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 🎶