Sweet

Featuring seven original studio albums and two discs of rarities, ‘Sensational Sweet (Chapter One: The Wild Bunch)’ is set to be the most thorough account of glam icons Sweet yet. Fully documenting the classic line up (Andy Scott, Steve Priest, Mick Tucker and Brian Connolly) the nine disc set includes 1971 debut studio album ‘Funny, How Sweet Co Co Can Be’ and the five following album…

This UK studio group comprised several of the country’s leading blues musicians. Saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith was a veteran of Blues Incorporated, the Graham Bond Organisation and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers before becoming a founder member of Colosseum, while John O’Leary (harmonica) and Keith Tillman (bass) were concurrently members of the John Dummer Blues Band. Stuart Cowell (guitar), Sam Crozier (piano), Junior Dunn (drums) and vocalists Annette Brox and Alan Greed completed the Sweet Pain line-up featured on the unit’s lone album…

Recollections of Britain's arch-glam gods generally inspire two theories of their producers, Mike Chapman and his partner, Nicky Chinn. Either they knew just what they were doing and calculated accordingly, or blindly hit pay dirt, following toothless early singles like "Funny Funny" (none of which grace this disc). By this reckoning, Sweet was a '70s-era pinup band or a closeted hard rock quartet who only got their due after breaking the Chapman/Chinn combination…

Sweet hit the peak of their powers on Desolation Boulevard, a wonderfully lightweight collection of fizzy melodies and big, dumb hooks…

The nucleus of The Sweet came together in 1966, when drummer Michael Thomas Tucker (b. 17 July 1947, Harlesden, London, England) and vocalist Brian Francis Connolly (b. 5 October 1945, Hamilton, Scotland) played together in Wainwright's Gentlemen, a small-time club circuit band whose repertoire comprised a mixture of Motown, R&B and psychedelia…

The title sets itself up for one hell of a fall, and the ongoing need for a decent Sweet box set is never going to be assuaged by this. But it is what it says on the tin, a 37-strong collection that, OK, they're not all the "Best Glam Rock Songs Ever," but maybe a dozen of them are, and the remainder should at least be invited to the awards ceremony. A dizzying spin through the band's entire RCA catalog, a mass of A-sides, B-sides, album cuts and what-on-earth-were-they-thinking cuts jostle for your attention…

In some ways, the Sweet epitomized all the tacky hubris and garish silliness of the early '70s. Fusing bubblegum melodies with crunching, fuzzy guitars, the band looked a heavy metal band, but were as tame as any pop group. It was a dichotomy that served them well, as they racked up a number of hits in both the U.K. and the U.S. Most of those hits were written by Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, a pair of British songwriters that had a way with silly, simple, and catchy hooks…