It’s 1974, and the members of Sweet are fed up. On paper their string of hits, including the previous year’s UK chart-topper Block Buster! and a run of No.2s (Hell Raiser, The Ballroom Blitz and Teenage Rampage) appears enviable, but the band are increasingly walled-in by a perception of them as just puppets of their songwriters Mike Chapman and Nicky Chin and producer Phil Wainman; indeed until Wig Wam Bam a couple of years earlier they’d had to battle to play on their own singles.
Having written the B-sides of those singles, Sweet were enjoying success as credible hard rockers in Germany, where their 1974 album Sweet Fanny Adams had briefly outsold Deep Purple’s Burn, but at home they remained viewed, as drummer Mick Tucker once put it so memorably, as “four dissipated old whores, mincing about on Top Of The Pops and churning out computerised pop”.
