15 February 1973
You’ll find it easily enough online – The Sweet performing ‘Block Buster!’ on the 1973 Top Of The Pops Christmas special with bassist Steve Priest dressed as a camp Nazi in Kaiser Bill spiked helmet and retrospectively-blurred-out swastika armband. Both versions, in fact: there’s an alternate take, not on the official Sweet channel on YouTube, where he also has a Hitler-style toothbrush moustache. Back then, that was all part of the let’s-shock-grandad milieu of glam and its kid brother punk. (The video below is a different TOTP appearance from earlier that year, when Steve Priest in a mere catsuit and eye make-up would surely still have been sufficiently and delectably outrageous to parents and grandparents anyway.)
So, imagine the effect on my small child brain when that old Top Of The Pops clip was aired, along with other glam snippets, years later on late-’80s Sunday morning TV. (It was on the Beat Box, RTÉ’s music video show, possibly due to a glam compilation having just been released.) I am pretty sure it was the moustache and non-blurred version that was shown, because you really don’t forget seeing a camp Nazi glam rocker squealing ‘We just haven’t got a clue WHAT to do!” and fluttering their fingers at you down the camera. It blew my mind. Fortunately, considering that I was young and impressionable, I chose to worship glam instead of national socialism. Thanks, The Sweet and ‘Block Buster!’
(A quick word about naming. The Sweet have always referred to themselves as Sweet, without the article, despite you, me and the entire world calling them otherwise. Also, this track was released under the title ‘Block Buster!’ but is also commonly cited as one word with no exclamation. None of this ever seems to be applied consistently, so I’ve gone here with what it says on the release from the time. If you encounter any confusion, just say it’s the one where the bassist is on Top Of The Pops and he’s looking right into your camp Nazi soul.)
I hope Steve Priest didn’t go to all that trouble dressing up on my account; ‘Block Buster!’ itself would have hooked small me. Even for big me it’s still gloriously silly fun. Yes, this is probably the first fateful and irreversible step for glam onto the slippery slope of Chinnichap tat; the vaguely villainous title character is less ‘Telegram Sam’ and more Yosemite Sam, and even while enjoying the booming timpani mid-section I know I’m being dumbed-down to. But the slinkiness of Priest and of that guitar riff, the latter shared coincidentally with another glam hit of the same time, help give ‘Block Buster!’ a sophisticated shimmer and a lightness on its feet that will elude the naffer, stompier efforts of Mud and Suzi Quatro to come.
I suppose now is an opportune moment to answer one of of your most frequently-asked questions: what do I look like? Well, it should be obvious by now; thanks to a formative childhood experience, I look like the bass player of The Sweet doing ‘Block Buster!’ on Top Of The Pops. Though there’s no Wehrmacht regalia in my look, you may still want to blur out any other bits that offend your eyes.
