If you don’t know who I’m talking about, I pitty you. (only THE bset band of the '70’s, bar none!]
Anyway, I’m confussed about the commercialism of them. I have an original 45 rpm (pressed from BELL RECORDS) of Little Willy. The label says “The Sweet”.
I also have a 45 (Pressed on CAPITOL RECORDS) of Ballroom Blitz. The label on that one says the bands name is just “Sweet”.
My greatest hits tape of them has them billed as just “SWEET”, but I heard them introduced at a concert once (Gawd this is dating me:rolleyes::() as “THE” Sweet.
This has bugged me for almost 30 years. It’s the same group!! How come sometimes they were billed as “The Sweet”, and sometimes as just “Sweet”. Can anyone clear this up for me???
In the mid-sixties they performed as The Sweetshop. They went through a few lineup changes and shortened the name to The Sweet in the late sixties because of concerns (believe it or not!) that “Sweetshop” was too “bubblegummy.”
By the time they started recording LPs, they realized that “The Sweet” sounded weird, and dropped the article, too. People still called them “The Sweet” out of habit, though.
Hey Larry Mudd - I didn’t know that - cool!
I always assumed that the discrepency was a Brit-U.S. thing, where one record label on one side of the pond called 'em one thing, and the other called ‘em the other. Kinda like the Beatles’ albums getting different songs on 'em in the U.S.
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Sweet trivia story - I have a friend who is a record producer. He is British and got his start in the early '80’s engineering records for folks like Erasure, Depeche Mode and Paul Carrack. Also, he started in music as a drummer. Anyway, he got a gig engineering a Sweet song - can’t remember which one, but not one of their hits. So my buddy had set up the instruments in the studio to get ready, including putting a pair of headphones by the drums so that Mick Tucker could have a “click track” fed into the 'phones (or “cans” as they are nicknamed). FYI, a click track is just that - a metronomic click so the drummer can stay in time while recording and not speed up or slow down.
So Mick starts laying down drum tracks with my friend engineering. After a bit, Mick takes off the headphones and says “have you got a click in the cans?” my friend says “yes” so Mick tried again, but with the headphones still on just looks up at my friend with a quizzical “well, I can’t hear anything” look on his face. So my friend exits the mixing room and enters the studio, takes the headphones from Mick and puts 'em on. He cues the intern still in the mixing room to turn on the click in the cans. And his head nearly explodes! The click is louder than bombs - Mick’s hearing was so shot that he was basically deaf and the volume was crushingly loud - my friend’s hearing was affected for days! He basically had to work something out with Mick using a flashing light on an electronic metronome.
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I’m not sure I’d call them the ‘best’ band of the 70s but they’re certainly a largely forgotten band that deserves wider renown. No doubt about that.
I was just listening to ‘Wig Wam Bam’ on the way into work this morning and thinking of starting a thread on The Sweet.
I, too, grew up calling them ‘The Sweet’. I can’t recall why at this point.
Did you guys know that Jaime Hernandez, one of the writers and artists of the ‘Love and Rockets’ comic did a story on The Sweet called ‘Wig Wam Bam’? It was about the lead characters childhood and listening to the band with a pal. There’s more to it than that, of course, but that’s enough to make me happy.
Thanks for the posts/info guys!
FWIW, I’m 29, and I’ve only referred to them as “The Sweet.” I never knew until the OP that they’re also called “Sweet.”