Foggy Notions are proud to Present Sparks live at National Stadium Dublin on 15th & 16th July. Tickets go on general sale on Friday 4th April. Fan Club presale starts Wednesday 2nd April via www.allsparks.com
Sparks announce extra dates on their MAD! tour which kicks off in Japan on June 8. The European leg of their world tour will now include 2 shows at Dublin's National Stadium on July 15 and 16 before the band return to the UK for a date at Edinburgh Playhouse on July 18, ending at Wolverhampton's The Halls on July 19. North American dates will be announced soon.
Ron and Russell Mael, and their band, wowed audiences and critics alike on their 2023 tour – including sold out shows at London's Royal Albert Hall (two) and Sydney Opera House, a hometown triumph at Hollywood Bowl, and a headlines-stealing set at Glastonbury Festival.This new tour promises more musical thrills and unbridled joy from the career-spanning show.
Despite the efforts of Edgar Wright's superb 2021 documentary The Sparks Brothers, which introduced the duo to a wider audience than ever before, the exact creative dynamic between the siblings remains inscrutable, as mysterious and unknowable as their private lives.
The one thing we know for certain is that Ron Mael is one of our most acutely perceptive observers of social mores. In a different discipline – dramaturg, cartoonist, novelist, cineaste, chronicler – he'd be a Moliere, a Hogarth, a Fitzgerald, an Altman, a Swift. He just happens to work within the medium of popular song. Another thing we know for certain is that Russell Mael has the asset of a talent to put those observations across in a uniquely arresting manner, captivating as a frontman and gifted with a countertenor voice of extraordinary range. The alchemy between Ron on keys and Russell on vocals – Two Hands, One Mouth, to invoke the name of one of their tours – is simply what they do. And they've rarely done it better than on MAD!, the band's 28th studio album.
Most acts, by the time they've been making music together across seven different decades, would have slowed to a crawl, creakily playing the oldies on the heritage circuit and releasing nothing more modern than the occasional Greatest Hits collection.
Sparks aren't most acts. If anything, their rate of productivity has sped up in recent years: since the millennium the duo have released eight new studio albums (including, in 2024, the original Sparks 2013 album recording of Annette), a radio opera (The Seduction Of Ingmar Bergman), a side-project (Franz Ferdinand collaboration FFS), a live album, a film musical (2021's Annette, which won a 'Best Director award for Leos Carax and the Best Original Score for the Maels at the César Awards), and several compilations (notably 2019's career-spanning Past Tense), toured the world numerous times, as well as appearing in the aforementioned The Sparks Brothers. Their laurels remain resoundingly unrested-upon.
Classic Rock "Forever fresh"
The Wire "Sparks have truly located their own niche and dug in, as opposed to joining in"
Clash "Piquant and literate"
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