Noël in 1979; Micky Dolenz in the late ’70s. (photos: YouTube, Getty Images)

The internet has many downsides, but if there was ever an example of its power being harnessed for good, it’s the recent unarchiving of “Dancing Is Dangerous” — a never-seen green-screen video by little-known Sparks protégé Noël, directed in 1979 by none other than the Monkees’ Micky Dolenz. It could, in fact, be argued that this is why the World Wide Web exists.

“It’s pretty weird, huh? A pretty weird video, if I’m being honest,” chuckles Dolenz, who up until very recently had forgotten he’d even shot the dystopian disco clip nearly half a century ago.

Scrappy dance-floor darling Noël’s Is There More To Life Than Dancing? — written and produced by Sparks’ Ron and Russell Mael, not long after they’d worked on their own disco record No. 1 in Heaven with Giorgio Moroder — recently received a 45th-anniversary reissue treatment on the Maels’ Lil Beethoven label, which sent the brothers on a quest to find the long-lost clip. According to a recent interview with the elusive and reclusive Noël for Synth History, the video for her debut single was shelved because Richard Branson — the head of Noël’s label at the time, Virgin Records — didn’t think it had enough “disco-dancing pizazz.” (Contradicting himself, Branson also allegedly believed that “disco was passé” and had already moved on to punk rock.)

But when watching Dolenz’s direction for “Dancing Is Dangerous” now, it’s obvious that the video was — like so many things Monkees-related — simply too weird and ahead of its time. Had it been released just two years later, when MTV debuted, it might have found an audience alongside other early, creative but low-budget videos by the Buggles, Devo, Missing Persons, and Oingo Boingo.

“In ‘79, not everybody was doing music videos yet. It was still kind of a new thing. And record companies were, frankly, a bit hesitant,” says Dolenz, who after the Monkees split in the early ‘70s became a television director in the U.K. and was looking to expand his career to commercials and videos. “There wasn’t really the distribution, the outlet, the platforms. There wasn’t really much going on at all with video, but some people were doing it.” And Dolenz, who points out that the Monkees’ “romps” in their eponymous ‘60s sitcom were really some the first music videos ever made, was eager to give it a go.

“I did like the song; it was kind of cool,” Dolenz, an early adopter of the Moog synthesizer, recalls of the new-wavey Noël tape he received from Virgin. “I came up with a visualization, and I guess they liked my idea, because they went with me.” While he admits that he doesn’t “remember a whole lot about the shoot” (please note, Dolenz’s recent autobiographical photo book is titled I’m Told I Had A Good Time), Noël’s memories of Dolenz’s high-camp high concept, as relayed to Synth History, are a lot sharper, involving an “entire storyboard,” a coffin, and an overactive fog machine.

Unfortunately, as Noël recalls, she had the flu and a 103 fever the day of the shoot in Los Angeles and she begged to reschedule, but because Dolenz was catching a flight out of town that evening, that wasn’t possible. She says she attempted to follow the “so excited” Dolenz’s direction, which entailed emerging from a casket “looking all mysterious and witchy,” but when the set’s copious dry-ice fog had the ailing, feverish singer wheezing and gasping for air by the third take, Dolenz disappointedly told her, “’Well, fine, then, we’ll just shoot some close-ups of your eyes and lips and a few standing and kneeling shots and call it a day.’ … He was very sweet and understanding, but I sensed how disappointed he was not to be able to film his vision for the video.”

Dolenz’s recollections of his vision for “Dancing Is Dangerous” are more technical, as he was eager to test out some camera techniques he’d learned from famous television directors Art Fisher and Jack Good on the set of the Monkees’ absolutely bonkers NBC special 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee. (“That’s a weird one too,” Dolenz laughs, promising to talk more about that also-ahead-of-its-time spectacle later.)

“In those days, very few people were doing chroma key, which is what called it back then. Now it’s called green screen, but back then actually it was blue, not green! Not many people were even attempting it, but I had seen it in action,” explains Dolenz. Fisher was actually the first TV director to use chroma key technology, and British director “Jack Good was very experimental, like I tended to be — maybe sometimes a little too experimental, I don’t mind telling you! But you win some, you lose some. The English were a bit ahead of us terms of experimental and edgy stuff, because they didn’t have the same kind of economic restraints that we [American directors] do. But anyway, I knew this was possible because [Fisher and Good] had done it, and my people, my crew, they got it. They knew what it was. But in 1979, it was still experimental to some degree. We were all kind of taking a shot here, because a lot of the people in the crew had never done it before.”

Dolenz says he and his “Dancing Is Dangerous” cinematographer also started “fooling around with a video technique that at the time was called frame-dragging, or lagging. It had to do with the way that you tuned the video cameras, the way that you tuned them for the intensity of the light coming in. This was on video, not film, and video was still pretty new in ‘79 to some degree, so it was all a bit of a crapshoot. We shot the video and the lag, and a lot of people looked at it and said, ‘Uh oh, the camera fucked up!’ And I said, ‘No, no, that was the point! That’s what it’s supposed to look like!” (Four years later, Dolenz would utilize this technique in a sci-fi series for Britain’s ITV called Luna, which starred a then-largely unknown teen actress named Patsy Kensit.)

Meanwhile, the flu-stricken Noël — a former fashion model whose punky persona first captured the Maels’ attention when they witnessed her perform with the Mick Smiley Band at the Troubadour — soldiered through the shoot and made it work, looking like a proto-Lady Gaga with her clown makeup, peroxided hairography, and rotation of fabulously slinky disco outfits. The result was a fever dream, literally and figuratively. While Noël styled herself, she tells Synth History that Dolenz “suggest[ed] which way he wanted me to look with my eyes, how to purse my lips or walk, kneel, and throw my hair back, since he had to scrap his concept for the video.” (Ironically, according to Noël, Dolenz ended up missing his flight that night anyway.)

The whole project seemed doomed from the start, but after interest in the mysterious Noël (whose true identity has never been revealed) grew after the release of Edgar Wright’s The Sparks Brothers documentary, the Maels reached out to her in October 2023. They retrieved the original Umatic master she still had in her possession, and had the “Dancing Is Dangerous” video digitized with the help of Whammy Analog in Silver Lake and the UCLA Film & TV Archive. And the rest was Synth History.

But, as mentioned earlier, the Monkees were always at the audiovisual forefront, and historically, “Dancing Is Dangerous” can be traced back to their above-mentioned television special, 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee. This was another seemingly doomed project — it aired opposite the 1969 Oscars ceremony, because Dolenz recalls NBC “didn’t have much confidence in it,” and the network’s plans to follow up with two additional Monkees specials were eventually cancelled. But decades later, 33 1/3 has found its own cult audience via the internet.

“NBC came to us and said, ‘We want to do a special,’ and we were all for it because at the end of the second [The Monkees] season, frankly, everybody was getting a bit bored. It was all just very samey. I think the general consensus was we didn’t want to do another season of just exactly the same thing. We wanted to do something different from just a long episode of The Monkees.” The band commenced work on 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee just three days after the premiere of their equally bizarre cult film Head, and the two tandem productions effectively if temporarily detonated the careers of the reluctant TV teen idols (while simultaneously ushering in the New Hollywood era). “I personally liked the idea of deconstruction. … It was, absolutely, the deconstruction of the Monkees,” Dolenz explains.

33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee was also an early experiment in using video, not film. “It was all videotaped, which was kind of — well, not kind of — it was totally new at the time,” says Dolenz. “The idea originally was to do it at NBC, which was set up for live television and all the big variety shows. But a week before we were supposed to tape at NBC in Burbank, all the TV musicians went on strike. I remember there being talk about just scrapping it, but then the producers and NBC and whoever said, ‘Let’s do it remote — a remote video broadcast!’ Now, that alone had hardly ever been done, except maybe on the 6 o’clock news. A staged thing with music and blue screen and all the bells and whistles and live performances had certainly never done on videotape.”

Relocating the taping at the last minute to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where productions were typically done on the fly through remote video trucks (“massive 13-wheelers,” as Dolenz recalls), 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee took advantage of the unexpected situation by using various video techniques and effects that were mostly new and unproven at the time. The result was a psychedelic TV trip through something called the Electro-Thought Machine, with a Wizard (played by Brian Auger) and his gorilla sidekick plotting to take over the planet by brainwashing the Monkees. Or… something like that.

“I don’t even remember the original script or anything, except that I know we were all scrambling to get this thing done and having to make up shots and having to make up the dialogue and having to constantly try to salvage what I think could have been a really spectacular, groundbreaking special,” says Dolenz. “It still turned out pretty interesting, but you have to watch it and understand it in the context of the time, and that it was experimental videotape, certainly cutting-edge. And, we got through it.”

33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee was quite a romp, so to speak. Among the surreal highlights were a classic ‘50s medley starring Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, and Little Richard seated at stacked-to-the-rafters grand pianos, and an epic finale featuring Dolenz and his bandmates Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, and Peter Tork, along with Buddy Miles, engaging in an almost Sonic Youth-like noise-rock jam in a cluttered Hollywood prop-house. And all this “deconstruction” climaxed with footage of an A-bomb blast of Southern California.

That warehouse jam was the Monkees’ final performance as a quartet (Tork quit the band immediately after the 33 1/3  taping)… until 1986, of course, when a Monkees marathon took over MTV and sparked a spectacularly successful reunion. And so, the world had finally, fully caught up with the Monkees. Dolenz even recalls that MTV darling Cyndi Lauper “came up to me once out of the blue at some event and said, ‘I’ve just got to tell you, I was a big Monkees fan, because you guys made it OK to be different.’”

Now Dolenz is the only surviving Monkee, sadly, but he shows no signs of slowing down, embarking on his Songs and Stories concert tour this summer. Is it possible that the Noël might join him onstage at one of the gigs for some sort of surprise noise-rock/disco jam? That’s highly unlikely… but if that does happen, someone had better videotape it.

Sparks (photo courtesy of BMG)

additional reporting by Lori Majewski

When music aficionados think of legendary Los Angeles bands, the Beach Boys, the Doors, Love, or maybe even Guns N’ Roses come to mind. One act that usually goes unmentioned is Sparks — despite that fact that the group’s Mael brothers, Russell and Ron, grew up in the seaside L.A. suburb of Pacific Palisades; got their start on the Sunset Strip in the early ‘70s; scored their biggest commercial hit, “Cool Places,” with Hollywood pop-rock princess Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s; and even recorded an ode to the ultimate SoCal attraction, Disneyland. But Sparks, with their absurdist lyrics, theatrical stage style, and dabblings in everything from art-pop to synth-pop to chamber-pop, always seemed just too weird to hail from the land of fun and sun.

As the brothers chat about their 25th studio album (and first album under their own name in eight years), Hippopotamus, we confess that for years we thought Sparks hailed from eccentric England, or from Germany, or Sextown USA. Or maybe even from outer space. “We’ve had French, too,” chuckles younger brother and Sparks singer Russell (an interesting observation, considering that one new Hippopotamus track is a tribute to Edith Piaf, and that the Maels are collaborating with French filmmaker Leos Carax on the upcoming movie musical Annette). With whimsical new songs titles like “So Tell Me Mrs. Lincoln Aside from That How Was the Play?,” “Life With the Macbeths,” “What the Hell Is It This Time?,” and “I Wish You Were Fun,” it’s clear that Sparks are still weird after all these years — and are definitely still fun.

Self-declared Anglophiles, Ron and Russell take being mistaken for Brits as a major compliment. “When we first started out, we were trying to pretend like we were a British band, and so then we finally moved to England after a couple of albums, just because there was no acceptance for us in our hometown, and there was this massive acceptance just for the first album we released there,” Ron says. (Sparks’s first big breakthrough came in 1974, when their madcap single “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us” went to No. 2 on the U.K. charts.) “And then when we came back to play in Los Angeles, they would list us on the marquees as ‘From England’! You know, we didn’t ever want to correct anybody about that, because we were living our dreams and pretending that we were a British band.”

Sparks didn’t exactly receive a heroes’ welcome whenever they returned to Los Angeles, where hairy, jammy artists like Little Feat and Johnny Winter ruled at rock clubs like the Whisky A Go Go. Sparks amassed a devoted cult following, but Ron recalls, “There would be this kind of audience divided right down the middle, half throwing things at us and then half not. … We feel that musically we were on that same level [as those other bands], but we always felt that the flash angle and what you’re doing onstage matters as much as what you’re doing musically — that it doesn’t detract from your musical credibility to be doing something interesting and even theatrical onstage. Those early times were difficult. And that was why we moved to England.”

Sparks rode the glam wave in early-‘70s England, even though, as “two guys from Los Angeles,” they “never really felt that we were 100 percent part of that scene, either,” admits Russell. However, their Anglophilia really worked to their benefit in the new wave ‘80s, shortly after they reinvented themselves as a synth duo with the help of legendary producer Giorgio Moroder. MTV, radio, and roller-rink DJ booths at the time were dominated by U.K. import acts — and nervy Angst in My Pants cuts like “I Predict” and “Eaten by the Monster of Love” (the latter appearing in the cult teen flick Valley Girl) fit right in.

“That’s the other odd thing — that everyone that is aware of Sparks has their period when they jumped into being aware of the band,” says Russell. While the original MTV generation discovered Sparks around 1982, other fans have their own favorite Sparks eras. “Like, in Germany, we’ve had hits that people don’t know about in other countries, like a song called ‘When Do I Get to Sing “My Way”’ was really popular — but specifically there. And then we’ve had things in France that have worked just in France: ‘When I’m With You’ was a really huge hit there. So people jump aboard finding out about Sparks in different times. And it’s always really curious to us. … We always manage to get a new, younger audience coming aboard later on, and they’re just as excited and passionate about Sparks as people getting on board 30 years ago. It’s a really odd thing for us.”

However, when asked to name their own favorite Sparks era, the Maels would rather focus on Hippopotamus than glorify their past. “I mean, there’s different times that have been just special for us,” Russell begins. “The period with Giorgio Moroder with the No. 1 in Heaven album was really special because it was sort of the three of us, Giorgio and Ron and I, not knowing what was going to be the end result of it. And I think that kind of naiveté when you go into something and not knowing what you’re going come up with was really special. And it was one of those albums that kind of set this blueprint for working a duo, and working with electronics, and working with more danceable stuff. But we’ve had other periods throughout our career, also, that are just of special for what they represented at that particular time. So there’s not one period that we kind of look back on and say, ‘Ah! If we only [could do] that again.’ To be honest, we’re really just excited about the new album, Hippopotamus, and going at it with a naïve approach just like we did way back when.”

“We try to be as dispassionate as we can as far as judging what we’ve done, just to make sure that we’re not going through the motions,” adds Ron. “I mean, if we had felt that it was something that was just putting something out in order to be able to tour or that sort of thing, you know, we wouldn’t do it. And we were excited when we started writing the songs for this album because we realized that, at least for us, they felt very, very inspired. … We try to keep things very colorful, but also at the same time not write down to a young audience.” “We have to make it something that is the encapsulation of everything that we do, and is hopefully as good as something we’ve done in the past,” explains Russell, “so that someone that’s coming completely fresh to Sparks, and they hear Hippopotamus, will go, ‘Wow, who’s this new band called Sparks?’ And, ‘I really like this!’”

Sparks say their 2015 supergroup with Franz Ferdinand, FFS, “reinvigorated us to work once again doing three- and four-minute pop songs” on Hippopotamus, and over the years they’ve collaborated with everyone from Moroder, Wiedlin, and Jimmy Somerville to Faith No More. One artist they have yet to work with is the patron saint of Anglophiles, Morrissey — although that could happen one day. The iconic ex-Smiths singer has publicly declared Sparks’s 1974 masterpiece Kimono My House as one of his all-time favorite albums (it was Moz who first talked Sparks into playing that album in its entirety at the Meltdown Festival he curated 12 years ago); Sparks released the track “Lighten Up Morrissey” in 2008; and the legends came in contact again a couple months ago, albeit in a very bizarre manner.

“We have a studio in my place, and I was working, and I went outside for a brief second, and leaning against my door is an album,” Russell recalls with a chuckle. “A Morrissey LP, inscribed by Morrissey, saying, ‘Russell, you must re-record this one demo that we had done. You absolutely must do it.’ It still had the Amoeba Records pricetag on the album as well. But he chose not to stick around and give me the record; he just set it gently against the front door.” Russell wasn’t creeped out by what some might have perceived as a stalker move. “No, I took it as a nice thing. If Morrissey is [reading] this, it’s meant in the best way. But he should have said hello, but he didn’t.” Audio of this conversation is available on demand via SiriusXM. Lori Majewski is the co-host of Sirius’s “Feedback” morning show on the Volume channel. This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

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