Below is a typed copy I made from a report in the Birmingham Evening Mail published Friday 14th February 2003.
Woody
GREAT SCOTT..
SWEET
STILL ROCK
What makes a grown man keep on rockin' when you can't even get a taxi back to your hotel?
Graham Young goes backstage with Sweet guitarist Andy Scott to find out.
Thirty years after Blockbuster was somehow their only No1 , Andy Scott is sitting in his dressing room at the Robin Hood2 in Bilston.
It's midnight and cold with the backdoor open, but he's just played a blinder to a very appreciative audience in the heartland of former chart rivals Slade.
The show had begun with the Cd intro jamming, the bass drum cover falling off and Andy's monitor packing in, all with no detriment to the fun. Wearing only a pale jacket over a fattened chest on stage, he'd grimaced so much throughout his lead breaks there were times when I feared for his health. But, like Gary Moore, Andy plays better the more he pulls his face.
In any case the Glamfather of Rock can't die yet. Not if the Sweet's string of No 2 hits from Teenage Rampage to Ballroom Blitz Hellraiser and Fox on the Run are to live on around the world. with bass player Steve "I Haven't Got A Clue what To Do" Priest long retired, Andy is soldiering on at 53, playing Bilston in the middle of gigs on successive nights from Bradford to Bognor. Original frontman Brian Connolly died ages 51 from liver failure on February 9th 1997, and 54 year old drummer Mick Tucker a year ago today from leukemia. February clearly isn't a good month in recent Sweet history, but more bad news arrives. As our interview draws to a close at 1.15am, the Robin2's patient caretaker says we have to leave, But Andy's taxi stil hasn't come!
After collecting my own car, I drive past the Robin. Andy , tour manager Kevin and keyboard player Steve Grant are still standing there, clouded by their own frozen breath. "Jump in lads," I cry, and after Andy's guitarsare piled into my boot, we set off for the Quality Inn at junction 10 on the M6.
"The hotel wouldn't have been my choice, but there you are," says Andy who lives with his second wife Maddy in a huge converted barn in deepest Wiltshire. It's now 1.30am and the trio instantly head to the hotel bar while I soberly drive back to Birmingham, reflecting on how drummer Bruce Bisland had to pack away his own kit.
"Everybody needs to do something and it's best to do something you enjoy," says Wrexham-born Andy. "So many people still want to see The Sweet, and this is the best they are going to get. The original band when it fired hot, was stratospheric and there are still nights when you think 'It doesn't get any better than this'."
The Sweet always had a curious profile in 70's Britain skipping from the bubblegum of Funny Funny and CoCo to the glam of Blockbuster and Hellraiser to piledriving heavy rock tracks like Set Me Free, Action and Burn on the Flame (all enthusiastically received in Bilston). At the same time they were trying to capitalise on delayed exposure in Europe and the US, where Little willy was top three, for example, at the time Ballroom Blitz rocked Britain.
By the mid 70's when they were recording their thunderous Give Us A Wink album, Sweet were jostling for studio space in Munich alongside the Stones and Led Zeppelin. Everything came to a head just after the band had resurfaced at home in1978 when Love is Like Oxygen became their last top ten hit. "We had big plans for the group then, but we got hit with a half million pound tax bill," says Andy. "I also found out that money that was supposed to come to me as the main songwriter was being diverted into the band."
During their last US tour, Brian was drinking so heavily that Andy, Mick and Steve had to do some shows on their own. The all new three-piece Sweet was born but Londoner Mick was the next to hit the booze big time. The band split up for good, but Andy, having played with the likes of Deep Purple, Meatloaf, Kiss and Alice Cooper in the US, still had the bug and has now had his current line-up together for as long as the original foursome. With nine No 1 hits and 23 in the top 20 in Germany alone, The Sweet remain huge in Europe and they will play St Petersburg on february 22. In March they'll be in Denmark and Austria on a joint bill with Slade and T-Rex, as well as playing Leipzig and Dresden in Germany on a joint bill with Slade on June 6 and 7. With a cracking new album Sweetlife to promote, as well as a Chronology CD in which the band re-recorded old hits with admirable faithfulness.
Most rock groups of the day from AC/DC to T Rex, Thin Lizzy to the Rolling Stones, lost one member to an early grave, but what's it like losing two? "I was always closest to Mick, but in a way losing Brian was harder and it was a real shock when he died. He'd been on the cabaret circuit with a band that would go on stage without him if he wasn't well, so I was saying he should be a surprise guest with us on the last six songs or so. Mick had been down several times before and you would think he would never drink again after things like pancreatitis and leukaemia. But he didn't stop and the last time I saw him he was so weak. he went into hospital and never came out. I was talking about all this the other day with Mick Box from Uriah Heep and we have to laugh. Life was for living very hard. And what have we got from the end of it? We're still here."