1 June 1989
Despite the band name, Irish hard rockers No Sweat seemed to be putting in the work. It was a Saturday afternoon, so Roxy Records in the centre of my home town of Tralee was busy anyway, but the prospect of spotting an actual band off the TV was intriguing to me and many others. A bit later than advertised, a white minibus pulled up outside and the members of No Sweat filed out to stretch their legs before doing what was probably their umpteenth in-store appearance of the week. Job done; I had seen an actual band, so I turned around and left before they had even made it inside.
That’s pretty representative of my interest, then and now, in hard rock in general and No Sweat in particular. Still, lots of other Irish people were into that stuff. Not only did their debut single ‘Heart And Soul’ duly get to number one, but its follow-up ‘Tear Down The Walls’ reached number four. Clearly there was investment behind them; ‘Heart And Soul’ was being endlessly plugged on Irish TV and radio, it had an expensive-looking video, the band were touring the record shops of Ireland (see above) to promote it, plus for added interesting-by-association content it had been produced by Dublin resident Joe Elliott of Def Leppard.
Even at the time, and clearly being cynical beyond my years, I saw a slight flaw in this reliance on the Joe-Elliott-producer angle. Joe Elliott was a singer and didn’t produce Def Leppard’s albums, so what did he know about producing? However, as I listen to it today, the problem with ‘Heart And Soul isn’t the production: the layers of vocals on the slow-down pre-chorus and big, big chorus certainly sound like money well spent, so fair play to Joe Elliott and the studio engineer on that score. It’s just that the actual song is cliched hard-rock-by-numbers, with lyrics about some seventeen-year-old girl running away and leaving “momma” and “papa” and “a part in a high-school play” because that’s what happens in big, dumb Americanised hard rock songs so by God that’s what you’re going to get in No Sweat’s ‘Heart And Soul’: 0% perspiration, 0% inspiration.
