In the early 1970s he was the golden face of British glam rock: blond hair, glitter, a voice that could cut through a siren riff, and a stage presence that made teenage audiences lose their minds. By the mid-1990s the same man was shaking on camera, walking with a limp, playing holiday-camp dates, and living far from the millionaire status his old bandmates still talked about.
Brian Francis Connolly, lead singer of The Sweet, died in February 1997 at 51. Nearly three decades later his songs still blast out of films, adverts and stadium PA systems. The man who sang them did not get a second act. This is the fuller story behind the familiar headline — updated with what later interviews, obituaries and family accounts have filled in.
Abandoned as a baby, raised as someone else
Connolly was born on 5 October 1945 in Hamilton, South Lanarkshire. His mother, Frances Connolly, was a teenage waitress. She left him in a Glasgow hospital as an infant. The identity of his biological father was never made public.
At two he was fostered by Jim and Helen McManus of nearby Blantyre. He grew up as Brian McManus. The McManus household was also connected to actor Mark McManus, later famous as Detective Jim Taggart — a resemblance that led some relatives to believe the two men were half-brothers. Connolly was never formally adopted. At 18 he learned the truth and took back his birth surname.
The family later moved south to Middlesex. Connolly trained toward engineering, then drifted into local bands. In Harrow he replaced a young Ian Gillan — later of Deep Purple — as singer in Wainwright’s Gentlemen. Drummer Mick Tucker was already in that group. The two of them walked out in late 1967, recruited bassist Steve Priest and guitarist Frank Torpey, and formed Sweetshop. On the eve of a debut single they shortened the name to The Sweet. Andy Scott joined in 1970. The classic line-up was complete.
Hamilton, South Lanarkshire — the Scottish town where Connolly was born in 1945.
The charming frontman who became a millionaire
Songwriters Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, plus producer Phil Wainman, turned The Sweet into a machine. Early singles such as “Funny Funny” and “Co-Co” were bubblegum. Then the sound hardened: “Block Buster!” hit UK No. 1 in 1973 with a police-siren intro; “The Ballroom Blitz,” “Hell Raiser,” “Teenage Rampage,” “Fox on the Run,” “Action” and “Love Is Like Oxygen” followed. The band amassed dozens of worldwide hits, a run of UK Top 20 singles, and sales often put at around 50 million records.
Guitarist Andy Scott later put the money in plain language: a lot of it went through the accounts. For a stretch they were millionaires.
Connolly was the face. Coiffed blond hair, open shirts, glitter, a commanding tenor. Girls dragged band members off Scottish stages and cut their hair with scissors hidden in handbags. At Kilmarnock in January 1973 bottles flew and the group fled mid-set — the chaos that fed the myth of “Ballroom Blitz.” On Top of the Pops he was the heartthrob Britain could not miss.
Connolly at the microphone in the early-1970s peak, the image that made him a teen idol.
The Sweet in full glam costume, mid-1970s: Priest, Scott, Tucker and Connolly.
The night in Staines that changed the voice
In early 1974, while Sweet Fanny Adams was being finished, Connolly was badly beaten after leaving a nightclub or pub in Staines, Surrey. Accounts differ. Andy Scott said he was trying to protect his Mercedes from vandals. Steve Priest called it a set-up: three men waited, then one kicked Connolly in the throat and, according to Priest, said something like “that should do the job.”
The damage was lasting. He lost part of his upper range. Other members had to cover vocals on several album tracks. The band cancelled a support slot for The Who at Charlton Athletic — the show Pete Townshend had invited them to play, the night they believed would prove they were a real rock band, not a glitter act. Confidence cracked. Heavy drinking, already present, got worse.
Smoking did the rest. Priest later said Connolly “smoked like a chimney” and kept losing his voice on songs written high in his range. By the Level Headed sessions in 1978, Scott recalled, they had to record “Love Is Like Oxygen” in the morning before Connolly started drinking. The single still became their last major international Top 10. On the following US tour, Scott said, he was often too drunk to perform.
Last UK show with the classic line-up: Hammersmith Odeon, 24 February 1978. Last live show with them: Florida, July 1978, supporting Alice Cooper. Official departure: 23 February 1979, announced the next month. Management told the others there was only one way the band survived: Brian had to go.
Solo flop, tax bill, house sold
The solo singles did not chart. “Don’t You Know a Lady” (1980) and “Hypnotized” (1982) came and went. A planned 1983 album never appeared. He opened a few dates for Pat Benatar with a band called Encore. The glam heartthrob was already a nostalgia act in waiting.
Then the Inland Revenue arrived. Sweet’s members were hit with a multimillion-pound tax assessment on the hit years. Connolly sold his house to pay his share. Later reports said he ended up in a council flat and took regular work on the Butlin’s circuit to keep money coming in. The contrast with Scott’s “millionaire status” line is the part that still travels every time the story is retold.
Thirteen heart attacks — or twelve over six weeks
In 1981 he was hospitalised with severe bloating. What happened next is told in conflicting numbers, all of them grim.
His first wife, Marilyn, said in later interviews that he suffered 13 heart attacks in 24 hours. Connolly himself told journalist Jasper Rees it was closer to 12 over about six weeks. Other accounts, including later newspaper features, use “14 cardiac arrests in 24 hours.” In the 1996 Channel 4 film Don’t Leave Me This Way he put the lifetime total at six and blamed alcohol. Doctors warned him that another drink would kill him. Family members said he then stopped drinking. The damage was already done: partial paralysis on the left side, a limp, tremors, slurred speech, a nervous-system disorder. Alcohol, heavy smoking and prescription diuretics are the factors most often listed together.
He still went back on the road.
The New Sweet, Australia, and a fading voice
From 1984 he toured the UK and Europe as The New Sweet, later Brian Connolly’s Sweet after a legal truce with Andy Scott over the name. Germany and Scandinavia remained loyal. Fees were a fraction of the 1970s. In July 1990 a planned Australian tour nearly collapsed when he was hospitalised in Adelaide for dehydration after the long flight. The band played dates without him; later shows were cut short.
A 1988 studio reunion with Tucker, Priest and Scott, brokered by Mike Chapman, failed because his voice could not carry a new album. He appeared in a 1990 Tower Records promotion with the original line-up, then went back to the oldies circuit. In 1995 he released the modest solo album Let’s Go. The same year his partner Jean Dibble, then 23, gave birth to their son, Brian James (BJ), on 26 May 1995. Jean also helped him trace his biological family in Canada; his birth mother had died in 1989. He met a brother and sister.
He had two daughters, Nicola (born 1974) and Michelle (born 1977), from his marriage to Marilyn Walsh, which ended in the mid-1980s. A second marriage, to Denise, also ended. In his last months the women from those chapters — Marilyn, Denise, Jean, and the daughters — were around his hospital bed. One of them later joked that even on his deathbed he had his “harem.”
Connolly in a mid-1990s television interview: the blond hair remained; the shake and the strain in the voice did not.
Final interview, final gig, final week
By 1996 the Channel 4 documentary showed a man who trembled, walked with a limp and only seemed fully alive when he hit the opening of “Block Buster!” on a Butlin’s stage. In his last print interview he still argued that he had carried the heaviest promotional load when Sweet first exploded. He talked about the heart attacks without self-pity and without a clean number.
His last concert was 5 December 1996 at the Bristol Hippodrome, on a bill with Slade II and John Rossall’s Glitter Band Experience. In January 1997 another heart attack put him in hospital in Slough. He discharged himself after a week, then went back in. He died at Wexham Park Hospital on 10 February 1997 (some reports say 9 February) of kidney and liver failure after repeated heart attacks. He was 51. Contemporaneous papers listed renal failure; later summaries add cirrhosis and the long aftermath of alcoholism.
He was cremated on 17 February 1997 after a service at Most Holy Name Roman Catholic Church in Denham, Buckinghamshire. His daughters scattered his ashes. Fans later paid for a memorial plaque at Breakspear Crematorium. A tribute concert followed at the Camden Palace in 1998.
What remains
The songs outlived the man. “Ballroom Blitz” found a new generation through Wayne’s World. “Fox on the Run” and “Action” were covered by metal bands who treated Sweet as secret ancestors, not a joke. Andy Scott’s version of Sweet kept touring; Steve Priest led another line-up until his own death in 2020; Mick Tucker died in 2002. Connolly’s son auditioned for The X Factor in 2013 and spoke about wanting his own name, not only his father’s.
The tragedy is not complicated. A foundling from Hamilton became the face of a movement, made and lost a fortune, had his voice kicked out of him, drank until his heart and liver gave way, and still walked on stage because that was the only place the old voltage returned. He told his daughters he would rather live a short life fully than a long boring one. He got the first half of that bargain.
The records still sound like a party that will not end. The life behind them ended in a hospital in Slough, with the people who had loved him at different times standing in the same room. That is the sad story of Brian Connolly — not a rumour, and not only a headline.
. The life behind them ended in a hospital in Slough, with the people who had loved him at different times standing in the same room. That is the sad story of Brian Connolly — not a rumour, and not only a headline.