The similarity was probably just a coincidence but Nicky Chinn, who wrote the Sweet song with Mike Chapman, remembers a meeting with Bowie at which the latter “looked at me completely deadpan and said: ‘Cunt’… and then got up and gave me a hug and said: ‘Congratulations’.”

 

Anyway, I’d forgotten quite how camp The Sweet were when they started out, and this is their campest moment, thanks to Steve Priest deciding to dress up as what he would later describe as “a gay Hitler” on Top of the Pops.

 

The archetypal “hod carrier in drag”, he contributes the finest of all his vocal interjections when Brian Connolly – with an Iron Cross around his own neck – inquires: “Does anyone know the way? Did we hear someone say…?”

At which point Priest, pouting and preening, puts on his silliest voice to respond: “We just haven’t got a clue WHAT to do!”

 

His comedy contributions were so much a part of The Sweet’s run of hits – I’m surprised to find this was their only number one – that he tried to be more outrageous with each consecutive hit.

 

I was the first one to wear hot pants on Top of the Pops,” he said once. “A year later, Bowie did it and everyone went, ‘Wow, David Bowie wore hot pants on Top of the Pops,’ and totally forgot the fact that I did it the year before.”

 

At one point he slapped on so much make-up that Bowie himself quietly suggested to him in the TOTP dressing room that he might be overdoing it a bit. He might have had this clip in mind.

 

An underrated musician, Priest had built his first bass guitar when he was in his teens and formed the band (originally Sweetshop) back in 1968. Sadly he died in June 2020.