Half a century on from their commercial peak, there’s a sense that Sweet (definite article dispensed with way back when) are a band performing a perennial encore, given the fact that their tour in 2015 was said to be their last. So although Full Circle is being promoted as their “final studio album”, we’d surely be foolish to expect them never to return.
Since the halcyon, Brian Connolly-led days of Ballroom Blitz, Blockbuster et al and being regulars on Top Of The Pops, their line-up changes have been so frequent that they make Hawkwind and The Fall look stable. The one stout thread running through them all, though, is Andy Scott, whose lead guitar playing and cast-iron fringe has remained in situ since the band first rose to fame in the early 70s, bar six years after they split in 1981.
And although the late Mr Connolly’s New Sweet fought their own corner for a while, and Steve Priest’s Sweet also spent a decade treading the boards before the bassist’s passing in 2020, Scott’s version is the only one to have made studio albums, the last one being the lockdown-created Isolation Boulevard, which consisted of remotely recorded (due to covid) reworkings of their 1975 classic album Desolation Boulevard. Full Circle though, is their first set of original songs since 2002’s Sweetlife.
Full Circle is far from the return to their roots that the title might suggest. Indeed, if you’d lost track of them back in the 70s then caught an airing of these tracks, you’d never guess whose name is on the cover. Chunky, boogie-infused glam-rock tunes made for stomping a platform boot to are in vanishingly short supply, as Scott’s version of Sweet long ago adopted the FM rock stylings of the 80s hair-metal generation who still held them in such high regard.
The pulsing power ballad Don’t Bring Me Water and the anthemic Coming Home could easily have been found on a late-80s Whitesnake album, while Everything, Changes and Defender could be long-lost Journey tracks, with frontman Paul Manzi insisting on the latter track, rather improbably: ‘I’ve got your back, whenever your back’s against the wall’ before a twin guitar solo kicks in.
Nonetheless, on its own merits this is well-crafted stuff, suggesting the one quality they’ve retained all these years is an ear for a sharp hook and a rabblerousing chorus, Chinn & Chapman be damned. Wig Wam Bam it isn’t. Reliable rock’n’roll fun it remains.
