Sweet “Ballroom Blitz” – The Story Behind The Song
Well, I’m wrong… kinda. The way I heard the story, Sweet “Ballroom Blitz” was written after a bad gig in Scotland. The band was chased off stage with patrons throwing bottles at them. THAT DID HAPPEN. The rest of the story, well, sigh… I had to do more homework. Here’s what I found:
Sweet didn’t write “Ballroom Blitz”
Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman are songwriters and they wrote this song for Sweet. The two also wrote Suzie Quatro’s “Devil Gate Drive,” and Tony Basil’s “Mickey.” You’re so fine. You blow my mind, hey Nicky… hey Mike.
One would THINK that Nicky and Mike heard about Sweet’s hasty retreat from the bad gig and were inspired to write “Ballroom Blitz.” Sadly, that is also wrong… at least according to Nicky Chinn. In an interview with Goldmine, Nicky said, “We were trying to write songs that had no meaning, and ‘Ballroom Blitz’ was one of them. I suggested the title and we sat down and wrote a song about a guy having a horrifyingly bad dream that his latest record hadn’t made it – he was in this ballroom, in a discotheque, and maybe he was on drugs because he started hallucinating. They were pretty funny words to that song, although I’ve forgotten the real version because I did this horrifyingly dirty version of that song.” I can only imagine the original lyric for “And the girl in the corner let no one ignore her.”
Sweet “Ballroom Bitz”
While I was researching “Ballroom Blitz,” I also read up on Sweet’s background. Before “Ballroom Blitz” was released, Sweet had a #1 hit in the U.K. with “Blockbuster” in 1973. This song was also written by Chinn and Chapman. The song’s opening sounds A LOT like David Bowie’s “Jean Genie.” Sweet said THEIR song came first. In an interview with The Independent, Sweet’s original vocalist, Brian Connolly said, “When we took the acetate into the RCA promotion department for the first time to let them hear what their next single was going to be, Bowie was there. I remember him saying, ‘That’s a great song, that’s definitely a winner.'”
Sweet – “Blockbuster”
The band fired Chinn and Chapman in 1974 and went on to write their own songs including “Fox on the Run” and “Love Is Like Oxygen.”
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