THE SWEET LIVE AT THE QUEENS HALL, EDINBURGH
John Scott digs out his platform heels and spandex jumpsuit and takes to the streets of Edinburgh to visit glam-rock legends, The Sweet.
Way back in 1973 Thursday night television, in the form of Top Of The Pops, brought much-needed relief from sky-high inflation rates and a seemingly endless series of public sector pay strikes. Glam Rock was all the rage. Dads everywhere would peer out from over their spectacles to mutter: “Is that a bloke or a bird?”, disappearing back behind their newspaper before emerging again to take a keen interest in whatever song Pans People were interpreting that week. Surfing high on the Glam Rock wave was The Sweet who scored a hat trick of hits that year including a Number 1 with Blockbuster.
Now nearly fifty years later the soaring interest rates and public sector strikes are back but thankfully, so are The Sweet; as welcome a distraction from the mundanities of daily life as ever they were.
Sadly, guitarist Andy Scott is the only original band member still with us but over the years he has pulled together an excellent band comprising Paul Manzi on vocals, Lee Small on bass, Bruce Bisland on drums, and more recent addition Tom Corey on guitar and keyboards.
The Sweet lived a dual existence during the Seventies: a credible hard-rocking band whose albums and gigs went down a storm with the older teens and twenty-somethings while the teenyboppers went mad for their pop hits. Even the youngest of those teenyboppers is now pushing pensionable age but as Paul Manzi tells us, we are all still sixteen in our heads and our hearts and tonight The Sweet’s tunes make the years melt away.
The night kicks off with Action from the 1975 album Strung Up, featuring the band’s trademark high-pitched backing vocals. At 73, Andy Scott can still hit those high notes and despite some right arm nerve damage, knocks out power chords and lead lines with aplomb. The pace never lets up from here on in, New York Groove being familiar to Sweet and Kiss fans alike. The Six Teens, a timeless tale of disaffected youth must surely have served as a template for The Boomtown Rats’ Rat Trap every bit as much as any song by Bruce Springsteen or Thin Lizzy.
The run of songs from Teenage Rampage to the final Ballroom Blitz mine a seam of unalloyed pop genius, even though Scott can’t quite disguise the ridiculousness of finding himself singing the backing vocals to Wig Wam Bam for the god-knows-how-many-thousandth time. Fox On The Run is a song so hooky that I’m still waking up with it rattling around my brain three days later.
The encores are of course the none-more-Glam Blockbuster (by the way, if you are wondering which came first, Blockbuster or Gene Genie, check out Honeybus’s Girl Of Independent Means from 1968), and Ballroom Blitz, inspired by the band being bottled off stage in Kilmarnock. There is no danger of a bottling tonight but as Andy Scott ends the song in a feedback frenzy while snapping off his guitar strings with a pair of pliers, there is no prospect either of any further tuneage. No matter though, tonight’s gig has been a masterclass in playing to your strengths and giving the audience exactly what they wanted. Forget inflation rates and wage constraints, for ninety glorious minutes we were teenyboppers again. And you can’t put a price on that.
Setlist
Action
New York Groove
Hell Raiser
Burn on the Flame
The Six Teens
Everything
Windy City
Set Me Free
Teenage Rampage
Wig-Wam Bam / Little Willy
Love Is Like Oxygen
Fox on the Run
Blockbuster
Ballroom Blitz
John Scott
