2008Released
4:01

Did You Know?

Interesting facts and trivia about Ballroom Blitz. By Songfacts®.

This was written by Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, who wrote many of the biggest glam rock hits. They also wrote Sweet's "Blockbuster," Suzi Quatro's "Devil Gate Drive" and Tony Basil's "Mickey."

This song tells a rather opaque story of band performing when mayhem breaks out in the audience, resulting in a "ballroom blitz." In 1973, Sweet performed at the Grand Hall in Kilmarnock, Scotland, where they were driven offstage by a barrage of bottles. It's likely that when the songwriters Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman heard about this donnybrook, they used it as the basis for the song, although Chapman put a wet blanket on that story when he told Goldmine: "We were trying to write songs that had no meaning, and 'Ballroom Blitz' was one of them. I suggested the title and we sat down and wrote a song about a guy having a horrifyingly bad dream that his latest record hadn't made it – he was in this ballroom, in a discotheque, and maybe he was on drugs because he started hallucinating. They were pretty funny words to that song, although I've forgotten the real version because I did this horrifyingly dirty version of that song." We can only speculate as to what the girl in the corner was doing in the original lyric.

In America, this was the second hit for Sweet, following "Little Willy." They had more success and notoriety in their native UK, where their outlandish lyrics caused some controversy. In America they were more of a curiosity, delivering fun, relatively mindless entertainment.

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Song Analysis

Key, BPM (tempo) and time signature of Ballroom Blitz.
BKey
MinorMode
4/4Time Signature
109BPM

Album

The album Ballroom Blitz is released on.

Released By

The record label that has released Ballroom Blitz.
SONY BMG MUSIC (CANADA) INC.
This compilation (P) 2008 Sony Music Entertainment (Canada) Inc.

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