Written, of course, by the mightiest hand

Thursday music corner: Sparks are Californian brothers Ron (b.1945) and Russell (b.1948) Mael, who have been making experimental art-pop music together since the late 1960s, and are gaining new fans in 2021 thanks to the loving and comprehensive portrait of them in director Edgar Wright’s recently-released music biopic The Sparks Brothers. 

Following their breakthrough 1974 single This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us, which reached no.2 in the UK pop charts thanks to an electrifying appearance on Top of The Pops, Sparks went through a variety of supporting band-members and musical styles. By 1979, they were struggling for relevance until they became intrigued with the newly-emerging opportunities of electronic music spawned from the disco scene. Enlisting the maestro producer of the disco oeuvre, the Italian legend Giorgio Moroder, they created The Number One Song in Heaven to act as the title track of an album of innovative, boundary-pushing electronic music that helped usher in the new wave/synth explosion. 

Most recently, Sparks collaborated with French film director Leos Carax to write the music for his film Annette, an intensely operatic musical melodrama featuring Marion Cotillard and Adam Driver. The soundtrack to Annette is Sparks’ 27th album release, if you include FFS, their 2015 ‘supergroup’ collaboration with Scots band Franz Ferdinand.

Sparks – The Number One Song in Heaven (1979, single version)

See also:

Music: Lo-o-o-o-ng songs, 11 June 2008