Famous Glam bands and Toni Visconty
Sweet (referred to as "The Sweet"
on one album) were a popular British glam rock group of the 1970s.
Sweet consisted of singer Brian Connolly, drummer Michael Tucker, bassist Steve Priest, and guitarist Andy Scott. A product of the very
successful Chinnichap songwriting team (Nicky Chinn/ Mike Chapman), Sweet are
perhaps best remembered for their outrageous stage gear - glitter and platform
boots and heavy makeup - practically defining the camp extreme of the glam rock look. Scott would later say it
only happened because they needed an excuse to meet Top Of
The Pops dancers Pan's People and figured that going to the make-up room was a good method of doing
so. Once they were in there, they started experimenting.
Sweet had strong songs that are
still frequently heard on oldies radio shows, but their career was founded on
the ephemeral young teenage market, and was fairly short-lived. Their biggest
hit was the UK Number 1 Blockbuster in 1973 though in the
Fox on the Run, The Ballroom Blitz, and Love
is Like Oxygen were by far their biggest hits in
the US.
In 1979 Brian Connolly left the band under
acrimonious circumstances and neither he nor the band recovered. The band had drug problems and were particularly suffering from
the effects of substantial alcohol intake. Brian suffered several cardiac arrests at the height of his excess.
Brian died from liver failure in 1997 having been content in his final
years to appear in retrospective documentaries to demonstrate the damage he'd
inflicted upon himself.
Mick Tucker died in 2002 from leukaemia at the age of 54.
David Bruce Cassidy (born April 12, 1950) is an American actor who starred in the television series The Partridge Family from 1970 to 1974. He is the son of the late actor Jack Cassidy and actress Evelyn Ward.
Prior to The Partridge Family,
Cassidy appeared in a number of television programs, among them Marcus Welby, M.D., The Mod Squad, Bonanza, and Ironside. When he first started working on
The Partridge Family nobody knew that he could sing, until Cassidy
himself brought it up. He then took over the lead vocals for The Partridge
Family recordings and quickly became a teen idol. On The Partridge Family he
played Keith Partridge, son of Shirley Partridge, who was played by Shirley Jones, Cassidy's real-life stepmother.
There were ten Partridge Family
albums and several David Cassidy solo albums during the run of the show.
Cassidy grew tired of playing the character of Keith Partridge and decided to
leave the series in 1974. He toured for a while after the show ended, retiring
from touring in 1975. He did continue to record after he left The Partridge
Family and released several critically well-received albums on RCA during the 1970s. He also starred
in an episode of Police Story in 1978 called A Chance to
Live. He received an Emmy nomination for this role. Due to the
success of the episode, NBC created a prime time show based on it called David Cassidy: Man Under Cover. The show was not a hit and was
cancelled after one season.
In 1980, Cassidy had a cameo in
the television movie, The Night the City Screamed. He also made a couple
of small films in the 1990s. Cassidy has appeared in several Broadway musicals, including Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor
Dreamcoat and Blood Brothers. In 1996, he took over from Michael Crawford in the
Cassidy has recorded several solo
albums and continues to record. He has rerecorded several Partridge Family
songs and is still touring as of 2004.
Tony Visconti is a record producer, and often
an instrumentalist or singer, who has had a long and illustrious career working
with some of the best known popular music artists from the late 1960s onwards,
notably T. Rex, David Bowie, Thin Lizzy and Sparks.
Visconti's association with
Visconti's website provides short
sketches from the recording of some of the better known albums with which he
was associated as producer.
Visconti was married for some
years to singer Mary Hopkin, and was also married to May Pang with whom he had two children.
He was born in New York City, but has lived in London for almost all of his adult life.
The New York Dolls were a glam rock band in the 1970s that prefigured much of what was
to come in the punk rock era. Influenced by the MC5, the Dolls influenced a whole era
of musicians and bands such as the Hanoi Rocks, Mötley Crüe, Guns N' Roses, The Damned and even Morrissey of the Smiths. Perhaps their most lasting influence
was on the sound and style of The Sex Pistols whose manager, Malcolm McLaren, was also involved with the Dolls
for a time (see protopunk).
The band was fronted by David Johansen who looked like Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones; Johnny Thunders was the swaggering junkie lead guitar player, Arthur "Killer"
Kane played bass; Sylvain Sylvain played rhythm guitar and the ill
fated Billy Murcia played drums. Billy died before recording their first LP and was replaced by Jerry Nolan.
The New York Dolls only released
two studio albums: the self titled New York Dolls in 1973 and the aptly titled Too Much Too
Soon in 1974, by which point internal tensions
and drugs had left the band on the edge of
splitting. Johansen had a moderately successful solo career (later he began
recording under the name of Buster Poindexter), and is currently active as a blues singer. Thunders and Nolan found
a modicum of fame with The Heartbreakers, who supported their heirs the
Sex Pistols on tour in
Johnny Thunders died in
British singer Morrissey, who in the 70s was president of the U.K. fanclub, organised a reunion of the three
surviving band members (Johansen, Sylvain, Kane) for the Meltdown festival,
which was rapturously greeted. All the greater was the shock when the news came
of Arthur Kane's unexpected death on July 13, 2004 from leukemia. Whether the planned LP for Morrissey's
Attack label will go ahead is unclear.