My name is Ingmar Bergman. What am I doing here?
40 years and 22 albums into a highly idiosyncratic recording career that takes in genre-defying albums with Tony Visconti and Giorgio Moroder as well as one of the all-time great unsing-able number one singles in This Town Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us, it'd probably be a mistake to ever really be surprised by Sparks' next move. Even so, eyebrows must still have twitched at news that the brothers Mael's next project would be The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman: a radio play (Bang!) about the inner fears of one of Europe's more, um, difficult filmmakers (Bang!), let alone one performed partially in Swedish (Yikes!). On the eve of the UK premiere of The Seduction... I had the great, nerve-wracking pleasure of speaking to Russell Mael - the voice of Sparks - about it.
BCR:The last time I saw Sparks perform live, earlier this year, you'd added a troupe of dancers pushing prams around the stage to the video backdrop you've been using for a while now. Isn't a radio play a bit of a counter-intuitive move for a band that's as visually aware as you guys are?
Russell Mael: We wanted to find a medium that we hadn't yet explored and fortunately we were invited at the beginning of the year by Swedish National Radio to do a radio musical for them. It's kind of an old fashioned genre, but we thought we could do something a bit different. We're still ultimately a pop band, but we feel there are other ways to be working within pop music which broaden what you're doing and keep it from having the cliched kind of trappings that all pop music seems to have now. So for us it was perfectly in keeping with wanting to do something that was not just another Sparks album with a bunch of songs on it.
BCR:I know that both you and Ron studied film at UCLA, so you know your auteurs, but presumably the Bergman element was dictated by the fact this was a Swedish commission...
Russell Mael: The only thing that they requested was that we come with up an idea for the entire story that enabled us to utilise the Swedish language in some form. Once we had come up with the concept, they let us have complete freedom to do whatever we wanted. All the sending files back and forth between LA and Sweden worked really smoothly and they were very open and an absolute pleasure to work with. They actually encouraged our eccentricity and wanted us to do something special.
With pop music now, all labels want is to hear the hit single and what will work commercially. It was so exciting to work somewhere where they knew that the creative output at the end is the important thing. It was kind of a lesson to be learned: if you let people do what they want to do, give them free range and basically encourage them to take chances to do something special, then sometimes the end result can be so much stronger.
It's a message that runs through the radio play itself. The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman opens with Bergman's triumph at Cannes in 1956. Tiring of all the attention, the director seeks refuge in a cinema showing some Hollywood schlock only to find himself mysteriously transported to Tinseltown where he's feted, cajoled and generally tempted to sacrifice his artistic scruples at the temple of Mammon, as other European emigres have been happy to do before him (there's a memorably grotesque scene where Bergman's taken to a cafeteria where Hitchcock, Von Sternberg, Munau et al are all busy stuffing their faces).
It's not ever going to work, of course, and Bergman finds himself fleeing demanding actors and no less demanding autograph hunters in a typically action-movie-like chase scene before being rescued through the good agencies of Greta Garbo who leads Bergman safely back to Sweden, directorial independence, playing chess games with death and all the rest of it. As with most of Sparks' recent work, the musical influences are many and varied - there's touches of glam, Bernard Hermann and mitteleuropan stomp in there for starters - but the lyrics (maybe I should say the libretto) are no less sophisticated.
It seems to be implicit in the play that the reason why Bergman and Hollywood aren't going to get along isn't that the latter is appalling per se, but because Bergman has a particular, not far short of dictatorial, way of working that requires absolute independence from all outside demands, be they creative or commercial. So the challenges flow both ways.
BCR:It wasn't until I'd heard the play once or twice that I realised that the Film Mogul - whose siren song to Bergman is Russ' first appearance in the piece - isn't supposed to be this wholly sinister character.
Russell Mael: Even if it's done with best intentions in Hollywood, things can get watered down. It often seems like by the time it's finished, a vision is not really what it had started out to be. So despite the mogul and others having possibly good intentions, in the end their aims may not have been what Bergman wanted them to be.
Initially I was only going to be the Hollywood movie mogul: we took it as a given that I would be taking that role within the play. Later we also felt that, the pieces Escape I and II - which are actually vital pieces to the music - we actually tried a few other people doing those parts, but felt it wasn't how we had heard it. So I'm not only the movie mogul, I'm policeman one and two - multitasking.
BCR:We don't hear your voice until ten minutes into this album, which is pretty unprecedented for a Sparks record.
Russell Mael: It is unprecedented, yeah. We wanted to keep it really true to being a radio drama. Actually, originally Ron was doing the voice of Ingmar Bergman - there's a demo version of it which will eventually be released, it's also really really good - but we thought that having an actual Swedish actor would give the piece a bit more resonance than it would have, certainly with me doing it, but also with Ron doing it.
BCR:It also gives you the leeway to have Bergman giving his lines in Swedish...
Russell Mael: We didn't really have to learn any Swedish. We did all the versions in English, all the demos, and then sent the Swedish production team the parts that we wanted to have in Swedish. We were told that they had a really great translator to do all of that sort of work. So we're trusting that, despite our lack of Swedish, that it reads well.
Most of Bergman's interior monologues are done in Swedish in the Swedish version and English in the English version. The places where we wanted to have him forced to speak in English - the ones where he's in Hollywood and he's dealing with English-speaking people - as we thought that that was the way it would have to be anyway. When he's dealing with the limo driver, he would have to speak in English if he wanted to communicate at all... so that's kind of how it divided out. In the times where he's doing his interior monologue, when he's speaking to himself, those are done in Swedish on the Swedish version and in English on the English version.
BCR:It's not a simplistic piece but it's difficult to not suspect that you identify a little with Bergman's situation: the defiant iconoclasts trying to keep commercial pressures at bay. Do you feel that same kind of disjunct with contemporary pop music? Is there anyone new you enjoy?
Russell Mael: We explore and listen to everything but, to be honest, not so much. There seems to be a lack of imagination. Everyone's so content with fitting in with what pop music is supposed to be. To us it's very conventional and very formulaic: even though any band would tell you it's not formulaic, it's ground-breaking and all of that, it's not really the case.
The whole system is broken: musically with bands not wanting or not being able to do anything different, the whole system's broken with the radio and with record companies... It's the end of pop music as it exists until people are willing to realise that and explore some other areas. It's always, 'there's a new band I really like and they sound a lot like...' Well, if it 'sounds a lot like' then it's already been done and, for us, that's just really unexciting. So - and it's a long answer to your question - there's not a lot new out there that we do listen to and really embrace.
BCR:You've made more than your fair share of shatteringly brilliant albums, but Lil Beethoven seems to have been the start of a really productive period for you. In 2002 it felt like it came out of nowhere.
Russell Mael: We wanted to do something at that point in our career that was just not relying on the old formulaic stuff that makes up pop music, but actively replacing it, like replacing drums with other elements, and figuring out other ways to structure songs.
Songs don't necessarily have to be verses and choruses, middle eights and and all of that sort of stuff. You can play with the structure, with the instrumentation of songs and all the expectations of when you need to have drums, because drums mean excitement, or when you should have guitars, because guitars are excitement... you can replace those with other elements of sound by having big vocal choruses or really aggressive sounding strings. They also have the attack and the bite of pop music. Replacing elements was definitely part of our goal with that album.
BCR:No one could ever accuse you of lacking ambition. The Sparks Spectacular, your London residency last summer which saw you performing all the 21 albums you'd released at that point, was a huge undertaking.
Russell Mael: There was four months of rehearsing to be able to do that. That's 250 songs we had to learn, or relearn in a lot of cases. We were really pleased with certain albums, like Introducing Sparks, which have been a little brushed under the carpet. People tend to think, well that was one of the lesser albums. We found that, in the context of the 21 nights there was a reassessment about what some of those albums were.
Also, doing all 21 albums together, it shows that there's a common thread throughout. Lyrically and even vocally, we rarely wavered off our course of intent. That's one of the main things we were proud of, that we were able to present all those albums. We wanted to really present them in the same way they had been done originally. There were few albums that, when heard in a live context, we thought just didn't cut it, so we were really proud of the entire body of work.
There was a reassuringly wide age-range at those concerts too, particularly for the more recent albums, which bodes well for the size of audience ready to embrace the Maels' next predictably-unpredictable flight of fancy. Sparks have been around for nearly as long as Sesame Street and should be as widely beloved: in fact, it suddenly seems like a weird omission that they've never appeared on it...
We'd love to, but we've never been asked!
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