“The lyrics were hastily written in the pub, hence the fact that it lacked a final verse”: Recorded in secret, Sweet’s Fox On The Run was given a second life by the Guardians Of The Galaxy

It’s 1974, and the members of Sweet are fed up. On paper their string of hits, including the previous year’s UK chart-topper Block Buster! and a run of No.2s (Hell Raiser, The Ballroom Blitz and Teenage Rampage) appears enviable, but the band are increasingly walled-in by a perception of them as just puppets of their songwriters Mike Chapman and Nicky Chin and producer Phil Wainman; indeed until Wig Wam Bam a couple of years earlier they’d had to battle to play on their own singles.

Having written the B-sides of those singles, Sweet were enjoying success as credible hard rockers in Germany, where their 1974 album Sweet Fanny Adams had briefly outsold Deep Purple’s Burn, but at home they remained viewed, as drummer Mick Tucker once put it so memorably, as “four dissipated old whores, mincing about on Top Of The Pops and churning out computerised pop”.

Tired of being fed inferior songs and tumbling down the pecking order on Chin and Chapman’s roster (which included Suzi Quatro and Mud), dissatisfaction boiled over as the songwriting pair, who were also Sweet’s managers, spent more and more time in California.

“They’d tried to pass us off with a couple of [sub-par] offerings, including Dyna-mite,” guitarist Andy Scott, remembers, referring to a song that Mud took into the top five, “but we needed something more in the vein of what we used to call ‘German marching songs’.”

The ditty that enabled Sweet to break free from ChinniChap (as the writers were known collectively) and also elude Wainman’s clutches already languished as an album track on Desolation Boulevard, the follow-up to Sweet Fanny Adams. Their record label, RCA, had recognised the potential of Fox On The Run, which, as Scott observes, “had been recorded [by Wainman] in the style of a live band”.

Although Sounds magazine later hailed Sweet Fanny Adams as “perhaps the finest collection of glam-metal mayhem ever laid down on vinyl”, the album – written mostly by the band – did not add to their tally of hits, so pressure was building.

“Just before Christmas [1974],” Scott recalls, “everybody just happened to be at my house when the managing director of RCA called to say: ‘We’re not getting the right answers from Mike and Nicky, but we really believe that Fox On The Run could be a hit’. And a week later we were in Ian Gillan’s studio, where nobody knew us; keeping things cloak and dagger was vital.”

Although the song is credited to the entire group, really it was Scott’s baby. The subject matter was an unspecified groupie, hence the couplet: ‘You talk about just every band/But the names you drop are second-hand’.

“Those lyrics were hastily written in the pub before recording the song for the album, hence the fact that it lacked a final verse,” Scott says, laughing. “We vowed that when we re-recorded it we would re-write the words, but never did.”

As a “budding producer”, Scott oversaw the session (but again the label said: ‘Produced by Sweet’). His primary goal was to sex up the track for radio. In the end, however, the guitarist actually added an element that would prove crucial: “The rest of the band had gone to the pub when I incorporated that pulse-type synthesiser sound at the start and stuck it onto the end as well,” he remembers. “Everyone loved it.”

RCA rush-released the reboot of Fox On The Run without bothering to notify Chinn and Chapman, who promptly jumped onto a plane back to England.

“Mike’s words: ‘Well, you’ve finally done it, haven’t you?’ were the best compliment anyone could have paid me,” a smiling Scott says now.

Subsequent albums would see Sweet relish their independence, and despite upping the hard rock quota the flow of hits continued for quite a while, although singer Brian Connolly’s growing alcoholism led to him being fired in 1979.

Fox On The Run has been covered by, among others, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Girlschool, Sweet Savage and the Scorpions (in German). Thanks also to exposure in films, Sweet’s singles are now enjoying a dramatic upturn in popularity. In 2016 The Ballroom Blitz featured in the film Suicide Squad, and Fox being even in just a trailer for Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 2 generated such a surge in online sales that it topped the iTunes Top 40 US Rock Song chart.

The original version of this feature appeared in Classic Rock in 2017.