Day After Day #281: Love is Like Oxygen

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Love is Like Oxygen (1978)

As I've discussed previously in this feature, the 1970s were a wild and wooly time. Coming off the end of the psychedelic late '60s, it seemed like everything went a little nuts in the '70s: the clothes were insane, the hair was everywhere and the music was all over the place. It made sense that glam rock emerged in the early '70s, thanks to T. Rex, David Bowie, early Roxy Music, Slade and others, including the Sweet.

The Sweet was formed in London in 1968 under their original name the Sweetshop, playing bubblegum pop before moving to a harder rock sound. The band was led by vocalist Brian Connolly, drummer Mick Tucker, bassist/vocalist Steve Priest and guitarist Frank Torpey, who left after a year and was replaced by a few guitarists until the band settled on Andy Scott. They signed a management deal with aspiring songwriters Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman and had a hit with the song "Funny, Funny" but the band started to make some headway with the singles "Little Willy" and "Wig-Wam Bam," which both hit #4 in the U.K. In 1973, "Little Willy" was released in the U.S. and got up to #3 on the Billboard Hot 100.

The Sweet were getting popular with teens, but they started to chafe at the bubblegum image Chinn and Chapman had constructed for them, preferring to play heavier material. At the same time, the band's stage attire was getting wilder and they began wearing makeup as glam rock exploded in the U.K. The band started calling themselves "Sweet" instead of "The Sweet" and had big hits with "Ballroom Blitz," which was written about a 1973 incident in which the band was forced off stage by fans throwing bottles at them, "Fox on the Run" and "Action." 

Sweet's big hits were very chameleonic; they could sound like a different band depending on the song. This was especially true with 1978's "Love is Like Oxygen," which could have fit in on an ELO album with its strings and classical elements. The band was going in more of a pop direction, and the nearly 7-minute album version contains several sections that sound nothing like "Ballroom Blitz" or "Action." 

"Love is like oxygen/You get too much you get too high/Not enough and you're gonna die/Love gets you high/Time on my side/I got it all/I've heard that pride/Always comes before a fall/There's a rumor goin' round the town/That you don't want me around/I can't shake off my city blues/Every way I turn, I lose."

The song also sounds like other late '70s pomp-rock acts like the Alan Parsons Project and 10CC.

"Time is no healer/If you're not there/Lonely fever/Sad words in the air/Some things are better left unsaid/I'm gonna spend my days in bed/I'll walk the streets at night/To be hidden by the city lights, city lights/Love is like oxygen (love is like oxygen)/You get too much you get too high (too high)/Not enough and you're gonna die (gonna die)/Love gets you high."

The song was Sweet's last top 10 hit, hitting #8 in the U.S. and Canada and #9 in the U.K. and Australia. It was nominated for Song of the Year at the Ivor Novello Awards but lost out to Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street."

The band opened for Bob Seger in the spring of 1978, a tour marred by a show in Birmingham, Alabama, attended by Capitol Records executives who saw a drunken Connolly collapse on stage, leaving the rest of the group to continue without him. Connolly was eventually fired the following year.

Sweet continued on as a trio, but eventually split up in 1981. Brian Connolly formed a version of the band in 1984 without any other original members, calling it Brian Connolly's Sweet and then New Sweet. Meanwhile, Andy Scott formed a version of the band in 1985. After some legal squabbles, Connolly and Scott agreed to call their bands by their names to avoid confusion. Connolly died in 1997 at the age of 51 after years of health problems. A few years later, Steve Priest put together his own version of the group; he died in 2020. Andy Scott is the last surviving member from the group's glory days.

I've never owned any Sweet music but have certainly heard them on the radio plenty over the years. In the mid-'90s, I was at a party with my buddy Bob when we discovered that the party host, a friend of ours, had a Sweet Greatest Hits CD. This eventually led to us cranking the CD at 2 a.m., singing along loudly to "Love is Like Oxygen," much to the annoyance of the hosts who were trying to get everyone to go the hell home. Ah, memories.