SWEET — The Sweet Featuring Little Willy & Blockbuster (review)

SWEET — The Sweet Featuring Little Willy & Blockbuster album cover

Boxset / Compilation · 1973 · Hard Rock

4/5 · 2020-11-11
siLLy puPPy

The debut album “Funny How Sweet Co-Co Can Be” from SWEET was a success in the band’s native UK and other regions of the world but was never released in the US. After that album’s 1971 release the bubblegum pop writing team of Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn who were steering SWEET onto the pop charts with one slick hit after another shifted gears and started focusing on singles instead of albums and therefore from 1971 to 1974 when the band morphed from an Archies inspired bubblegum pop band to a Who inspired hard rock entity. During this period SWEET only released a huge string of singles with no accompanying albums.

Many of the non-album singles were actually some of the bands biggest hits and best known including “Little WIlly,” “Wig-Wam Bam,” the #1 hit “Block Buster,” “The Ballroom Blitz,” “Teenage Rampage” and “Hell Raiser.” In order to collect all this singles into a nice album’s listening experience, SWEET released this compilation in 1973 that was intended to be a surrogate album and also served as the debut album in the US. While officially an eponymous release, this album often appears as THE SWEET: FEATURING LITTLE WILLY & BLOCKBUSTER due to the fact the two hits were advertised on the album cover. Looks and sounds tacky but that was the world of bubblegum pop of this era!

Originally featuring ten tracks, the CD reissue adds another five and the album covers the entire run of singles (except "Ballroom BLitz") and B-sides following the UK debut “Funny How…” to the album “Sweet Fanny Adams.” This marketing snafu is a constant source of headaches for modern databases and if that wasn’t bad enough, SWEET’s album “Destination Boulevard” was basically two completely different albums. The UK version a completely new album and the US album resembling a collection of singles and select tracks that more resembled this compilation album than a true album. Despite the band still being in its bubblegum pop phase, SWEET had begun the process of turning itself into a rock band during this period and there is a greater emphasis on guitar hooks, heavy bass and drum interaction and more rocking tempos.

In fact you can hear a huge leap from pop to rock from the track “Alexander Graham Bell” which came form the “Funny How Co-Co” sessions to the more heavy rockers such as “Hell Raiser” which is obviously the inspiration of how to mold the band Motley Crue in the following decade. Just listen to the opening riffs and it sounds exactly like the beginning of “Kickstart My Heart.” One of the reasons this collection of songs is so much better than the band’s UK debut is that the influence of Chapman and Chinn was tapering off and SWEET as a band was writing more of its own material however the band learned a thing or two from the duo and retained the infectious hooks only teased out in more interesting ways. However Chapman / Chinn written like “Blockbuster” and “Hellraiser” are still the best tracks on this one.

While this album gets thrown into the compilation bin on music databases, i would personally consider this one a bonafide SWEET album that emerged between the pure bubblegum pop phase of “Funny How Sweet Co-Co Can Be” and the band’s extraordinary “Sweet Fanny Adams” as it functions to collect all the loose material in between and throws them together. This is a surprisingly great album with many of the tracks featuring the fully developed hard rock drive inspired from bands like The Who and other early 70s hard rock bands. SWEET had clearly escaped the confines of its Archies imposes limitations and developed into one of the most addictive hard rock bands of the 70s. The one drawback of this album is that it didn’t include singles like “The Ballroom Blitz” and “Get On The Line” so Americans would either have to purchase British imports or wait until the US version of “Destination Boulevard” opened with the over the top dramatic single “The Ballroom Blitz.” For fans of the SWEET, this one is definitely highly recommended.