00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hi, des Andy's got from the Sweet and you're listening to Cornsey on Adelaide five double A.
00:00:06
Speaker 2: Well you know that song, folks, it's it's very famous. The band is called Sweet and Andy Scott is still touring with Sweet and he'll be here on November the fifth at the theb And Theater. We're speaking to him in wheel chair more places at the moment, Donald Zoom blink, Andy Scott, how are you? Thank you for joining us?
00:00:26
Speaker 1: Well, I'm all right. We're getting some Australian weather over here, as you can see. I'm well, not completely but when the hot weather's out, I think newsreaders around the world are sat in their jockey pants, you know, their boxers and you know, with a shirt on the top. So I'm the other way around. I'm sat in my shorts.
00:00:48
Speaker 2: You live in wheel Cheir, do you, Yeah.
00:00:50
Speaker 1: I'm famous for its Stonehenge and other odds and sods. It's the group one of the greenest counties in the UK. Gets a little bit of mixed weather.
00:01:00
Speaker 2: And he is seventy seven. You're a huge hit Sweet, big stars in the seventies. Did you ever think you'd still be doing it?
00:01:09
Speaker 1: Well, the quick answer is no. I used to know quite a few footballers back in the day, and we all felt we had the same kind of career ten years, if you're lucky, ten years. Sometimes footballers would go into their thirties, and sometimes certain musicians would go into their thirties, but very rarely did you have other than a jazz musician or a folk musician or somebody in a kind of variety act. You never normally went beyond thirty because in pop music and rock music you would be considered there's another one coming along with blonde with blonde hair, you know what I mean. But then I don't know what happened. It kind of got turned on its head. I think Europe picked up on it before the UK. They started to have what they called Oldie Knights, kind of nostalgia nights, and they'd have on there like the Hollies and the Tremelos and the Searchers, and they went down a storm. So then the next the next era is obviously the seventies and Slade and Sweet, and we started to do a few of those, but we realized it's not a career move, you know, it's it's very much of the era. You know. They wanted to hear your hits. And then when the band we're back together full steam in the late eighties, we made an album, we did some live recordings, somebody we had a live video app and all of a sudden I realized that the suite had a following all over the world. In fact, the first place that we came back when we reformed, the first place that we came back to was Australia and we had such a fantastic time.
00:02:47
Speaker 2: Well, the songs, the songs are so identifiable. I mean, you know we know the words to them, but can I can I go back? I'm always interested in the formative years. You're born in Wrexham in now you mentioned football. Have you followed the have you followed the journey of the rex And Football Club with Ryan Reynolds?
00:03:08
Speaker 1: And yeah, as soon as I came out of the womb, I was a Rexham supporter. I think my dad put a red scarf around me.
00:03:16
Speaker 2: And how did you think when these two Hollywood stars we bought the team and what was the feeling like then?
00:03:26
Speaker 1: Well, I had been a fundraiser for the club prior to their involvement back in the early seventies, when things were really going wrong. They got a very how can I put it, wilful guy who took over the club, and he wanted to sell the ground for real estate. And then he had this big idea about building a stadium between Wrexham and Chester now Chester are an English club and Rexham are a Welsh club, and getting the two teams. One week Chester played there, one week Wrexham played there and that was batted as far out of the ground as you can imagine. And then I was doing some gigs and you know, doing fundraisers to just basically keep the team together. I was sponsoring players. It was a bad time. And then the supporters, God bless them, the Supporters Trust put together a scheme where you put whatever you can in and you buy a brick. It's like buying a brick for a wall. And they raised enough money to grab the ground out of beings being sold, and they also took over the kind of running of the club that they had some very special people who came in and did it on a voluntary basis, but because of what had gone on before to keep the ground safe, it was under the stewardship of the university next door, which was a good thing because it joined all the real estate of that up. You have to have this build up. And then, of course I heard about it because I knew the CEO and I used to go in the boardroom a lot. And then he said, we've had this. He said, I can't talk about it, but he said, I will tell you. We've had this offer for something to buy the club for two or three million. And I went, well, that that's going to be handy, isn't it. And but I said, as long as they're not from some nefarious Eastern European country or Middle Eastern conglomerate or god forbid. I then said the words god forbid Americans, you know, who know nothing about football and anyway, he then told me who it was, and I went, oh, okay, But he said the meetings that they've had have been so so good, and they had and in between a guy. I've still not met them. I will tell you this, Robin Ryan. No, and I don't get to the home games as often as I used to, but they have been there when i've been there, and I've spoken to their film crew and they said, oh, we must interview you, but it never happens. And and I'm not going to push for that because what they're doing is right, is really really good, and we know, I just have to get it one right. We missed out, you know, on promotion to the Premiership by one point that this this.
00:06:09
Speaker 2: Year premierships that's the yeah.
00:06:13
Speaker 1: The first division. Yeah yeah, I'm whearing, I'm wearing the second division now the championship. So we we missed out on one point, and that is ridiculous, you know, after everything that we were in the top six for the majority of the second half of the season and to just miss out like that, you know, what was it?
00:06:32
Speaker 2: What was the journey like there for those you know that they the television series told it as it was the just the average footy supporter.
00:06:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, like, well, you see, I think I think that that's kind of the right way that they don't want to start with people like me. But they do have a couple of journalists that I know in there, and they have, you know, a couple of guys. They haven't spoke SPOTM to two any ex players other than people like Mickey Thomas and of course Joey Jones died last year, which was a big thing for the club because he he was like the Wrexham star, you know, was he you No, he was about my age, you know.
00:07:18
Speaker 2: Like he's a legend of the class.
00:07:20
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely, and he played for Chelsea and Liverpool and being a Welsh he had I don't know whether he's the most capped Welshman, but he's close, you know, he's anyway there we are, So yeah, it's a fantastic thing, it really is.
00:07:36
Speaker 2: What was Rexham like to grow up because they have formative years.
00:07:41
Speaker 1: Well, we're a spillover from Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, probably closer to Liverpool than anybody. We had an ancient city just up the road in Chester. So Chester was like the for want of a better word, the snobby, you know city and Wrexham was the was the poor relation just down the road on the River Dee. And I mean, look, I had a fantastic growing up. I wanted for nothing, did what was well. He was a part time footballer at one point. He's done virtually everything. He was just too young to go and he really wanted to. My granddad used to tell me God, he did he want to go out and fight, you know, for Britain. But he was something like fourteen or fifteen and when the war ended he joined up and did did some national service. He also worked on the trains. He was like the the do everything guy on when he was a teenager on the on the train station. And then he had a myriad of jobs. And at one point when he first because he played for his army division of all things, he got signed up by Chester. You know the other team is a part of time. Yeah, he didn't tell anybody though.
00:09:01
Speaker 2: Andy Scott is my guest, famous from playing with Sweet and he's bringing Andy Scott's Sweet to ad Laid on the fifth of November at the Theban and Theater back shortly, folks, my guest on conversations tonight. I say tonight because we're recording it tonight by zoom. Andy Scott from Sweet. He's in wieltchair and he's bringing Sweet to town with all those great songs that are so enduring. But we're talking about it. He's growing up in a little place called Wrexham in Wales. So what was your childhood like? Sounds like you're inspired to be a footballer first and rather than a guitarist.
00:09:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, there wasn't a time when me and my brothers didn't have a ball at our feet, you know, kicking it around the place, which to annoy the neighbors. We had a garage that was around the back of the house and the door was alongside the door way of the next door neighbors garage as well, so kicking a ball against the garage once in a while, I'd have an neighbor come out and go, I think it's time to stop that now, Andrew, you know, and then I'd sulk and go into the garden. But there was more space in front of the garage, and then I'd be kicking it about ten feet away from the book, from the wall in the in in our own garden. But the truth was, my brother, my younger brother, was always going to be the footballer from you know, from the age of five you could see you could kick and trap a ball, and you know, he had some talent, and he ended up playing for quite a few of the local teams and never quite made it into the you know, getting signed by any of the academies. But then he's like that, you know, he he he had a job and he just wanted to play. And my dad and I used to go and see him on a Sunday morning sometimes and he would be fantastic. Nobody would get past him. He was good with the ball, you know. And and I think think it was a missed opportunity. You know, Wrexham should have signed him.
00:11:00
Speaker 2: When did you pick up a guitar? And was it an ambition? When we had driven to do it?
00:11:07
Speaker 1: Well? My brother and I went to see I've Got a step brother, and we went to see a film with Cliffridge and the Shadows that the Young Ones, and there's these guys in the background swaying and dancing with their guitars, and I went, I want to do that, and my brother said, yeah, same here. So we're not a friend of my dad's was a guitar player and he left an acoustic guitar at the house saying, I wonder whether the lads would like to have this try it out? And my brother picked it up first and he got on with it really well, and I was having a little bit of trouble, and then he got into At the age of fourteen, he was asked by a guy that my dad worked with, you know, we need a bass player. How's your Michael, And he said, oh, I'll ask him, and he asked him and that he went along to some rehearsals and they needed a bass player, which has only got four strings, which was easy, supposedly.
00:12:02
Speaker 2: And very important. It's very important th the bass player, of.
00:12:05
Speaker 1: Course it is. And anyway, he got in this band, and now the acoustic guitar was left for me, and I'd been messing around with it anyway. And then I spoke to some of the guys in school we were forming bands and all this stuff. And then I got into a band that was well, could play a bit, really play a bit, and they needed it. We all have with guitarists. But they said we need a bass player. So I talked my dad into getting me a bass and an AMP and we were off. I was a bass player for a couple of years. And then the band I was in supported Jimi Hendrix on his first tour in nineteen sixty seven and I looked at that three people on stage and we were a band of six people, you know, with the saxes and stuff, and I thought, I said to my singer, I said, this is the future, you know, not what we're doing. And he said yeah, he said, I'm with you with that. And he could play Hammond organ and flute. So we formed this prog rock band called the Elastic Band, and we were we were off, you know, and we started to do television and a lot of other things.
00:13:15
Speaker 2: Did you swip from bass to the guitar? Guitar?
00:13:19
Speaker 1: But then my brother came into the Elastic Band as a bass player, but he could play sax, and whenever he was playing sax, I would play the bass. So it was quite an interesting unit. You know.
00:13:32
Speaker 2: You do that so dismissively. Then who taught you and how did you learn? And how hard well? Or do you have the inherent music instinct?
00:13:42
Speaker 1: I think there's a bit of instinct. But the guy called Bert Whedon, who was a guitarist, who had his little booklet for for guitar players called play in a Day. I still got mine. It's it's a bit rough around the edges, but these Playing a Day books, everybody had one, and it taught you. It gives you little cheats as to how to change chords quickly without moving too many fingers in the beginning. And then then of course once you're on your way, you kind of pick up you see somebody playing a chord that you would normally play up up the neck, and they're playing it down here somehow, and you think I need to learn that one, you know, And it's like that. I remember talking to Richie Blackmore in the seventies and just just saying to him, you know, how do we come up with everything? And he went, well, he said for me in the early days, he said, if there was a guitar player playing something that I couldn't play or wasn't playing, you know, like a riff or an idea for stuff, I'd make sure that I then knew that and it would become in my deeper recesses of my mind to be brought forward at some point. So you pick up from everybody, you learn from everybody. It's and now I'm as I'm a bit older, I've got dare I say this, I've got little cheats for everything, you know, because my fingers do not fly up the the threat board that often as quickly as it used to.
00:15:19
Speaker 2: Yeah. But can I ask, and it might be a difficult question, but the recognized guitarists, the legendary guitarists like let's say Clapton and Jimmy Page, how do you how do you compare to them?
00:15:32
Speaker 1: Do you do?
00:15:32
Speaker 2: You?
00:15:32
Speaker 1: Can you play like them. Well, there was a time when yes, I could, I.
00:15:37
Speaker 2: Could do that that, so it had to be instinctive. I mean, no one teaches you that.
00:15:43
Speaker 1: If you listen to our albums you will hear a different side to sweep. You know that there's always you know, the album tracks which you've got, you know, the band stretching out a bit and like long guitar solos and things things like that, things that I don't believe in now, because we're known for our hits. I was only ever given four eight bars maximum to do some guitar work. So I'm used to that, and I think that the audience appreciate the fact that we're not one of these bands that at the end of a song it'll go on for another five minutes with me trying to wreck the guitar. You know, it's not going to happen anymore. We play our hits pretty close to the original and there might be a little bit of diversion here and there, but the majority of it is you'll be able to recognize it, sing along with it, and anyway you get some more you can fit more songs into the set.
00:16:37
Speaker 2: So you're playing with your in a band with your brother, and how does Sweet come along? How does what's the what's the birth, what's the genesis of it?
00:16:48
Speaker 1: Well, the Elastic band split up when the singer got an offer from a band called The Love Affair. They had one big hit, Everlasting Love, and he got an offer to join them. I think it was about money as much is anything. So he left and my brother and I moved to London and got into a band that had had a minor hit record called The band was called Mayfield's Mule and the hit was Drinking My Moonshine. It was a bit like I don't know, dr hook, you know that? That that kind of thing called Creeden's clear Water, that kind of a band. And that band was only together for another six months before the leader of the band, Chris Mayfield, decided to move back to Wales and just live off his royalties. So Mike and I went. I was stuck in London and I went to an audition and Sweet was the band, and I'd already met them previously and when I walked in the room, we jammed a bit, and that from then onwards, I was a member of Sweet.
00:17:49
Speaker 2: So that was his original four. When you were Brian Connelly, Stave Price, Miktacker on you was that that the iteration of the band? Then? Yeah, can remember your first gig with them?
00:18:00
Speaker 1: Somebody did remind me, not not that long ago. It was in August or September, and it was a seaside resort and they had these like pavilions. You know. It might well have been something like Scarborough Pavilion or maybe somewhere in the east East Anglia, but you know it was you go up there in the van, you do the gig and you drive home in the van, you know, and if you had another gig, you'd sleep in the van.
00:18:29
Speaker 2: Andy Scott is my guest, folks. He's coming to town with Sweet on November the fifth of the theater back half from the break. Welcome back to conversations everybody. If you just tuned in, it's a great chat. Andy Scott the guitarist from Sweet and he's bringing Sweet to town in November. Talking about his early days growing up in Wrexham, picking up a guitar, learning to play bass and guitar and becoming a you know, an accomplished guitarist himself. He sort of skipped over that quite modestly, but anyway, this is the question probably you need to ants if you can. How were you discooed? We're a glam rock band, were how did you describe yourself in those early days.
00:19:07
Speaker 1: Well, we got the record deal, but we hadn't had the record out yet. The first single had a cross results and Nash kind of song that I wrote on the B side, And because it hadn't been released yet, we were still using other people's material, cover stuff like from led Zeppelin or Deep Purple or The Birds. Because we were a harmony band, you know, we could do a oh and we loved the Who, so we would do like a little medley of Who songs. We all love the hook, Yeah, And it was one of these And apparently Townsend sorts once and said something in an interview about there's an up and coming band that i've seen who you know really good? He said, in fact, it not knocked me out when they did a medley of my songs, you know, Sony. Anyway, were just cruising along, you know, playing to about in these boardrooms anything from five hundred, two hundred, five hundred, seven hundred people and no road manager at this time, and we put.
00:20:12
Speaker 2: The lighting in yourself and setting up yourself, are you Yeah?
00:20:16
Speaker 1: And we picked up a roadie from Warrington when we played with I think it might have been deep purple in this place in Warrington, and this guy was hanging around and and he said that do you need anybody you know? Because he was in a band, but he the band was splitting up, and we said we could do with somebody to do our pa and set set the gear up. And from then onwards he was driving the band and we were we were lounging about, you know.
00:20:49
Speaker 2: Did he get paid? Did you pay him?
00:20:51
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, But but quite frankly, he's one of my mates now. I still meet him. I still see him from time to.
00:20:58
Speaker 2: Time, raining his to the band. Initially you're doing other people's stuff, as you suggested. Then the Chiny Chap production And was that with the cause of some anngs to you because you had some pretty good stuff yourself at the record company wouldn't let you record? Am I right there? Or was that?
00:21:20
Speaker 1: Well, it wasn't the record company, it was the production company. Phil Weynman was the producer and Nicky and Mike were the were the songwriters. How it came together was Nikki bumped into Brian somewhere Nikki chin Yeah. Brian bumped into Phil Wayneman, the producer, and said, I've got these two songwriters written some really really poppy songs. I think your voice would be great on them. So Brian went along to a session recording recorded two or three of their songs, and one of them, Funny Funny, was was to be the first single. Now he lied to fill when he said, oh, the band's still together, because it would be great if we could get their backing vottles on the single, and Brian lied and said, yeah, yeah, the band's all right.
00:22:10
Speaker 2: But while they were looking for me, had you broken up?
00:22:15
Speaker 1: No, no, no, there was another guitar player before me who had left, and Brian Steven, Mick, Steve Priest and Mick Tucker went into the studio and did the backing votles and the first thing that Phil said, Oh, I'm glad you didn't bring the other guy because I've never liked him, and then oh great, you know, so so they found me and then that was that we started to involve because we were doing so many of the Chinny Chap demos for them. When the first album came out, it was full of their songs with only two or three of our songs, So we started to change the sets slightly to accommodate a mixture of things because you can't complete pull the audience in a heavy rock way, you know, because they used to seeing us perform songs like Funny Funny and Cocoa and you know, stuff like that. But it wasn't until a Little Willy and Wigwam Bam where we were having a bit more say and starting to say we don't want to record just pure pop songs anymore. We want want some kind of rock and roll meet in there.
00:23:24
Speaker 2: We'll end this interview a little Willy, Yeah. I really like it was. It's got a higher ridge. But they were also using session muso. It's rather than you initially were they not? Did that put you off? Did you annoyed that.
00:23:41
Speaker 1: We were all entering our twenties. I was only twenty twenty one, Brian was twenty four, I think, And because we were at that age, it's not a matter of sticking up totally for your values. You see an opportunity that might propel you forwards, and that was the opportunity for us. With both hands. We knew what we were doing but there was always this thought in our heads, we're going to change this, because if we don't, this will be our only success. It'll be these silly, little nursery rhyme pop songs. And it wasn't, as I said, It wasn't until Little William Wig went back, where there was a bit of comedy, nuance, double entoundre in the songs where we started to feel things are changing in the right direction. And then, of course after seventy three, when Nicky and Mike moved to America, we got our chance with Fox on the Run, which I produced and wrote, and we were away with our own material.
00:24:42
Speaker 2: Then it's amazing that's still played. Most of your music's still the good stuff was still played. But I did see an interview where you were asked what sort of money you were making, and that you'd done two hundred and fifty gigs in the year, but you had no idea of where the money with. Is that true? In those early days, you're exploited.
00:25:04
Speaker 1: I don't know about exploited, but I think we had We kind of waged ourselves and we'd all boat houses and think things like that, and we realized that as always inflation, what we'd waged ourselves at was never going to be enough, you know, and the last thing we wanted to be seen to be doing is struggling. So we had to basically say we need more. And when the accountants kind of explained that there wasn't really a lot more because we'd been buying some equipment and we've been doing this that and the other tax had taken stuff, I remember thinking to myself, what the hell you know? I think it was seventy four, you know. And then we never really had a manager best for it that way, but the managers that we had were not what I would call the right thinking managers. We did have a business manager towards the end who was trying to help a bit more, but the other managers that we've had getting involved with the tours and stuff like that. We went to America in seventy six and did a headline tour and loads of other infills with major bands. We were paid advances from the record company and from our publishing, which is henous, unheard of, and all that money went into our touring.
00:26:26
Speaker 2: So you can't have me nothing.
00:26:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know, we're trying to build and stay in decent hotels. But for God's sake, there's going to be somebody budgeting here, you know. And it was kind of no, No, it's going to be all right down the road, you know, next year, you know. And I remember coming back from America and thinking, I don't know whether I want to go back there, you know. Yeah, yeah, I mean the audiences are great and the you know, and now we have this slight problem where everybody knows the songs, but they don't remember the band, you know. Really, yeah, you feel like that a little bit.
00:27:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, did there come a time whether the funds did start to flow from your from your writing and your touring, and because the touring is about the only way you can really make money these.
00:27:15
Speaker 1: Days, I think, well nowadays, Back then we were selling millions of records but not earning anything from the tours. You know. It was ticket prices. I look back. We did the Hammersmith Audience in London, which is one of the bigger venues, in nineteen seventy eight, and the ticket price was four pounds fifty.
00:27:35
Speaker 2: The price of tickets to concerts these days.
00:27:38
Speaker 1: Is four and fifty quid now, isn't it?
00:27:41
Speaker 2: Actually? Do you know what what do you change these days for your for your well, ticket price, your ticket price, your especial meet and greet, they come and meet you at the back and all that.
00:27:51
Speaker 1: We used to do that. Now I think our ticket price is anything from probably seventy five to one hundred euros, but it depends on the size of the venues. Sometimes we do what we call a club tour club notes, and then the ticket place will be down at something like fifty or sixty euros, and because it's a club, they may well get to meet us afterwards.
00:28:12
Speaker 2: You know, my guest tonight is I said tonight because we're recording it that night. Andy Scott is in England. We're here in Adelaide. He'll be in Adelaide on November the fifth with Sweet. All that music, that great music, some of which you've heard and some of which you will go out with back after the break. Andy Scott is with me on conversations, the guitarist in Sweet, and he's still doing it, still playing Sweets music. It's hard not to not deliberate on It's hard not to know when you look at the history of the band, and hard not to be impacted by the tragedy of the band. And you're the last surviving member. What's it been like for you as slowly they you know, your mates have passed away.
00:29:01
Speaker 1: Being in a band like three, it was like being married. Remember, you know we were in our in all our own pockets. You know, we did a lot together. There wasn't the only time that you had on tour was when you get to your room, basically, and some of us spent our time a little bit more wisely than others. See. The tragedy of Brian is that I only came up with this not that long ago. I was thinking, why did he? I mean, we all liked a little bit of a drink, but not you know, to be drunk all the time. Why did Brian turn to alcohol? And when I first got involved with Sweet, Brian was the guy. He would rent the van, he'd probably drive it. He'd he'd get the gigs together, he'd speak to the agent and then we met you know, the the production team. And somebody is saying, you don't need to do that anymore, Brian. You know, we've got we've got an agent. Now we've we've got somebody who who Yeah, the van will will be fine, or we'll have a banded car. Limousine that that will drive you everywhere. So he's got nothing to do other than be the lead singer of the suite.
00:30:12
Speaker 2: And I had he had a unique voice too, And yeah, that was impact on he was he was assaulted one which impacted on his vocals. Two.
00:30:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, there was that. We'd been invited as well to play with The Who at a football stadium in London. Uh And he was out and about in his Mercedes car, parked it outside a bit of a dodgy back room of a pub with the after hours club, and he went in there and I think that he got on a few people's nerves when he went outside. One of them is jumping up and down on the bonnet of his car, so he went to grab him and somebody hit him from behind and then the boot went in and we ended up in hospital. And I remember going to see him and he could hardly speak. And I'm afraid that the other three of us said when we were leaving, well, I suppose the Whose gigs off then, because it was only in a coup couple of weeks, you know, you know the dark humor of it all, you know, isn't it. Yeah? And I just thought, well, you know, that's it, And it's true. His voice was never quite the same afterwards. He had a bit more rasp to his voice, which kind of suited the things that we were writing, you know, the more hard rop things. But every time we wanted, the best vocal I got out of him in the studio was Love is like oxygen. The verses, because I'd already recorded the choruses and all the other bits that went with it, and we needed Brian to sing the verse. You know, that's the sweet voice. And he came in one morning and I said to the tour manager, bring him in the morning, no drinking, nothing, and he not it off in about half an hour. And I remember thinking to myself and they see, if it was like this forever, we'd be all right. But of course, the first thing he's going to do when he leaves the studio, he's got to a pub, you know.
00:32:12
Speaker 2: So let's just let's just Brian Connolly with piano and his own voice. Yeah, is there a genius thing? What's there a genius there?
00:32:21
Speaker 1: Do you think? Well, he stuck to my demo. He'd obviously listened to it, and in that one moment of blatant fabulous coherencey. He nailed it, you know, and it was fantastic.
00:32:37
Speaker 2: It all comes to an end at some stage, doesn't it. Like people die, they go the movement. The dynamics of bands always intrigued me. When when did the income for you guys?
00:32:49
Speaker 1: Well, remember, we're damned if we do and we're damned if we don't. When Brian left the band in nineteen seventy nine, So whether he leaves or whether he stays, it's not going to be a win situation because with him and his voice and the way the way things were, he could not stay. Everybody realized that. But then if he leaves, the dynamic of the band changes drastically, and I wanted to put another singer in there. In fact, I'd spoken to Ronnie James Dio as a possible you know, and changing the style completely and moving into another direction. And it had to be all three of us that agreed to this. Steve Priest said, no, I want, he said, you and I can carry on being vocalists here because there were there were a number of shows where Brian was too drunk to appear and we would go on stage with just the keyboard player and the three of us and do the gig, you know, without without Brian, and you know, it happens, and Brian and Steve obviously thought, yeah, we we can do this. It was blatantly obvious by the time we were doing the second album without Brian that it wasn't going down the right way. In the meantime, Steve had also met an American girl and wanted to move to America, and he was kind of saying things like we should all go and live in America. And I thought, I'm not going to live in America. You know, they have guns over there, mate, you know, you know, I just want to be my own person, and you know I'm British. You know. By nineteen eighty one he had fully integrated, and by eighty two he fully moved over to America. And that put a little bit of a dampner on how the dynamic of the band was going to continue.
00:34:39
Speaker 2: What was the aedulation of the female fans like in those days? Can you visit that without any sense of embarrassment or guilt?
00:34:50
Speaker 1: No, it was. It was ridiculous, especially in places like Sweden. We we got a tour bus that moved right up to the doorway of the Grand hotel in Stockholm. We didn't realize that this was like a rubber mat on springs. So when the when the bus pulled right up to let us out so we could rush straight into the hotel through the doors, it fell into the the area below, so the door and the bus is now stuck. It can't move. We rushed in. But not only that, we told the hotel to just close the door when when you know, when we when we come in, they they thought, oh, that'd be all right, and about one hundred girls squeezed down the side of the bus and came in after us. So the lobby was complete chaos. And not only that. That night the King of Sweden was hosting a dinner in their ballroom area for some diplomats and he had to go into that room through the kitchens. You know. We sorry, you can't pull up in the front of the building. And we got banned from the hotel after that.
00:36:03
Speaker 2: What was it? Your photo wasn't your vault.
00:36:06
Speaker 1: It was a bus drivers but but we did tell him get as close as you can, you know.
00:36:11
Speaker 2: So there's a tragedy. The other three guys, Brian, Steve and Mick past does where does it leave you. What have you been doing for those last twenty odd years? Have you been all touring all the time.
00:36:25
Speaker 1: Well, there was a time when Mick fell ill in the nineties and I thought, I don't know whether I want to carry on, and my agent, the record company we were signed to in Germany the band all said well, if he comes back from this, he could he could rejoin, you know, and there is a possibility. But then it developed into leukemia, so he was never going to come back because back then it was the kind of leukemia with He said, if he has a bone marrow transplant, I'll give him five years, you know, And it was five years that he had. After that, he and I hadn't quite fallen out as such, but he was basically obviously like you would if you're going to carry on. Well, I changed the name of the band to Andy Scott's Sweet, not Sweet So, but because at that time, rightly or wrongly, Brian was had been doing some gigs under the name Brian Connolly's Sweet, so it was it was all getting too mixed up. This is why I thought I thought about doing something different. But then it all picked up again and we were recording under the name Andy Scott's Sweet. We were doing TV shows, we were you know, it was like it always was, and and then Brian felt really ill in ninety seven. In ninety six, I was doing a tour of Britain and his backing band of musicians were going out and doing some gigs without him, and I heard about this, so I rang him up and he said, there's nothing I can do about it. I said, there is, Brian. You need to get somebody around you to go and stop those people anyway. I said, there's one way we can do this. I was doing a tour in December of about eight gigs, maybe six or eight gigs, and I said, why don't you come along and get on stage with us for the last half an hour. The audience will go nuts. And he said yeah. But then he fell ill around Christmas, and I thought thought to myself, And by the beginning of the following year he was in hospital and he died, which was terrible. And then then then the musicians carried on after he died.
00:38:37
Speaker 2: It's an amazing journey, Andy, I can't believe. I can't believe you're still doing it and the music still sounds great, and we're going to go out with Little Willy, which not one that I really knew, but it's a good rocking song. We'll just give people a taste of what they can. We'll help you do it at the seventh Theater.
00:38:58
Speaker 1: On we do everything from nineteen jeen seventy through just twenty twenty six.
00:39:03
Speaker 2: Well done. This is Sweet Little Willy and Andy Scott's Sweet will be appearing at the thebin And Theater on November the fifth. Great to chat Andy, thanks so much your time.
00:39:12
Speaker 1: That's all right, lovely to talk to you mate.
00:39:15
Speaker 2: It's a Sweet Little Willy and as I said before, Andy Scott and the Sweet will be here at the Thebdon Theater on November the fifth. Thanks so much for joining us, folks.
Speaker 1: Hi, des Andy's got from the Sweet and you're listening to Cornsey on Adelaide five double A.
00:00:06
Speaker 2: Well you know that song, folks, it's it's very famous. The band is called Sweet and Andy Scott is still touring with Sweet and he'll be here on November the fifth at the theb And Theater. We're speaking to him in wheel chair more places at the moment, Donald Zoom blink, Andy Scott, how are you? Thank you for joining us?
00:00:26
Speaker 1: Well, I'm all right. We're getting some Australian weather over here, as you can see. I'm well, not completely but when the hot weather's out, I think newsreaders around the world are sat in their jockey pants, you know, their boxers and you know, with a shirt on the top. So I'm the other way around. I'm sat in my shorts.
00:00:48
Speaker 2: You live in wheel Cheir, do you, Yeah.
00:00:50
Speaker 1: I'm famous for its Stonehenge and other odds and sods. It's the group one of the greenest counties in the UK. Gets a little bit of mixed weather.
00:01:00
Speaker 2: And he is seventy seven. You're a huge hit Sweet, big stars in the seventies. Did you ever think you'd still be doing it?
00:01:09
Speaker 1: Well, the quick answer is no. I used to know quite a few footballers back in the day, and we all felt we had the same kind of career ten years, if you're lucky, ten years. Sometimes footballers would go into their thirties, and sometimes certain musicians would go into their thirties, but very rarely did you have other than a jazz musician or a folk musician or somebody in a kind of variety act. You never normally went beyond thirty because in pop music and rock music you would be considered there's another one coming along with blonde with blonde hair, you know what I mean. But then I don't know what happened. It kind of got turned on its head. I think Europe picked up on it before the UK. They started to have what they called Oldie Knights, kind of nostalgia nights, and they'd have on there like the Hollies and the Tremelos and the Searchers, and they went down a storm. So then the next the next era is obviously the seventies and Slade and Sweet, and we started to do a few of those, but we realized it's not a career move, you know, it's it's very much of the era. You know. They wanted to hear your hits. And then when the band we're back together full steam in the late eighties, we made an album, we did some live recordings, somebody we had a live video app and all of a sudden I realized that the suite had a following all over the world. In fact, the first place that we came back when we reformed, the first place that we came back to was Australia and we had such a fantastic time.
00:02:47
Speaker 2: Well, the songs, the songs are so identifiable. I mean, you know we know the words to them, but can I can I go back? I'm always interested in the formative years. You're born in Wrexham in now you mentioned football. Have you followed the have you followed the journey of the rex And Football Club with Ryan Reynolds?
00:03:08
Speaker 1: And yeah, as soon as I came out of the womb, I was a Rexham supporter. I think my dad put a red scarf around me.
00:03:16
Speaker 2: And how did you think when these two Hollywood stars we bought the team and what was the feeling like then?
00:03:26
Speaker 1: Well, I had been a fundraiser for the club prior to their involvement back in the early seventies, when things were really going wrong. They got a very how can I put it, wilful guy who took over the club, and he wanted to sell the ground for real estate. And then he had this big idea about building a stadium between Wrexham and Chester now Chester are an English club and Rexham are a Welsh club, and getting the two teams. One week Chester played there, one week Wrexham played there and that was batted as far out of the ground as you can imagine. And then I was doing some gigs and you know, doing fundraisers to just basically keep the team together. I was sponsoring players. It was a bad time. And then the supporters, God bless them, the Supporters Trust put together a scheme where you put whatever you can in and you buy a brick. It's like buying a brick for a wall. And they raised enough money to grab the ground out of beings being sold, and they also took over the kind of running of the club that they had some very special people who came in and did it on a voluntary basis, but because of what had gone on before to keep the ground safe, it was under the stewardship of the university next door, which was a good thing because it joined all the real estate of that up. You have to have this build up. And then, of course I heard about it because I knew the CEO and I used to go in the boardroom a lot. And then he said, we've had this. He said, I can't talk about it, but he said, I will tell you. We've had this offer for something to buy the club for two or three million. And I went, well, that that's going to be handy, isn't it. And but I said, as long as they're not from some nefarious Eastern European country or Middle Eastern conglomerate or god forbid. I then said the words god forbid Americans, you know, who know nothing about football and anyway, he then told me who it was, and I went, oh, okay, But he said the meetings that they've had have been so so good, and they had and in between a guy. I've still not met them. I will tell you this, Robin Ryan. No, and I don't get to the home games as often as I used to, but they have been there when i've been there, and I've spoken to their film crew and they said, oh, we must interview you, but it never happens. And and I'm not going to push for that because what they're doing is right, is really really good, and we know, I just have to get it one right. We missed out, you know, on promotion to the Premiership by one point that this this.
00:06:09
Speaker 2: Year premierships that's the yeah.
00:06:13
Speaker 1: The first division. Yeah yeah, I'm whearing, I'm wearing the second division now the championship. So we we missed out on one point, and that is ridiculous, you know, after everything that we were in the top six for the majority of the second half of the season and to just miss out like that, you know, what was it?
00:06:32
Speaker 2: What was the journey like there for those you know that they the television series told it as it was the just the average footy supporter.
00:06:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, like, well, you see, I think I think that that's kind of the right way that they don't want to start with people like me. But they do have a couple of journalists that I know in there, and they have, you know, a couple of guys. They haven't spoke SPOTM to two any ex players other than people like Mickey Thomas and of course Joey Jones died last year, which was a big thing for the club because he he was like the Wrexham star, you know, was he you No, he was about my age, you know.
00:07:18
Speaker 2: Like he's a legend of the class.
00:07:20
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely, and he played for Chelsea and Liverpool and being a Welsh he had I don't know whether he's the most capped Welshman, but he's close, you know, he's anyway there we are, So yeah, it's a fantastic thing, it really is.
00:07:36
Speaker 2: What was Rexham like to grow up because they have formative years.
00:07:41
Speaker 1: Well, we're a spillover from Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, probably closer to Liverpool than anybody. We had an ancient city just up the road in Chester. So Chester was like the for want of a better word, the snobby, you know city and Wrexham was the was the poor relation just down the road on the River Dee. And I mean, look, I had a fantastic growing up. I wanted for nothing, did what was well. He was a part time footballer at one point. He's done virtually everything. He was just too young to go and he really wanted to. My granddad used to tell me God, he did he want to go out and fight, you know, for Britain. But he was something like fourteen or fifteen and when the war ended he joined up and did did some national service. He also worked on the trains. He was like the the do everything guy on when he was a teenager on the on the train station. And then he had a myriad of jobs. And at one point when he first because he played for his army division of all things, he got signed up by Chester. You know the other team is a part of time. Yeah, he didn't tell anybody though.
00:09:01
Speaker 2: Andy Scott is my guest, famous from playing with Sweet and he's bringing Andy Scott's Sweet to ad Laid on the fifth of November at the Theban and Theater back shortly, folks, my guest on conversations tonight. I say tonight because we're recording it tonight by zoom. Andy Scott from Sweet. He's in wieltchair and he's bringing Sweet to town with all those great songs that are so enduring. But we're talking about it. He's growing up in a little place called Wrexham in Wales. So what was your childhood like? Sounds like you're inspired to be a footballer first and rather than a guitarist.
00:09:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, there wasn't a time when me and my brothers didn't have a ball at our feet, you know, kicking it around the place, which to annoy the neighbors. We had a garage that was around the back of the house and the door was alongside the door way of the next door neighbors garage as well, so kicking a ball against the garage once in a while, I'd have an neighbor come out and go, I think it's time to stop that now, Andrew, you know, and then I'd sulk and go into the garden. But there was more space in front of the garage, and then I'd be kicking it about ten feet away from the book, from the wall in the in in our own garden. But the truth was, my brother, my younger brother, was always going to be the footballer from you know, from the age of five you could see you could kick and trap a ball, and you know, he had some talent, and he ended up playing for quite a few of the local teams and never quite made it into the you know, getting signed by any of the academies. But then he's like that, you know, he he he had a job and he just wanted to play. And my dad and I used to go and see him on a Sunday morning sometimes and he would be fantastic. Nobody would get past him. He was good with the ball, you know. And and I think think it was a missed opportunity. You know, Wrexham should have signed him.
00:11:00
Speaker 2: When did you pick up a guitar? And was it an ambition? When we had driven to do it?
00:11:07
Speaker 1: Well? My brother and I went to see I've Got a step brother, and we went to see a film with Cliffridge and the Shadows that the Young Ones, and there's these guys in the background swaying and dancing with their guitars, and I went, I want to do that, and my brother said, yeah, same here. So we're not a friend of my dad's was a guitar player and he left an acoustic guitar at the house saying, I wonder whether the lads would like to have this try it out? And my brother picked it up first and he got on with it really well, and I was having a little bit of trouble, and then he got into At the age of fourteen, he was asked by a guy that my dad worked with, you know, we need a bass player. How's your Michael, And he said, oh, I'll ask him, and he asked him and that he went along to some rehearsals and they needed a bass player, which has only got four strings, which was easy, supposedly.
00:12:02
Speaker 2: And very important. It's very important th the bass player, of.
00:12:05
Speaker 1: Course it is. And anyway, he got in this band, and now the acoustic guitar was left for me, and I'd been messing around with it anyway. And then I spoke to some of the guys in school we were forming bands and all this stuff. And then I got into a band that was well, could play a bit, really play a bit, and they needed it. We all have with guitarists. But they said we need a bass player. So I talked my dad into getting me a bass and an AMP and we were off. I was a bass player for a couple of years. And then the band I was in supported Jimi Hendrix on his first tour in nineteen sixty seven and I looked at that three people on stage and we were a band of six people, you know, with the saxes and stuff, and I thought, I said to my singer, I said, this is the future, you know, not what we're doing. And he said yeah, he said, I'm with you with that. And he could play Hammond organ and flute. So we formed this prog rock band called the Elastic Band, and we were we were off, you know, and we started to do television and a lot of other things.
00:13:15
Speaker 2: Did you swip from bass to the guitar? Guitar?
00:13:19
Speaker 1: But then my brother came into the Elastic Band as a bass player, but he could play sax, and whenever he was playing sax, I would play the bass. So it was quite an interesting unit. You know.
00:13:32
Speaker 2: You do that so dismissively. Then who taught you and how did you learn? And how hard well? Or do you have the inherent music instinct?
00:13:42
Speaker 1: I think there's a bit of instinct. But the guy called Bert Whedon, who was a guitarist, who had his little booklet for for guitar players called play in a Day. I still got mine. It's it's a bit rough around the edges, but these Playing a Day books, everybody had one, and it taught you. It gives you little cheats as to how to change chords quickly without moving too many fingers in the beginning. And then then of course once you're on your way, you kind of pick up you see somebody playing a chord that you would normally play up up the neck, and they're playing it down here somehow, and you think I need to learn that one, you know, And it's like that. I remember talking to Richie Blackmore in the seventies and just just saying to him, you know, how do we come up with everything? And he went, well, he said for me in the early days, he said, if there was a guitar player playing something that I couldn't play or wasn't playing, you know, like a riff or an idea for stuff, I'd make sure that I then knew that and it would become in my deeper recesses of my mind to be brought forward at some point. So you pick up from everybody, you learn from everybody. It's and now I'm as I'm a bit older, I've got dare I say this, I've got little cheats for everything, you know, because my fingers do not fly up the the threat board that often as quickly as it used to.
00:15:19
Speaker 2: Yeah. But can I ask, and it might be a difficult question, but the recognized guitarists, the legendary guitarists like let's say Clapton and Jimmy Page, how do you how do you compare to them?
00:15:32
Speaker 1: Do you do?
00:15:32
Speaker 2: You?
00:15:32
Speaker 1: Can you play like them. Well, there was a time when yes, I could, I.
00:15:37
Speaker 2: Could do that that, so it had to be instinctive. I mean, no one teaches you that.
00:15:43
Speaker 1: If you listen to our albums you will hear a different side to sweep. You know that there's always you know, the album tracks which you've got, you know, the band stretching out a bit and like long guitar solos and things things like that, things that I don't believe in now, because we're known for our hits. I was only ever given four eight bars maximum to do some guitar work. So I'm used to that, and I think that the audience appreciate the fact that we're not one of these bands that at the end of a song it'll go on for another five minutes with me trying to wreck the guitar. You know, it's not going to happen anymore. We play our hits pretty close to the original and there might be a little bit of diversion here and there, but the majority of it is you'll be able to recognize it, sing along with it, and anyway you get some more you can fit more songs into the set.
00:16:37
Speaker 2: So you're playing with your in a band with your brother, and how does Sweet come along? How does what's the what's the birth, what's the genesis of it?
00:16:48
Speaker 1: Well, the Elastic band split up when the singer got an offer from a band called The Love Affair. They had one big hit, Everlasting Love, and he got an offer to join them. I think it was about money as much is anything. So he left and my brother and I moved to London and got into a band that had had a minor hit record called The band was called Mayfield's Mule and the hit was Drinking My Moonshine. It was a bit like I don't know, dr hook, you know that? That that kind of thing called Creeden's clear Water, that kind of a band. And that band was only together for another six months before the leader of the band, Chris Mayfield, decided to move back to Wales and just live off his royalties. So Mike and I went. I was stuck in London and I went to an audition and Sweet was the band, and I'd already met them previously and when I walked in the room, we jammed a bit, and that from then onwards, I was a member of Sweet.
00:17:49
Speaker 2: So that was his original four. When you were Brian Connelly, Stave Price, Miktacker on you was that that the iteration of the band? Then? Yeah, can remember your first gig with them?
00:18:00
Speaker 1: Somebody did remind me, not not that long ago. It was in August or September, and it was a seaside resort and they had these like pavilions. You know. It might well have been something like Scarborough Pavilion or maybe somewhere in the east East Anglia, but you know it was you go up there in the van, you do the gig and you drive home in the van, you know, and if you had another gig, you'd sleep in the van.
00:18:29
Speaker 2: Andy Scott is my guest, folks. He's coming to town with Sweet on November the fifth of the theater back half from the break. Welcome back to conversations everybody. If you just tuned in, it's a great chat. Andy Scott the guitarist from Sweet and he's bringing Sweet to town in November. Talking about his early days growing up in Wrexham, picking up a guitar, learning to play bass and guitar and becoming a you know, an accomplished guitarist himself. He sort of skipped over that quite modestly, but anyway, this is the question probably you need to ants if you can. How were you discooed? We're a glam rock band, were how did you describe yourself in those early days.
00:19:07
Speaker 1: Well, we got the record deal, but we hadn't had the record out yet. The first single had a cross results and Nash kind of song that I wrote on the B side, And because it hadn't been released yet, we were still using other people's material, cover stuff like from led Zeppelin or Deep Purple or The Birds. Because we were a harmony band, you know, we could do a oh and we loved the Who, so we would do like a little medley of Who songs. We all love the hook, Yeah, And it was one of these And apparently Townsend sorts once and said something in an interview about there's an up and coming band that i've seen who you know really good? He said, in fact, it not knocked me out when they did a medley of my songs, you know, Sony. Anyway, were just cruising along, you know, playing to about in these boardrooms anything from five hundred, two hundred, five hundred, seven hundred people and no road manager at this time, and we put.
00:20:12
Speaker 2: The lighting in yourself and setting up yourself, are you Yeah?
00:20:16
Speaker 1: And we picked up a roadie from Warrington when we played with I think it might have been deep purple in this place in Warrington, and this guy was hanging around and and he said that do you need anybody you know? Because he was in a band, but he the band was splitting up, and we said we could do with somebody to do our pa and set set the gear up. And from then onwards he was driving the band and we were we were lounging about, you know.
00:20:49
Speaker 2: Did he get paid? Did you pay him?
00:20:51
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, But but quite frankly, he's one of my mates now. I still meet him. I still see him from time to.
00:20:58
Speaker 2: Time, raining his to the band. Initially you're doing other people's stuff, as you suggested. Then the Chiny Chap production And was that with the cause of some anngs to you because you had some pretty good stuff yourself at the record company wouldn't let you record? Am I right there? Or was that?
00:21:20
Speaker 1: Well, it wasn't the record company, it was the production company. Phil Weynman was the producer and Nicky and Mike were the were the songwriters. How it came together was Nikki bumped into Brian somewhere Nikki chin Yeah. Brian bumped into Phil Wayneman, the producer, and said, I've got these two songwriters written some really really poppy songs. I think your voice would be great on them. So Brian went along to a session recording recorded two or three of their songs, and one of them, Funny Funny, was was to be the first single. Now he lied to fill when he said, oh, the band's still together, because it would be great if we could get their backing vottles on the single, and Brian lied and said, yeah, yeah, the band's all right.
00:22:10
Speaker 2: But while they were looking for me, had you broken up?
00:22:15
Speaker 1: No, no, no, there was another guitar player before me who had left, and Brian Steven, Mick, Steve Priest and Mick Tucker went into the studio and did the backing votles and the first thing that Phil said, Oh, I'm glad you didn't bring the other guy because I've never liked him, and then oh great, you know, so so they found me and then that was that we started to involve because we were doing so many of the Chinny Chap demos for them. When the first album came out, it was full of their songs with only two or three of our songs, So we started to change the sets slightly to accommodate a mixture of things because you can't complete pull the audience in a heavy rock way, you know, because they used to seeing us perform songs like Funny Funny and Cocoa and you know, stuff like that. But it wasn't until a Little Willy and Wigwam Bam where we were having a bit more say and starting to say we don't want to record just pure pop songs anymore. We want want some kind of rock and roll meet in there.
00:23:24
Speaker 2: We'll end this interview a little Willy, Yeah. I really like it was. It's got a higher ridge. But they were also using session muso. It's rather than you initially were they not? Did that put you off? Did you annoyed that.
00:23:41
Speaker 1: We were all entering our twenties. I was only twenty twenty one, Brian was twenty four, I think, And because we were at that age, it's not a matter of sticking up totally for your values. You see an opportunity that might propel you forwards, and that was the opportunity for us. With both hands. We knew what we were doing but there was always this thought in our heads, we're going to change this, because if we don't, this will be our only success. It'll be these silly, little nursery rhyme pop songs. And it wasn't, as I said, It wasn't until Little William Wig went back, where there was a bit of comedy, nuance, double entoundre in the songs where we started to feel things are changing in the right direction. And then, of course after seventy three, when Nicky and Mike moved to America, we got our chance with Fox on the Run, which I produced and wrote, and we were away with our own material.
00:24:42
Speaker 2: Then it's amazing that's still played. Most of your music's still the good stuff was still played. But I did see an interview where you were asked what sort of money you were making, and that you'd done two hundred and fifty gigs in the year, but you had no idea of where the money with. Is that true? In those early days, you're exploited.
00:25:04
Speaker 1: I don't know about exploited, but I think we had We kind of waged ourselves and we'd all boat houses and think things like that, and we realized that as always inflation, what we'd waged ourselves at was never going to be enough, you know, and the last thing we wanted to be seen to be doing is struggling. So we had to basically say we need more. And when the accountants kind of explained that there wasn't really a lot more because we'd been buying some equipment and we've been doing this that and the other tax had taken stuff, I remember thinking to myself, what the hell you know? I think it was seventy four, you know. And then we never really had a manager best for it that way, but the managers that we had were not what I would call the right thinking managers. We did have a business manager towards the end who was trying to help a bit more, but the other managers that we've had getting involved with the tours and stuff like that. We went to America in seventy six and did a headline tour and loads of other infills with major bands. We were paid advances from the record company and from our publishing, which is henous, unheard of, and all that money went into our touring.
00:26:26
Speaker 2: So you can't have me nothing.
00:26:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know, we're trying to build and stay in decent hotels. But for God's sake, there's going to be somebody budgeting here, you know. And it was kind of no, No, it's going to be all right down the road, you know, next year, you know. And I remember coming back from America and thinking, I don't know whether I want to go back there, you know. Yeah, yeah, I mean the audiences are great and the you know, and now we have this slight problem where everybody knows the songs, but they don't remember the band, you know. Really, yeah, you feel like that a little bit.
00:27:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, did there come a time whether the funds did start to flow from your from your writing and your touring, and because the touring is about the only way you can really make money these.
00:27:15
Speaker 1: Days, I think, well nowadays, Back then we were selling millions of records but not earning anything from the tours. You know. It was ticket prices. I look back. We did the Hammersmith Audience in London, which is one of the bigger venues, in nineteen seventy eight, and the ticket price was four pounds fifty.
00:27:35
Speaker 2: The price of tickets to concerts these days.
00:27:38
Speaker 1: Is four and fifty quid now, isn't it?
00:27:41
Speaker 2: Actually? Do you know what what do you change these days for your for your well, ticket price, your ticket price, your especial meet and greet, they come and meet you at the back and all that.
00:27:51
Speaker 1: We used to do that. Now I think our ticket price is anything from probably seventy five to one hundred euros, but it depends on the size of the venues. Sometimes we do what we call a club tour club notes, and then the ticket place will be down at something like fifty or sixty euros, and because it's a club, they may well get to meet us afterwards.
00:28:12
Speaker 2: You know, my guest tonight is I said tonight because we're recording it that night. Andy Scott is in England. We're here in Adelaide. He'll be in Adelaide on November the fifth with Sweet. All that music, that great music, some of which you've heard and some of which you will go out with back after the break. Andy Scott is with me on conversations, the guitarist in Sweet, and he's still doing it, still playing Sweets music. It's hard not to not deliberate on It's hard not to know when you look at the history of the band, and hard not to be impacted by the tragedy of the band. And you're the last surviving member. What's it been like for you as slowly they you know, your mates have passed away.
00:29:01
Speaker 1: Being in a band like three, it was like being married. Remember, you know we were in our in all our own pockets. You know, we did a lot together. There wasn't the only time that you had on tour was when you get to your room, basically, and some of us spent our time a little bit more wisely than others. See. The tragedy of Brian is that I only came up with this not that long ago. I was thinking, why did he? I mean, we all liked a little bit of a drink, but not you know, to be drunk all the time. Why did Brian turn to alcohol? And when I first got involved with Sweet, Brian was the guy. He would rent the van, he'd probably drive it. He'd he'd get the gigs together, he'd speak to the agent and then we met you know, the the production team. And somebody is saying, you don't need to do that anymore, Brian. You know, we've got we've got an agent. Now we've we've got somebody who who Yeah, the van will will be fine, or we'll have a banded car. Limousine that that will drive you everywhere. So he's got nothing to do other than be the lead singer of the suite.
00:30:12
Speaker 2: And I had he had a unique voice too, And yeah, that was impact on he was he was assaulted one which impacted on his vocals. Two.
00:30:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, there was that. We'd been invited as well to play with The Who at a football stadium in London. Uh And he was out and about in his Mercedes car, parked it outside a bit of a dodgy back room of a pub with the after hours club, and he went in there and I think that he got on a few people's nerves when he went outside. One of them is jumping up and down on the bonnet of his car, so he went to grab him and somebody hit him from behind and then the boot went in and we ended up in hospital. And I remember going to see him and he could hardly speak. And I'm afraid that the other three of us said when we were leaving, well, I suppose the Whose gigs off then, because it was only in a coup couple of weeks, you know, you know the dark humor of it all, you know, isn't it. Yeah? And I just thought, well, you know, that's it, And it's true. His voice was never quite the same afterwards. He had a bit more rasp to his voice, which kind of suited the things that we were writing, you know, the more hard rop things. But every time we wanted, the best vocal I got out of him in the studio was Love is like oxygen. The verses, because I'd already recorded the choruses and all the other bits that went with it, and we needed Brian to sing the verse. You know, that's the sweet voice. And he came in one morning and I said to the tour manager, bring him in the morning, no drinking, nothing, and he not it off in about half an hour. And I remember thinking to myself and they see, if it was like this forever, we'd be all right. But of course, the first thing he's going to do when he leaves the studio, he's got to a pub, you know.
00:32:12
Speaker 2: So let's just let's just Brian Connolly with piano and his own voice. Yeah, is there a genius thing? What's there a genius there?
00:32:21
Speaker 1: Do you think? Well, he stuck to my demo. He'd obviously listened to it, and in that one moment of blatant fabulous coherencey. He nailed it, you know, and it was fantastic.
00:32:37
Speaker 2: It all comes to an end at some stage, doesn't it. Like people die, they go the movement. The dynamics of bands always intrigued me. When when did the income for you guys?
00:32:49
Speaker 1: Well, remember, we're damned if we do and we're damned if we don't. When Brian left the band in nineteen seventy nine, So whether he leaves or whether he stays, it's not going to be a win situation because with him and his voice and the way the way things were, he could not stay. Everybody realized that. But then if he leaves, the dynamic of the band changes drastically, and I wanted to put another singer in there. In fact, I'd spoken to Ronnie James Dio as a possible you know, and changing the style completely and moving into another direction. And it had to be all three of us that agreed to this. Steve Priest said, no, I want, he said, you and I can carry on being vocalists here because there were there were a number of shows where Brian was too drunk to appear and we would go on stage with just the keyboard player and the three of us and do the gig, you know, without without Brian, and you know, it happens, and Brian and Steve obviously thought, yeah, we we can do this. It was blatantly obvious by the time we were doing the second album without Brian that it wasn't going down the right way. In the meantime, Steve had also met an American girl and wanted to move to America, and he was kind of saying things like we should all go and live in America. And I thought, I'm not going to live in America. You know, they have guns over there, mate, you know, you know, I just want to be my own person, and you know I'm British. You know. By nineteen eighty one he had fully integrated, and by eighty two he fully moved over to America. And that put a little bit of a dampner on how the dynamic of the band was going to continue.
00:34:39
Speaker 2: What was the aedulation of the female fans like in those days? Can you visit that without any sense of embarrassment or guilt?
00:34:50
Speaker 1: No, it was. It was ridiculous, especially in places like Sweden. We we got a tour bus that moved right up to the doorway of the Grand hotel in Stockholm. We didn't realize that this was like a rubber mat on springs. So when the when the bus pulled right up to let us out so we could rush straight into the hotel through the doors, it fell into the the area below, so the door and the bus is now stuck. It can't move. We rushed in. But not only that, we told the hotel to just close the door when when you know, when we when we come in, they they thought, oh, that'd be all right, and about one hundred girls squeezed down the side of the bus and came in after us. So the lobby was complete chaos. And not only that. That night the King of Sweden was hosting a dinner in their ballroom area for some diplomats and he had to go into that room through the kitchens. You know. We sorry, you can't pull up in the front of the building. And we got banned from the hotel after that.
00:36:03
Speaker 2: What was it? Your photo wasn't your vault.
00:36:06
Speaker 1: It was a bus drivers but but we did tell him get as close as you can, you know.
00:36:11
Speaker 2: So there's a tragedy. The other three guys, Brian, Steve and Mick past does where does it leave you. What have you been doing for those last twenty odd years? Have you been all touring all the time.
00:36:25
Speaker 1: Well, there was a time when Mick fell ill in the nineties and I thought, I don't know whether I want to carry on, and my agent, the record company we were signed to in Germany the band all said well, if he comes back from this, he could he could rejoin, you know, and there is a possibility. But then it developed into leukemia, so he was never going to come back because back then it was the kind of leukemia with He said, if he has a bone marrow transplant, I'll give him five years, you know, And it was five years that he had. After that, he and I hadn't quite fallen out as such, but he was basically obviously like you would if you're going to carry on. Well, I changed the name of the band to Andy Scott's Sweet, not Sweet So, but because at that time, rightly or wrongly, Brian was had been doing some gigs under the name Brian Connolly's Sweet, so it was it was all getting too mixed up. This is why I thought I thought about doing something different. But then it all picked up again and we were recording under the name Andy Scott's Sweet. We were doing TV shows, we were you know, it was like it always was, and and then Brian felt really ill in ninety seven. In ninety six, I was doing a tour of Britain and his backing band of musicians were going out and doing some gigs without him, and I heard about this, so I rang him up and he said, there's nothing I can do about it. I said, there is, Brian. You need to get somebody around you to go and stop those people anyway. I said, there's one way we can do this. I was doing a tour in December of about eight gigs, maybe six or eight gigs, and I said, why don't you come along and get on stage with us for the last half an hour. The audience will go nuts. And he said yeah. But then he fell ill around Christmas, and I thought thought to myself, And by the beginning of the following year he was in hospital and he died, which was terrible. And then then then the musicians carried on after he died.
00:38:37
Speaker 2: It's an amazing journey, Andy, I can't believe. I can't believe you're still doing it and the music still sounds great, and we're going to go out with Little Willy, which not one that I really knew, but it's a good rocking song. We'll just give people a taste of what they can. We'll help you do it at the seventh Theater.
00:38:58
Speaker 1: On we do everything from nineteen jeen seventy through just twenty twenty six.
00:39:03
Speaker 2: Well done. This is Sweet Little Willy and Andy Scott's Sweet will be appearing at the thebin And Theater on November the fifth. Great to chat Andy, thanks so much your time.
00:39:12
Speaker 1: That's all right, lovely to talk to you mate.
00:39:15
Speaker 2: It's a Sweet Little Willy and as I said before, Andy Scott and the Sweet will be here at the Thebdon Theater on November the fifth. Thanks so much for joining us, folks.
