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…

By late 1975, the Sweet were no more the power in pop land that they had once seemed to be. It was nine months since they broke away from songwriters Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, with whom they'd enjoyed almost unfettered success – since that time, only "Fox on the Run" had suggested that the Sweet's own songwriting prowess was even vaguely capable of competing with the masters, and two further singles ("Action" and "The Lies in Your Eyes") had emerged as the band's worst performing efforts since their very earliest days…

Sweet hit the peak of their powers on Desolation Boulevard, a wonderfully lightweight collection of fizzy melodies and big, dumb hooks. Essentially, the album consists of three dynamic singles buoyed by a bunch of filler, but those singles – "Ballroom Blitz," "The 6-Teens," and "Fox on the Run" – are addictive slices of bubblegum glam rock…

Although they were often dismissed as a fluffy singles group in their day, Sweet crafted a handful of strong albums in the mid-'70s that sported some surprisingly muscular hard rock. A fine example of this trend is Sweet Fanny Adams. Although this album got little exposure in America on its own, over half of this album's contents ended up on the American edition of Desolation Boulevard. Sweet Fanny Adams' tone is set with the opening track, "Set Me Free," a fiery rocker that blends ultrahigh vocal harmonies to a furious succession of guitar riffs that jack the song up a level of speed metal frenzy…