The Sweat were formed in 1980 by Clive Culbertson after his previous band No Sweat had split. Clive had just had a successful dubut solo single and solo single, he recruited Michael Katin on guitar who he had known from their time together in the mid seventies band Maybe. Another old band member Ricki Bleakley, this time from Fantasy was drafted in on drums. The line up was completed by David Stuart on keyboards and Trevor Forbes on guitar. It seems that the name change from No Sweat to The Sweat was brought about by the change in personnel alone!

Clive Culbertson – “When we were No Sweat, the reason we had to change our name was that we were threatened with legal action by Pete Townsend's label Eel Pie Records because their band No Sweat had had that name for several years. We then changed our name to The Sweat and the other band broke up shortly afterwards”. They had also changed labels, having signed to Double Dee Records (which was owned by Dave Dee of Dave Dee, Dozey, Beaky, Mick and Tich fame) on the back of some demo recordings made with Georgoe Doherty of Rip Off Records. These had been sent out to all the major record companies and quite a few showed an interest in signing the bandbut The band elected to sign with Dave Dee’s Double D label. All of the band members had bought his records in the 60s and were a bit star struck; otherwise I think they would have gone with some of the other deals on the table.

Their debut single “Why’d Ya Have To lie” was duly released on the label and The Sweat were soon off touring around Britain. Producer George Doherty recalls doing a ten gig tour of England with Clive back in the seventies “Yeah we played the Marquee in London. We were using the main bands PA. I remember the guy working it asked me for £50, we were on £60 for the gig. I told him to see the door. Apparently though, that was the thing to do, pay him the money. The tour cost us about three grand. When you came back you said to yourself, what was all that about. It was nice rubbing shoulders with bands like The Pretenders, but we didn’t sell any more records on the back of it”.

Dave Dee’s label was also encountering some serious distribution problems which they were never to overcome, so despite the massive airplay which the single was receiving, the fans couldn’t actually find copies to purchase. The band actually sold far more records at their gigs than their label ever managed to do in the shops! An album was released in June 1980 entitled “No More Running”, again to much critical acclaim but again the release was dogged by poor distribution. By early 1981 the band had had enough and split up.

The Sweat album was given a CD and a LP release by Tokyo based 1977 Records in Japan in 2007. This release included three tracks from Clive Culbertson's former band, No Sweat, as well as a number of tracks culled from various singles released by The Sweat. To coincide with this, Clive reformed The Sweat in Nov 2007 and flew out to Japan to play two exclusive sold out dates in Tokyo.