SWEET

SWEET - The Fox Is Back On The Run In North America!

By Martin Popoff

SWEET bassist and co-vocalist Steve Priest has been living in America for years, having put Sweet aside only to watch guitarist Andy Scott carry on with a version of the band back home in Blighty. But after catching an ERIC CLAPTON show at the Staples Center, he figured it was time to fire up the ol’ ‘Fox On The Run’ and take all those great songs around North America once again.

And let’s be honest, it’s impossible to get too, too authentic on the lineup. Two of the boys – Brian Connolly and Mick Tucker – are dead. And Andy and Steve aren’t getting along too well, not to mention the fact that they are separated by a continent and an ocean. Ergo, Steve’s got Stuart Smith on guitar, Joe Retta on vocals, Stevie Stewart on keyboards and Richie Onori on drums to bring these songs to life – and by the sounds of it, they are indeed living well.

“We’ve just done two gigs in Los Angeles, which were The Whiskey and The Canyon Club, and they were brilliant,” laughs Priest. “Great audiences both times, and we just came out swinging, you know. We’ve rearranged the set list slightly since we began rehearsing. That was from doing The Soundstage, when we did a little warm-up gig in Ventura, and I said, ‘There’s something wrong with this. It’s not quite mixing.’ So we just juggled a couple of songs around and then all of a sudden it flowed.”

Look and listen for all the big hits to be played, including ‘Ballroom Blitz’, ‘Action’, ‘Set Me Free’ and ‘Love Is Like Oxygen’. But will we also be hearing those patented harmonies?

“Oh yeah. I mean, the drummer can’t sing, because he starts yelling. He can’t help it, because that’s what he does (laughs).”

Have you noticed that any of the songs have been fairly difficult to pull off?

“Yeah, I was quite surprised, actually,” answers Steve. “Because I just used to play them. I didn’t have to pull them apart. But when we did, there were some very funny timing things, like in ‘Teenage Rampage’, there are a couple of bars of 5/4 in there. I mean, I don’t remember that (laughs). But it follows the vocals, so it doesn’t sort of skip. It just follows the vocals, but it means there’s like half a bar here or there that shouldn’t be there. ‘Action’ is not too bad. You know, it’s hard work. They all are, actually. I mean, not hard work as in, I don’t like it, but as in, it’s physically hard.”

Don’t look for the band to be all glammed up however. If you recall, Sweet were part of the brief UK glam boom in the early ‘70s, and some of the outfits they wore were downright blinding… “Yes, well, the very worst… I had a pair of silver lamé hotpants once, and I added a silver shirt, and it was a little risqué. Of course I had silver boots. Also I remember, I was doing one TV show, and I had these women’s boots on - I have no idea how I got into them. But they were extremely high and we had been imbibing of champagne before the show, and I nearly fell over; I nearly broke my ankle (laughs). But as always, I got used to them.”

Pomp and spangle aside, Sweet were an enormously talented early metal band with a complicated history. The early ‘70s saw them as a glam singles band in the UK to be sure, but Desolation Boulevard, Give Us A Wink and Off The Record in the mid ‘70s – bigger in America than back home - offered some of the most proficiently written and played thinking man’s metal there ever was, up until that point.

“Brian was incredibly unique,” muses Priest, thinking back on the boys, half the band now dearly departed. “He had a very distinctive voice, a good command of the stage. He was very self-confident. Or at least he looked it. No, he was a great front man.”

You look at the old videos, and he looks like he’s leading a gang up there…

“Yeah (laughs). Yeah, that’s exactly what he was like, the orchestra leader. And then Mick, incredibly underrated. I think he’s one of the best drummers who came out of England. Amazing technician, and he pounded the hell out of them. He had so much stamina. He would do a 20 minute drum solo, and then go into ‘Set Me Free’. I never knew how he did it. And as a rhythm section, we were totally nut and bolt. Once we were together, it was locked tight.”

Did he play a fairly large set?

“It was pretty big. It was double bass drum, and I think he had a five tom toms, three on the drums, and two on the floor - he might’ve had more than that.”

Back to the here and now, and what you’ll hear (get tickets now), Priest promises that, “At the moment were trying to establish ourselves as what we should’ve done in the first place, with all of the obvious songs that people heard and went, ‘Oh, I’ve heard that - what is it?’ For the first six months I just want to hammer home who we are, and play the songs we’re known for. And then we will move on and keep them in the repertoire so we know them, but also start knocking in either some new ones, or old ones that are good. Of the old stuff, ‘Little Willy’ is the only one of the really poppy ones that I will do. Everyone recognizes it and everyone goes nuts when we play it, so I suppose, it has to be. We do ‘Wig-Wam Bam’ and ‘Teenage Rampage’, but that’s about it for the poppy ones. It’s been going down really well, anyway. If we can keep that up… and then as long as they want to come back and see us again, that’s the main thing.”

“With the new singer that I’ve got, you wouldn’t know the difference,” remarks Priest, in closing. “It’s amazing. I mean, he can only sing the song like he can sing the song, you know what I mean? But it just comes out… with the harmonies and everything, it just sounds like the original band. The only thing is, he’s got a much more rock ‘n’ roll voice than Brian used to have. It’s more like, let’s see, a bit more like GILLAN, in some ways. He can scream till the cows come home, and it’s like, ‘Christ, how you do that?!’ I said I’m not going to turn this into a Sweet look-alike band. I wanted it to sound alike, but now it’s got its own character. And the people who have seen us have said, ‘My God, it’s even better than the original.’ Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, but it is good (laughs).”