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The Sweet story: biography and interesting facts about the sweetest glam rock band ever

An uneasy road to success for one of Britain's most famous glam rock bands.

Glam rock band The Sweet: biography and interesting facts

The British band Sweet has come a long way from bubblegum pop, through glam rock and finally to hard rock. They were at the top of the hit parade, survived the breakup and finally were "cloned" altogether. Let's tell you how it happened.

the sweet
The Sweet

Beginning

Sweet was formed in 1968 by drummer Mick Tucker and vocalist Brian Connolly. The two met when they were in the band Wainwright's Gentlemen, which, by the way, has nurtured more than one famous rock band: Ian Gillan and Roger Glover, who later joined the legendary Deep Purple.

The two friends decided to leave and form their own musical group, which also included Steve Priest and Frank Torpey. The quartet called themselves "The Sweetshop" and began playing in pubs in London. Already at this initial stage, the band managed to gain enough popularity to get noticed by the record company Fontana Records. A contract was signed and the band shortened their name to "The Sweet".

However, this was not a good start for Sweet: their first single, "Slow Motion", was not a success, and Fontana quickly became disappointed with their choice and cancelled their contract. Frank Torpy also decided to leave the band, which was barely on its feet.

We can only be glad that it didn't stop anyone. Mick Stewart replaced Torpey, and Parlophone Records replaced Fontana, and the work continued, three more tracks in the genre of light pop music were recorded, but these songs again failed to make the charts. Stuart left too, and his place was taken by Andy Scott, who by then had already established himself in the music circle. And again a new contract, this time with RCA Records. In addition Sweet signed another very important contract with the duo of authors Nikki Chin and Mike Chapman.

Time of popularity

The first single that the new team created, "Funny Funny", became a hit and reached number 13 in the UK chart. Things were looking up, but it was too early to relax.

A few more successful singles followed, and Sweet felt confident enough to release their first album, called "Funny How Sweet Co-Co Can Be". The album flopped, with newspapermen branding Sweet a "singles' band". On top of that, Chinn and Chapman began inviting outside, so-called "session" musicians to record songs. The band members had to act decisively.

The musicians themselves were not satisfied with the established reputation of the band singing pop music. When recording their singles, they put a hard rock style song on the second side, which was what they really wanted. And the interesting thing is that these B-sides made a much bigger impression on the listeners than the soft pop compositions that Chinn and Chapman wrote for Sweet. The latter had no choice but to change their style and write "harder" songs. Things picked up again, and finally, in 1973, the song "Block Buster!" was released, reaching the top of the charts in Britain and many other countries in Europe and even Australia. More than 25 million records were sold worldwide. Success has finally arrived!

Their next single "Teenage Rampage" takes the band to the top of the charts again. Sweet go on tour in the US, where they gather rave reviews not only from fans, but even from members of The Who. They even have a joint concert planned, but right before that Connolly, the lead singer, is attacked by hooligans and suffers a neck injury.

https://youtu.be/aja7Ixj3-w0

After returning from the tour, the guys decide to finally break up with bubblegum music, as well as with the duo of Chinn and Chapman. Now they write their own songs. Their first self-produced work "Fox On The Run" is on the 2nd place in the European charts, it is so much loved by other musicians that it was covered by such bands as Scorpions and Def Lepard.

The end of the good ones times

The '70s were Sweet's heyday. Their songs were on the hit lists and they did a world tour in '75, but by the end of the decade the picture started to change.

The decline in popularity was slow, the process of disintegration was not quick either. First, Connolly left the band and decided to start a solo career. For some time Sweet performed with three musicians, but without the same success. This led to the band breaking up in 1982, shortly before releasing their album "Identity Crisis".

Clones

After the breakup, something interesting happened to the band. In the beginning, as it often happens, one of the former members of the band wanted to turn back time and bring the band back to life. The initiator of the project was Connolly, he even appeared at the autograph session with Tucker and Priest, but later he started to take other musicians to the band. This is how The New Sweet was organised, playing old hits, it was 1984.

But only a year later, in '85, Andy Scott and Mick Tucker decided to revive the band. And they also started to perform under the name Sweet. Then Tucker left the band, and the name was changed to "Andy Scott's Sweet".

Andy Scott
Andy Scott

A sad spate of deaths followed. In 1997 Connolly died, which ended his version of the band. And in 2002, Tucker passed away.

For a while there was only one version of Sweet in the world again, but in 2008, cloning happened again, and Steve Priest put together his own version of the band. This version of the band played successfully in the USA until 2020, when Priest died. And thus, there was only Andy Scott's clone left in the world, which still exists to this day.

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