The Sweet are all set to go Full Circle, the 1970s glam-rock hitmakers all set for a 13-date December UK tour.
Guitarist/vocalist cum national treasure and glam rock royalty, Andy Scott, the golden thread linking the band’s past to present – over six happening decades – acknowledges that the long tours can’t carry on indefinitely and is looking to ‘wind down’ some of his live commitments… but he insists it’s not the end for the band.
“This could be our last tour, but that doesn’t mean we’re not going to do any more gigs, just that we might not be doing 15 to 20 dates strung together. Then again, we might!”
Having scored 15 top-40 hits in the ‘70s, eight of those going top-five – including 1973’s classic UK No.1 ‘Blockbuster’ – it’s fair to say that The Sweet perfected the art of making memorable records in a highly-competitive era.
And as well as the fire and steel shown in the recording studio and the glamour and excitement they transmitted onto our TV screens, there was always plenty of live passion too, something that his current bandmates Paul Manzi (vocals), Bruce Bisland (drums, vocals), Lee Small (bass, vocals) and Tom Cory (guitar, keyboards) know only too well, as you can find out for yourself on the Full Circle tour, which opens in Wrexham, where Andy made his debut in a church hall youth club 60 years ago, at the age of 14, and ending in Frome, Somerset, close to his West Country base of the last 30-plus years.
From 1971 breakthrough ‘Co-Co’ to 1978’s ‘Love is like Oxygen’, and all points between and beyond, The Sweet’s song catalogue also includes ‘The Ballroom Blitz’, ‘Fox on the Run’, ‘Hellraiser’, ‘Little Willy’, ‘Teenage Rampage’, ‘Action’, and ‘Wig-Wam Bam’.
And their most recent single, ‘Changes’, with its chugging guitar riff and catchy chorus, suggests Andy is still enjoying making music to this day. Is he still fired up on the songwriting front? And are these songs still coming to him regularly?
“The older you get, as a record producer… Well, I’m such a bad editor. When I say bad, I mean… if I don’t think an idea is anywhere near where it should be, it gets ditched straight away. So you have these moments where you spring up in the middle of the night and you write down some lyrics or you patter down to the studio area – which is on a gallery, because I live in a barn – and I pick up an acoustic guitar and hopefully record it on the phone before it goes completely.”
I’ll bet you’ve lost a few songs in the past, though, haven’t you?
“Yes! Of course, in your dreams, the song’s magnificent. ‘Fox on the Run’ was one of those. It was my friend Kevin who found the original demo. He goes through my cassettes and stuff, where I’m almost whispering and just chunking the acoustic guitar. I wrote that one when living in a house near Heathrow Airport. I woke up in the middle of the night and didn’t want to wake my fairly new-born son and first wife, so I’m going {Andy whispers}, ‘I – I – I don’t want to know your name…’”
Iconic. And talking of ‘70s legends, I see your good pal Suzi Quatro’s doing the rounds again too, putting on a few dates in mid-November. Meanwhile, fellow QSP bandmate and Slade drumming legend Don Powell is keeping busy with a number of projects, while his former bandmate Dave Hill’s doing his own thing with his version of Slade, Jim Lea has been exceptionally busy in the studio this year, and Noddy Holder’s guested on a few live dates. And all of them despite – like Andy – a few major health issues in recent years. What is it about you lot that keeps you out there, performing, all these years on?
“Well, I did speak to Don, and said, ‘Do you ever envisage yourself going back on the road?’ Especially after the fallout between him and Dave. And he basically said, ‘No, but I don’t mind doing the odd gig.’ When he comes back, he’s got a pile of mates and they’re going to do a gig somewhere. And he’s got a band he can step up with in Denmark. But he said, ‘I don’t want to start having the Don Powell Band doing what you do.’ And I can see that. He doesn’t need to do it, but when he’s doing it, he enjoys it.”
Well, you do it big time when you’re out there.
“Yeah. But like me, his recovery rate… it’s going to take some time, you know.”
My conversations with Andy always tend to include some discussion or other about his old chart rivals and good friends, Slade. We talked in our previous interview – five years ago, in December 2018 (linked here) about how he was also ‘schooled’ in the ‘60s on that pub and club circuit at home and overseas. And as he pointed out when he was good enough to write me a foreword for Wild! Wild! Wild! A People’s History of Slade – following Suzi Quatro’s lead – his early days included a mid-‘60s spell in The Elastic Band, who just happened to be playing a Grand Bahama club residency at the same time as The ‘N Betweens, the band that morphed into Slade, who were playing another nightspot on the island.
What’s more, by late ‘71 they’d both tasted UK chart success – Andy by then with The Sweet. Far greater success was to follow, but there was already a sense of accomplishment.
“Absolutely. And I was a bit of a fan of Slade. When I got back from the Bahamas and The Elastic Band imploded, I remember going to see them somewhere. I think that was when they were doing some of the skinhead stuff. I remember being in the dressing room, chuckling a little bit, and Noddy looked at me and kind of went, ‘Just leave it, alright!’”
As he knows full well, a couple of them looked the part, but for the others it just didn’t work, look-wise. They didn’t look so hard, really. The music could be though, and it made people sit up and take notice, which was Chas Chandler’s intention. So that certainly worked. It was an inspired idea, and it made them stand out from the crowd. And I’m guessing that Andy probably learned from that experience as well.
“Well, I remember dragging Mick {Tucker} when I first joined The Sweet, down to the Boathouse at Kew. We walked in, went into the dressing room, and you could see they were getting ready to go on. I said, ‘Nice to see you,’ they went on, and we stood at the back somewhere. And it was like being in a war zone, the sound. They had that huge WEM PA system, which was like, I suppose, a good quality transistor radio turned up very loud. There wasn’t a hell of a lot of frequency differences. But the band themselves… I remember Mick and I both going, ‘Well, you know, that is full on energy!’”
Records suggest that Kew Bridge show was on December 29th in 1971, when ‘Slade’s ‘Coz I Luv You’ had just spent its 10th week in the UK top-40 (after four weeks at the top),with The Sweet’s ‘Alexander Graham Bell’ having just finished its UK top-40 run, their third charting single that, their transition from bubblegum pop to a harder glam sound still some way ahead of them.
And talking of 1971, does he recognise himself now on Top of the Pops footage for the band’s first No.2 hit, ‘Co-Co’, kept off the summit for two weeks that July by Middle of the Road’s dreadful ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’? Is he back in the moment remembering that appearance?
“With ‘Co-Co and ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ that summer, in Europe one or other was No.1 in the charts everywhere, for about two or three months. You couldn’t go anywhere. I remember doing a TV show in Spain, and the hotel where we were staying were playing both. You just couldn’t get away from it!
“But to answer your question, I don’t think any of us would remember the first appearance on Top of the Pops. We were probably like rabbits in headlights, and a little bit stiff-legged. How can I put it… when the camera comes round, catches you, you put a little cheesy smile on. But Brian (Connolly, lead singer} was magnificent in those days.”
He was a great frontman. Did that kind of take the pressure off you a bit, In a sense?
“Well, I think you’re all just happy to be on Top of the Pops, aren’t you. Regardless of whether you’re fully into the material. It’s a hit, so you do the best that you can. Yeah. And then you set about trying to manoeuvre things. And Mike Chapman {co-producer, co-writer} grabbed the shield and sword and was going into battle for us, saying, ‘The band needs to play on these records. It’s all very well having ‘Co-Co’, with a bunch of Latin-Americans and all that stuff. But the band has to start…’ And he started to write these songs.
“When he came to see us, he realised that we were big Who fans, as we were doing a big Who medley. So when he wrote ‘Little Willie’, the first thing Mick {Tucker, drums} and I noticed when he played it to us, it’s like the start of a Who song.”
Well, now you mention it.
“We were a pop band emulating, shall we say, a Who riff. And then ‘Wig-Wam Bam’ was probably a ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll song.”
There was a lot of those influences in that era, from the Electric Light Orchestra to Mott the Hoople, and I guess David Essex, Mud, Showaddywaddy… rock ‘n’ roll with an early ‘70s treatment.
“Yeah, and T-Rex were all a bit Chuck Berry. Cheesy, but with easy guitar, you know.”
And then came 1973 and ‘Blockbuster’, 50 years ago. Does he recall where he was when it overtook Little Jimmy Osmond at No.1?
“Well, I remember – and I’ve seen the photographic evidence – being at Top of the Pops when we were at No.1, and there were magnums of champagne in our dressing room. I’m not even sure whether we were allowed to have alcohol in the dressing room in those days.”
You had five weeks at the top with that, eight weeks in the top 10, 12 weeks in the top 40. That’s not so bad, is it. You kept contemporary competition like David Bowie, (whisper it) Gary Glitter and Elton John off the top. And then The Strawbs, before finally giving way to Slade’s ‘Cum on Feel the Noize’ in a momentous year for them.
“Yeah, and now I’m told, if we could sell all our vinyl on tour, when we have a 2,500 run, if you could make sure they were bought in advance so they could go in with some downloads and others, you would go in the charts with 2,000 to 3,000 sales. And yet that wouldn’t even have covered our daily sales back then.”
The Sweet are now seen first and foremost as a singles band, and the albums were not nearly as successful, chart-wise. But I saw somewhere that you’ve sold around 55 million albums.
“I think that’s been exaggerated. It’s 55 million units sold. We haven’t sold 55 million albums. Otherwise I would be a very rich man and living the life! And the truth of that is, I would still be doing what I’m doing. But when you total it all up, probably there were more singles sold than albums. Because every one of those singles from ‘Blockbuster’ and ‘Hellraiser’ to ‘Ballroom Blitz’, ‘Teenage Rampage’, ‘Fox on the Run’ and ‘Love Is Like Oxygen’, they all sold more than a million units. And I think ‘Co-Co’ did as well.”
You had a run of other No.2s as well, and were also kept off the top by Dawn’s awful ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon’, plus Wizzard’s amazing ‘See My Baby Jive’ and ‘Angel Fingers’. Even the Simon Park Orchestra’s ‘Eye Level’, the theme tune from Van der Valk. With a couple of those, I guess it was more a case of those rare moments when the older generation went out and bought a single. But was there a real sense of competition between yourselves, Slade, Wizzard, Glitter, and so on?
“I think we all knew when the others were going to be releasing things. There was an unwritten rule that you didn’t have a Slade, a Wizzard, David Bowie or Sweet single coming out at the same time. You tried to stagger them.”
By time you were back there with ‘Teenage Rampage’ (perhaps my favourite Sweet moment), it was ‘Tiger Feet’ keeping you off the top. Did you have a good relationship with Mud?
“Oh, yeah. I liked the lads in Mud. I’ll never forget Mick Tucker’s words to Nicky, when we ended up with the No’s 1, 2 and 3 in January ‘74. There was Mud at No.1 with ‘Tiger Feet’, then us with ‘Teenage Rampage’, and Suzi {Quatro} with ‘Devil Gate Drive’.
“We were expecting, after a couple of weeks, that we would go to No.1. But what happened? We stayed at No.2, and Suzi went to No.1 for one week. And Mick’s word to Nicky Chinn was, ‘Judas!’ In other words, if anybody should have been No.1, it should have been us, because we were the ones that kickstarted you with all these other bands! But it just made me roar with laughter.”
By 1975, The Sweet had stalled again at No.2 with ‘Fox on the Run’, with the Bay City Rollers at No.1 with ‘Bye Bye Baby’ this time. Had the fickle world of pop music already moved on?
“Well, it certainly wasn’t our immediate goal to have another No.1 single. I think you’re absolutely right. And by that time, we’d also moved on from Phil Wainman as producer, and Nicky {Chinn} and Mike {Chapman}as the writers. Because the album that we were then making for RCA was the heavy metal album, in Germany. We’d moved on and we were starting to play arenas, on the same circuit as Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, and a few of the other bands in Germany.
“And not a lot of people realise that by 1975, we’d stopped playing in the UK. We didn’t play here between the end of ’74 and the beginning of ‘78.”
By which time you were into the ‘Love is Like Oxygen’ era.
“Yeah, I can’t remember the last gig in ’74, but the first gig we did in ‘78 was at the Hammersmith Odeon.”
And did you find you still had the numbers turning out then?
“Oh, if our agent had been a little bit quicker off the mark, we’d have done two or three nights at Hammersmith Odeon. It sold out so quickly. When he went in there, there wasn’t another date for at least 10 days. I said, ‘Well, let’s do another two weeks afterwards then,’ but, you know, the moment had gone.”
We mentioned album sales. Do you look at one particular album and think, ‘That’s where we properly got it together’? I’m thinking, Sweet Fanny Adams or Desolation Boulevard. Do you think either of those LPs truly told the tale of you at those particular moments in time?
“I definitely think that regarding working with Phil, without interference from Nicky and Mike, on Sweet Fanny Adams – because they were in America. The fact that there was no single on the album, it was just album tracks and we had written the majority of them… And for the next album, Desolation Boulevard, the American version is basically Sweet Fanny Adams with a couple of tracks – like ‘The Six Teens’ – from the European Desolation Boulevard. That’s a good album, but they cherry-picked the best of two albums.”
“But quite frankly, I still like, Level Headed.”
Do you think that (1978 LP) gets enough kudos?
“Well, the only song they would immediately know on that is ‘Love is Like Oxygen’. And of course, it takes up space on the vinyl. There are only four tracks on that side, because it’s nearly seven minutes long.”
Returning to the modern day, Andy remains fiercely protective of the band’s legacy, today as ever. But I note that he’s being a little careful regarding his description of this forthcoming tour. Not least with regard to saying whether this is the last Sweet tour. However, I get the impression he’s looking forward to these dates, and having a bit of a party out there.
“Yeah. As I’ve said, UK dates might be a little easier, but I don’t want to start going away for four or five weeks, like we have done, going from Switzerland to Austria to Germany to the Netherlands, or Denmark or Sweden. I don’t mind going abroad and doing a couple of shows, as long as the distances are not outrageous. As long as we’re not going from Hamburg to Munich. And we’ve got a couple of guys out in Germany who are looking after us properly.
“I’ve also cut my own cloth accordingly. If I’m going to be doing this, it’s not about the money for me. It’s got to be about having the right band, making sure that they’re happy as well. I don’t need to have a figure in my mind as to what I need to earn for everything. And I’ve got an agent who realises that. I’d rather stay in the best hotel, have a car pick me up and drive me everywhere and travel business class everywhere, rather than come home with an extra few hundred quid. It’s not about that for me.”
Of the classic line-up, there’s just Andy now, but we are after all talking about a legendary mainstay of a band that has managed a colossal 53 years of hit singles, shifted millions of albums, and amassed 34 No.1s. And it’s a group that has clearly stood the test of time. What’s more, it all starts off in Andy’s former neck of the woods, in Wrexham on December 1st, although I see he’ll be struggling to get in a home game at the Racecourse Ground this time around, with the fixtures not exactly in his favour (although his beloved football team host Morecambe in League Two on November 25th, then Yeovil Town in the FA Cup second round on December 3rd).
“I don’t get to the football as often as I should, but it will be 60 years since I did my first show, with my school band in a youth club in a church hall in Wrexham, so this will be virtually 60 years on, because it was November/December 1963, when I was 14.”
So it’s proper Full Circle, as the tour title suggests.
“Exactly!”
And will there be post-tour celebrations in the West Country at the end?
“Well, I’ve been told that I might be kidnapped by some guys who don’t see me enough down my local. As I come off stage, someone says, ‘We’re gonna put a bag over your head and drag you to our local.’ But I’m trying to look after myself, and going down the pub like I used to – early doors – having a couple of pints, isn’t part of the agenda anymore.”
It seems that Andy might do well to heed the advice of that immortal line, “You better beware, you better take care …”
Andy Scott and Suzi Quatro have provided forewords for Wild! Wild! Wild! A People’s History of Slade (Spenwood Books, 2023), which you can order via the publisher’s link or through Amazon or your local bookseller. You can also try before you buy via your nearest library.
The Sweet’s Full Circle tour takes place this December, with dates at William Aston Hall, Wrexham, Friday 1st; The Wulfrun, Wolverhampton; Saturday 2nd; Picturedrome, Holmfirth, Friday 8th; Queen Margaret Union, Glasgow, Saturday 9th; Fire Station, Sunderland, Sunday 10th; Apex, Bury St Edmunds, Thursday 14th; Academy, Manchester, Friday 15th; Lowther Pavilion, Lytham St Anne’s, Saturday 16th; Tramshed, Cardiff, Sunday 17th; Rock City, Nottingham, Wednesday 20th; Islington Assembly Hall, London, Thursday 21st; Lighthouse, Poole, Friday 22nd; Cheese & Grain, Frome, Saturday 23rd. Tickets are available via this link.
For further information, check out the band’s website and keep in touch via Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. You can also check out the band’s YouTube channel.
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