Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series.
Sparks started out as an L.A. band, but the group experienced its first real commercial success in the mid-’70s, after Ron and Russell Mael relocated to London and took the U.K. charts by storm. The Mael brothers returned to California in 1976, but remained fairly unknown in their home country as they began making dance music with producer Giorgio Moroder that continued to sell better in Europe. Two developments helped Sparks finally begin to build a following in America, and southern California in particular: a more rock-oriented new Sparks lineup, and the emergence of 106.7 KROQ-FM.
Rick Carroll became program director at KROQ in 1979, and his embrace of punk rock and new wave became an enormous influence on the development of the modern rock radio format in the ’80s. Many of KROQ’s favorite acts were British, but the station also proudly played plenty of California bands like Missing Persons, X, Oingo Boingo, and the Go-Go’s. Sparks weren’t in KROQ rotation at first, but the band’s 1981 album Whomp That Sucker, with the Maels backed by members of the L.A. band Gleaming Spires, changed that. KROQ’s year-end “Top 106.7” songs of 1981 featured four Sparks tracks: the singles “Funny Face” and “Tips For Teens,” as well as the album tracks “I Married a Martian” and “Upstairs.”
“I Married a Martian” could be read as a metaphor for marrying someone from a different culture, or someone who seems to become strange and unfamiliar to you over the course of your marriage. But it’s perhaps more entertaining to take it at face value as a sci-fi story song about marrying a woman from Mars. Whomp That Sucker became the first Sparks album to appear on the Billboard 200 since 1975, due in part to KROQ’s support. And the band remained a staple on the station throughout the ’80s, and climbed higher on the American charts with their next two albums.
Last year the Norwegian podcast The Burning of the Midnight Amp devoted an episode to Whomp That Sucker. The hosts’ deep dive on “I Married a Martian” noted the similarities between the song’s lyrics and the plot of Tim Burton’s 1996 film Mars Attacks!, and the fact that Burton had developed an unproduced film project with the Mael brothers in the late ’80s.
Three more essential Sparks deep cuts:
“Biology 2”
The original lineup of Sparks that played on the band’s first two albums included the Maels and a second set of brothers, guitarist Earle Mankey and bassist James Mankey. Earle Mankey, who wrote the delightfully odd early Sparks songs “Biology 2” and “Underground,” became a prolific producer and engineer, while James Mankey went on to co-found Concrete Blonde.
“The Ghost of Liberace”
On the 1994 comeback album Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins, Sparks imagined Liberace, who died in 1987, making his own comeback in the afterlife, adored again as a phantom haunting the Earth.
“Pacific Standard Time”
The bridge of this lovely track from 2020’s A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip contains a line that could sum up Sparks better than any other lyric from the band’s enormous catalog: “Our inconsistency is our consistency, our insincerity is our sincerity.”