Chartsweep 1976: Sweet - Fox on the Run
by Donald Gorinchem
Band has a manager and producer. Manager and producer write the band’s hits. Band has no say. Band grows tired of being puppets. Band strikes out on their own. This droll series of tropes are a popular archetype of pop myth making. In the career arc of 70s bubblegum glitter rockers The Sweet, it rings true to a degree. ‘Fox On The Run,’ released on March 7th, 1975 -- peaking at number 5 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart on the week of January 17th, 1976 -- was the band’s 14th single but the first written by the band themselves. It could thus be seen as the point in the classic narrative when the band took control and proved that they could write a bona-fide pop hit all by themselves. Not only was it a successful pop single and a damn fine slice of glam pop, but it has endured as one of the two songs synonymous with their name.
Up until ‘Fox On The Run,’ manager/producers Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman wrote the lion’s share of The Sweet’s singles. These included UK top 10 hits ‘Little Willy’ and ‘Wig-Wam Bam,’ both from 1972, as well as the other song that has endured as one of the band’s most recognizable, 1973’s ‘The Ballroom Blitz’ (a top 10 single in both the UK and the US).
These earlier singles slotted in well with one of the prevailing trends of UK chart music in the early 70s: glitter rock, aka glam rock. To say that glam rock was a phenomenon in the UK would be an understatement. The average episode of Top of the Pops was filled with groups in outlandish androgynous outfits, an era of multimedia titans like David Bowie, T. Rex, Gary Glitter, Roxy Music, Slade and countless others, including The Sweet. While some of these glam rock artists were able to find success in the US, this was dwarfed by glam’s popularity in the UK. Just in this list of artists, one can see some level of sonic diversity in glam rock, who were mostly united in their androgynous over-the-top visual aesthetics. The Sweet’s early hits were much closer to the compositionally straightforward pop stylings of, say, a Gary Glitter or even a Slade, versus the artier leanings of a Bowie or a Roxy Music, who take sonic risks and whose music has conceptual sweep.
These Chinn/Chapman-penned hits also slotted into the bubblegum sounds of, say, The Archies and the like. As pop fodder they’re fine but to me they lack emotional depth or sonic heft. ‘The Ballroom Blitz!’ is the one exception, as it tows the line of their poppy material enough where I can't deny it’s brilliance as a well crafted, catchy pop song. But, despite their success, all was not well in the Sweet camp. They were beginning to resent their bubblegum image, and how much control Chinn/Chapman exerted over their recorded output. They couldn’t release their own songs as singles, and didn’t even play their instruments on any single prior to ‘Wig-Wam Bam.’ The band was able to write and play on the B-sides to these singles, and they reveal the band’s true interests: harder edge rock like The Who (evidenced by their cover of ‘My Generation’ on their most well known LP, ‘Desolation Boulevard’).
The band didn’t make a clean break with Chinn/Chapman, who continued to write songs for them, and even seemed to comply with the band’s desires. The songs ‘Block Buster!’ (the band’s sole UK number 1 single) and ‘Hell Raiser,’ two excellent 1973 Chinn/Chapman-penned singles released before ‘The Ballroom Blitz’, are much harder edged than their previous singles, and point to where the band themselves were to go.
The more hard rock, Who-influenced Sweet is where I was introduced to, and came to love, the band. As a kid, my dad owned a copy of the US version of their album ‘Desolation Boulevard,’ a constant car ride companion. He played it often in the car, and it was in this environment where I grew to like the Sweet’s music. Up until that point, he had raised me on a steady diet of hard rock acts like Kiss and Led Zeppelin, so consequently I tended to gravitate to harder edged cuts like ‘No You Don’t,’ ‘Into The Night,’ ‘Set Me Free,’ and ‘Sweet FA.’ Their two gigantic pop hits won me over after.
What really struck me about this material, having absolutely no context for UK glam rock at the time, was that it was heavy, yet there were incredible pop hooks, and these crazy layers of harmonized falsetto background vocals that blur into a single texture. As a kid who had just started to dabble in playing drums, my ears were beginning to notice the musicianship in the things I was hearing, and The Sweet were no exception, despite how simple their songs often were. Take the tight interplay between bass and drums at the end of ‘Sweet F.A.’ Particularly, because I had chosen to play drums, Mick Tucker’s playing on this material jumped out. A fairly underrated player, or at least someone I don’t hear brought up very often, his opening fills on songs like ‘Set Me Free’ and ‘No You Don’t’ make him someone to take note of.
My experience with The Sweet mirrored my dad’s experience with them some thirty years prior, being drawn in by their heavier material after hearing it from a friend who owned the album on cassette, and eventually being won over by the big singles from that album. I think his experience with the band was typical for kids into hard rock in North America at the time. The Sweet weren’t typecast as a bubblegum glam act to American audiences like they were in their native UK. My dad informs me he didn’t even hear songs like ‘Little Willy’ until much later, so he had no baggage when engaging with The Sweet’s music.
To him they slotted into the hard rock landscape of the time, and he was none the wiser about their bubblegum past. Even the album cover of ‘Desolation Boulevard’ plays into this, featuring the band dressed down and much more rugged looking than their normal image, with an L.A. cityscape in the background. This is how they were presented to the American public.
Little did I know at the time that none of my favourite songs from the US ‘Desolation Boulevard’ were featured on its UK counterpart. The confusion surrounding the US vs. UK releases of this album rivals that of the Beatles or the Stones’ early albums. The US ‘Desolation Boulevard,’ the one me and my dad grew up with, is a hybrid of a completely different LP, ‘Sweet Fanny Adams,’ their two big non-album singles, and a few tracks from the UK ‘Desolation Boulevard.’ ‘Sweet Fanny Adams,’ which features nearly all Sweet-composed songs, was released prior to ‘Desolation Boulevard’ in the UK.
This was the band’s statement of intent for the future, the fully crystallized version of their harder edged glam rock sound, featuring equal parts heavy riffs and over-the top falsetto harmony vocals. This was the actual LP that housed all of my favourite songs from the US ‘Desolation Boulevard,’ and it wasn’t even released in the US! The American LP buying public at this time was much more interested in hard rock, generally, so this is why the US version of ‘Desolation Boulevard’ contains the bands hard rock tracks along with their big singles. It’s popularity in America dwarfs that of their other albums by several orders of magnitude.
Are you sufficiently confused yet? Because there’s more. ‘Fox On The Run’ is actually on the UK version of ‘Desolation Boulevard,’ but not the version that is well known to most people. There are both an LP version and a 7” version of ‘Fox On The Run,’ and the two versions are very different from each other. The underlying composition is the same, but the arrangements are what make each version unique. The LP version is more of a standard hard rock track, complete with a nearly two minute guitar solo, making the song nearly five minutes long. While this version is great in it’s own right, and a great pop song is hiding in there somewhere, it’s clear this version wasn’t destined to be a chart topper.
For the first single penned by the band, The Sweet, with the help of Chinn/ Chapman, decided to rework the song into a much more radio-friendly three minute fusion of their pop sides and their hard rock sides, creating an indelible pop song in the process. The long guitar solo is excised, being replaced with a more catchy harmonized lead guitar line. Also added are glitzy keyboards, including the incredibly distinctive opening sounds of the song, starting as a low sequenced rumble and building to an air raid siren, where the band crashes into the song proper. As an opening to a song, it’s brilliant in that it immediately demands attention.
The distinctive echoed vocals on the first word of each verse is added, as well as the band’s trademark over-the-top falsetto background vocals, which lead into each chorus. All of these changes introduce little sonic details during every second that maintain interest throughout what is already a well written pop song. It’s a masterclass of pop arrangement, and help the song add up to a glammy guitar pop masterpiece. Even as someone who was more interested in The Sweet’s hard rock side, I simply couldn’t deny the power of this pop gem.
‘Fox On The Run’ did well in both the UK and the US Billboard chart, and along with ‘The Ballroom Blitz,’ helped to establish the band in the US consciousness. The Sweet would land another hit in 1978 with the excellent ‘Love Is Like Oxygen,’ but even this didn’t quite match the success of these two singles. The band never reached this level of commercial success again. It’s only fitting that the symbolic representation of the band striking out on their own would become one of the songs they are most identified with to this day.
‘Fox On The Run’ has been featured in films such as ‘Dazed and Confused’ and ‘Detroit Rock City,’ keeping the song in the minds of listeners years later. It entered the spotlight once again as recently as 2016 when it was used for the trailer to ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.’ It’s easy to see why music supervisors would be attracted to the song: it encapsulates its genre and era well, but goes beyond more standard choices from Bowie or T. Rex. It’s a rush of energy, with an incredibly distinctive opening to punctuate a scene. The opening of the song in particular is almost tailor-made for a trailer. It all the while plays into the trend of ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ films’ penchant for music supervision of songs from this particular era in popular music.
The song is rightfully one half of the legacy of The Sweet, and continues to draw younger listeners to their more hard rock material, which often gets overlooked or lost in the shuffle when talking about glam rock. To me, this is a shame for a few reasons. I most definitely hear The Sweet’s sound to some extent in glam metal acts like Motley Crüe, Ratt and Quiet Riot (although they covered and essentially brought Slade, not The Sweet, into the American consciousness), and for that I think deserve a little credit. They were a unique band in the glam rock landscape in the UK, simply by combining heavy rock and glam pop. In the US, you had the New York Dolls, and even Alice Cooper or Kiss who combined glam theatrics with a base of heavy rock, but in the UK The Sweet were an anomaly. Another reason why they deserve some level of respect is because, along with the aforementioned US bands, the idea of combining glam pop songwriting with heavy riffs proved to be incredibly influential on a whole cohort of harder edged glam bands that emerged from LA and dominated the charts a decade later.