Glam War! Slade vs. Sweet

It's the Sweet for me as well, love.

*blows air-kiss, flounces away*

I just knew we'd see eye to eye, Sean and Ned. Love on ya!

*minces away, occasionally staring back coquettishely*

finest moment: "Hiawath-er didn't worry too much! GRZAM!" from WIG WAM BAM.

The Slade are OI! for your pub-hippy uncle. They also spell worser than Ludacris.

"She's alright! alright! al-RIGHT!" from GUDBUY T'JANE.

Don't make me choose.

But Bolan trumps all.

Also: both are Glitter, not Glam.

Multiply that by ten and I'll agree, sure. ;-)

the truth = > 2 x mark s-timate, < nedstimate x .5

But to answer the question - Slade. Just a great rock group - what a singer Noddy Holder was! They could do rockers and slowies equally well - I love their version of John Sebastian's 'Darling Be Home' on 'Slade Alive'. 'Slade in Flame' is both a great alb and a pretty good flick. The only time I was ever excited by Oasis was when they did 'Cum On Feel The Noize' live on TOTP - they performed it v. well, it was a slightly (at the time) unexpected choice, and I thought it made quite a gd point abt English groups who had number one hits and still ROCKED. A little bit.

Sweet's 'Little Willy' = Chuck Berry's 'My Ding-A-Ling'.

Anyway, they're both undervalued.

Now here I'll agree fully. I have to say, I always thought Tori Amos would do a great version of this song.

The Sweet were good too but yeah they just made 6 or 7 great singles.

yeah i got "Play It Loud", it is choice.

Slade had one trick, a great one, but one trick nonetheless, and more to the point I practically never listen to them: growing up in laddish and 70s-reviving 90s Britain I'm afraid they were all exhausted and played out for me long, long ago. I'm thinking that their "Far Far Away" / "How Does It Feel?" period might be up for rediscovery, but I somehow doubt I'll be the first to do the rediscovering.

The Sweet OTOH just got so much in their career (as Andrew L alludes, their original name, Sweetshop, was TERRIBLE). I think they might have been doing a kind of pop-psych thing when they started, but what really intrigues me is their first single "Funny Funny" from 1971: a sound far from what we associate with them, it's grinning naive jaunty upbeat bubblegum pop, more streetwise than White Plains or Butterscotch, for sure, but you can imagine it coming straight from Cedric Collingford's radio in his prep school dormitory, dreaming of Catweazle (whereas the thought of him listening to Slade is, ugh, unthinkable, you just don't want to know). This was what Chinn and Chapman knew best, of course, how to jump on board whatever trend was passing but do it with a greater panache than the rest, hence the Sweet's weirdest single, the bizarre and, these days, rather lyrically dodgy (in terms of the stereotypes it's built around) cod- reggae of "Poppa Joe".

When glam hit in '72 ChinniChap were in their element (though I agree with Andrew that "Little Willy" is a terrible dud, the only Sweet single to evoke the more repressed and un-evolved aspects of 70s Britain) because with each single they could hone the style better and cram more into the songs: the whipcracking "wig-wam bam shang-a- lang" break of "Wig-Wam Bam", EVERYTHING about "Blockbuster", the sheer heaviness of "Hell Raiser" (what gets me about this was how totally they took the pop sense out of heavy metal and channelled it into a single: the *timing* of the "YEAH! YEAH! YEAH! LOOK OUT!" bit Ned highlighted, and the brief moments of foot-stomping silence between each "YEAH!", is a lesson to anyone in pop music, even now). And the sheer cheek of the name-checking intro to "Ballroom Blitz", the "WE WANT SWEET!" chant on "Teenage Rampage", "she took me com- PLETEly by surprise with her ultrasonic eyes", "BUT THEY DON'T CARE!!!" ... the best sequence of pop singles by any group in the 70s, without doubt.

Once they'd broken the ties that bound them with ChinniChap it gets a little harder to instantly figure out: I'm not familiar with the UK flops (but still big hits in Germany) that came out around 76/77, though I love "Fox On The Run" and "Action" (their best-produced singles - the synth on "FOTR" kicks as hard as "Virginia Plain" - but still retaining the best virtues from the glitter years) and "Love Is Like Oxygen" (on the cusp of powerpop by then: coldest greyest 1978). But I'm increasingly thinking that "The Six Teens" might be their best single: that the late 60s generation were so obviously drifting through time, their subcultural control completely out of their grasp, so soon after the fact is a measure of the impact of the cynicism and edginess and dissatisfaction with vaguely-expressed utopianism that really took hold around 1972/73, that the Sweet could pay tribute to that generation without sounding in any way maudlin, sentimental or contrived is astounding. If anything, the Six Teens came through to take up far too strong a hegemony on the British media: see this song as a veiled warning, maybe!

As a trilogy, which is how I listened to them just recently, there is just so much in "Funny Funny" / "Hell Raiser" / "The Six Teens": from the last vestiges of post-war innocence to fantastic capsuled comic- book aggression (can it really only have taken two years?) to a resigned, epic hymn to what was already rapidly becoming a lost generation. And there are only two of them left now, because Mick Tucker died the other week, and it's five years since Brian Connolly went. Meant at least as much to me as Aaliyah going, that. The beating heart of the 70s, and resonant forever: not even the dreadful re-recordings of their old hits one or other of the later competing "versions" of the Sweet did in later years (these things litter MP3 sites so be careful you get the proper singles: usually the re-recordings are about five seconds longer than their sources) can ruin that magic.

I have to say something about Tolkien and Fellowship here before Mark S does. Because I know he will. ;-)

Wha.. HUH?

And that was a really nice piece you did there on Sweet. I really enjoyed reading it...

(four good singles.... FEH!)

Sweet.

Slade.

Sweet has some pretty fine moments - but Slade are one of the all-time great rock bands.