Q and A: Andy Scott (Sweet)

By PAUL SOUTHWELL

ONE of the most influential bands of the glam rock era was Sweet, aka The Sweet, who melded flamboyance with melodic sensibilities that were all over seventies radio. Sweet has weathered a variety of musical trends but the various versions of the band have toured pretty much constantly over the decades. For last remaining original member, guitarist Andy Scott, the time has come to pull up stumps on the international touring life, and so Sweet’s ‘The Farewell Tour – Greatest Hits’ is upon us. I had a pre-tour conversation with Scott. Sadly, Scott’s long-time health problems flared up while still in Germany and he has since had to miss the Australian shows. Regardless, this is a fascinating chat with one of the biggest stars of British glam rock.

Hot Metal: Are you ready, Andy?
Andy Scott: “Yeah, ha-ha.”

HM: I know you get that a lot.
AS: “Not enough, actually.”

HM: You’re returning for a final run. But you’ve actually done quite a number of tours here, including regional dates. How was that for you?
AS: “We haven’t been there for a little while. We did Rock The Boat [2019] with Suzi Quatro. Also, we did a tour with her about eight years ago [February 2017] when we did the QSP tour, which was Quatro, Scott and Powell [Don Powell of Slade]. But the actual Sweet on tour, we haven’t done for about 10 years. We went everywhere then, because we seemed to have left it alone, or maybe there’s a spring off from doing the QSP and doing the Rock The Boat. We’ve sold out a couple of the gigs out and we’re doing second shows in a couple of cities like Melbourne and Adelaide. For Rock The Boat, you played with various members of The Angels and Rose Tattoo.”

HM: You even went on to do a cover of “Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again?”
AS: “Yeah, we did. I’m not sure whether The Angels were that impressed with it.”

HM: But you’ve also got the unofficial chorus in that song, of course.
AS: “Yeah, yeah. Now, I was in a covers band in London in the very early eighties when Sweet weren’t doing so much and that was the highlight of the gig. Well, most of the gig, because in London, at that period, in Fulham and Earl’s Court, there were a lot of Australians. They used to have this thing on Sunday afternoon called Church. ‘Are you going to church?’ and we didn’t know what they meant. They meant, ‘Are you going for a beer?’ You know, ‘Are you going to the pub?’ Yeah. This covers band called Paddy Goes To Holyhead [German folk-rock band] used to play at Church, and of course, we got to realise that “Take a Long Line”, “Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again”, “It’s a Long Way to the Top” and “A Whole Lotta Rosie” – all these songs became part of the central core of this band. Of course, that then transferred when The Sweet came back on the road. I said, ‘We’ve got to start doing songs like this because they are crowd stoppers’,” you know?”

HM: You’re back for what is coined the farewell tour. Is this true?
AS: “It’s touring that gets to me. I’m 15 years with prostate cancer now, and I get incredibly tired sometimes. But then if you stop doing what you’re doing, I think that something else takes over, and I certainly don’t want to do that. So touring is difficult. I don’t want to go away for three months at a time. That would finish me, I think. But we like to do Europe in two or three shows of a weekend, have a weekend off, and then do another two or three. But you travel all the way to Australia, and you’ve been on a plane for 20 odd hours and here you are. So, what are you going to do? You’re going to do a tour on a boat and then go home and then come back two weeks later to do a tour? No, it’s great if you can get off the boat and start and do the tour, because you’ve travelled all that distance and the promoter who’s grabbed us has basically done the right thing. He’s given us a day off to travel here and there. It’s not like, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang and out. There are some days off which are much appreciated.”

HM: Yeah, certainly. I gather you’re looking at your set list and thinking, “Okay, everybody wants to hear the hits,” but at the same time, you’ve got new material and a new album out.
AS: “Yeah, well, by the tour, we will have a new album, Full Circle, which will be out. We’ve also released a couple of the singles from it earlier this year, and there’s one out right now; ‘Burning Like a Falling Star’. It’s already gone into the iTunes charts, and it’s in this thing called the Heritage chart over here [UK] so I guess we’ll be sticking that in, and finding a couple of not obscure, but favourites from albums. You know, I think our set these days, it’s like a lot of bands, it’ll start this way, and it’ll finish this way, because the half an hour is at either side. That’s what they expect. It’s the half an hour in the middle that’s going to be a movable feast.”

HM: Indeed. Can you talk about the lineup that you’re bringing down?
AS: “Yeah, we’ve been together now for five or six years. The lead singer, he’s been in and out of the band. He was like the guy who would step in if somebody else couldn’t do something, you know? He’s now the lead singer and Paul Manzi, he’s fantastic. He has got a great range, got a great character in his voice. The bass player is Lee Small. He has done so many live and recording sessions with various bands. He’s like what you would call a utility musician, you know? But he’s got a great voice, too. I’ve got Tom Corey, who is co-producing the Full Circle album with me. He was in a band that I produced, but I recognised that this is the guy. When I heard their demos, their demos were fantastic and I realised it was him who had engineered and produced them. So, I thought, well, he’s an ideal person to have alongside me when we do some new recordings and he’s a great guitar player as well. We’ve got our drummer who was on the album. Bruce Bisland has stepped aside. He just wants to be at home, spend some more time with his wife, who has had long term illness, but she’s doing well at the moment, and as he said, ‘It’s time to just step off the carousel for me.’”

HM: Yeah, fair enough.
AS: “But, yeah, we’ve got a great young drummer, Adam Booth, who is also very versatile. He plays all the instruments. He stood in with us as a bass player in the past when we had a bass player fall off the perch, shall we say; ended up being fired during a tour about five years ago.”

HM: Adam was also a guitar tech, right?
AS: “He was, yes. He’s what is known as a good lad. He is, yeah.”

HM: A lot of the musicians in your band are multi-instrumentalists and in a way, they could basically be doing any of the jobs to some degree.
AS: “Yeah, and there’s, I won’t spoil the secret, but there is a moment in the set where I step aside for about six or seven minutes, and they do something which is going to surprise a lot of people…”

HM: That sounds pretty good. If you look back at the early material of Sweet, one of the things that developed, even as it got heavier or more hard rock, there were still those vocal harmonies that defined your band. Is that something that happened naturally?
AS: “Well, in the late sixties period, there were a lot of vocal harmony bands coming through, and there were also bands and artists like The Who, Cream, Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix. So, the idea was to see if we could blend some of that with vocal harmonies and I think in the end, we did succeed. There were bands before that, like Three Dog Night and Vanilla Fudge who had these great vocals with a kind of heavy rock backing. Now, I think that it’s an absolute. It’s just trying to get the right blend of commerciality and still sounding like you mean it, you know? There was so much session stuff going on in the late sixties in the pop world. Something had to change, you know, and this is where glam rock picked it up. They basically took what was happening in the late sixties, dressed it up a bit and put a little bit more raunchy guitar behind it.”

HM: In that light, I believe that it was “Fox on the Run”, which pretty much spelt like the end of your songwriting partnership with Mike Chapman and Nicky Chin.
AS: “Yeah, it did. They were branching out and rightly so as they were writing songs. I think Mike, at this point, didn’t want Nikki Chin to be his writing partner. There were a lot of things going on that we didn’t really know about. They moved to America to try and get involved with the scene over there. They produced a couple of things, wrote songs over there. They didn’t come back to the UK when we wanted an album made, so we did it with our producer and they’d left a couple of songs behind, like “AC-DC” to put on this album [Sweet Fanny Adams] and we wrote the rest of it. It was probably at that time the best album release that we’d done. When they heard this, they came hurtling back to the UK and brought with them a song called “The Six Teens”. We did another album with them [Desolation Boulevard], and it wasn’t quite as successful as the album we’d done with the producer, but we’d written a song on this album called ‘Fox on the Run’. But it wasn’t the version that was the album version. They then hurtled back to America and we didn’t see them for a couple of months. The record company was saying, ‘Well, we’ve got scheduled a new single in January,’ and we went, ‘Oh, right, okay,’ and the guy who ran the record company, RCA, he actually said, ‘There’s a song on the album called ‘Fox On The Run’. Everybody’s singing it around the office, but it’s not produced properly.’ So, we went into a studio. Well, we went into a studio [Audio International Studios, London] just before Christmas, in fact, the studio was owned by Ian Gillan from Deep Purple. He’d just bought or taken the lease on this recording studio, and we were the first band to use it. We went in there with his engineer and made “Fox On The Run”, and I suppose there’s an old cliché; the rest is history.”

HM: Also, “Love is Like Oxygen” is a song that you co-penned [with Birmingham sound engineer Trevor Griffin], was that when Sweet felt largely independent of most writers at that point. Is that correct?
AS: “Yeah. We’d been doing all right around the world after ‘Fox On The Run’ but we didn’t really get much of a foothold in the UK. But we were going to America a lot. We came to Australia a couple of times, we went to Japan, and we did tours of Europe. The closest we came to playing in Britain was the casino in the Isle of Man, which is in the Irish Sea. Somebody made the comment a few years later, ‘Well, that was the year you should have taken yourself out of the country. You’d have saved yourself a bit of tax,’ and I went, ‘Well, tell that to the manager.’ So, in 1978, we’d been in France recording, and this idea came up. I co-wrote it with our sound engineer [Griffin], who could play the piano, and was a really good pianist. He’d come up with these various parts and said, ‘I’m trying to put together this rock opera,’ and he played me the pieces and I said, ‘Well, that piece, that piece and that piece, can we record them and put them together?’ We bolted them together and I played the guitar riff with his chords and everything, and I took it away and I said, ‘This could work.’ At this point, we’ve got a classical arranger [Geoff Westley] involved, and he was working on the Level Headed album. We had strings, we had a 40-piece orchestra on a couple of tracks. I said to him, ‘What about this?’, and he went away with it. He came back and he said, ‘Right, we can put this track down now,’ and I’d written this piece for the middle with classical guitar, and he was the one who said, ‘Why not move the chords, do this, and do a big resolve back to the original,’ where when you get back to the original, it becomes electric. So, I got that. We got the band in, and he told everybody kind of what to play and when to come in. No click track. We had Mick Tucker [drummer] just clicking his hi-hat through the whole middle section number of 74 or 72 bars, and then there was this moment where he just went and all that section, where the arranger, said, ‘I don’t believe it.’ He said it was so close to being exact. He said it was a joy for him to put the piano parts into that and I have to say I’m forever in awe of that, and it became our biggest hit around the world for a long, long time. It brought us back into focus.”

HM: Do you think you’re aware of a hit when you write it or when you mix it?
AS: “Well, because I hadn’t presented “Love is Like Oxygen” at that time, it wasn’t until the record company and the management listened to the album without it, where they said, ‘We could do with a track here’. There were some nice, good tracks there but there’s usually a track that stands out. It was at that point where I played them my demo, and they went, ‘That’s it!’, and Mick, the drummer who hadn’t heard it, said, ‘Well, let’s release that then,’ and I said, ‘No, it needs doing properly,’ and that’s when I got the arranger involved and a couple of days later we were in the studio putting it all together. But you see, without tracks like “Bohemian Rhapsody”, that seven-minute track would never have been accepted.”

HM: That’s true. During the seventies, bands focused on territories or countries. So that in the States you had Journey, and I guess in the UK you had The Sweet and Queen and so on, but you might have toured overseas to play with these other bands. Did it feel like you were competing with them, given certain countries, had generally not heard of them or were aware of their level of success in other countries?
AS: “Well, in 1978, we did a real mixed bag of touring. We were with Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band most of the time. But we also did dual headlines with Journey, of all the bands. We also did a couple of short, short tours with KISS and Alice Cooper. We did some one-offs, or two gigs, in the UK with REO Speedwagon or Cheap Trick. We were mixing and matching in ‘78. We did our own tour, which was the Level Headed tour. But in the meantime, we were getting better offers to play bigger places with people like Bob Seger. So why wouldn’t we do it, you know?”

HM: You got to play alongside Ritchie Blackmore for a rendition of Free’s “All Right Now, for the late Paul Kosoff. That’s pretty rare as Ritchie doesn’t let many people play with him.
AS: “No. Well, when we first played LA in ‘74, or ‘75, we met him. I think it was Rainbow he was with at that point. We met him in a club somewhere and we said, ‘Oh, we’re doing this thing in Santa Monica, and he said, ‘I’ll come along’, and we never heard anymore. Then we heard the story that his roadie had arrived at the backstage saying, ‘Ritchie Blackmore’s here,’ and they wouldn’t let him in. So then on our first headline tour in ‘76, the Desolation Boulevard tour, we met him, and he said, ‘I had to contact him this time,’ because I knew the hotel he was in. I said, ‘Paul Kosoff had died on a plane flight back to the UK.’ What was he doing? Going back home, I don’t know. He was obviously not well, but he was supposed to be our support act at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. When he died, it was the first thing we thought about, because we used to have “All Right Now” in our stage set in the early seventies. I phoned Ritchie up and I said, ‘Do you want to come and play on All Right Now for the final encore?’ He said, ‘Yeah, of course, just, let’s get somebody to let me in this time.’”

HM: I’m sure he always had the last word.
AS: “Yeah, exactly and he got up and I was going to haul on a Marshall for him because we had one on the side wings, and he said, ‘No, no, I’ll just plug into this,’ and so he plugged into an amp that we’d been using for the synthesisers, which had a couple of horns in the top. I said, ‘You’re not going to like that, and he said, ‘Oh, it’ll be all right,’ and the first thing it did was it whistled like hell. So, he turned it down a little bit. Now, I’ve never seen that, and he stepped forward, and he sounded like, how can I put it? It didn’t have a rare sound. It was like a Stratocaster, fairly clean, and here’s me with my 335 through all these amps cranking away. Anyway, it went down really well, and I had a lot of people say to me, ‘How come you managed to outdo Blackmore?’ and I said, ‘Well, somebody gave him the wrong amp, didn’t they? He could hardly play through that.’”

HM: Wow, that’s a pretty good story. What was it like being a guitarist in the seventies when things like Les Pauls and Stratocasters were quite affordable? I suppose they helped you get your tone to some degree because they were more readily accessible.
AS: “Well, I was a 335 [Gibson ES-335] man, and I bought a few of those while I was in America, and I bought quite a few Stratocasters because I could see the change coming, that flying 335s around the world with the kind of cases that there were. A Gibson is like this and a Stratocaster is like that, there’s more chance of a Gibson breaking than there is a Stratocaster or another style of Fender guitar. So, I started to change, and I was probably one of the first who was putting humbuckers in my Stratocaster instead of just going with the regular pickups. I’ve had many a conversation with people like Scott Gorham from Thin Lizzy [and Black Star Riders] about flying, because he still uses his Les Pauls, and he said, ‘You learn to buy the best case possible. I’ve had so many of my Les Pauls arrive at the other end with a crack where the neck joins the body and that’s never going to happen again.’ The only thing I can think back now is in the mid-seventies, I could have bought so many Les Pauls from the early sixties. Why didn’t I?”

HM: What led you to the ES 335? That’s more of a jazz instrument.
AS: “Well, that’s Ritchie Blackmore. I remember seeing him with Deep Purple, and he had this sound. It sounded like the string was hitting the wood. It was not dirty, but bluesy, and I thought, ‘That’s the sound!’, and he had this solid body tremolo Bigsby that was fitted on an arch top, so the tremolo arm was higher, and it wasn’t closer to the body. I thought to myself, ‘I’ve got to find one of these,’ and I found one, and that became my guitar. This is before I joined Sweet. This was in a band called The Elastic Band, and it became like a little bit of a trademark. Plus, the other thing is you could get some fantastic sustains with the 335. You only had to just hold it, and it would start resonating, and it was great stuff.” 

HM: I suppose Blackmore’s higher action for his guitar with the tremolo bar probably gave him a little bit more sustain?
AS: “Yeah, yeah. It also gives you more, you know, leverage with the arm itself.”

HM: So, what about the SGs and the Epiphones? How did they come into the picture?
AS: “Yeah, I had a couple of SGs as backups before I went to America and started to stockpile a few 335s and things like that. I loved those little bodied Epiphones, and in America, you could buy them for $100. You know, the ones with the Epiphone ‘e’ in the middle. I’m not sure what they’re called.” 

HM: Perhaps the Crestwood?
AS: “Crestwood, yeah, and they’ve had two small humbuckers, a tremolo and I’ll tell you who used them a lot, Humble Pie. They loved those little Epiphones and the little Les Pauls, the Slabs, as they were called.”

HM: Well, it’s just interesting the way that everything’s changed, because now with amplifiers, for example, everyone’s gotten to the digital realm, and you’re not getting that natural sound of a cabinet moving air, which is a totally different thing. But I don’t know if you’ve jumped into the digital age or not.
AS: “No. My other guy, my second guitar player, who plays the keyboards, has got my Kemper [digital guitar amplifier profiler]. I had a couple of Kempers in my studio. He’s got the one that you put on the floor, and we sampled my sounds into the Kemper. My son, who’s the sound engineer for the band, he now says, ‘I’ve got two Andy Scotts on stage,’ because he’s got my sound in his Kemper and he said it’s great because he can now spread the guitars a little bit and they sound similar.”

HM: That’s actually a pretty smart move. If you look at the classic discography, what would be your favourite track? Do you think it is possible to say that given the body of work?
AS: “Probably for me, one, two and three would be “Love is Like Oxygen”, and then it’s a cross between “Fox on the Run” or “The Six Teens”, and then number four would be “Action”.”

HM: Okay. That’s kind of quite a breadth of options. I suppose by comparison to the material that you’ve done post vintage Sweet, if you want to call it that, is there a particular track that stands out on any of those later albums?
AS: “Yeah, I think there’s a song that I wrote called “Everything”. We still have that in the set. It’s like somebody described it as James Bond meets The Sweet, which I will take that.”

HM: Excellent. Finally, what are your recollections of being here in the mid eighties performing on Hey, Hey, it’s Saturday?
AS: “Well, they used to put some rather naughty comments on the screen, you know, about wearing tights in those days; those spandex type tights and, the spiky hairdo. We were about to do the second song on the show and one of the guys from the crew put Mick Tucker’s drums about five foot high in the air on a podium. When he went to get on the drums for the second song that we were going to be performing, they’d taken the steps away. So, he’s standing there going [mimics confusion] and they’re filming it, remember, because it was live, and he’s going, and he said those very words, ‘Where’s the effing steps?’, live on TV. So, Daryl [Somers], went, ‘Get in the steps now!’ I remember our singer [Paul Mario Day] talking to Dicky Knee, the mop with a hat on it. Afterwards, I said, ‘You do realise that’s a bloke holding a Stick?’”