Song of the Day 10/3: Sweet, “The Ballroom Blitz”

With the federal government shut down, everything except crucial work is supposed to stop. Apparently work on Trump’s turd of a White House ballroom qualifies as crucial, because it will continue regardless. Talk about a ballroom blitz. I suppose they want to get it finished before the Don keels over.

Sweet’s ballroom blitz supposedly originated with a gig the quartet played in Kilmarnock, Scotland in 1973 when concert-goers forced the band from the stage by throwing bottles and other objects. The practice is so common in the UK it has a name: bottling.

Songwriter and producer Mike Chapman later claimed that the story was false and that the lyrics were just nonsense, but Chapman is a demonstrable liar whom the band ultimately ditched because they didn’t like playing his bubblegum-pop songs. The lyrics don’t read like nonsense – they read like the story of a band being attacked by the audience. It became a No. 5 hit in the U.S. in 1973.

The song’s most notable cover was by the Damned, who released it on their 1979 LP “Machine Gun Etiqutte” and as the B-side to a single. The track features Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead on bass, with a brief solo at about the 2-minute mark.