‘Kimono My House’: The Story Behind Sparks’ Daring Breakthrough Album
Swapping L.A. for London, Ron and Russell Mael hit the big time with a genre-defying sound of their own.
Listening to it today, it’s still hard to believe that Sparks scored a U.K Top 5 hit in 1974 with a record as boldly eclectic as their third album, Kimono My House. Co-founded by brothers Ron and Russell Mael, the Californian band’s first two albums, Halfnelson and A Woofer In Tweeter’s Clothing achieved only moderate success in the U.S., but a successful U.K. tour to support the latter significantly built up Sparks’ British fan base and resulted in a deal with Island Records.
Consequently, the Mael brothers moved their base from Los Angeles to London, where they recruited a new lineup – bassist Martin Gordon, guitarist Adrian Fisher, and drummer Norman ‘Dinky’ Diamond – to play on Sparks’ next recordings. They opened their Island account in style by releasing Kimono My House’s trailer single, “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us”: a magnificently tense, cinematic vignette which U.K. broadsheet The Guardian explained was “a three-minute warning that Sparks was a band different from any other – with octave leaping vocals, gunshots, incomprehensible lyrics, and an unrelenting sense of drama.”
Listen to the Sparks album Kimono My House now.
As the exhilarating “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us” climbed to No. 2 and its follow-up “Amateur Hour” also went Top 10, Sparks appeared on numerous U.K. music shows including Top Of The Pops. However, while Russell’s hyperactive stage presence and acrobatic falsetto and keyboardist Ron’s unsmiling demeanor and Charlie Chaplin mustache cemented their band’s singular visual identity, it was only when the wider public heard Kimono My House in its entirety that they realized just how ambitious – and fearless – Sparks really were.
The album’s aforementioned hits and the wry “In My Family” siphoned off some of the day’s glam-rock energy, but there was also Bertold Brecht-esque cabaret (“Falling In Love With Myself Again”) and bubblegum pop (“Complaints”), as well as the left-field progressive rock of “Equator.” Indeed, while fans marvelled at Ron Mael’s ability to write genius pop songs about subjects as unlikely as Albert Einstein (“Talent Is An Asset”) and suicide pacts gone wrong (“Here In Heaven”), critics also reached for the superlatives, with respected critic Robert Hilburn declaring Kimono My House to be “the most invigorating, appealing album that I’ve heard in longer than I can recall at the moment.” The album was even dubbed “an instant classic” by British rock weekly NME.
Its reach amplified by such positive notices, Kimono My House jumped up to No. 4 in the UK in the summer of 1974 and won a well-earned gold disc for its creators. Its success gave Sparks carte blanche to make further landmark titles including Propaganda and Indiscreet and Ron and Russell Mael still regard it as a benchmark release today.
“Kimono My House is a record we definitely have fondness for, musically and lyrically,” Russell said in a recent interview on Sparks’ official website. “It gave us the opportunity to come to Britain and it was so well received. It was a real special album, both commercially and critically, so it means a lot to us. We never like to get too nostalgic…but let’s just say that, without recreating it, every time we make an album it has to be the Kimono My House of now.”
