Sweet

The Sweet started out in London in 1968 as the Sweetshop and ended up as the loudest, gaudiest pop machine of the glam years. Brian Connolly sang, Steve Priest played bass, Mick Tucker drummed and, from 1970, Andy Scott played guitar. Teamed with songwriters Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman and producer Phil Wainman, they scored their first hit with "Funny, Funny" in 1971, pure candy-floss bubblegum.

Then they toughened up fast. Over 1971 and 1972 the sound swung toward a hard rock crunch that owed plenty to the Who, topped with those shrieking, sky-high backing vocals. "Block Buster!" went all the way to number one in Britain in 1973, and "Hell Raiser", "The Ballroom Blitz", "Teenage Rampage" and "Fox on the Run" all stalled one spot short. America caught on with "Little Willy", "The Ballroom Blitz", "Fox on the Run" and "Love Is Like Oxygen", the last a moodier, more ambitious number from Level Headed that proved they could do more than stomp.

Connolly quit in 1979 to go solo, and the others carried on as a trio before calling it a day. From the mid-'80s Scott, Connolly and Priest each fronted their own Sweet. Of those three only Scott is still with us, and he still leads a version of the band; Connolly passed in 1997, Tucker followed in 2002 and Priest in 2020.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.