I hated "Little Willy." All my friends loved it the way I loved Mott The Hoople. I wasn't going for any of that. But then, a few years later, I heard "Action." The playing, the arrangement, the production, all of it still blows me away. I loved this single so much, I did the ol' re-evaluation shuffle, and I've been a Sweet fan ever since. Maybe not every record, but the first four or five, for sure.
Anyway, this felt like a good way to wake up on a dreary Friday morning.
7 comments:
Now That's What I Call Power Pop!
All of those Chinn/Chapman songs by Sweet are great, but this is one right up there with "Love Is Like Oxygen" for a band-penned really solid song.
But, yeah, "Little Willy" hit that sweet-spot (no pun intended) for me right when I first discovered a.m. radio in 73. Followed by Ballroom Blitz in 74 and Fox on the Run in 75! What a glorious time to be alive! They sounded like nothing else in the Top 40.
"Little Willy" was my gateway drug into The Sweet. I guess you could say I was re-introduced to it somewhere in the mid-80's. It was the first classic rock radio show, at least the first one I ever heard (save for 'oldies'), called The Time Warp.
I actually got to see Andy Scott's version of the band a little over a year ago.
I was suspicious at first of Little Willy, but could not ignore "Ballroom Blitz".
A lot of the Chinnichap pop tunes were aimed at teenage girls & certainly the girls I knew then fancied the songs and the boys in the band something rotten. We hairy, muscular young men, of course, went for the heavier, er, muscular stuff that the band played at their live shows (where we took our starry-eyed girlfriends) & put on the B-sides of the singles. Now, "Little Willy", "Tom Tom Turn Around", "Co-Co", etc are guilty pleasures. Tracks like "Action" were just the ticket back then & still do the business today. Cheers!
I never liked "Little Willy", but "Action", "A.C.D.C" and "Oxygen" were standouts. "Ballroom Blitz" is a good one, too.
If you watched TOTPs and are a "middle aged" Scotsman (me) then you'll always have had an affinity with the Sweet. Not a patch on Mott The Hoople or the Sensational Alex Harvey Band though.
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