My thanks to Dave Glover for sending me this interview.
(Photo's to follow later...)

ANDY SCOTT – THE SWEET   Out of all of the Glam Rock bands of the Seventies, The Sweet stands out as masters of the craft. They had it all, the songs; the look, the sound and a wide fan base that has ensured continued popularity from 1971 until today. During their heyday, 1971 to 1979, The Sweet sold 50 million records around the world and appealed to pop, rock, heavy metal and new wave fans alike. Each member of The Sweet had their own fans. Lead singer Brian Connolly, who sadly died in February 1997, was the perfect frontman. A great, charismatic vocalist and 70's pinup who gave the band its image and ensured adulation from the pop audiences of Europe. Bass Guitarist Steve Priest added a sense of humour and irony to the band's records and live shows, his throwaway vocal ad-libs now as legendary as the Glam era itself. Drummer Mick Tucker has become an icon to rock players the world over. Although unrecognised through the bands hit singles, Mick Tucker's talent as a player set him far ahead of his peers. Lead Guitarist Andy Scott joined The Sweet in the early Seventies and changed not only their sound but overall direction. His playing style, sound and studio creativity helped to separate Sweet from the other bands of the time. His songs have also influenced and inspired many. His 1978 composition "Love Is Like Oxygen" won an Ivor Novello award and became a huge hit on both sides of the Atlantic while the 1974 album track "Set Me Free", became a regular cover for a number of the Eighty’s major Rock acts. Andy Scott joined the Sweet in the early Seventies, as the band signed to RCA records, and the production/songwriting team of Nicky Chinn, Mike Chapman and Phil Wainman.   When I first met the band, songwriters they were not, hard gigging musicians they were not. I'd been in bands that had done tons more gigs than the Sweet. I joined them, I think at exactly the right time, when they were starting to gig. I'd heard them on the odd BBC radio session, my band were also doing these sessions, but we were gigging as well. You never came across the Sweet on the gig circuit. >When was that, 1971? 1970 I joined. The first single was released in 1971, I think it was recorded in 1970. They had a guitarist called Mick Stewart and thats when they started to do a few gigs. I don't know how long Mick had been in the band. He was a lovely bloke, but they obviously wanted someone who, as opposed to being able to talk a good gig, could maybe play one, you know? - I remember the first thing I said was "I hope we're going to do a lot of shows". I think Mick Tucker was certainly living at home at the time, Brian was sporadic between living at home and his own flat, Steve by then was married, with a daughter, quite young in life I would have thought for a musician. I'd moved down from North Wales, so I was renting and looking after myself. I definitely needed the where with all to survive in London. One of the things that you know is that if you're doing so many gigs a week, you’re going to be able to afford your rent... >Did the band have a deal or management when you joined? It was all beginning then. I think Nicky Chinn, Mike Chapman and Phil Wainman were very, very important. Without them, things wouldn’t have taken the turn that they did. I think that Phil Wainman at that time was the catalyst and main person, the records wouldn’t have got made without him. Mike Chapman had been a lead singer with a band and we used to lay the tracks down with Mike doing the guide voice, because he knew the inflections that he wanted. Mick and myself, for example, could pick up on something that he was doing, his phasing, which might then suggest something else, like "how about if we played it this way" at that point. If there was a spearhead, it was definitely Phil Wainman >So at the time, the main team behind The Sweet was Chinn, Chapman and Wainman? At that time, that’s the way I saw it. There was my audition, which Mike Chapman basically took control of. I was one of the few who actually sang one of his own compositions at the audition. I don't whether Mike liked that, that there was now someone in the band who could possibly write a song, or whether he just saw that as another side. I'm not sure who actually made the decision, I certainly think that Mick Tucker had a lot to do with me being there >What were you doing prior to Sweet? Well, I was in a band called SilverStone when I was 15/16 that won Opportunity Knocks, the Huey Green thing. They were like a sixties Soul band with saxes and a drummer who was also the lead singer, doing Mose Alison, a bit of Otis Redding, Joe Tex, what I consider to be good soul. There were a lot of those bands up North and they seemed to be the lifeblood of the music business. We were very fortunate in 1967, to be the support act for Jimi Hendrix in Manchester. I say fortunate because out the SilverStone band came the Elastic Band and that happened immediately after seeing Jimi Hendrix. You've got to imagine that being in a 6 or 7 piece soul band ain't going to pay the bills as easily, you've got to earn a lot of money. I'd always loved bands like The Yardbirds, having been in bands like that earlier in my career. I was a bass player when I first started but I could also play guitar - I used to show the guitarist in SilverStone what he should be playing, the Steve Cropper bits, things like that. The obvious thing to do, once we'd seen Hendrix was to change the whole direction because we had guys within the band that really wanted to do something different. The rest didn't want to leave their jobs. So thats when we became professional musicians, my brother joined the band as a proper bass player and I became the guitarist. We all loved jazz, but couldn’t play it, as a lot of rock musicians can't. You end up thinking that you're playing this real jazzy piece, when actually it’s quite a stilted piece of nonsense. But we were very lucky, we got a record deal with Deram and Decca and that was good until the lead singer left to replace Stevie Ellis in The Love Affair, so my brother and I and the drummer, because we knew a few people and lived near Liverpool, became the Scaffold's backing band for a while. That was very good for you as a musician because they told you what they wanted and there were no variations, we got discipline, which was very important. We also got good money, good hotels.. it was very different, I wasn’t used to that! After that, my brother and I basically said sod it, lets go to London. I went to 2 auditions on the same day. I went to see the Alan Bounds Set, because Jess Roden had just left, and I went to see the Sweet, who I found extremely refreshing. I was only 19 by then, so a lot had happened in the 5 years that I'd been playing. Prior to my joining, I think that they'd been signed to a production company at EMI, they were used as backing vocalists on a few records. >Do you think that by choosing you, they were looking to change direction, to become more of a Rock Band? When I joined, they were doing a lot of what I consider to be "cheap covers", they had the odd song that was really good, but all the obvious covers, like Paranoid, Deep Purple things. I introduced a lot of things, we were doing a Motown Medley, and we also rehearsed up a whole load of Who songs, My Generation, Can't Explain, Happy Jack, Substitute, a blend of about 8 Who songs. I introduced Paperback Writer and songs like that, ideal songs for live guitar, bass, drums and 4 voice bands. You have to feature what you've got, if you've got 4 voices, then use them, don't do a song like Paranoid! I think the early part, we were a bit like headless chickens. We were just doing whatever was happening. There was no plan, we had our first hit record and we were going out on the road sounding a bit like Deep Purple, with a hit record that sounded a bit like The Archies! - when you then follow that up with one of the biggest summer hits of the year "CoCo", especially abroad, with all the marimba, steel band, timbale and cow bells, you start thinking, "better start counting the money"!. You're not sure how long its going to be around. It could have all come to grief if Mike Chapman hadn't forced himself to come along to a couple of gigs. I think he was at the Glasgow gig where Brian and myself ended up in the audience twice. He also came to another gig in the back of the car with us. We'd just had Blockbuster and he knew that there was a good change happening, he'd seen that we were heavier and ballsier than the records were determining. I think that he had The Ballroom Blitz in mind before Blockbuster - I remember him talking about the performance that night and saying that it was a Ballroom Blitz, long before he wrote the song. So he probably had the title in mind for a while, being the kind of bloke he was. >What was you live set up during the Ballroom Blitz era? When I first joined the band, I had Marshall cabinets and a Sound City head, which I had to use upside down because the valves would fall out! It was a great amp, but you had to use it upside down, on a bed of sponge! It was in the repair shop a little bit, Marshall's in Ealing naturally enough. I used to borrow a Marshall head. So often in fact that in the end Steve Priest said to me "you might as well buy that", which I did. We did a deal with Vox for a while, but the amps weren’t loud enough, I've still got a couple of the combos that they gave us, they had Jennings logos on the front of the stuff we used. That only lasted a few months and we were back with Marshall. We had a dreadful experience with an Italian company called Davoli. They were wholly responsible for the debacle that happened in 1973 at The Rainbow, every piece of equipment blew up and we ended up having to use the support band's gear. Apart from that, I've stuck with Marshall through years because they've been good to me, they've always been there when I've needed help, or repairs. Blockbuster was the Davoli days, but the realistic combination for me back then would have been an H&H combo with a 4 x 12" and a Marshall half stack, which I've always preferred, the full stacks are too high. I like to have some 2 x 12" in there as well for a bit more direction and a bit more of a harder sound, so I used a selection of 2 x 12", 4 x 12" cabinets with or without combos, with Marshall 100 watt 2203s or the Superleads, stuff like that. By then, we were travelling around the world a lot. We once flew to Japan and took all our own gear, PA and everything, unbelievable! >Didn't you use the H&H IC100 for a while? That was a specific period, the mid 70s period. I used to have so many amps on stage, we used virtually everything. During an American tour, I remember flying my H&H heads over and we hired a whole load of Fender gear, because all I wanted was a cleaner sound. I used the cleaner Marshalls too, not the overdriven stuff that you get today. The Marshall sound was the depth of sound, as was the H&H. I still have a couple of H&H amps as well. I don't throw gear away - I've got a garageful of stuff! I also got involved with a guy called Pete Cornish who designed my pedal board, it was about the size of my coffee table! This was long before racks, he used to put everything in the pedal board. Since then he's worked for just about everybody, Brian May, Clapton, loads of people. He was working for Pink Floyd last time I had anything to do with him when he was messing with my board. I had so many add ons after the fact where I wanted to volume pedal the input to certain echo units, he had to get in there and get me an extra pedal somewhere on the stage so I could filter in the echo where I wanted it off a pushbutton - this guy could do anything. Because I went to him quite early on, 73 or 74, he was building everything into the pedal board. An MXR Phasor, Electric Mistress, Memory Man, which had one of the longest delays you could get at the time. He also built in an Eventide Harmoniser and Delay Line. In the studio, I would have been using a Pete Cornish Booster Box, a line driver straight into an amp. I had one of his splitter boxes, which had hum cancellation and switching to bring things in and out of phase. These were huge bits of kit, not one of those things that you can just shove in your pocket, the size of housebricks. They were heavy too. I don't know what the hell he used to put in there. Guitar wise, when I first joined the band, I had the clothes I stood up in and the 335, which is an oddity. I bought it from a shop in Manchester called Barretts. They'd had a fire and had a lot of damaged stock. My 335 was actually 2 guitars, both damaged and put together. I think that because of that, I've ended up with a very weird, but great sounding guitar. It’s not something that came off of any production line. It’s also something I'd never get rid of because I still use it in my home studio. As soon as I joined the band I realised that I needed a spare guitar, because you can't break strings and expect the audience to just stand there! - I'd had a Fender, which I rue the day that I sold, a Cherry Stratocaster from the early 60s, from when I was with the ElasticBand. When I moved to London and needed capital, I remember someone taking that Strat off my hands for around £100, really sick!. One of the first things I bought with the first bit of money that we had was a spare guitar. I just plumped for an Standard with 2 pickups. It might have been a Junior, I'm not sure. Because it was a Gibson, a least it reacted in a similar way, but we all know what the P90s are like, a bit howely. I used to use a Hornby Skewes treble booster straight into the amp, an anodized blue box with a flick switch, you had to tape it onto the top of the amp and switch it on. I remember Mick Tucker used to say that "that sounds just like Blackmore", then I found out thats what Blackmore used to use, exactly the same, a Hornby Skewes treble booster. That was live and studio - everywhere. The only other thing I had was a wah wah pedal, but I've never been any good with them, so I stopped using that in the end. >Who influenced your sound at the time? Jeff Beck - Much more than Clapton. I think that when he joined the Yardbirds, that set the tone for me. Blackmore, he used to go into that mothertone, neck pickup sound. Randy California and Spirit as well, brilliant. >Around 1975, the Fox On The Run era, you became known as more of a Strat player.. I'd been using Stratocasters live for a while. I'd got the Strats for the work were, you might do some odd things. If your going to throw something about, its not going to be the 335!, also the spring had fallen out on the bigsby so many times on the 335, that I thought I must get something better and more reliable if I want to do the full wang bar bit. So I started to use Stratocasters. I'd discovered DiMarzio pickups, so I'm starting to get it to sound like a Humbucker with a Strat. I've got a collection of pickguards, about 15 or 16 with all different kinds of cuts outs and mountings on them. I broke the head off the 335 in Australia on a tour. Maton Guitars fixed it brilliantly and I vowed to her that I'd never break her again!. She came on the road and she still did certain gigs, but she was never used with any kind of a vengeance. Plus by then I'd got 3 other 335s - a black one with gold fittings, a Union Jack finished guitar - I'll never forget Roger Giffin turning round and saying "this is criminal, what you did to this guitar" and he put it back into its original order. He got the red white and blue off and it was a fine Cherry underneath. I've always loved what Stratocasters do, its just getting rid of the whistle and the single pole sound in a rock environment. When you're onstage and you've got that hum and buzz, the only way round it is to replace the pickups, which is what I started to do. Then 5 way switching, then making sure that the wang bar has got the strongest springs, and oiling as many parts as possible, so that the strings are able to move properly. This was long before locking trems - I could use a guitar once with a wang bar, then it had to be tuned. You then realise that you need 3 Stratocasters on the road - all set up, if not identically, very close. Dimarzio were the only company at the time developing the replacement pickups, the ones that sounded right anyway, and they were bloody expensive but you had to go along with that. They also made the Fat Strat, that would fit in exactly where an old Strat pickup would go, only it didn’t - you had to cut out the body a bit more to get it in. So the Strat I was using wasn’t really a straightforward Fender. I used to go to gigs and see Beck play what looked like a Standard Stratocaster. Of course I found out later that he'd had his mate Seymour Duncan, re wind and rewire every single sodding part of that guitar!. It may have looked like a Standard Strat but what was under the surface, God only knows. I remember thinking how does he get that single pole to sound like that, then you realise that he didn't >and you're still using Strats to this day? Yes. Mainly out of one's financial position, as time goes on and the 50 or 60 guitars that one had get shaved down when biting the bullet!, I think that even Eric knows about that one!, you end up with the guitars that you're actually going to use. I've got a 62 Strat which I bastardised by putting a Kahler on it, but its now been put back into its original condition, and retouched around where the Kahler used to be. My stage guitars are Squiers. The realism of it is, if you're on the road and you need to get another guitar quickly, then you've got to be able to go out the next day and find something at least pretty damn close. Wherever you are in the world, you can always find a Fender that you can use that night and that's the way that I'm trying to look at it now. You can always do the gig. I use a hot rails in the bridge position, it’s a Seymour Duncan. I've also got to know Kent Armstrong and his pickups which for the price, are bloody good. He probably doesn’t think of me as a sensitive bloke when I send him Seymour Duncans to rewind. I've got a couple of really old Duncans. Don't believe the stories that they don't blow, they do. I've blown up so many Seymour Duncans that you wouldn’t believe it. I've still got about 4 that need re-doing. I've got 4 Strats set up this way so, I just keep rotating them as they go. When you throw your guitar about a bit, and bang it with a drumstick, then the pickups going to give here and there. I think of the Squiers as the tools of my trade, the chopped neck and the Seymour Duncan pickup are all part and parcel of the sound. I'm a Kahler man and I'm destroyed that Kahler are no longer in business. I've been buying up as many bits as I can. Thankfully, JHS came up with a couple for me a couple of weeks ago so I do have spares now. I use the Kahler Pro, the flat mounted one. >Why Kahlers as opposed to Floyd Rose? They don't interfere with your palm. A lot of the Sweet chuggs and sounds are dampened from the bridge and with a Floyd Rose, everytime I've tried to damp the bridge, the bloody thing moves about and goes out of tune. I know that you can control yourself but you end up playing like an airy-fairy American! - With the heavy pick and the light playing. I play with a medium pick, which snaps and I hit the strings. I come from the Pete Townsend school of guitar destruction. It’s not the modern day style of playing. Hammering, I can do a certain amount of it but the way we used to do it in the 60s and the 70s was with the pick, not with your fingers. That way, the sound comes out of the guitar and amp, as opposed to a rack. I suppose Eddie Van Halen covered the lot, he could do everything, probably still can! Andy Scott is currently touring with his band Andy Scott's Sweet. He has released some fine albums, including "A", "The Answer" and "Glitz Blitz & Hits", a selection of Sweet hits, re-recorded. SWEET DISCOGRAPHY - UK SINGLES Funny Funny Co Co Alexander Graham Bell Poppa Joe Little Willy Wig Wam Bam Blockbuster HellRaiser Ballroom Blitz Teenage Rampage The Six Teens Turn It Down Fox On The Run Action The Lies In Your Eyes Love Is Like Oxygen UK ALBUMS Funny Funny How Sweet CoCo Can Be Sweet's Biggest Hits Sweet Fanny Adams Desolation Boulevard Strung Up Sweet's Greatest Hits Give Us A Wink Level Headed Cut Above The Rest Waters Edge