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🔘 The Sweet Soft Underbelly of Rock – Feb 10, 1973

  • Writer: glamslam72
    glamslam72
  • Feb 10, 1973
  • 3 min read

Updated: Feb 10

The February 10, 1973 NME two‑page feature exploring The Sweet’s backstage tensions and glam‑rock contradictions.


🔘 Overview

In this two‑page NME feature, Nick Kent spends time with The Sweet during a moment of rising fame and rising frustration. What begins as casual bar‑room banter quickly turns into a candid look at the pressures of glam‑rock success: cramped dressing rooms, chaotic promoters, and the tension between their bubblegum image and the harder‑edged musicians beneath. Kent’s piece captures The Sweet as both cartoonish and combustible — a band whose glossy singles masked a far more complex reality.


🔘 Source Details

Publication: New Musical Express Date: February 10, 1973 Issue Context: Two‑page feature Provenance Notes: Transcribed from original newsprint; cleaned and formatted for GlamSlamChronicles.


🔘 The Story

By early 1973, The Sweet were riding high on the glam‑rock wave, propelled by hits like “Blockbuster” and a carefully cultivated image of glitter, colour, and chaos. But as Nick Kent discovers, the band’s offstage reality is far more grounded — and far more irritable — than their pop persona suggests.

Kent’s piece opens with the band venting about the indignities of touring: inadequate dressing rooms, disorganised promoters, and the general grind of life on the road. Beneath the humour and swagger lies a band increasingly aware of their own contradictions: serious musicians trapped in a bubblegum frame, frustrated by the gap between their abilities and their public perception.

The article also touches on the band’s relationship with their audience, their place within glam culture, and Kent’s own conflicted admiration — especially for the irresistible, disposable brilliance of “Blockbuster.”


🔘 Key Highlights

  • Nick Kent spends time with The Sweet during a tense moment on tour.

  • The band complain about poor venues, cramped dressing rooms, and chaotic promoters.

  • Kent describes “Blockbuster” as a “masterpiece of instant rubbish.”

  • The Sweet are portrayed as both playful and frustrated — musicians overshadowed by their own image.

  • The feature reveals the gap between glam‑rock fantasy and backstage reality.


🔘 Article Text

NICK KENT’S JOURNEY INTO CANDYLAND

Funny how moods change; there we all were — The Sweet and myself — in the bar, having a few drinks, sharing a joke or two, getting involved in the usual chit‑chat, when guitarist Andy Scott starts getting heavy.

Now what, you may be wondering, are a good, fun‑loving pop group like The Sweet doing getting heavy?

Well, it’s like this. Let’s say that you’re a hard‑working musician and you’ve been, shall we say, a trifle ruffled of late by all sorts of petty hassles — usually involving cramped dressing rooms and bird‑brain jobsworth types. Then you come face to face with a promoter responsible for sorting such problems out.

Wouldn’t you rise to the occasion and speak your mind? Right? Right.

“Listen,” said Scott, “how’d you feel if you were trying to get your arse into a pair of tight trousers in front of a bunch of people because there wasn’t any dressing room? Real, eh?”

The promoter, a woman, nodded sympathetically before launching into a vehement castigation of Glaswegian promoters and their tricks.

“I’ll tell ya,” retaliated Steve Priest, the bassist — a chubby, rather awkward figure with saucer‑wide eyes — “it’s enough to drive you mad.”

“In its own cute way Blockbuster is a masterpiece,” says Kent, “adhering gracefully to that genre known as instant rubbish… with an irresistibly banal appeal that will surely be exhausted within three months. The truth is, Sweet meet a need present in rock since the beginning.”


🔘 Closing Notes

Nick Kent’s feature captures The Sweet at their most contradictory — glamorous yet irritated, playful yet serious, adored yet misunderstood. It’s a rare glimpse behind the glitter, revealing the human frustrations beneath the glam‑rock spectacle.


🔘 Sources & Copyright

All original text and images remain the copyright of their respective publishers and creators. This post is presented for historical, educational, and archival purposes only.







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