On March 17th, 1979 you could buy ‘Squeezing Out Sparks’, it is arguably both Graham Parker’s best album and one of the high points of the late seventies. Parker’s previous releases were not so well received commercially so Parker took his band the Rumour and his new work to a new label and producer, this was now a time of make or break. Recently Elvis Costello had just made commercial inroads with some of the same concepts he’d been exploring back on “Heat Treatment” and “Howlin’ Wind“, yet according to the revealing liner notes The Rumour was failing to catch fire on the new material until producer Jack Nitzsche told them to get serious and play the songs for what they were.
The result was an album of such brute force that Parker has yet to better it, and it became his breakthrough in the year of Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces and Joe Jackson’s Look Sharp! Fed by genuine anger and the energy of the ascending New Wave, the songs on ‘Squeezing Out Sparks’ burn everything from Hiroshima, “Discovering Japan” to the drug-infested bar scene and the wanna-be hipsters crawling through it, “Saturday Night Is Dead” to abortion in all its contradictory facets (“You Can’t Be Too Strong”) rumoured to be about a relationship with a Sydney radio DJette.
The Fat Angel Sings 