” you’ll find the blueprints for Air’s space-age bachelor-pad soundscapes and Daft Punk’s robot prog; in “Tryouts for the Human Race,” you get the dry run for LCD Soundsystem’s skyscraping electro-rock anthems.
Sparks’ relationship with Moroder would last for just one more album, the more new wave-leaning Terminal Jive, after which the forbidding logistics of touring with “a synthesizer the size of a building” (as Ron describes it) prompted the Maels to reform Sparks as a proper band for their ’80s run. There would be many more peaks and valleys to follow, but No. 1 in Heaven was the album that gave Sparks the confidence to weather them, cementing their legend as rock’s most unpredictable, chameleonic, and brilliantly counterintuitive band. Thanks to four decades of advances in synthesizer technology and the album’s legion of imitators, No. 1 in Heaven may no longer represent the sound of the future—but its techtopian pop still feels like the future you wish you were living in now.
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