Andy Scott is the only remaining member of the original 1970s line-up that gathered an army of fans as it toured decade after decade.

His passionate interest in Wrexham Football Club goes back to the 1950s when the peerless Manchester United “Busby Babes” played at the Racecourse in the FA Cup. United became Andy’s first club and Wrexham his reserve.

He has followed Wrexham’s battle to survive the machinations of business interests and wants to help the trust buy some equity in the club for fans.

“I’m not your Elton John type of benefactor millionaire,” he says, “but I want to do what I can.”

Andy was born in Maesydre and went to Grove Park Grammar School, where as a sports-mad footballer he was made to play rugby. He recalls: “Some sportsmaster always wanted me to play hooker and that is not a place I wanted to be. Especially while trying to retain some kind of looks.”

He wound up playing with his own team independant of the school. “I was never going to be a professional footballer but I kind of liked the idea,” he added.

As his hair grew longer and his interest in music-making increased, Andy formed a band with some school mates: “We were orginally called Guitars Incorporated. There were about six of us, all with guitars, no drummer. We started to think we’ve got to refine this a bit. I think we lost a member and then I decided to get my dad to guarantor some hire purchase so I could become the bass player. Then another of the guys said his dad used to play in the Salvation Army and had a drum kit.

“From there, aged between 14 and 17, I very quickly went through half a dozen bands in Wrexham. I ended up with probably the best band in town, The Silverstones Set – we won Opportunity Knocks six times on television in 1956.”

Asked how the current band compares to the original Sweet, Andy says: “In some ways it’s a little less volatile. So the chances of having good gigs rather than having amazing, or shall we say, luke warm gigs, is a lot better. The average is a lot better and it sounds like the original band. There is no point in going out there touring as the Sweet if you don’t sound like them.

“I’ve been disappointed with a few bands I’ve seen recently where some original members aren’t there. The one thing I’ll say about Status Quo is that they still sound like Quo. Whereas, sadly, the last time I saw Deep Purple they had moved on and it didn’t sound like Deep Purple any more. They are still absolutely fantastic but different.

“With the musicianship you have to have everyone playing the notes in the right way. Purple are one of my favourite bands and Deep Purple in rock were a defining moment in music.”

He stresses the need for a signature sound that enables a group to immediately establish its identity when it begins to play. Does nostalgia rule?

“Well, what else am I gonna do? I’m not in the first flush of my youth, and today, musically I’m not sure I’d want to be. It used to be a fairly hard business, but if you were good you’d at least get a chance. I’m not sure any more that everything that should get an airing does. I don’t think the X-factor type shows help the situation. In the initial stages it’s the pals that pull you through, not the public.”

What advice would he give to a young Wrexham band trying to make a name for themselves.

“I’m not sure going direct to a record label would be the obvious way at the moment. There are people using the technology with the internet and the web to promote themselves. It’s a way of stirring a little bit of interest, getting people wanting to come and see you. There are even people doing webcasts because they can’t get gigs.

“So they film themselves playing live and then put it up on the web on one of those myspace type sites. People are getting a thousand hits a week.

“That’s a very surreal way of doing a gig but if it’s your only way, good luck to you. We were starting to get concerned through the back end of the eighties into the nineties. People were there for five minutes and either changed their name or disappeared. In my day, and I don’t want to sound like a grumpy old man, we used to think the pop business was a bit transient in the seventies, but today it’s even more so. They’ve gone later in the day – never mind next week.

“You put something up for downloading now and you could find that when you go back to it later in the day, they’ve decided to remix it and put a different version up there. The way things are going you could end up with having people able to mix your record for you the way they want to hear it.

“I’m not sure today we’d be walking straight into a record deal if we didn’t have 30 years experience behind us. I’m just not sure. Hopefully the songs would still stand up, and they obviously do because we see the royalty sheets and the playlists. There’s clearly someone playing a Sweet record every five minutes in the world somewhere.

“The band I was with before the Sweet, the Elastic Band, from Overton, was a band that had they stuck together might have done something really well as a local band, because no Wrexham band has become internationally famous to the extent we have.

“The only others that come to mind are Mike Peters with The Alarm, from Rhyl and Lemmy of Motorhead, who’s also from up on the North Wales coast. But musically back in the sixties all the bands were going to Liverpool and Manchester. In fact the Elastic Band were the first band from Wrexham that used to play abroad and travel the length and breadth of the country.”

Is he still making a good living?

“Well, it’s better than working! I couldn’t see myself working for anybody. I’ve got a recording studio at my home in Wiltshire and my son Damian is my sound engineer.”

The band tours constantly and arranges its gigs to book almost any venue of a reasonable size at home or abroad. Andy reckons he’s been close to visiting almost every town in Germany where the Sweet have had 26 top twenty hits, nine of them number ones. They had hits there they didn’t have in Britain.

Pressed again on comparing the band now and the band then, Andy says: “It’s as good a band but the original band could be supersonically brilliant or have those moments of apathy. This band is good most of the time. We had two shows back to back at the Rainbow Theatre in London, one went belly up, when all the equipment blew, and the air was also blue, but we followed it up eight months later with a whole new stage show, filmed by the BBC that was stratospherically good. That still stands up today.”

A far cry from Andy’s time as a member of The Missing Links, from Cefn Mawr, and The Strangers. He remembers rehearsing in a hall in Acrefair next door to a pub, and having band members old enough to buy beer, pass him out a half of Border bitter.

Copyright North Wales Newspapers