On one of the band’s Top of the Pops performances Steve managed to outrage my father with his make-up and pouting to the camera. I just thought all of that was an in-joke, a very muted kind of rebellion.
I’ve already featured what I think of as the band’s good hits; the ones that weren’t mere bubblegum fluff.
The Sweet’s B-sides were their attempt to show that they were serious musicians. Some see them as forerunners of and influences on later heavy metal bands. At the time most of my acquiantances thought they were maybe trying a bit too hard.
On this one (the B-side of Hell Raiser) it sounds like they were trying to channel Led Zeppelin, specifically The Immigrant Song.
The Sweet: Burning
Stephen Norman (Steve) Priest, 23/2/1948 – 4/6/2020. So it goes.
If The Troggs were my musical vice of the 1960s the band which took that role in the 1970s was The Sweet.
Their early hits were mostly rubbish created by the songwriters Chinn and Chapman (who also were responsible for the band Mud and wrote for Suzi Quatro among others) but The Sweet began to hit their stride when they moved away from directly appealing to the young “teenybopper” market in 1973 with the harder edged Blockbuster which started off their biggest run of chart success.
Examination of their B-sides – which they wrote themselves, and leaned toward heavy rock – reveals more than a degree of casual sexism: a feature mostly absent in the bands they aspired to emulate.
Some sources have it that lead singer Brian Connolly was related to the actor who played Taggart, Mark McManus. As Wiki says that Connolly was fostered this would not quite be the case.
The Six Teens was the most lyrically interesting of their big 1973/4 hits, referencing the disturbances of 1968, but it was the start of their popular decline.
