The Sweet notched up their sixth Top Five hit when The Ballroom Blitz went to number two in September 1973.

“Are you ready Steve?” (Uh-huh). Andy? (Yeah). Mick? (Okay). All right fellas…. let’s GOOO!!!” It’s 1973 and The Ballroom Blitz is a welcome antidote to a Great Britain of food shortages, strikes, power cuts and the three-day week.

With that classic call-and-response introduction, this was The Sweet’s best single yet, and the most memorable of Steve Priest’s camp cameos: the one about the man in the back with his eyes as red as the sun, and the unignorable girl in the corner: “SHE thinks SHEEE’s the passionate one!”

The Ballroom Blitz would have given The Sweet their second number one (after Block Buster!) were it not for the oddest of novelty hits, Eye Level – the theme music to TV cop show Van Der Valk – by The Simon Park Orchestra.

It’s written, like all their classic hits, by Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn, but was actually inspired by real-life events when the band were playing a gig in Kilmarnock and were driven offstage by a hail of bottles hurled by the crowd of unappreciative Scots.

The trouble started, one can only assume when the man in the back said “Everyone attack” and, following a warning from the girl in the corner, it turned into a ballroom blitz.

I’d love to know why. To this day no one seems to be sure. The two most likely reasons are that Brian Connolly was blind drunk (because that, sadly, was usually the case – he had 14 alcoholism-induced heart attacks before finally succumbing in 1997), or because the band’s Glam outfits, eye-shadow and lipstick didn’t go down too well with the hard bastards of Killie.

That’s the theory put forward by Steve Priest in his autobiography – Are You Ready Steve? – where he recalls that the men spat at the band while the women “screamed to drown out the music” until the group left the stage.

I suspect the real reason may have been that The Sweet, fed up with being dismissed as musical lightweights playing bubblegum pop to “teenyboppers,” preferred to play their proggier self-composed songs rather than the hits in concert, sparking a riot.

So it was most likely a protest at not being given the hit singles the fans had paid their money to hear. But we may never know, because only one of The Sweet, guitarist Andy Scott, survives today, and he lives in California.

RIP Brian Connolly (1945 – 1997)RIP Mick Tucker (1947 – 2002)RIP Steve Priest (1948 – 2020)