Sparks
Carling Academy, Islington, London
FOUR STARS

The Ting Tings
Carling Academy, Oxford
FOUR STARS


The fashion for performing an entire album in concert has been taken to characteristically lunatic extremes by Sparks, who are playing all 20 of their old albums over 20 nights in Islington. Afterwards, they will perform the 21st, Exotic Creatures Of The Deep (Lil' Beethoven Records, THREE STARS), in the bigger surroundings of the Shepherds Bush Empire – if they’re not in hospital.

As Russell Mael says, it’s ’21 nights of ridiculousness’. When they finished the new album, instead of taking a holiday like normal pop stars, Russell and his brother Ron set about rehearsing 250 songs. Even after coming up with a shrewd season-ticket offer – all 21 shows for £350 – they risked playing their more obscure stuff to empty houses. It takes nerve to play your whole oeuvre.

There are smaller pitfalls too. Playing the songs in album order can mean starting with tracks that are either not good enough or too good. The Kimono My House show began with the barnstorming oddness of This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us (too good), while the Propaganda show got underway with the operatic folk of the title track – too weird, even for Sparks fans.

But it was soon clear that the Maels are on to a winner. The Academy was packed both nights, and the air was full of fond complicity, as if we had all gathered for the long-awaited wedding of a lovably eccentric uncle. In fact, two of them.

Uncle Ron is eerily unchanged, proving that the simplest way to be sure of ageing well is to look middle-aged in the first place. Uncle Russell's mop of curls has mysteriously given way to straightish hair, flopping over one eye, so he has gone from Marc Bolan's little brother to Bryan Ferry's. The one person he doesn't remotely resemble is Ron.

Both brothers are unwavering in their personas – one a sinister driving instructor, the other a genial gigolo. Behind them are three younger men whose long hair and drab clothes suggest the sort of Seventies plod-rock band to which Sparks once offered an alternative. But they are deft musicians who cope well as the material bounces from glammed-up music-hall to heavy yodelling.

These whole-album shows nearly always work. They produce an intense warmth, fired by nostalgia but also by a sense of renewal, like re-reading a good book. Both these titles bear re-reading, and the Maels deliver them with verve, keeping things simple and adding just one B-side as an encore. The season may be long, but each show is a breezy 50 minutes.

For Ron, sitting at his synth with the most deadpan face since Charlie Watts, it can't be hard work, but for Russell, leaping about and singing nineteen to the dozen, it is a spectacular feat of stamina. The fans, mostly as old as him and considerably balder, sing along with every word and cheer him as you might cheer a red-faced colleague in the London marathon.

The spirit of Sparks pops up again in the Ting Tings, another quirky, genre-busting duo. The differences are that they unrelated, mixed-sex, from Lancashire not Los Angeles, and have already had a bigger hit than Sparks have ever managed after going to number one this week with the knockout garage-pop of That's Not My Name.

Their debut album, We Started Nothing (Columbia, THREE STARS), is hit-and-miss. For the first three tracks, you think you've struck gold; for the other seven, you wonder how they ever got a record deal. The answer is that they didn't, exactly. They were dropped by their label first time round, and wrote That's Not My Name to vent their frustration, which explains its scintillating stroppiness.

In concert, they’re engaging enough to get away with some filler. Katie White is a proper frontwoman, sexy and effervescent, playing guitar, keyboards and percussion and shaking her blonde mane with sulky vivacity. Jules DeMartino is a classic foil, playing drums and guitar, sometimes simultaneously. In the shadows, a nameless man discreetly beefs up the sound.

The Ting Tings are derivative, of the Raveonettes and Toni Basil, but they add a sharp twist of their own. And as pop groups go, they rock.