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Snippets from the conversation with Rob Brydon at The Union Chapel, London, UK, May 25th 2025 (x)

SNL . May 15th 1982

Franz Ferdinand & Sparks = FFS (x)

“It was a long time ago, in 1981. My brother Pierre and I, living not far from the Forest National concert hall in Brussels, often went to see bands during their afternoon rehearsals. That day, the Mael brothers — Ronald and Russell — of The Sparks were rehearsing a few songs for their evening concert. We had no credentials, just a couple of 16 and 17-year-old 'tourists' passing by with a camera. No one asked what we were doing there. It was another era.”

Images taken by Frederick Mouleart

can't stop thinking about this comment

more gifs i took from the sparks brothers :D

these have probably been giffed before but i felt like looking through tumblr posts would be less fun than sifting through 2 hours of footage + manually cutting and cropping these myself

I used to work at a famous arthouse theater in West LA from about 2002 until ‘08-’09, when I moved up at another theater in the chain. Even then I was often called in to pinch-hit when the famous place was expecting a film to be busy or if they needed someone between new hires. (I left the company in 2015.)

One of the downsides to working there was that parking was pretty terrible. The theater itself was built in the 1920s, and the street to the east of it was almost all apartments. Most of those were built from the ‘40s up until the ‘60s, so they were largely street parking only. Not to mention the fact that the street on the west side of the theater was getting busier-- hipster boutiques and Pan-Asian eateries had started popping up a few blocks down the road from us. (IYKYK.)

So the employees of the theater, the video store, and the less-hip restaurants next to the main drag all had to compete with customers of said businesses —as well as those of the used bookstore— for the handful of double-stacked spaces in the back alley. The best space was the fairly generous single spot by the dumpster. You weren’t gonna get towed because you blocked someone in, or get blocked in yourself, or risk your car’s bumper by parking in the other, shorter single space by the freeway on-ramp; you could simply just park your car and forget about it until your shift was over- no need to play musical chairs. And if your shift ended after midnight and you had the day’s cash earnings stuffed in your jacket to deposit at the bank, the closeness of the spot was optimal.

That is all to say that the dumpster spot was hot property.

Cue the Black Volkswagen Thing.

(I marked The Thing even then because a member of the theater’s Rocky Horror cast also owned a Volkswagen Thing, though his was white. I thought it funny that two of the same rare car* should converge in this one place, often on the same day.)

The Thing did not belong to the theater staff. It did not belong to the video store staff. (I asked.) It did not belong to the staff of the used bookstore, who had three dedicated spots and never had enough customers to need more than two employees at a time**. (It might have belonged to one of the restaurants, but we hadn’t the Spanish nor Arabic skills to ask.) Nevertheless, The Thing was parked in the dumpster spot at some point during almost every weekend, and it would be there at the worst possible time.

It seemed that I could rarely beat The Thing to the coveted space no matter how early I got there. Maybe if I showed up before 4. But very often between 4:30 and 5:55, The Thing was there. Sometimes I stuck my head out the back door during a shift to see if the space was free. If it wasn’t, it was because a car had parked there after The Thing had left. And sometimes The Thing had the audacity to take up the other single spot to the same result. It seemed The Thing existed entirely to spot-block me.

Then one day, while I was attempting to park, I saw a man coming from the bookstore towards the lot. It was Boss Accountant.

Boss Accountant was a lithe man with a stern face and plastered hair that was too black for his age; he usually dressed in a crisp white shirt and tie with proper trousers, and seemed like he was on his lunch break from an accounting firm despite it being the weekend. He looked like the boss battle in a video game where you had to fight your way through an office building; the final accountant you had to beat to level up. I had seen him at the bookstore more than once.

I put my car into park —hazard lights on— waiting to see which spot would be freed up.

Boss Accountant was approaching The Thing.

A customer! It was a customer that had been spot-blocking me! Not even one of my fellow workers there for a six-hour haul, but someone there for a capricious ninety minutes at best. And a customer of the stuffy bookstore to boot. Clearly not deserving of the coveted spot.

I glared at him beneath my sunglasses while he took his sweet time getting there. I tried not to begrudge the old man, BUT…!

My fingers drummed irritably against the steering wheel. This fucker. I inched slightly closer as he got in the car. The spot was MINE gatdammit and no one else was gonna come along and take it.

Finally, after an irritably long time (and probably him figuring out that I wasn’t a crazed fan trying to box him in but someone gunning for the coveted parking space) the backup lights came on. I reversed. He pulled out and drove away. I pulled in, triumphant. Spot-blocked no more! At least, not on that day. In my own mind, I had tangled with The Thing and won. (I was like 23 and undiagnosed, bruh- go easy on me here.)

Then one day the dumpster spot got painted off as disabled parking, and the dumpsters were moved to the other single spot, leaving us all to fend for ourselves in the double-stack and on the street.

I’m unsure what year this all took place, and I didn’t know (at the time) what had become of Boss Accountant and The Thing, since I saw less of them after that. (Thinking back, it was probably promo and touring for Hello Young Lovers that took him/it away.) My moving to the other theater made the point moot anyway. It’s definitely moot now as the bookstore was razed for a new-build apartment sometime in 2016. The new building does not have its own parking garage.

However, enough time had passed that I didn’t recognize Boss Accountant when he bought a ticket for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg during a slow weekend matinee in 2014. Pleasant demeanor. Polite smile. Crisp shirt, too-black plastered hair. Didn’t order concessions, didn’t dwell in the lobby but went right into the theater. The old man was surely out of earshot when my manager looked over at me. “Do you have any idea who that was?”

“No.”

“That was Ron Mael from Sparks.”

“Who?”

---

Thank goodness I watched The Sparks Brothers at home on Netflix, cuz when I saw that car I about lost my gatdamn mind.

*J, the Rocky Horror guy, told me they were rare. Looking up info now, I see that less than 30k of them were made for the North American market, and they were only sold in the US from 1973-74. A 2017 report from an informal registry of Thing owners estimates around 5k of them still exist today in the entire US. Weird, right?