Heads turn as Andy Scott pushes through the saloon doors of The Barley Mow, a mane of long white hair trailing behind him. To commemorate the final album by Scott’s band Sweet, Classic Rock has brought the guitarist back to the pub in London’s Paddington frequented by the original group throughout the 70s. This is the watering hole in which Sweet came to relax over a pint or three following the recording of their biggest hits, including Hellraiser, Blockbuster! and The Ballroom Blitz. According to Sweet folklore, a section of Fox On The Run may even have been written within these walls.
Scott isn’t entirely sure whether he visited The Barley Mow since those heady days. “I may have done,” he says, grinning, “but that would be when I lived in London”, and the inference is clear. These days the Welsh guitarist – who in June 2024 celebrated his 75th birthday with an event in Portmeirion surrounded by fans who have adored him for decades – resides more peacefully in the West Country, with wife Jane and their dog Ted.
Strictly speaking, Scott isn’t a Sweet original (the hitmakers were called The Sweet until ’74), having become their third lead guitarist in 1970. More than half a century on, following the deaths of blond bombshell frontman Brian Connolly in 1997, drummer Mick Tucker in 2002 and bassist Steve Priest four years ago, Scott became the last man standing from the group that found super-stardom during the era of glam rock. That fact weighs heavy on his mind, and although relations between band members were tempestuous at times – Sweet reluctantly sacked Connolly in 1979, when he was gripped by the alcoholism that eventually claimed his life, then continued as a three-piece – absent friends are never too far from Scott’s thoughts or words.
Having fought testicular cancer for 15 years, Scott is very much in touch with his own mortality, and is determined to enjoy the years he has left as both a musician and a human being. For now, with a half-pint of bitter in hand, a nostalgic Scott is enjoying being back at The Barley Mow, close to where back in the day, Sweet became fixtures at Audio International Studios in Rodmarten Street.
“With the singles, we’d get everything done in one day, including B-sides, before heading over here,” he remembers. “The first was probably Poppa Joe [a UK No.11 in 1972], though we didn’t play on that one.”
At the beginning, with external songwriters Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn (aka Chinnichap, whose roster also included Suzi Quatro and Mud) and producer Phil Wainman insisting that the early Sweet records were done by session players, only Connolly’s voice was on them. “Our first session [as players] was Little Willy,” he continues, referring to a No.4 from that same year.
Transporting Scott back in time to the 70s, which Sweet member would have been the first to the bar?
“Steve would not have been buying a round, I can tell you that now,” he says, smiling. “Mick or myself would have been in the chair. If our tour manager was around, drinks would have been on the band.”
Who would have been chatting up the barmaid?
“Take a guess,” he demands, grinning. “It wasn’t me.”
Then as the lead singer it had to be Brian.
“No. It was Mick. On the Sweet Fanny Adams album Mick wanted a dedication to ‘the barmaid at the Barley Mow’. Check it, it’s there.” (He isn’t lying).
Amazingly, Sweet sometimes tumbled out of Audio International and into the boozer wearing outlandish clobber similar to what they wore on Top Of The Pops.
“The ridiculous thing is that we used to show up at recording sessions dressed up to the nines – well, Mick and I did,” Scott recalls with a twinge of embarrassment. “Steve tended to dress down, and Brian often wore a jacket with matching trousers, but Mick and I would be there in our long leather coats, or in the winter it would be fur coats.”
With millions watching Top Of The Pops every Thursday evening, the usual suspects – Sweet, Slade, Bolan, Bowie – seemed to take turns to elevate things to the next extreme. Few will forget that on the TOTP Christmas special in 1973, Priest astonished viewers when they borrowed a Nazi uniform, complete with Hitler ’tache and Swastika armband, from the Beeb’s props department.
Asked how it felt to have the most popular single in the country, even for just a week (Blockbuster was Sweet’s sole UK chart topper, holding off their RCA labelmate Bowie’s similar-sounding The Jean Genie at No.2), Scott momentarily turns misty-eyed.
“It’s fantastic, the absolute zenith of all you’ve worked for,” he says proudly. “Nowadays it’s difficult to find out who is number one in the chart, and if you do, chances are you won’t know who they are anyway.”
It was Marc Bolan who fuelled Sweet’s glam bug, advising them where they could source the most outlandish costumes. The band members endured cramped feet until Scott found a cobbler willing to make women’s boots in men’s sizes. “I had a pair of blue metallic leather ones with silver bits that I wore for years,” he reminisces, before relating how Mick Tucker visited the now legendary Kensington Market stall run by Queen’s Freddie Mercury and Roger Taylor: “After buying a pair of boots similar to mine, Mick being Mick told Freddie who he was. As Mick walked away, Freddie shouted: ‘We’ll be bigger than you one day.’”
Queen had the last laugh, of course, and Sweet never forgave their rivals for what they saw as appropriating and popularising their own super-harmonised, multi-layered sound. The sleeve of Sweet’s 1976 album Give Us A Wink was covered in faux graffiti, including the declaration: “Queen are a bunch of winkers” that had the first word almost but not quite erased.
Following their final Chinnichap hit, The Six Teens, in the summer of ’74, the band toned down the glam glitter and platform boots and adopted a look more befitting a rock group. Sweet were young, talented, famous and rich, and they wanted the world to know it.
“I once told my now-wife Jane that had she met me back then she wouldn’t have liked us,” Scott admits. “We had a lot of self-confidence. We didn’t suffer fools gladly. Even checking into hotels was too much effort – we made our tour manager do that for us. Some hotels would allow it, which caused a lot of chaos. But in that glam era of ’72 to ’74, that’s how you had to be,” he adds in self-defence. “The ones that stood out from the pack were Bolan, Bowie, Slade and us. If you were in a band that didn’t have that self-confidence, you didn’t get noticed.”
In those pre-breakthrough years, Sweet presumably spent plenty of hours in the Barley Mow, plotting against the ‘men in suits’ who sought to keep them in the shadows?
“Absolutely,” Scott says emphatically. “There would have been a lot of skulduggery and Machiavellian thoughts – with Steve at the heart of it all. He always said: ‘Each of them is earning what we earn.’ That had to change.”
The situation did change, but it took time. Having self-written and performed a run of wonderful, gonzoid bubblegum B-sides such as Burn On The Flame, Someone Else Will and Rock & Roll Disgrace, Sweet gradually severed ties with their puppetmasters, hence the title of 1975’s Strung Up, a half-live and half-studio release that established the band’s credentials as a fully-fledged, leather-clad hard rock outfit. To those that would listen, anyway.
The German market, where Sweet Fanny Adams went toe to toe with Deep Purple and Burn – and Scott topped Ritchie Blackmore in a poll of leading guitarists in rock – quickly became a stronghold for Sweet, which it remains today. Which explains why the band’s latest Full Circle album includes a dandruff-shaker titled Destination Hannover.
On the day of our meeting, Scott is bursting with pride over the looming success of an album made, as he puts it, “from a standing start”. Although the current Sweet line-up re-recorded Desolation Boulevard in lockdown as Isolation Boulevard, Full Circle is their first record of original material since Sweetlife back in 2002.
“Full Circle is already into its third pressing and it looks like it will go into the German chart,” Scott says, and just for a moment that taking-on-the-world swagger of the 70s is back. “Last thing I heard, we’re number fourteen and David Gilmour is number fifteen. That’s not too bad, eh?”
As its title implies, Full Circle is very much promoted as a signing-off statement, and closes with an emotional title track that includes a spoken-word part from Scott, referencing the “stratospheric highs and profound lows” of his own life and the career of Sweet. Reviews across the board have voiced approval, with Classic Rock’s praising the variation of the music on it, from “chunky, boogie-infused glam-rock tunes” to 80s hair-metal and more than a smidgen of super-polished AOR. “Chinn and Chapman be damned. Wig-Wam Bam this isn’t, [but] reliable rock’n’roll fun it remains,” our verdict concluded.
“Well I knew that it could be our last, so it had to be a good one,” Scott explains, slightly cagily. “Right now I don’t know that it will be. The way I’m feeling, well… my wife and I had a long chat.”
And you’ve changed your mind?
“It might kill me to be on the road, but it will certainly kill me to not be on the road. So I may as well keep things together, but that would involve more input and responsibility from the guys.
“The elephant in the room is that quite a few bands no longer have any original members. So I’m left wondering could there be a Sweet beyond me? And I don’t know how to answer that.”
Could/would you try?
“I’d probably be okay with it, but there would need to be someone to steer the ship. If I wasn’t around then maybe guest guitar players could replace me? I haven’t thought it all through yet. But Foreigner go out and tour without Mick Jones, and apparently it works very well.”
Something similar has happened before. Back in 2015, Sweet announced a farewell tour, only for Scott to backtrack before its conclusion.
“I was going through something medical back then and it played on my mind, but yeah, I did alter that decision,” he says. “Our current promoters in Germany really look after us. We travel well and stay in nice hotels. Given my age we play a little less than they as gig promoters would like, but it still works really well.”
In some ways Sweet find themselves in the same boat as their old mates Uriah Heep, who recently announced a curtain call to their own 55-year run, but with the proviso that weekend gigs, one-offs and festival runs all remain possible.
“I’ve had that conversation with Mick Box,” Scott says. “Both of us agreed that without playing live, what on earth would we do? So doing it sensibly remains the only option.”
And that’s what looks set to happen, with the band adding an April 2025 show at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire to a now traditional festive run across the UK, which was set to begin in Wolverhampton on December 16. “Shepherd’s Bush will be special, though,” Scott promises. “I’m hoping to get some special guests on stage with us.”
Whether or not Sweet will release the occasional track, as opposed to making full-length albums, only time will tell.
“I’m not saying that we’ll do another album, but the success of this one changes my outlook,” he offers. “If we were to release new songs individually, then why not scoop them all together into an album? So there could be another one.”
So much for Full Circle being a permanent full-stop on Sweet’s recording career.
“Yeah,” Scott responds gamely, “but you’ve got your scoop, haven’t you?”
Whether or not Scott’s ill health will allow these possibilities remains uncertain. The spirit is strong but the flesh isn’t always willing. This was our second attempt to get Scott to the Barley Mow for a chat, the first having been postponed when he felt under the weather. He’s had good and bad days; a few weeks after our interview a run of German dates were postponed due to him suffering from sciatica. Later, he was forced to sit out Sweet’s tour of Australia, which proceeded with local stand in Randall Waller. As this issue went to press, doctors forbade Andy to undertake Sweet’s December shows in the UK, but they went ahead with FM’s Jim Kirkpatrick helping out.
Since being diagnosed with cancer in September 2009, Scott made his fight with it as public as possible, staging Rock Against Cancer benefits and regularly advising fans to have their prostate checked.
In December of 2023, during a gig at Islington’s Assembly Hall in London, he reduced a previously rowdy audience to silence when he revealed that the disease had reached the dreaded Stage Four and that he was “taking all the pills that I can”, but “it’s like the last stage of upgrading your Mac – you can’t go back”. Unable to resist some dark humour, he continued: “The hormone that I’m taking is a female one, which is why I seem to look at shoes a lot these days. I get hot flushes and find myself crying alone that all men are bastards.” As the lights came up again, fans in the Assembly Hall appeared shell-shocked. Some were close to tears. This was very big and extremely unwelcome news.
“Let’s not beat about the bush, Stage Four is bad,” Scott says, still managing to sound pragmatic. And why shouldn’t he? His isn’t an aggressive form of cancer, and the doctors believe he could and should live to a ripe old age. Nevertheless, not long after that same London show he was prescribed new hormones, which disagreed with him.
“I had a horrible Christmas [in 2023], but now I’m okay although I tire easily,” he reveals. “On stage during a long set, after forty-five minutes I’ve started to take a sit-down while the band plays without me.”
The history of Sweet is as convoluted as it is long, with drummer Mick Tucker the only member of the ‘classic’ line-up not to have led his own incarnation of the band. These days, as the public face of Sweet, Scott is proud of his stewardship of the name. “It took plenty of work to get back to where we are now,” he states. “For a while, the tax bills came to me. There were a million headaches.”
Of the fallen three, Scott possibly misses Tucker the most. Together the pair reunited Sweet in the late 80s, and three sold-out shows at London’s Marquee suggested – falsely, it transpired – a brave new future.
“Mick was a lovely guy, but his Jekyll-and-Hyde syndrome drove some of the other band members mad,” Scott sighs. “That’s why Phil Lanzon [keyboard player] left to join Uriah Heep.”
Scott still cites the regrettable vocal injury suffered by Connolly during a pub car park punch-up as pivotal to Sweet’s inability to take the next step up the ladder. Ultimately, it led to Connolly’s drinking spiralling out of control and, eventually, his expulsion from the group. Everything came to a head during a US tour with Capitol labelmate Bob Seger, when band manager Ed Leffler pulled the sozzled Connolly from the stage at a gig in Atlanta, Georgia, leaving the other three to finish the show. The rest of tour was cancelled. When Sweet convened to make Level Headed at Clearwell Castle, where they’d recorded their last Top 10 hit, Love Is Like Oxygen, Connolly now had a minder to keep an eye on him. Not that it kept him out of trouble.
“One evening there was a thud on the roof of the mobile studio. Brian had jumped out of his window onto the parapet below and onto the van,” Scott recalls, uncertain whether to laugh or cry. “After that he was known as Spiderman.”
When Connolly shot a rifle to silence birds that were keeping him awake, shooting over the heads of disbelieving bandmates having a game of cricket, Scott recalls the manager of the Castle insisting: “You’re leaving now.”
When soon afterwards Connolly fled a drying-out clinic and was found in the nearest pub, as a group Sweet reached the conclusion that enough was enough. “I had to say: ‘Brian, I love you, mate, but you are fucking up the band,’” Scott recalls sadly. “We didn’t want to sack him, but there was no alternative.”
Fans had hoped that as Sweet’s last two survivors Scott and Steve Priest might put aside their issues to reunite. But although the ice thawed slightly before the bassist passed, it didn’t happen.
“In California, Stevie had formed his own line-up of Sweet. I only found out when we mistakenly received a contract for some gig in the middle of nowhere in America,” Scott explains. “I thought that was a bit cheeky.”
Since Priest’s death “the leftovers of his backing band”, as Scott puts it – still performs live. “Musicians must earn a living, I get that, but I object to being badmouthed by people who were never in the original band,” he comments dryly. “The respect for me is zero.”
With Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott, Gene Simmons from Kiss and the Crüe’s Nikki Sixx all citing them as a primary influence, Sweet, conversely, now receive plenty of kudos. Despite the ups and downs of his career, Scott has no regrets.
“People ask why I never agreed to join another band, one notable example being when Sammy Hagar wanted a solid guitarist behind him,” he reveals, “but I knew that if I left Sweet the band would disintegrate, and we still had unfinished business.”
With retirement of one form or another now looming, what does the future hold for Andy Scott? An allotment, perhaps?
“Fuck off!” he retorts slightly spikily. “We might get another dog, and I’d like to go fishing a little more. I love watching Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse’s TV show, chatting by the riverside all day, and then going to the pub in the evening. What’s not to love about that?”
Andy, you’ve earned it.
