Sweet Notes

FF

Sweet Notes

Stuck in the middle with the Chartbusting Champions of Un-hip

by Simon Frith

Even in close-up Brian Connolly looks like a pop star. Blond hair, neat little face, boots up to his waist. In the pub people keep eyeing us - we must be famous, but who? A girl gets brave but plays safe — gets Mick Tucker’s autograph first, then mine. But it’s Brian she lingers over, telling him how much she likes his records, giving a good glimpse of tit. When she’s, gone Brian and Mick agree how horny they are: “I could take her and the bar maid.” “Why don’t you?” I asked, “She seemed eager enough.” “All you bloody journalists are the same — you think our only talent is for easy lays.”

It’s true, we do. The Sweet have become the 70’s pure pop group, the new Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, etc. lots of hits, lots of money, lots of women, but nothing to write about. Slade are ok cos they’re really working class, man;. Gary Glitter’s okay cos he’s fat and forty and good for a laugh; Marc Bolan’s ok cos'he’s nutty as a fruitcake; but the Sweet - yawn! Charles Shaar Murray spoke for rnpst of the music press:

The Sweet are an exceptionally unexceptional band who’ve been lucky enough to get a solid string of instant songs of such banal simplicity that they’ve become hits. They play to an audience of rather unimaginative eight-to-sixteen year olds, and what they play is a clumsy parody of what rock music is really about. The Monkees ripped off the Beatles. The Sweet rip off the heavy bands. The process continues.

And this wraps up the Sweet real pretty, except that I liked the Monkees.

Now Fact 1 is that seven of the eight singles Sweet have made reached the English top three and (including the European market) sold at least half a million copies apiece. The last two, “Blockbuster” and “Hell-Raiser,” were among the fastest selling English singles ever — silver discs in a week or so.JFact 2: every single single was written, masterminded, plotted by Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, who’ve done the same service, as successfully, for Mud (“Crazy” and “Hypnosis”) and, maybe even more successfully, for Suzi Quatro (“Can the Can” was the first female single to top the charts for five years — not since the days of Mary AppleCheeked Hopkin). Fact 3: not only have all the Sweet’s singles been simple, hummable and lovable (“I write everything round one chord” — Mike Chapman. “Sweet embarrass me.” — Nicky Chinn); they’ve also had a winking eye for the main chance. Sweet have moved tidily and responsibly from “Funny Funny” (“We liked the record when we made it because there were still echoes of ‘Sugar Sugar’ around.”) via a welltimed Caribbean Shuffle (“Pat>a Joe” etc.) to the rococo heavy splendours of “Blockbuster” (“The minute ‘Jean Genie’ came on Rosko’s Roundtable I called up Mike Chapman and said ‘What’s going on? It’s like ‘Blockbuster.’”) and glitter rock. And so, adding one and one and one, the Hypothesis: the Sweet are a pretty package with nothing inside — jerking on strings tied by Chinn and Chapman twitching with the plagiarised ideas of real artists, selling to lumpen-boppers, to the dummies at the bottom of a pretty crummy market.

But I still like the Monkees and there are still the L. Bangs Anti-Theses: 1. There’s no distinction between puppets and artists (that’s just a comfy critical fantasy) — all rock stars are strung up one way or another and the cleverer the manipulation the niftier the result. 2. Ideas don’t fall from the sky and in rock they’re all ripped off the back of cornflakes packages. 3. All rock fans are idiots, the more idiotic the better. This way up the Sweet become the most exciting thing to come from England since Freddy and the Dreamers and may be.even better than them.

But maybe not cos there’s another possibility — that the Sweet bejieve all that art arid authenticity crap and think that’s where they1re at. Take the Chinn/ Chapman bit:

Steve Priest: “We’re one big happy family. We hadn’t had a hit before we worked with them and they never had a hit before they worked with us.”

Brian Connolly: “We started together. We gave them their first top ten record, their first top five, their first number one, and their first gold record. And, needless to say it worked the other way round. They must be the most successful pop writers in the country now.”

Fair enough except that the Sweet are worried that their own creative role isn’t appreciated — “Mike and Nicky write songs that reflect where we’re going, but we’re going that way through our own decisions.”

The most touchy issue is the style switch from the perky “Wig Warn Bam” to the punky “Blockbuster.” This was mostly interpreted as the result of Chapman’s boredom and Chinn’s acuteness (Gary Glitter had revealed that the T.Rex/Slade trail was paved with gold even for nincompoops) but this is not how the Sweet see it — “it was everybody’s decision to move to a heavier vein.”

Brian Connolly: “We’re a rock band. Anything before our hits, especially our most recent hits, wasn’t representative of us, though I would say we’re more commercial and more jolly than most groups.”

Mick Tucker: At first the records sold the band, even though they weren’t really us. Now the records sell because it’s the Sweet.”

Brian Connolly: “There wasn’t a decision to change the style of Sweet. Chapman and Chinn wanted a single that was more representative of the Sweet as we perform. They follow us, they don’t guide us. Chapman is the musician of the duo and he knows what is the group.”

The Sweet are insistent that they’re a real rock group — the only criticism they’ll make of Chinn, Chapman and their producer, Phil Wainman, is that they take the edge off the real, raw Sweet sound — and like all post-Procol Harum poppers they have bad dreams, a paranoid terror that people don’t believe they play on their records. For most of a Sweet interview they’re establishing their credentials: Mick and Brian spent their early years (cl965) in a Harrow soul group, Wainwright’s Gentlemen — hot stuff, Brian was the replacement vocalist for Ian Gillian. When they left (in 1968) to form Sweet Shop, they added Steve Priest because he “he was known as one of the best bass players in the area.” They made the first Sweet record, “Funny, Funny,” as a threesome but when they auditioned for a guitarist they got Andy Scott from the Elastic Band, a well-respected progressive Welsh group. Sure the Sweet were a calculated commerical venture (Chinn, Chapman and Wainman put the whole thing together — writing, producing, managing) but they’re not jlist pretty-faces, honest.

But, still the paranoia. So they play all the instruments on “Little Willy,” do all the voices on “Co Co,” — but is that anything to be proud of? The bummer is that they don’t write the stuff.

Mick Tucker: “We can’t write a ‘Blockbuster’. We’ve tried. We’ve written the B sides of our records, but we can’t write hits, at least not right now. Mike and Nicky know what we need and want, and that’s a gift. The music is pretty simple, but it gets the audience. Maybe it’s not hip to like the Sweet. Slade get front pages for a year but they’re not the best band in the world. I do respect them for writing their own songs. Maybe the rock writers would like us more if we wrote our own songs.” *

The dream is that one day they’ll flip, the B-side, (presently, anonymous thumping) will be the hit. They’re determined to conquer the States as an LP group and already “at our concerts we’re attracting a more mature audience, people who can realise we can play.” But, for the moment, Sweet’s real talent is neither writing nor playing — it’s putting on a show. Their stage act is entirely their own creation and reveals wit and flair — Mick Tucker, for instance, has a parody drum battle with a film of himself; in the middle of “Hell Raiser” they go into “FBI” and an exact recreation of the Shadows’ 1960 stage act. People who’ve only seen Sweet on Top Of The Pops think the make-up, the glitter, the camp is a Bowie rip-off but it (and Bowie) are part of a much older show-biz tradition of putting on the style. It doesn’t have a lot to do with rock, it emerged rather from music hall and pantomime, from drag acts and blue comics, from the notions of spectacle and all-round entertainment. “Jolly” is Brian Connoly’s word for it.

To be a jolly pop star is an honourable and traditional ambition and Sweet’s claim to be jollier than most other groups is correct; all their singles have been fleeting fun. But though they’ve sold, they haven’t had much appreciation:

Mick Tucker: “We’ve come through every sort of slating. The earlier 45s get described as rubbish, the later ones as rip-offs. They really do turn the knife in...”

And so the knife artists remain on the attack; the Sweet, despite their screaming hordes, remain on the defensive, caught (like many other British pop groups) in a dilemma — how to get both respect and reward?

Rock ’n’ roll never really made a decisive break from traditional English popular culture. Instead, surprisingly quickly, it was incorporated: “Long Tall Sally” was sung by pantomime principal boys; rock ’n’ roll was a new facet to be added to the all-round appeal of a Tommy Steele; the decrepit music hall act of a Screaming Lord Sutch became an equally decrepit rock act. To this day old American and English rock ’n’ rollers eke out their livings working men’s clubs, alternating with Shirley Bassey and Frankie Vaughan. This sort of continuity is not surprising: whatever rock ’n’ roll’s breakthroughs in style or content, its commercial organisation was nothing new. If Sweet are the creatures of their management,^ what was Elvis Presley? If they are simply the vehicle for some sharply exploitative songwriters, what were the Coasters?

CONTINUED ON PAGE 75.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 44.

By the time the Beatles appeared it had become quite reasonable to be a rock group with straightforwardly showbiz ambitions - Billy J. Kramer, Gerry Marsden, Herman, Freddy, Cilia and the rest of them spent their Xmases doing Jack and the Beanstalk; the Barron Knights built a club comedy routine around their gifts of rock parody; the Beatles played Sunday nights at the London Palladium. When English rock did make a break from pop it was not the result of a simple stylistic change, more important was the ideological choice — crude commercialism, easy entertainment were rejected, new values were introduced: authenticity, technique, originality, expressiveness, complexity.

Hence Sweet’s dilemma; they are basically an old-fashioned pop group — rock is what they play, money is what they make (it’s no accident that Steve Priest started his professional career doing session work for Joe Meek and the Honeycombs). But the rock they value and want to play is exactly that music which seems to discredit commerce — the group Sweet were originally inspired by was the Yardbirds, the frist English band to be valued for all the things (skill,* experimentation, difficulty, truth (?)) that didn’t make it popular; the group Sweet now most admire is Deep Purple, who do appear to combine skill and success, critical respect and mass adoration. “Ripping off’ doesn’t describe what Sweet, expecially in their stage act, are doing. Their business is not simply recycling other people’s original musical ideas in simpler forms; it is, rather, incorporating new-style heavy rock into an old style pop show; making Led Zeppelin jolly. That’s not easy and Sweet do it well - certainly as well as Freddy and the Dreamers and the rest of them. Freddy conquered America, so could Sweet (& Geordie & Mud & Nazareth & Status Quo & Jook & ... ). And they probably will.