The success of The Ballroom Blitz was that it straddled pop tribes – camp enough to appeal to glam fans and (thanks to Andy Scott’s guitar work) more than acceptable to rock fans. Even I and my prog-rock peers in Glasgow liked The Ballroom Blitz, and it was raw enough to survive the arrival of punk rock a few years later.
As a DJ I played it regularly well into the twenty first century, either as part of a glam rock segment or as the ideal track before or after the Spin Doctors’ Two Princes, whose rhythm and tempo it matched perfectly. Music historians might prefer to segue between The Ballroom Blitz and Bobby Comstock’s Let’s Stomp from 1963, to which the Sweet hit owes quite a debt. The introductory snare rhythm and the guitar riff, played by horns on Comstock’s track, are almost identical.
Are you ready, Steve? (“Uh-huh.”) Andy? (“Yeah.”) Mick? (“OK.”) Alright fellas, well let’s GO-O-O-O! Brian Connolly’s exhortation to the rest of the band kicks off a straight-ahead piece of power-pop rock from the experienced pens of writing duo Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, who almost by themselves wrote the soundtrack to the glam-rock era.
Chinn and Chapman had already written seven hits for the band when, on a UK tour in early 1973 the band were hounded off-stage in the Grand Hall, Kilmarnock by a belligerent bottle-throwing audience. When they recounted the incident to Chinn and Chapman, the songsmiths turned it into yet another hit, which got to #2 in the UK chart later the same year.
Everything about the track says “punch-up!” and it’s no wonder the song has cropped up repeatedly on the soundtrack albums of light-hearted action films like Wayne’s World and Daddy Daycare. It has been covered, sampled and lampooned innumerable times, as in Armageddon Days are Here (Again) by The The, which begins, “Are you ready, Jesus?” “Uh-huh!” “Buddha?” “Yeah!” “Mohammad?” “OK!” “Well alright fellas, let's GO-O-O-O!”
The Grand Hall is a handsome ballroom, Kilmarnock’s former Agricultural Hall attached to Kilmarnock’s former Corn Exchange, now the Palace Theatre. History does not relate the cause of the riot which forced The Sweet back to their dressing room, but it was not the first in the entertainment complex of this rough and ready Scottish town. When a promoter misled a 1920s audience into believing that American film star Mary Pickford would be appearing in person at the Palace, it was only the stentorian insistence of a police officer in the stalls which prevented a disappointed rabble from storming the stage.
Girls screamed and swooned at The Sweet’s heavy make-up and glittery stage persona, which may well have upset the male members of the Kilmarnock audience. As the lyrics report, “The man at the back said ‘Everyone attack!’ and it turned into a ballroom blitz.” This was the age of glam and The Sweet were in every sense the musical movement’s poster boys. Behind the scenes, Chinn and Chapman were responsible for ten Sweet hits before moving on to write for Suzi Quatro. Their songs also charted for other glam rockstars including Mud, Arrow, Smokie and Racey, all on pop entrepreneur Mickie Most’s RAK record label.
The Palace Theatre in Kilmarnock is a fine traditional proscenium-arch variety theatre which has hosted major stars – Ken Dodd, for example, who always overran his allotted time and for whom the audience was always willing to miss its last bus home; and Rolf Harris. Part of Harris’s act was to paint a large picture with broad brushes and rollers, humming as he did so and occasionally asking the audience, “Can you tell what it is yet?” On a backstage wall at the Palace he daubed a self-portrait and dedicated it to the resident stage crew, who used to show it off proudly to visitors like me. (I suspect it may have been painted over now, in the light of Harris’s conviction for sex offences a few years ago.)
I too have played the Palace Theatre, to rather less audience opposition than The Sweet. I was the stage manager on several tours of a wildly successful stage comedy called The Steamie by Tony Roper, which I think played the Palace a couple of times. The play was about the hopes and fears of a group of Scottish women in a public laundry on the eve of the 1960s, and I accompanied its first three Scottish tours of one-night stands. One of my nightly duties was to call backstage over the theatre tannoy at the start of the show, “Are you ready, lighting? (“Uh-huh.”) Are you ready, sound? (“Yeah.”) Are you ready, actors? (“OK.”) Alright ladies, well let’s GO-O-O-O!
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