Tommy Sparks 'Tommy Sparks' album

We need a saviour of rhythm, someone who possesses a guiding light, someone whose beats conceal some promise amidst all the crazy mixed-up jargon busying our weary minds. If there’s one man on the cards with the credentials to do just that it’s Mr Tommy Sparks. With rave in his heart, a guitar in his hand and a mission on his mind, he’s creating blasts of life-affirming melody and empowering elegies. Fitting just as snugly into a ram-jammed superclub as it would at the gnarliest of rock festivals. Tommy’s tunes are here to remind people of the universal power of music to make you move.

Tommy can map his life in musical phases. The Gothenburg-born, Stockholm-raised tear-away attributes his pre-teens to the discovery of hip hop after his sister lent him a mixtape of Kool Moe Dee and Jungle Brothers. It was his first musical love and one that’s underpinned his creativity his whole life.

“I wanted to be involved in the culture, but being a pale teenager from Sweden isn’t the greatest starting point for rapping”, he admits. His father was an acclaimed thespian whose eccentric and erratic routine gave him a taste for the nomadic lifestyle. “My father was an actor so I grew up around the theatre, when I saw Stop Making Sense it blew my mind. Seeing music and theatre come together like that.” he recalls. “When he was out of work for about four months of the year which we spent travelling in a VW Camper Van he bought off a group of nuns in Germany. It was great seeing so much as a child but it left me restless with an urge to be on the move, constantly.’ His teens were indebted to grunge. Like many kids do, he discovered the likes of The Pixies and Sonic Youth aged-13, the same year he quit school, and duly picked up a bass spending the next few years trying his hardest to emulate Lee Ranaldo. Then things were hit by a rather large curve ball. With The Prodigy’s escalating global dominance acting as somewhat of a bridge between rock and rave, he discovered dance music. “It wiped the slate clean for me. I didn’t realise anything out there could unify people like that, with such little pretence and instant effect.” Eventually, becoming increasingly disillusioned with the squeaky-clean Swedish lifestyle he followed his elder sister to London armed with nothing but a Clash CD and a Jack Kerouac novel. “London was the perfect mess I needed,” he recalls. “Plus I like egg and chips.” He formed Vatican DC, the anti-disco-beat power-indie troupe who went on to support his heroes, The Prodigy, but after releasing a critically lauded debut album “a communication breakdown” signalled a premature demise. Talk about good timing, as the band split an offer came in to fill in on a tour for Bloc Party in the paternity absence of bassist, Gordy and an invite into the studio from hero-turned-friend Liam Howlett followed, which resulted in Tommy being on the forthcoming Prodigy album ‘Invaders Must Die’. By the end of the Bloc Party tour the Myspace he’d set up to house the solo bedroom tinkerings he’d been committing to his laptop away from the prying eyes of his band, got a message from Island Records.

Not looking back, Tommy’s surged forth from the ashes of Vatican with a manifesto of mechanised mayhem. Playing every note himself, he’s compressed every guitar clang, bass hum, key parp and tub-thump down to a tightly woven swathe of infectious beat-booming. In self-imposed solitary confinement he laid the groundwork for the album holed up in an out-house to his mother’s home on the archipelago islands outside Stockholm. “I constructed the tracks without distractions in a hip hop mind-state. It was all about the bare hooks.” With the help of Arctic Monkeys’ and Foals’ studio-don Mike Crossey he awoke the inner-beast of his loops, the results are most certainly a force to be reckoned with. Lead album cut ‘I’m A Rope’ is a juggernaut of rolling rhythm section, with mantra-like schizophrenic lyrics. While ‘Much Too Much’ is a veritable fiesta-time procession of quaking keys, cowbells and a swooping chorus that reminds you that whatever shite maybe going on outside your window, that at least you’re alive, and more importantly, dancing. Forthcoming single ‘She’s Got Me Dancing’ is a brazen manifesto of Chic dance floor assult. “I wanted to make something direct and uplifting without being cheesy,” he divulges. “I wanted to make something that could connect with people in the way a DJ does with a club.” It’s a mentality that’s carried forward into his live setup, where despite his to-the-point three-minute gems, he’s built a show that moulds the tracks together with set-building interludes and links. He tellingly cites the ultimate realisation of his mission to Talking Heads’ ‘Once In A Lifetime’, for achieving total danceability whilst posing moving questions. “Lee Scratch Perry once said, ‘rhythm is in the heart and melody is in the brain’, and that’s always something that’s stayed with me,” he sighs. It’s a sentiment that thanks to Tommy’s emergence will be staying with us too.

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Tommy Sparks - Tommy Sparks