All in All

There’s been a bit of a hiatus in my blogging of recent so what’s been happening (other than all the wedding planning and dealing with all necessary domestics while Mac worked every hour under the sun on the NHS film)? The usual, I guess; cooking, gigging, comics, walking Marfa. There’s not a lot of mileage talking about walking Marfa (enjoyable though it is), or cooking, and I am slowly moving away from comics I feel, so that leaves me with live music.

It’s now the end of July and I have seen a total of 64 gigs and 80 separate bands/acts so far this year. Not bad, eh? As usual there have been highlights and lowlights – the highs include Tom Waits, Baby Dee and Grace Jones, whilst I’ll express a little boredom at Smashing Pumpkins, disappointment at Dragonette being cancelled at the last minute (despite them arriving at the venue ready to play), and last night’s support of Post War Years were pretty awful.

But there’s been one live event this year that so far has eclipsed everything in terms of scale, excitement, anticipation, and general bravery, which is Sparks’ 21 shows, where each show was each of their 21 albums in sequence. I’ve said it before, I love Sparks, and so the only thing to decide for this was which gigs we were going to. Time-wise, every show was not going to be an option. In the end we went to 7, and still regret missing a couple.

However, considering what a big thing this was, I cannot express how disappointed (if not angry) I was at the lack of press the whole thing received. I only recall one review – Simon Price in the Independent on Sunday reviewing Indiscreet, I think. We saw one of the main writers from Word magazine at a number of gigs but was there ever a review? No, so I hope he didn’t get press passes. We assumed everyone was waiting for the last show (the new album), but nothing followed it, which was a great shame as this would no doubt help cd sales. I mean, no-one has done anything like this before. Few people have such a large back catalogue, so it really should have been acknowledged.

The shows we went to were all incredible, with the atmosphere really building up as they progressed towards album 21. We saw Kimono My House (excellent, but slightly annoying audience), Indiscreet (if we could we would have done Propaganda too, but for this one we had to choose between the two and I do feel we did choose the more exciting and adventurous album), No 1 In Heaven, Gratuitous Sax (incredible), Plagiarism (with a guest appearance from Jimmy Sommerville), L’il Beethoven (better than ever) and finally Exotic Creatures. With more time we would have added Propaganda, Hello Young Lovers, and maybe Angst In My Pants too.

Once the tour had finished, the rest of June felt rather deflated, knowing that it was all over, let alone that it may be a couple of years before they are back again. At the rather emotional end of the Exotic Creatures show, just after Ron set fire to each album cover, Russell said ‘It’s been fun, we must do this again some time’. If they ever do, I’ll be there.

Labels: Sparks