039: Sparks - Terminal Jive (1980) - Album history and discussion

We’re back on the Sparks track! After a brief detour into Noël’s side project Is There More to Life Than Dancing?, Frode, Trond, and Chris return to the Mael brothers’ main discography to explore Terminal Jive (1980) — Sparks’ first album of the new decade.

In this episode we discuss how the band followed up the groundbreaking No. 1 in Heaven with Giorgio Moroder’s team, why Harold Faltermeyer rather than Ron Mael handled the keyboards, and the curious story of “When I’m With You,” their most commercially successful single, which topped the French charts for six weeks and sold 750,000 copies. We also look at why the album quickly became Sparks’ least favorite, despite its success in France, and how their presence in European pop culture around this time even included Paul McCartney dressing up as Ron Mael in a music video. Ultimately, we explore how this transitional phase set the stage for Sparks’ dramatic rebirth in the early 1980s with a new band lineup.

In the next episodes we will go through the album track-by-track.