The Ballroom Blitz
"The Ballroom Blitz" (often called "Ballroom Blitz") is a song by British glam rock band The Sweet, written by Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman. The song reached number one in Canada, number two in the UK Singles Chart and the Australian Chart, and number five on the US "Billboard" Hot 100. It remains an enduring favourite with close to 30,000,000 streams on YouTube. Background. "The Ballroom Blitz" was inspired by an incident on 27 January 1973 when the band were performing at the Grand Hall in Kilmarnock, Scotland, and were driven offstage by a bottling. History and  description. The song was recorded at Audio International Studio, 18 Rodmarton Street, London, and released as a single in September 1973. The song appeared on the US and Canadian versions of "Desolation Boulevard" but never appeared on a Sweet album in the UK, other than hits compilations. The initial guitar and drum riff of the song has similarity to a 1963 song by Bobby Comstock called "Let's Stomp". Cover versions. The first cover of "The Ballroom Blitz" was by the Les Humphries Singers in 1974, the first German single to reach #1 in New Zealand. In 1979, the song  was covered by the Damned, which featured Lemmy from Motörhead on bass guitar. It was released as a B-side to "I Just Can't Be Happy Today" and featured as a bonus track on their CD reissue of "Machine Gun Etiquette". Other covers include Krokus in 1984, the Surf Punks on their 1988 album "Oh No! Not Them Again" (in the lyrics jacket it just says, "You should know the words by now"), Japanese glam rock band Scanch on their 1991 album "Ultra Romantic Bombers for Unlimited Lovers" under the title of "R&R Dynamite Kyoujidai", thrash metal band Nuclear  Assault on their 1991 album "Out of Order", Tia Carrere featuring a back track featuring Tommy Nickerson on the soundtrack to "Wayne's World" in 1992, and Christian rock band Calibretto 13 on their album "Enter the Danger Brigade" in 2000. In 2016, The Struts recorded it for the soundtrack of film "The Edge of Seventeen". In 2021, White Denim published a cover of The Ballroom Blitz via Dropbox.