December 4, 2010

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Sweet - Glamrock pioneers with a bumpy ride.


When my friends at Shout! Factory put together a Sweet anthology last year, I was reminded how good they were in their heyday. Everyone knows Ballroom Blitz, it was played all over Los Angeles even before it was released in the U.S., but they had a lot of other great material that's been sadly neglected over the years.

So tonight I'm playing a track off their 1975 album Give Us A Wink. Action was a hit for them here in the States as well as the UK. The album was released in the U.S. in 1976, seven months after it was first issued in the UK. - a little screwed up as far as marketing was concerned and probably having a lot to do with career misfires during that period of time. The world wasn't on the same page, especially when you have a lot of support from one record company and none from the other who happens to be in the biggest market. So, if you were a fan and got the import from RCA-UK, you heard the album in 1975 and they were still called The Sweet. If you didn't have access to imports, you had to wait until Capitol released it in 1976 by which time they dropped "The" and just became Sweet. Pretty confusing and no doubt frustrating for the band and fans alike.

Luckily that sort of thing doesn't happen anymore, due in large part to iTunes and the ability to expose your material all over the world at the same time.

Sweet went from being a quasi-bubblegum outfit to becoming an iconic Glamrock band of the early to mid 1970's, before their popularity waned and they went the Hardrock/heavy metal route. They are still together, although two of their founding members have since passed on and are releasing new material.

But for those of us getting used to Platform shoes in the 1970s, this was the band to listen to.

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