In a recent interview with Emilee Capogni, Sweet guitarist Andy Scott discussed the resemblance between Mötley Crüe’s ‘Kickstart My Heart’ and his band’s ‘Hell Raiser.’
“I’ll tell you who played [‘Kickstart My Heart’] to me the first time,” the rocker started his story. “We were gonna go and see Mötley Crüe and Skid Row in Sweden. I was in Sweden producing a band called Sha-Boom, and [the guys from the Swedish band] Europe came into the studio and they said, ‘Come with us tonight. We’re gonna see Mötley Crüe.'”
“They said, ‘Our keyboard player went to see them last night in Gothenburg, and we’re gonna see them in the ice hockey place in Stockholm.’ I said, ‘Yeah, as long as these guys are okay.’ And [they] said, ‘Oh, they’re coming with us.’ So we all got in taxis and cars and lobbed up there,” he continued.
“I went, ‘Well, somebody’s using my guitar riff,'” Scott recalled. “I said, ‘You know, it happens.’ And when we got to the gig, they started the whole show with the stripper, which is what we did in the ’70s, and the first song they played was ‘Kickstart My Heart.’ And we used to do ‘Hell Raiser.’ And the whole of Europe, the band, who were in the audience when we used to play in Sweden back in the ’70s, were all laughing now looking at my face, me going, ‘Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Lovely.'”
While Mötley Crüe has not commented on the resemblance, bassist Nikki Sixx earlier shared his admiration for Sweet in his book, ‘The First 21.’ Sixx revealed that he once tried to recruit Sweet singer Brian Connolly as the frontman for his pre-Mötley Crüe band, London.
“How hard could it be for the top band of the Strip to find a new singer?” Sixx wrote at the time. “‘F*ck Nigel Benjamin,’ I told the guys. ‘We’re going to get Brian Connolly!’ Brian Connolly was the voice behind ‘Ballroom Blitz’ and ‘Solid Gold Brass’. He’d left Sweet by that point and recorded one single, but a solo album had not materialized. I called Uncle Don and asked him, ‘Can you help me get ahold of Brian Connolly from Sweet?'”
Sixx also mentioned that he still has the letter he wrote to Brian Connolly.
‘Kickstart My Heart’ is the second single from Mötley Crüe’s ‘Dr. Feelgood’ and it reached No. 27 on the Billboard Hot 100 in early 1990.
