- Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
- The Sweet is the band’s first American album and, along with “Little Willy”, includes several of their early hits like “Wig Wam Bam” and “Blockbuster”.
The Greatest Music
Ever Recorded!
The Sweet – The Sweet (1973): There are several “firsts” here: The Sweet – just Sweet appears on their albums after this one, The Sweet – is generally regarded as the first glam rock band and also one of the most popular, glam rock being a high-energy form of rock music that is like a tamer cousin of heavy metal. Other glam rock recording artists in this time period include Mott the Hoople, Gary Glitter, T. Rex, Queen, and, early on, David Bowie. The prolific English songwriting duo of Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman had their first successful hit singles from songs that they wrote for the Sweet; they also wrote hit singles and album tracks for Suzi Quatro, Tina Turner, Huey Lewis and the News, Pat Benatar, and Toni Basil, among many others.
The Sweet got off the ground with a bubblegum pop song called “Funny Funny” that made the Top 20 in the U.K. and in other countries. “Little Willy” is among their other singles in this vein and was their first big American hit, reaching #3 on the Billboard Hot 100. The Chinn/Chapman songs eventually moved more toward a hard rock flavor, such as their #5 U.S. hit “The Ballroom Blitz”; by 1975, Sweet broke with Chinn/Chapman and was writing most of their own songs, including two more Top 10 U.S. hits, “Fox on the Run” and “Love is Like Oxygen”. The Sweet is the band’s first American album and, along with “Little Willy”, includes several of their early hits like “Wig Wam Bam”, “Blockbuster”, and “Hell Raiser”. The latter song was the Sweet’s first of three consecutive #2 British hit singles, the others being “The Ballroom Blitz” and “Teenage Rampage”.