And then, apart from one exception, it falls into sameyness and derivative mediocrity. My recent listening to this LP really brought me down before I worked out why. At first, I thought it must be how derivative I found it. There are lifts from Queen's stacked high backing vocals, wholesale pickings from recent Led Zep albums and so on. That adds to the punchy rock they were already playing but there's something else that I didn't know about when I was fourteen and hearing this the first time around.
Before that I have to confess that Sweet (sometimes THE Sweet) was the band that got me into rock music when I was thirteen. Huh? Yep, before that, it was classical and earlier for me. By classical, I don't just mean folks in tuxes playing bassoons, I mean the classical era: Mozart, Haydn, and back into the baroque and the renaissance and the middle ages and all the folk I could get from those times. When my sister tried a gateway dose she did it with Stairway to Heaven. I got as far as the end of the recorders and left the room. But then I turned thirteen.
High school in Townsville was not the best setting for Bach T-shirts. So, I started watching Countdown and listening to commercial radio after school. None of it surprised me but I liked how I could find the structure in it. It was ok. But then I saw Greg Jameson flirting with Lisa Preston while a group of girls came up and taunted them with the chorus of Fox on the Run. I kept hearing lines from it in conversation. I lay on the carpet of the rumpus room with the radio blasting, every other song and every commercial a massive irritant until, yes, finally, the big bashing chord with the synthesiser riff that gave way to the shouting vocal and then the big chorus. The implant was complete. Seriously, I knew the song by heart after one hearing (not difficult) and understood the queasy fun of its link to sex (well, sexual feelings).
It's always a big time in pop music and 1975 rolls into my memory as a huge flashing ball of shouts and thwacks. There's the civic construction scale of ABBA's choruses, the perky batch pad pop of Sherbert, the spiky satire of Skyhooks, the underage gig of Hush and the Ted Mulry Gang and a miasma of joyful mush. It became another source of the world, like TV, and prefectly sealed with Countdown, the most mercantile show about pop music on any Australian network (and it was on the ABC!). It felt like a bubble suit that kept the dickheads away from the trills and glissandi of my symphonies and concerti. And, by then, I liked it.
Later, from Sweet (remember them?) came Ballroom Blitz, a rerelease which I loved from the word go with its comedy voices and hard riffs. And then there was Action, rough and spiteful (we'll get to it later). By Christmas, the compilation Sweet Singles became the first rock record I ever bought.
Right, so, the year turns and the band releases its next banger, Lies in Your Eyes. The next album followed on behind and boy did I get it. Yes, the title was naughty when you changed that one letter and the cover art had a pair of eyes on it that became a wink when you moved the inner sleeve under the dies cut hole and the whole record winked. Most of the art was a painted brick wall in that '70s airbrushed commercial art style that wasn't Hipgnosis. And then I put it on. And it was ok.
After Lies in Your Eyes the band roll out a bunch o' others that all merge stylistically and are hard to tell apart after you've heard them. The lyrics say things like, "you crawled into my bed like a cockroach .... but I loooooove you!" and tell the other person that he's up to his balls inside her. You get the picture. That works fine for a straight teenager and, really, that might be enough to break out the nostalgia. But it isn't.
Yes, I grew out of cock rock machismo, never really having been in it. And musically, Sweet were a tight band with very solid playing and vocals. Andy Scott is a seriously good rock arranger of guitars whether it's sly quotes of famous riffs or very flashy licks. And Brian Connolly's voice is one of the finest melodic shouting sets of pipes from the era. He's note perfect and urgent but never overwrought or flamboyant. Perfect rock of its time. So why is it such a deflation?
Sweet were cast as a bubblegum outfit in the late '60s and fell under the guidance of Chinnichap, Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman who were the '70s equivalent of Mickie Most from the '60s or Stock Aitken and Waterman moving to the '80s. They chose songs that worked with the football chanters as well as the teenyboppers: crunchy and sugary in small delicious packages. The band itself had serious talent and wanted to break into writing their own material. And so they did. This is the first album composed entirely of their own work. Chinnichap didn't even produce.
Have you got it? The songs suck. Perfectly played riffaramas and barnstorming choruses with Andy Scott doing extra time on the guitar arrangements. But, just as he's good at those, he's a lousy lead player, never flying free from a kind of shy mumbling around the middle of the fretboard and then for far too long. The songs begin and end and are followed by others that do the same and sound the same. There are no statements beyond a kind of suburban older cool guy bravado, '70s Fonzie without the catchphrases.
Side two is enlivened with Action from the previous year but it's tarted up with a pretty synth intro. This spitting rocker about the music press and fame feels like a hit single the way that Lies in Your Eyes does. It's the opposite of what happened with Fox on the Run (on its album it's a grunty rocker but when the synths were added to the single mix it soared). And then it's just more. White Mice attempts the kind of metal band playing funk that Led Zeppelin had got into and the finale is a kind of tokenistic mystic East workout that had done it when Zep put Kashmir on their album from the previous year. Seven minutes of plodding and cod mystique and the record ends. At the time, I played it a lot, mostly for the guitar sounds. But now, it just saddens me and it bugged me as to why it should until I remembered something else from when I was thirteen.
One weekend afternoon in 1975, my sister came to tell me that Raymond had come over. Raymond Young was my best friend in grade 5. Bikes, wargames, running around. We'd already drifted at primary school by the time I left it and I think it was because his family moved and he went to a new school. But there he was two and a bit packed childhood years on. He asked me if I still made model aeroplanes. I told him no and asked what his favourite band was. The gaps between what he said and then what I said stretched into minutes. I was happy to see him but, as he himself understood, it was just too late. "I'd better go," he said, his eyes on the patio floor. I think I shrugged good naturedly and walked to the front gate with him. We waved to each other and he walked down the street. I wondered if he still made model aeroplanes and why. It felt like he hadn't visited me from his new house but from 1972.
Give Us a Wink is like that in the same way that A Day at The Races is not. Be it ever so campy and posturing, the Queen album scrubs up and blares out its goodness as though it had hit the shops last week. Sweet just didn't seem to know how to not be a loud, glittering bag of pop rocks. They lived on the Top 40, not in the stadium. A few more singles (more bangers) later, they faded from view, returning like too many others as a nostalgia act pretending to be a current force, with dwindling original membership so that you could see Brian Connolly's Sweet or Andy Scott's. I kept imagining them in those tiny boxed ads in the Townsville Daily Bulletin for restaurant venues that stipulated in the copy that only the smart casual types would be admitted. But the fans who had been both smart and casual had long abandoned them (though they would buy the kind of CD compilations of the Sexy Seventies with Sweet hits that you find in Op Shops now).
So, I was saddened to hear this record again. It made me think of when the spent Sherbert tried to '80s themselves up by renaming as The Sherbs or Skyhooks after Shirley left. Compare and contrast The Angels who had turned up as basic rockers who even starred in a movie that sounded so horrible (even then) that I was emabarrassed without ever seeing it. At some point, they cut their hair, learned how to palm mute overdirven guitars the way Sweet had dones so well, and kind of pretended they were a new punk band. That was when they became famous. And all the likes of Sweet could think to do was bring out their plastic Spitfires and Stukas and hope that worked. The laughter would have drowned them out. I couldn't raise a smile.
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