#sparks (band)

[sircatticus]

this is the album cover of all time, ron & russ u guys were craaaazy for this one

[russellmaelofficial]

sparks- funny face (1981)

[maelwives]

Damn Ron, I didn’t know you were chill like that

[cilogram]

Resuming my loving trawl through the frames of The Sparks Brothers documentary to post stills I haven't seen on tumblr yet.

[whompthatsucker1981]

sparks you tube comments

[alabamyright]

some screenshots i took from the sparks brothers

[the-hottest-band-tournament]

Round one

My Bloody Valentine

Formed in: 1983

Genres: Shoegaze

Lineup: Kevin Shields – guitar, vocals

Bilinda Butcher – guitar, vocals

Colm Ó Cíosóig – drums

Deb Googe – bass

Albums from the 80s:

This is Your Bloody Valentine (1985)

Man You Love to Hate – Live (1985)

Geek! EP (1985)

The New Record by My Bloody Valentine EP (1986)

Ecstasy (1987)

You Made Me Realize EP (1988)

Isn't Anything (1988)

Propaganda: 

Sparks

Formed in: 1968

Genres: New wave, art pop, disco rock

Lineup: Russell Mael – vocals

Ron Mael – keyboards

Albums from the 80s:

Terminal Jive (1980)

Whomp That Sucker (1981)

Angst in My Pants (1982)

In Outer Space (1983)

Pulling Rabbits Out of a Hat (1984)

Music That You Can Dance To (1986)

Interior Design (1988)

Propaganda: 

[red-crescent-marigold]

yeah i draw sparks sometimes .what about it

[become-a-robot]

some guy in 1984: I need a strip tease from a psychic drag queen who really fucking sucks at predicting the future

(Ron Mael slowly removing feather boa) Pretzel Take Care Of Cancer (slips off gloves) They're not going to have the sun anymore

[funeraldasrosas]

Sparks (1974)

photo by Gijsbert Hanekroot

[punk-rockdyke]

skinny white man with brown hair making new wave music save me…. save me skinny white man with brown hair making new wave music

[archeolatry]

Go take a look at this beautiful trove of old SparkSound magazines someone is selling on eBay. For the price they might as well be made out of gold, but the seller's been nice enough to take big, largely readable photos of so many of the issues. Is there a similar digital hoard of scanned versions? I'd love to see more! (I've seen photo pages in full but only snippets of the rest.) The absolute like... raw, sloppy, fanzine chaos of these as as official publications from a major label band is blowing my fucking mind, even if it is just for the fan club. It's literally their mom cutting and pasting and cramming mentions from both Melody Maker and TV Guide onto an A3 sheet of paper, layouts be damned. The apostrophe on her typewriter is broken for a couple issues but she carries on with an asterisk. She's also around 60 by this point and banging this out to an audience of hundreds or thousands like it's a local Kiwanis club newsletter. But she's doing it with gusto, by gum, and it's punk as hell. The best thing about it is that the lack of style is made up for by the absolute top-tier access to the band, and her being surprisingly on top of pertinent details.

For those of you who weren't in a fandom before the internet, those behind-the-scenes photos were like your favorite band's proof of life. There was no Instagram or Twitter, or anything that proved they existed between national TV appearances and touring in your area (besides those mentions in Melody Maker anyway). If you were lucky, your fandom had the capacity to trade videotapes and people in Scranton could see local TV appearances in Los Angeles and vice-versa. If you were really lucky they weren't all copies of copies with potato quality sound and video. Likewise, if you wanted the 12" extended European dance mix of a song with a B-side unavailable in the US, you had to either special order it somewhere and pay through the nose, hope it was in the imports section of a record store (and still pay through the nose), or you had to trade cassettes or burned CDs and hope the other person didn't flake on you. The fact that she's saying "Don't go running to the import section yet, the single will be out on ____ record label on this date with this track listing" is WAY more info than we usually got from our official sources. All "Mary Martin" needed to do for exclusive content was take pictures of her sons on vacation. On one page she's absolutely dunking on Russell them in wry cut-and-paste captions and on another she is the perfect hype man, telling people shows at The Greek Theater are gonna sell out so get your tickets early (but hold your horses on travelling- they're working on Japanese dates for September so you may not need to fly to the US). The personal thank-yous! The CARE! *slams fist on table* If any other band had their mom as the head of their fan club it'd be the most contrived shit in the universe, a complete lie, or both. I fucking love these guys.

[carcarrot]

'Spark-ling Russ Writes To You': A collection of writings from Russell Mael's weekly column in Mirabelle magazine, 1974, pt. 1 (pt. 2)

[maelwives]

Aaaaayyy

[cilogram]

Continuing my loving trawl through the frames of The Sparks Brothers documentary to post stills I haven't seen on tumblr yet. (This time Russell, with stealthy Ron Reflections)

[whompthatsucker1981]