Sweet Crisis have friends in high places. There was the time when an
incognito Peter Green watched their sound-check (“Apparently he told our
manager that he loved us,” beams guitarist Piers Mortimer). And the time
when frontman Leo Robarts blagged his way backstage at a Queen show to
meet Paul Rodgers (“I just started singing Free songs a-capella, and
he joined in”). And let’s not forget Mortimer’s brush with Robert
Plant at a urinal. “There’s this guy in a Rasta beanie, and he went:
‘Killer set.’ I look over, and it’s Robert Plant, for fuck’s sake! Thank
God I didn’t piss all over him.”
The clang of name-dropping is impressive. But perhaps the
more important point is that grass-roots rock fans are also rallying
around the Cambridge six-piece. If you liked last year’s CR Tracks
Of The Week contender Treading In Deep Water – a Stones-meets-
Free country-blues strum – then you’ll love the early tunes from
Sweet Crisis’s work-in-progress debut album, which move from
the road-movie groove of Black Magic to the dance-floor-ready
rhythms of Mad Soul. “That blues-soul thing with dirty guitar
tones, minimally played, that’s our palette,” says Robarts. ”
After a decade in a string of almost-famous bands, there’s still
a happy-go-lucky chemistry between Robarts and Mortimer: an
inseparable double act who terrorised the drinking dens of theirhome town. “Leo’s famous in Cambridge for being outrageous,” says the
guitarist. “He had this flat, which was known as a twenty-four-hour party
zone. It was a few storeys up, and Leo once fell out of the window. To this
day, I haven’t got a fucking clue how he survives half of this shit.”
Likewise, the band have cheerfully weathered the industry slings and
arrows. “We’ve had things happen to us with management,” says Robarts.
“We’ve binned a shitload of music – threw away a whole album, just
because it had no flow. But if it’s not right, don’t fucking force it.”
The turning point, they reckon, came in January, when they hit
a songwriting hot streak in Switzerland. “We were writing up in
the mountains,” Mortimer recalls, “knocking the songs into shape
in the day and testing them out at night. It was so inspiring.”
“We played a shit-ton of shows in Switzerland,” Robarts adds.
“Got these songs embedded, then flew back completely mangled
and went to the studio that same morning. Our eyeballs were
sticking out, but we went in and did an eight-hour session – and
those songs sound like our shows.”
On the album you’ll hear the keyboard work of another famous
friend – Deep Purple’s Don Airey. But above all, these tracks are
the sound of a band carving out their own legend. “We’ve had
years of scratching around,” says Robarts. “But these songs are
where our heads are at. We’re at the start line now.” HYSweet Crisis’s debut album is due in October. They play
Camden Rocks June 2 and Ramblin’ Man Fair July 21.They’ve got big names to drop, and with a debut
album due in October their future looks bright.Sweet Crisis
“We love Humble Pie,
the Stones, Lynyrd
Skynyrd, Gary Clark
Junior and Jack White,”
says Robarts. “But
I was ridiculously
inspired by Free and
Paul Rodgers. When
I was about thirteen
my dad put Free’s
Fire And Water in my
stocking, and I listened
to it relentlessly.
That album was
a massive inspiration.”FOR FANS OF...“That blues-soul thing with dirty guitar tones,
minimally played, that’s our palette.”
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