Are you ready Steve? Andy? Mick? Alright fellas, let’s gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!

Ahem, sorry about that, however some of us still get thrill chills upon hearing the kick-arse opening to Ballroom Blitz. For when it came to glam rock, with their big boots, big hair and big sound, Sweet/The Sweet (the ‘The’ seems to have been transient) stomped bloody great indelible footprints all over the movement as well as worldwide charts, so it’s certainly about time a decent doco about them was released.

This isn’t quite it, although at times it is interesting. While admirably sourcing dirt on The Sweet from many very close to the band (producer/manager Phil Wainman, songwriter/producer Micky Chinn) and even from within the band itself (Andy Scott), it takes a scattershot, populist approach to their career, zeroing in on the big hitty periods and shooming over the other times like some sort of bodgy calendar with massive handfuls of months missing.

From their beginnings as a dodgy, Caribbean-influenced bubblegum pop band through the super-stompy glam days to heading into the sort of rock territory the wake of which many lesser pop-metal bands waded along in for the next decade or more, stories that are both apocryphal and acknowledged fact are brought up, as well as glimpses at the tensions which arose when that old bugger the dollar became involved. This is all punctuated by the pleasing inclusion of mostly complete film clips of both promotional and telly appearance varieties, although again many are leapfrogged over or simply not mentioned.

Glam was bright and shiny, sparkly and glittering. This 4:3 transfer isn’t. Granted, the nature of archival footage is that it varies in quality, however in this case it would appear much of it was never archived well at all. While modern interview footage is OK, it’s the clips – the bits which many will be after this for – which truly suffer. Milky blacks, washed-out colouring, dropouts, lines, fuzz, grain, speckles, wobbles and jumps all pop up regularly, in what is ultimately very disappointing visual fare.

Despite claims that this has been “digitally remastered for Dolby Digital 5.1�, there’s very little to prove as much, not least of all as the 5.1 flag isn’t actually set on the disc. While front and rears have sound emanating from them, that this was based on a mono source – and a very dubious one at that – is more obvious than the fact that Fox on the Run rocks. The music generally sounds quite harsh, and features regular examples of pops, crackles and hiss along for the ride as well as the odd fleeting glitch insome clips. Synch is occasionally dubious, however at least the recently shot interview stuff and narration all sounds fine.

Little in the way of extras sweetens the deal, with an essentially useless selected discography listing a bunch of album titles and not much else, plus brief band profiles which it appears weren't checked before being plopped on the final master... Two chunks of Umbrella propaganda look promising – live clips of Roxy Music and Eurythmics – however they just cut off abruptly midway through. I mean really, why bother with such newfangled, modern-day techno-witchcraft as a fader?

If you can deal with the shoddy video and audio then at your average movie length The Very Best of Sweet makes a better fist (preferably pumped in the air with spiked leather wrist accoutrement for effect) of things than many similar such docos. Anybody still stomping around in high heel boots like it’s the early to mid-'70s never went away should find much to get off on, but you’d hardly call it a revolution (now!).