The Sweet’s Andy Scott: “The thing about the ‘B’ sides was we were trying to push our own boundaries”… By Zentinel Daily – Leeno Dee Well…here I am so many years on from hearing Wig Wam Bam as a kid – which literally and instantly changed my life. I mean seriously, Sweet were my first cut. And now here I am speaking, on Zoom at least, with the last living member of that band: Andy Scott.Who would have thought?I wonder how we’ll start? “People will have probably told you I’m an arsehole.”What a start. “But I’m not you know…” Over the next forty odd minutes, I’m left with no doubt whatsoever that Andy Scott is a gentleman – so no illusions shattered there. Amiable and with a great sense of humour. We could have kept chatting for hours. So… Anyone that’s ever been near a radio, TV, cinema…hell-anyone alive – has likely heard Andy Scott’s work. Whether they knew it or not. As the guitarist of British group Sweet, his band’s music from the early seventies onwards has been not only heard extensively on radio via the plethora of hits they’ve had, which include Ballroom Blitz, Love Is Like Oxygen and Fox On The Run, to barely scratch the surface, but also featured in many films and TV shows over the years. Sweet’s original run ended around 1980, but Andy Scott has managed to keep a viable and convincing version of the band afloat since the mid eighties, releasing many albums and touring the world to eager audiences, although for a time there was also a US based version of Sweet, fronted by late bassist Steve Priest, who passed away in 2020. Starting in the late sixties but hitting their stride around 1971, after Scott, the last of three guitarists to play with the band, had settled in, and with an alliance formed with songwriting duo Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn, Sweet began to have the hits that had thus far eluded them. Sure, these early tunes were, shall we say, on the lighter side, but flip those records over and you got a taste of who Sweet really were. The Calypso pop of CoCo would have Done Me Wrong Alright – a Deep Purple-ish bruiser as its flip, while Little Willy would have Man From Mecca‘s proto metal with a backwards, Hendrix-inspired solo. It wouldn’t take too long for Sweet to exert their own style on subsequent records, with such killer singles as Hellraiser, Blockbuster, Teenage Rampage, and the aforementioned Ballroom Blitz all smashing the singles charts. Several mighty albums would soon follow too. Inevitably, before too long, having written the ‘B’ sides-which in most cases were equal in quality to the Chinn/Chapman penned ‘A’ sides (Rock And Roll Disgrace – stand up please!) Sweet began a run of self written hits which would see newer artists cover them to this day- Fox On The Run, Action, Lies In Your Eyes and of course Love Is Like Oxygen. However, every up has a down, and sadly, Sweet’s started with the departure of vocalist Brian Connolly in 1979. Connolly passed away in 1997. In 1974, when Sweet were recording the Sweet Fanny Adams album, it emerged that Brian Connolly had been the victim of a beating outside a pub, with his throat reportedly being targeted. Was this possibly the beginning of Brian’s troubles with drinking, which would eventually lead to his departure some years down the track? “OK. Listen, when I first joined the band Brian kind of took me under his wing and I went out with him a couple of times and I realised ‘I can’t go out with Brian on the town anymore’ because his intake and mine were at completely opposite ends of the spectrum. It’s when you’ve woken up in London, on a bathroom floor that you don’t recognise and there’s something in the bowl that you don’t remember parting with…(both laughing) and you start saying… ‘Oh…this is not a road I want to go down!’ And yes, we decided we would need to keep Brian on a rein, but he was the oldest, he was the organiser back then and a few years later we realised – that incident we were talking about- what was he doing on his own, without anybody with him, driving his Mercedes to a slightly sleazy pub in a satellite town outside of London, not far from where he lived, ‘cause maybe he fancied a drink… Surely he knew a publican closer to home who would keep the bar open for him without all this hassle. He goes into this place and apparently a few girls go ‘oh wow-it’s Brian Connolly’ and are all over him and when he comes outside there are a couple of guys and one of them is sitting on top of his Mercedes, and he’s told him to get off, and as he’s gone to get him off somebody from behind hits him, he goes to the ground and then they start kicking him and stuff. And the thing is, there was bruising on his collarbone and neck (rubs throat for emphasis)-and we weren’t there, we had no idea. I just remember getting a phone call from his wife saying ‘he’s in hospital, he’s got really bad damage I don’t know what the hell he was thinking’. Anyway, cut to the fact that we were about to do a tour of the UK followed by a gig with The Who. Now, my thoughts were, will he be well enough to do the Who gig? And the chances were – yes, he would have been, but to cancel ten shows in England, in the month leading up to that Who gig would have looked wrong. I suggested we reschedule them afterwards and the general consensus was no -we’re gonna have to ditch the lot. And I thought ‘This is criminal, this is terrible’”. That Who show would certainly have been a big break. “Yes, this was our moment, our break to show people we could be more than just number one in the pop charts. And his voice was different after that. You could hear it. Luckily when we recorded Fox […]