SWEET - Steve's Ready Page 3
by Martin Popoff

You look at the old videos, and he looks like he's leading a gang up there...

"Yeah (laughs). Yeah, that's exactly what he was like, the orchestra leader. And then Mick, incredibly underrated. I think he's one of the best drummers who came out of England. Amazing technician, and he pounded the hell out of them. He had so much stamina. He would do a 20 minute drum solo, and then go into 'Set Me Free'. I never knew how he did it. And as a rhythm section, we were totally nut and bolt. Once we were together, it was locked tight."

Did he play a fairly large set?

"It was pretty big. It was double bass drum, and I think he had a five tom toms, three on the drums, and two on the floor - he might've had more than that."

Back to the here and now, and what you'll hear (get tickets now), Priest promises that, "At the moment were trying to establish ourselves as what we should've done in the first place, with all of the obvious songs that people heard and went, 'Oh, I've heard that - what is it?' For the first six months I just want to hammer home who we are, and play the songs we're known for. And then we will move on and keep them in the repertoire so we know them, but also start knocking in either some new ones, or old ones that are good. Of the old stuff, 'Little Willy' is the only one of the really poppy ones that I will do. Everyone recognizes it and everyone goes nuts when we play it, so I suppose, it has to be. We do 'Wig-Wam Bam' and 'Teenage Rampage', but that's about it for the poppy ones. It's been going down really well, anyway. If we can keep that up... and then as long as they want to come back and see us again, that's the main thing."

"With the new singer that I've got, you wouldn't know the difference," remarks Priest, in closing. "It's amazing. I mean, he can only sing the song like he can sing the song, you know what I mean? But it just comes out... with the harmonies and everything, it just sounds like the original band. The only thing is, he's got a much more rock 'n' roll voice than Brian used to have. It's more like, let's see, a bit more like Gillan, in some ways. He can scream till the cows come home, and it's like, 'Christ, how you do that?!' I said I'm not going to turn this into a Sweet look-alike band. I wanted it to sound alike, but now it's got its own character. And the people who have seen us have said, 'My God, it's even better than the original.' Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say that, but it is good (laughs)."