SLS: Two Sweets

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As he tells us in his post, Universally Perceived Pleasurable Flavor (original US spelling), Jim is inviting us today to play a song that mentions candy, honey, sugar or sweet. It will be interesting to see how many pick up on the ‘candy’ part, which has very limited use here. Five years ago I even amended a Wikipedia page to reflect that we use the term ‘sweets’ here, and wrote a post about it: The Day I Changed The World if you want to see it (too much time on your hands?).

This theme sounded familiar, so I looked back and found that we had something very similar around four years ago. I did think of taking the lazy route and just reposting that, but then I thought that wasn’t really in the spirit of SLS. So today I’m only playing one of the two songs I previously shared, along with something different.

This is the returning one, a trip back to a time long ago, when converting videos to colour turned them very grainy:

And as usual the lyrics can be found on genius.com.

Sweets For My Sweet was the debut single by The Searchers, released in June 1963, and it topped the UK Singles Chart for two weeks that August. It wasn’t released in the US until the following year, but wasn’t a hit there. The band had formed in Liverpool in 1959, and were part of the Merseybeat scene that dominated pop music here for a while, and also became part of the ‘British Invasion’ of the US Charts, along with many other bands of their day. Rather ironically, given that background, the song is actually a cover of one originally released in 1961 by The Drifters, and written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman. Over here, this version was inescapable: I can remember spending a day at the seaside with my cousin and her family at the time this was in the charts, and it seemed that everywhere we went there was a transistor radio blasting it out! Happy times, and a seemingly more innocent era. Then again, I was just coming up to my tenth birthday so was a bit limited in my outlook!

I thought I’d go for another cover for my second sweet song. You will, I am sure, know this one, but it was my first introduction to my favourite covers band so I’m giving you their version:

It might not be about sweets, but there was a lot of food in that video! And here are the lyrics, courtesy of genius. com.

Sweet Child o’ Mine was, as you no doubt know, a track on Appetite For Destruction, the debut album by Guns N’ Roses, released in July 1987. It was released as a single in June 1988 and topped the US Chart, also making #6 in the UK after a re-release in 1989. The album has sold more than 18m copies in the US and 2.6m in the UK, with correspondingly huge numbers elsewhere. The single has also performed in spectacular fashion, with more than 5m sold across all formats in the US and 3m in the UK. As was usual with the band, songwriting credits are shared by all five of them, as the music came out of a studio session where they were messing around with riffs, after which Axl Rose wrote the lyrics.

I am playing the First To Eleven cover as I love just about everything they do. They are from Erie, Pennsylvania, and as I said this is the first of their videos I saw, in which they hosted a street party in their home town. I love the way everyone is having so much fun in that, though I’ve still to work out how it suddenly became night time around the 4.50 mark, and Audra had a complete change of outfit! The video was posted in June 2019, a couple of weeks before she turned 18 – she is the youngest member of the band, two of whom were school students of the fourth member when he set it up. Audra joined a couple of years later, at 15, when the original vocalist left. They have been very prolific in their video releases, usually at least one a week, and are still going strong. They have been massively successful on YouTube, with 2.05m subscribers, and this is one of their most popular videos, with more than 76m views. And in any case, their musicianship is superb and deserving of attention, while I much prefer watching Audra to Axl Rose.

That’s me done for today, and I hope you enjoyed these. My thanks as always to Jim for hosting the show, and to fellow participants for filling my Sundays with (mostly) great music. Take care – another heatwave is coming, although we did have a very brief but heavy shower about ten minutes ago.

I’ll see you again for some more Tuesday Tunes, with a new theme this week 🎶

50 thoughts on “SLS: Two Sweets”

  1. With my dad being in the record business, I was something of an annoying know-all when I was young. When my schoolfriends were raving about The Searchers’ hit in 1963, I was pompously informing them it was a cover of an original that my dad had in his collection. And because dad was a sales manager at Pye Records, The Searchers’ label, I had a free copy of their version too. 😊

    Best wishes, Pete.

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      • I rarely paid for a record until I was in my early 20s and my dad had left for another woman. It also gave me an interest in all kinds of music, and that has continued throughout my life.

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      • You were lucky to have had that start to your collection. Mine was developed mostly by what I heard and liked on the radio, and was controlled by the restraints of pocket money and gifts until I could get weekend and holiday jobs!

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  6. I guess while they were waiting for the guy to finish his guitar solo the sun went down and she took the chance for a shower and clothes change. Not a Guns ‘n Roses fan but have to admit this song has one of the great intro’s. This is an excellent band you’ve found here, and I agree with you on the Audra v Axl debate!

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  7. The Searchers song is classic, jaunty and upbeat and speeds along nicely. The cover version is really good. It’s nice to hear the lyrics clearly, not through Axl’s wring-tones. But to be fair to him the lyrics are more subtle than the histrionic way GnR delivered them.

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  8. Clive I missed The Searchers on AM radio, so this is a new one to me. Sounds on par with a lot of bands around that time and is quite pleasant to listen to.

    That’s a decent cover of Sweet Child o Mine!

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  10. Clive, good cover by First to Eleven of “Sweet child of mine.” Audra does a very credible job, but my wife commented that Axl Rose’s voice has so much range and variability, he takes the song to unique places. Keith

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    • I can see what she means, but I still prefer Audra! There’s another very good cover, by an earlier incarnation of the bluegrass band Thunder And Rain.

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  16. I knew both your song selections today, Clive. The Searchers song had almost all the prompt words, which is a nice coup. Always great to hear First To Eleven; this is one of their best covers. Funny, I didn’t give any thought to going with something edible. I think we’ll see fewer songs about food than you might expect.

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