Sweet sensation a lesson to us all

IT is a good thing to write your songs; say what you want to say and look how you want to look. It's good also to ignore your record company, management, press agent etc and just do what you want to do. It's a bad thing to have professional songwriters doing the work for you, and bad also to dress up in silly costumes just so you might sell some more records.

This is the received wisdom. It's wrong. At least, it's wrong in one specific case: M'Lud, may I present to you the strange and curious tale of The Sweet. When the band first formed, they fancied themselves as real musicians and wanted to play real heavy rock music. The problem was the resultant squall was lumpen, discordant rubbish.

But this was the early 1970s and there was a new sound and a new look on the block. Shove on a bit of lippy and rouge, make your sound more teen-oriented and you too could be in on the game. Glam had arrived and The Sweet were in luck. Quickly disabused of the notion that they could write their own material, an appointment was arranged for them with Dr Hit - in this case Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman. For the benefit of our younger readers: just consider Chinn and Chapman to be the Dr Dre of their time.

The first thing Chinn and Chapman did was to hire a bunch of session musicians - the songs the pair had written for The Sweet were great and they didn't want them ruined by the actual band trying to play them. Then the makeover people arrived. The band's hair was cut in a uniform fringe-with-long-bits-at-the-back way - or, as it is technically known, a girl's haircut.

The magnificent set of songs Chinn and Chapman provided - Blockbuster, Ballroom Blitz, Hell Raiser etc; propelled them to the top of the hit parade and, for a while, there was no considerable distance between them and Queen, T Rex and Bowie. As long as the band kept their heads down and did what they were told - right down to the amount of glitter they put on each cheek - they would be fine.

Not a band you'd go looking for if you were compiling a list of "Great Intellects of the British Glam Rock era". The Sweet, somewhere along the line, got a sudden attack of hubris. All along, Chinn and Chapman indulged the band's "but we're a real rock band" idea by allowing them to write their own B-sides and the occasional album track. These were all uniformly awful affairs but somehow the band convinced themselves that they should dispense with the services of Chinn and Chapman, ditch the make-up and go in a heavy rock direction.

You know what happened next: the hits dried up and despite desperate cries of "but we're still big in Scandinavia", the band shuddered to a halt in the 1980s amid the usual recriminations. It all had gone a bit Tap.

When the solo album deals mysteriously failed to materialise, the band had to set aside their profound hatred of each other to do the obligatory reunion tour. As we say politely in these circumstances: the tour proved to be less anticipated than expected.

Somewhere out there a band called A. S. Sweet, with only one of the original members, is still doing the live circuit - probably opening up for The Showaddywaddy Experience. A far better option would be to hire yourself out to record companies who are being plagued by a semi-retarded boy band member who wants to "go solo and write my own stuff - real music".

After hearing The Sweet story the deluded fool would soon be rushing back in to the studio to cover a Barry Manilow song.

All The Sweet albums have just been re-released; ignore them all and pick up a copy instead of the superlative The Very Best Of Sweet.