I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #27:

It was pure pop, but it just wasn't for now people, as Nick Lowe would phrase it. Sparks, as oddly anachronistic as main songwriter and keyboardist Ron Mael’s catatonic Charlie Chaplin facade, came along much too late for the Gilbert and Sullivan-style comic operas their work suggests, and a few years too early for the first ripples of skinny-tie new wave, which might have fully embraced the Los Angeles-based band.

So leaving behind the vicissitudes of the fickle glam fandom in America to logically take their infectious and witty Brit-beat confections to the land of the 19th-century British music hall, Ron and, incongruously, his seemingly standard-issue golden-god vocalist brother Russell, found a home and waiting arms in London. It wasn’t long before they formed a new band and success came along with their 1974 recording of the quirky Kinks-some Kimono My House, sparked with a potent, if unlikely, combination of wily wordplay and big dumb fun.

The lead-off cut, a big hit in Britain, fulfills that complexity — but with an American twist. While retaining an operatic kill-the-wabbit Euro-aura that showcases Russell’s acquirable-taste of a soaring falsetto, “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us” nonetheless lyrically presents a western horse-opera chorus replete with rifle blasts to complement the gunslinger bravado. In addition, a Walter Mitty-esque fantasy element plays throughout, further cementing — even in the most mundane of circumstances — a sense of rugged and individualistic American heroics:

Zoo time is she and you time
The mammals are your favourite type, and you want her tonight
Heartbeat, increasing heartbeat
You hear the thunder of stampeding rhinos, elephants and tacky tigers
This town ain't big enough for the both of us
And it ain't me who's gonna leave…

…Daily, except for Sunday
You dawdle in to the cafe where you meet her each day
Heartbeat, increasing heartbeat
As 20 cannibals have hold of you, they need their protein just like you do
This town ain't big enough for the both of us
And it ain't me who's gonna leave…

“It’s a lot like playing the violin / You cannot start off and be Yehudi Menuhin,” sums up an ode to adolescent lust, the whimsical and wistful “Amateur Hour.”  The song summons up the Kinks, not only in the invocation of “Waterloo Sunset”-style background harmonies, but lyrically as well. Then again, as “Amateur Hour goes on and on / When you turn pro you know she'll let you know,” consider it The Village Green Preservation Society gone relatively wild:

Lawns grow plush in the hinterlands
It's the perfect little setting for the one night stands
Now the drapes are drawn and the lights are out
It's the time to put in practice what you've dreamed about
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