The story of Sparks and ‘Modesty Plays/Blaise’
When I first hear Sparks’ song
‘Modesty Plays’ on 1986’s album Music That You Can Dance To, I was
puzzled. I had heard of Modesty Blaise, the
strip comic secret agent and righter of wrongs, and it seemed to me that that
was what Russell was singing. But the title is different. So, what is the story
behind this song?
The background. In 1981, Sparks
were approached by producer and screenwriter Larry Wilson (screenwriter for
Beetlejuice (1988) and The Addams Family (1991) and, later, for the
proposed Mai the Psychic Girl project) to record a theme tune for
an ABC Network television pilot based on the comic strip Modesty Blaise,
by Peter O’Donnell. This strip first appeared in the London Evening Standard in
May 1963, and ran until July 2002. It was syndicated worldwide and was
published in the Los Angeles Times from 1976-80. There were also reprints of
the comic book published in the US, novels and short stories based on the
character and a film in 1966 starring Monica Vitti, Terence Stamp and Dirk
Bogarde with a theme tune by Johnny Dankworth, so it is very likely that the
Maels would already be aware of it. The T.V.
pilot starred Ann Turkel as Modesty and Lewis Van Bergen as her loyal sidekick
Willie Garvin, and the setting was transposed from London to Los Angeles.
So, what happened to the Sparks
theme tune? I’ll let Russell pick up
the story: ‘The song got the thumbs-up from the multitude of execs that need to
weigh in and sign off on any Hollywood project…. Next came the period that
everyone working in Hollywood hopes to avoid, but unfortunately seldom do:
development hell.’ In his introduction
to the Titan Books edition of Modesty Blaise. Cry Wolf (2006), Russell
tells how the show was announced in trade magazines as an impending smash hit:
‘We believed what we read – silly us. And we read, and we read, and we waited,
and we waited’. In the meantime, the
song had been distributed to ‘friends, loved ones and record companies’ and was
in demand as a new Sparks’ single. ‘Shortly thereafter, we heard from someone
upstairs at Paramount TV that empowered female characters were passé
as far as Hollywood was concerned and that the project was going to be
shelved.’ It is not unreasonable to
suspect that his version of events here has been somewhat coloured by Sparks’
later unhappy experience with Mai the Psychic Girl, which also failed to
get off the ground for a variety of reasons. Beneath the self-deprecating
humour can be sensed a lingering helpless frustration and a degree of
bitterness at the obstacles to creativity that beset a project in the world of
film. In any case, the ABC series was
indeed cancelled after the pilot.
What to do? Russell explains: ‘Afraid of raising any
legal issues over the copyrighted name ‘Modesty Blaise’, and not wanting to
disappoint the record companies who had already heard the song, we concluded
that the refrain I sang over and over throughout the song was really saying
‘Modesty Plays’, and that no, Your Honour, I absolutely was not singing
‘Modesty Blaise’. So, to this day, we
have a song called ‘Modesty Plays’, and any similarity to any female comic-book
heroines, living or dead, is strictly coincidental’.
Modesty and the song. In the stories, Modesty is of uncertain
Eastern European origin and her back story is that of a child escapee from a
displaced persons camp, who, after much solitary wandering and hardship,
eventually runs a highly successful international criminal organization called
‘The Network’. Now a wealthy young
woman, she is living in a London penthouse until tempted out of retirement by a
government minister to combat crime and serve the cause of good. Unlike Mai the Psychic Girl, she does not
have supernatural powers but, drawing on her previous experience, is
extraordinarily resourceful in her quests to locate and vanquish villains, and tough
and fearless in unarmed physical combat. She is also an elegant beauty
(as most fictional women in a positive powerful role were at that time required
to be), who is not above using her physical attributes to bedazzle and confuse
an enemy. Indeed, parts of the comic strip involving nudity were censored in
the US editions.
This duality of femininity and power
is highlighted in Sparks’ song, in which their Modesty is portrayed as
sophisticated and wealthy, with expensive tastes. She is no idle socialite
however, despite the title ‘Modesty Plays’: ‘she may like caviar and
cocktails/She may like symphonies and sun/But underneath the gown and high
heels/She’s like a fully loaded gun’.
This captures nicely the impression made on other characters in the
first Modesty Blaise novel; that she is as though coiled ready for action beneath
an enigmatic serenity and femininity. As
with some other Sparks’ female characters, appearances are deceptive, and she
is dangerous to know: ‘She may not look like Genghis Khan/ And she may talk
about her manicure/But she can sure get things done’. Her methods are all the more successful for
being unexpected: ‘She may seem cultured and demure/But there’s another side,
be careful/She’ll hit you like a 2 by 4’.
A picture is painted of a world bereft of heroes, which is ‘running out
of time’ in the battle against crime (no change there). Just as Mai the Psychic Girl has a mission to
save the world, so Modesty is the hero we need: ‘as long as Modesty is on our
side/Good will surely prevail’. The pace and energy of the music also reflects
the high-powered action in the comic strips.
It is tempting to look for traces
of Modesty in other Sparks’ songs: in ‘The Toughest Girl in Town’ (1988
Interior Design), perhaps, who also is said to have been ‘used and abused’ in
the past. Despite the experience with this pilot, Sparks went on in the
following years to invest a great deal of time and energy working on a proposed
musical movie about another empowered female character, the Japanese manga
heroine, Mai the Psychic Girl, in the effort to bring this to fruition, only to
be disappointed once again. But that is
another story. (See ‘What Was That? Four
of Sparks’ songs for Mai the Psychic Girl’ on
sparkstalkbypenny.blogspot.com).
So, there you have it: the single
was released in France as ‘Modesty Plays’ in late 1982/early 1983, at the
request of a French company, Underdog, and in Germany by Metronome. It was then rerecorded for the album Music
That You Can Dance To (1986), described in the Sparks Sound newsletter v.12:n.1
as ‘a reworking of a song that had been released in French speaking territories and restaurants a couple of years
ago’. And Russell sings…well, what he sings.
What do you hear?
