My longstanding obsession with the band Sparks, first noted here, has gone to new depths. The band is about to put out a 21st album, Exotic Creatures of the Deep, and to celebrate, they are in the midst of playing the other 20 albums, live, in sequence, on 20 nonconsecutive nights.

This is happening in London, a better epicenter for the Sparks fan base than anywhere in the U.S. The venue is the Carling Academy Islington, which is apparently a mid-sized rock club. Message board postings on the Sparks site put the capacity at around 800.

It's amazing the band is able to pull this off. Many of their songs have never been performed live, and some weren't meant to be (a couple of disco albums in 1979 used technology that then wasn't portable). The song count comes to something like 270, including rarities and B-sides that are being used for encores. The brothers Ron and Russell Mael are handling keyboards and vocals -- they've been the core band for 35 years -- with two guitarists, a bassist, and a drummer.

May 16 happened to be the first of these shows, and I found myself with three hours of time to fill on the radio due to a scheduling gap. It took an hour to decide I'd have the guts to do this -- and to retrieve the vinyl, pick songs (since I'm not familiar with much of the catalog) and set up my laptop to play a couple of newer tunes that KZSU doesn't have.

With apologies to the Maels, I have to admit not everything Sparks did was a home run. The disco albums -- well, if disco's your thing, they're fine. The '80s guitar-pop period, which is when I got into the band, is a lot of fun but a tad embarrassing and silly; all my friends just loathed the band back then. But the latest album Hello Young Lovers got real airplay on our station, and while the '70s albums tap the glam/classic rock vein, they're quirky enough to not sound dully retro.

I had a lot of fun. Whether listeners did, who knows.

Here's the best part about the 21x21 concert series, as Sparks is calling it -- you can watch all 20 shows on the Net, using this link. It's not a hi-def, high-budget webcast. Just one camera and a lot of pauses and glitches. But considering it'd be hopeless for most of us in the U.S. to attend the shows, it's more than enough. And even the mediocre albums are coming across well in a live setting.

At this writing (May 25), the band's up to 1979 and has eaten through their most popular and enduring albums. There have been two sellout crowds, but the audiences are going to be thinner for the remaining 12 or so shows. A bit of insider perspective is available on a tour diary being compiled by drummer Steve Nister.

I hope they keep up the momentum and energy level. I wish these guys well, I really do.

It ends June 11, and is followed by a performance of Exotic Creatures at a different venue June 13.

I'll post the setlist soon. Rather than go chronologically, I tried to jump around as much as possible. Genre whiplash was my goal. I didn't manage to record the whole thing, so I don't know how well it worked.

Format:
ARTIST -- "TRACK TITLE" -- ALBUM TITLE (LABEL, YEAR)
Horizontal lines denote microphone breaks.

Sparks -- "This Town Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us" -- Kimono My House (Island, 1974)

Europeans would be stunned at how unknown this song is in the 'States. It wasn't until I started rediscovering Sparks in 2005 that I even knew the song title, and I didn't hear it until months later -- even then, courtesy only of YouTube. It's Sparks' biggest single ever, a fast-paced, glam-tinged track with nice hard guitars and a thumpy beat. Mike Patton and Faith No More did their own version, even. But I don't believe I ever heard it on rock radio -- even back when rock radio actually took chances and tried to promote new music.

I followed "This Town" with a song that U.S. listeners had a fighting chance of recognizing; this one got some MTV airplay back in the day. Not quite electronica dance music, but close, with an upbeat poppy attitude and a fast spoken segment that's catchy.

Sparks -- "Perfume" -- Hello Young Lovers (In the Red, 2006)

Sparks -- "Girl From Germany" -- A Woofer in Tweeter's Clothing (Bearsville, 1972)

Going 'way back, to when Sparks was principally a guitar band that caught Todd Rundgren's ear.

So, we've got this CD single with some heavily Euro-dance treatments of what would otherwise be a pretty good song. It's also got the 7" edit of the song, rather than the full version. This one, like "Change" (which completely slipped my mind, dammit) is a surprisingly poignant song, something I hadn't come to expect out of Sparks. It's yet another YouTube-able track.

Along with "Cool Places," which I'd deemed too embarrassing to spin, this was one of Sparks' near brushes with a hit single in the U.S. They played this and "Mickey Mouse" (also turned that down for airplay; this is a jaded college-radio audience we're talking about) were played on Saturday Night Live, and it's that appearance that kicked off mywhole Sparks fascination.

In case anyone wasn't listening hard enough to the lyrics, I wanted to demonstrate the sense of the absurd that's in many of these songs. Not all -- some tracks have a more straightfoward sense of humor, but that's harder to demonstrate on air. (A fave moment, from "Moustache:" "But when I trimmed it real small / My Jewish friends would never call.")

I went for the all-out disco sound of "Tryouts for the Human Race" on a previous history-of-Sparks set. This was a more directly poppy (and shorter) way to showcase this album.

Unquestionably the most-played Sparks track on KZSU in the CD age.

The nearly seven-minute magnum opus gets its own "set." (Using "magnum opus" in the really loose and probably incorrect sense of, "really really big song.") A bit more here.

One of the few songs credited to Russell Mael as opposed to Ron Mael. Catchy, clever, and lyrically complicated; if you'd told me Russell did one song on this album, I wouldn't have guessed this one.

The phony brass synths on here probably sounded nicely jokey at the time, but they're awfully dated now. It's a classic Sparks kind of lyrical idea, though.

I needed a slow one. This fan favorite seemed to fit the bill.

The song consists almost entirely of the title sung over and over and over. That might sound ridiculous, but if you think of the song more like an instrumental, it opens up to something quite catchy and interesting. Plus, the closing monologue is amusing. It's my second favorite track on this album, actually. ("Suburban Homeboy" is tops and would have made the playlist, except the MP3 version on my laptop is too tinny for airplay.)

Even at the height of my Sparks fandom, I considered this album a tad embarrassing. Songs like "The Willies" and "Wacky Women" were a bit too lyrically silly (although the latter was one of my favorites); the falsetto attacks in "Tips for Teens" and "Where's My Girl?" drove my friends insane. I always liked this track, though. It's a silly and funny one, but the music makes it seem almost serious and regretful.

I kept leaning on Hello Young Lovers simply because it was the only full-length CD on hand.

A last-minute download from eMusic. MP3s don't always play well over the air; the weakened sound quality, sent through the analog sound chain of radio, doesn't always survive well, even to my clunky unrefined ears. I hope this one worked out. I wanted more representation of Sparks' later years, and this high-energy track seemed the right fit.

A minor-key album opener, but still at a danceable pace. Clever lyrics, too.

There's no connection to Sparks here; I just figured I'd leave a long jazz track on for M-Smooth, the next DJ, to fade out.

* = Item in KZSU rotation
! = Pop anomaly
? = Item not in KZSU library

-- Go back to Memory Select playlists.
-- Bay Area free/improv music calendar: http://www.bayimproviser.com.