It’s strange to find myself sitting in the bar of the Manchester
Malmaison waiting to meet the man whose voice I first heard 34 years ago on Top
of the Pops. Outside the steadily falling northern rain keeps me company as I
reflect on the 25-year career of Slade stretching from 1966 to 1991. Slade’s
first chart run of seventeen consecutive hit singles (that included six number
ones) began in May 1971 when Get Down and
Get With It broke them into the Top 20 and ended in January 1976 with the
appropriately titled Let’s Call It Quits.
During this period they also had six hit albums (three of which went to number
one), made the highly-acclaimed film (‘Flame’), continually toured Europe and
the world and wrote one of the best loved Christmas pop records of all time.
And then the fairytale ended… the hits dried up, America refused to be
conquered and Punk exploded across the British music scene leaving Slade as
yesterdays working-class heroes – it was all summed up by the title of their
1977 album Whatever Happened to Slade?
By 1980 the group were on the very verge of splitting when a chance
offer came to play at the Reading Festival. Slade’s legendary performance gave
birth to an amazing comeback that lasted until 1991 and a final chart single Radio Wall of Sound (No.21) – which
became their 34th Top 100 single. And then Noddy Holder left the
band along with his writing partner Jim Lea – since which time the original
Slade have never reunited on stage or performed together. Dave Hill and Don
Powell went on to form Slade 2 and still tour to this day playing the Lea and
Holder penned hits to an ever-ageing audience.
Noddy arrives on time sporting a mustard jacket and long paisley
scarf. We greet each other and settle into a corner with a pot of Earl Grey
tea. At 61 he looks dapper, cheery, relaxed and healthy – a man who seems
content and settled in his years – a far cry from the rock icon of yesteryear
who strode the stage in tartan trousers, black mirrored top hat and red
platform boots.
I take this opportunity to raise a question concerning the master
tapes. Having detected that many of the tracks – particularly single A and B
sides – were lifted from vinyl (this has been confirmed to me by Salvo), I had
wrongly assumed that the original masters must have been lost. “We’ve still got the masters but we actually
found that on some of our records, especially in the old days, the way we use
to mix them – we use to test them through little transistor sized radios to see
how they’d sound on radio… that’s the sort of sound we wanted… Oh yes, it was a
deliberate policy to master off vinyl – we compared what we got off some of our
master tapes with what we got off our vinyl where they’d been compressed. We
wanted the sort of sound that we had in our old days.”
When the compilation album ‘Sladest’ was released in 1973 it pulled
together all of Slade’s hit singles to date – it sold extremely well (No.1)
because up until that point many of the 45s had not appeared on albums: Get Down & Get With It, Coz I Luv You,
Look Wot You Dun, Take Me Bak ‘Ome, Cum On Feel The Noize and Squeeze Me Pleeze Me. Nod elaborates further: “We never had singles from albums… and if they were on albums the
singles had already been out. That was a deliberate thing… We had the best of
both worlds… we sold tons of singles, we sold tons of albums… Now, we didn’t
want to short-change the fans on records or on touring – if you look at some of
our old ticket prices we were really cheap to go and see! We purposely kept the
costs down, we subsidised it out of our own money (and our own royalties) – we
kept the cost down of the tickets to see us live and you got twelve or so brand
new tracks on albums.”
Nod’s lyrics during this period were often misunderstood and are
actually quite cutting and astutely observant of success and fame. “I’m not saying we didn’t change at all but
we certainly kept our feet on the ground probably more than a lot of people
because we were still based in the Midlands, we still had a lot of our old
mates – but we saw a lot of our contempories totally changing. Fame changing
them, money changing them – I’ve seen it happen all through my career. I didn’t
wanna be them… People use to think the lyrics were flippant, but they’re not
flippant – a lot of trouble was taken over the lyrics. It’s very hard to put
across in three minutes a good solid message in a song, and things that
probably sound flippant on the surface are not flippant at all if you actually
listen properly. I never do interviews where I discuss the lyrics of songs, I
think it’s up to the listener to judge and get out of them what ever they
want.”
Throughout 1973 the Slade juggernaut seemed unstoppable – Cum On Feel The Noize and Skweeze Me Pleeze Me went straight to
No.1 and My Friend Stan made No.2. On
July 1st they headlined the Earls Court Exhibition Centre for a
concert that was seen as a celebration of their success. The show was filmed
for prosperity but Noddy tells me “We
never filmed and recorded it for public consumption, we did it for our own
keepsake.” and, although the film is in good condition, the soundtrack is
very poor and not up to the standard required for a commercial release. They
closed a memorable year holding down the No.1 slot for four weeks with their
perennial Christmas hit Merry Xmas
Everybody – little realising that it would be their last chart-topping
single.
The ‘glam-rock’ tag pinned to Slade and their flambouyant stage attire
may have initially helped their success, but in the intervening years it has
gone a long way to detract from, and trivialise, their musical legacy. When
Union Square proposed the re-launching of the back-catalogue it was clearly
with the intention of establishing the credibility of the music – “I knew at some point the tide would turn in
our favour. It started to happen a bit in the 90s when Vic & Bob did the
mickey-take of us ‘Slade In Residence’, Oasis covered ‘Cum On Feel the Noize’;
things like that were happening. We were getting songs in movies, some of our
songs were used in adverts – the tide had started to turn and people started to
look into the back-catalogue. Union Square said to us “You’ve not got the
credibility you deserve from the music point of view.” Most people associated us with this wacky band they saw on Top of the
Pops every week – ‘Merry Xmas’ topping all that off – but it is also ‘Merry
Christmas’ that has kept us in the frame for thirty-odd years.”– reflects
Nod. “Me and Jimmy are not the first two
you think of as us up there with the big songwriters… but we’ve written more
than forty-odd hits and over twenty-odd albums – it’s a big body of work.”
The
release of ‘Old New Borrowed & Blue’ (1974) marked a distinct shift in the
writing style of Lea and Holder – a deliberate move away from the foot-stomping
rockers of the previous three years. The disc opens with the superb-cover Just A Little Bit which Mr Holder tells
me he first heard in 1964 when The (Liverpool) Undertakers released it (The
Undertakers name was later used for one of the bands in ‘Flame’) and finishes
with the Stonesy Good Time Gals. Sandwiched
in between are ten tracks that cover a pot-pourri of styles – the ballads Everyday and Miles Out to Sea; the honky-tonky Find Yourself a Rainbow; the pure-pop of When the Lights Are Out as well as the fearsome rockers We’re Really Gonna Raise the Roof, Do We
Still Do It and Don’t Blame Me.
Nod
insists it was important for the band not to get bored – “The fatal thing for a band is to tread water. We probably could have
had more number ones than we did – we got robbed on a couple of occasions!”
He recognised that the groups desire for new artistic and creative challenges
would, to some degree, be at the expense of the 3-and-a-half-minute hit. “We knew we could not survive in terms of
longevity just churning out Slade anthems – and as writers we didn’t want to
just write Slade anthems, I didn’t as a singer. I knew I could sing all sorts
of songs – ballads, country songs – I didn’t just wanna be a ‘shouter’ as I was
called.”
Salvo
label manager Chas Chandler (no relation to Slade’s long-time manager!)
believes that the movie ‘Slade In Flame’ is the jewel in the legacy. It has now
been released on DVD as a widescreen presentation – the new print is cleaner
and brighter and the sound (although in mono) has been much improved. Shot and
released in 1974 the film is now garnering praise and has been acclaimed as one
of the best of its genre. In a way it was the film Slade shouldn’t have made but fortunately did! This gritty motion picture
takes the varnish off the music industry and exposes its darker underbelly as
it follows the fortunes of a fictional pop-group called Flame. Nod continues: “We could have done a slap-stick comedy, and
pissed through that, and people would have loved it… We wanted to make a
serious movie – none of us had ever acted but we knew the sort of movies we
liked. What was the use of doing a movie we just fooled around in but we didn’t
like?”
Flame’s
style harks back to the British ‘kitchen-sink’ dramas of the late fifties and
early sixties epitomised by (amongst others) A Kind of Loving, Saturday Night Sunday Morning and Room at the Top. It starred a young Tom
Conti, the late Alan Lake and Johnny Shannon – quality British actors that gave
the film real backbone and much needed support to Nod, Dave, Don and Jim. “It would have been no good us doing an
arty-farty film because we are not arty-farty type people – it sat perfectly
with our working-class background.” Unfortunately the hard-hitting
storyline left critics and fans less enthusiastic and somewhat baffled as it
was unexpected and didn’t sit well with the band’s goodtime ‘glam’ image. In
many viewers eyes the identity of ‘Slade’ and ‘Flame’ became blurred and this
seems to have had a knock-on effect as Slade’s popularity began to wane through
1975 and 76. I ask Nod if the response to the film had affected the group – “Dave and Jim certainly were deflated. Dave
more so but Jim was as well (at the time) because it was a kick-in-the-teeth
really because we knew it was good… Dave thought it was a mistake but he always
said it; you gotta give Dave his due – he said it when we got the script, he
said it when we were filming it and he said it when he saw it – so he didn’t
change his mind! He thought it was too near the mark, too near the knuckle of
exposing what goes on behind the rock industry – and he’s entitled to his
opinion. The teen audience didn’t get it – we half expected that to happen but
it was no good us catering for that audience. Making a movie was a totally different
ball game to anything we’d done before – we could not make a credible movie and
expect it to entertain that young market of ours.”
Nod’s
personal favourite the superb Far Far
Away became the first hit single from the film but it galled him when it
was held off the top slot by crooner Charles Aznavour’s She – (at the time the theme song for the ITV series ‘Seven Faces
of Woman’). The follow-up How Does It
Feel? stalled at number 15 – the first Slade 7” not to make the Top 10
since 1971 – which was extremely disappointing as it is without doubt one of
Jim and Nod’s most ambitious and finest compositions. It was also a portent of
things to come.
Having
first visited the States at the end of 1972 Slade returned to tour in ’73 and
’74 with little success. In 1975 they began the real American offensive by
relocating the band to New York – a base from which to work and tour the
continent over the following two years. By neglecting the home market they
risked losing popularity in the UK and this appeared to be happening when In For a Penny and Let’s Call It Quits both only managed No.11. The 1976 Nobody’s Fools album (which features
Nod’s favourite Slade sleeve) was clearly aimed at the American market and it
was the first Slade album since ‘Play It Loud’ (1970) not to get into the UK
Top 10 (it made No.14). The third single off the album, the title track Nobody’s Fool was the last single to be
released on Polydor before Slade moved to Chas Chandler’s newly formed Barn
label. The single didn’t chart.
“We gave up two years from the rest of the
world to try and crack America because it was the only market, up until that
point, that hadn’t happened for us. We were getting stale we thought in Europe
anyway… we’d done the movie… it was the only market left we hadn’t cracked. We
proved ourselves around America live on many tours, many times… New York we
could headline. LA, San Francisco we couldn’t headline – they didn’t get us… In
the Midwest we were storming it… The acts that you mentioned earlier like Black
Sabbath, Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, those ilk of acts were album acts in
America and considered so – but they worked America over and over. Fleetwood
Mac were there six years before they had a hit… now, we couldn’t afford to
spend that amount of time there away from the rest of the world… It
was crippling financially…” Without a big hit single stateside from Nobody’s Fools the album didn’t sell
even though it was critically well-received. Noddy is more sanguine and likes
to emphasise the achievements that Slade had in the States and lists many
cities where they could sell-out 20,000 seater venues – Philadelphia, Chicago,
Detroit, Kansas, Cleveland. “We had a
mass following over there but not enough to become massive. Quo toured America
and couldn’t even catch a cold!” It is worth noting that many of Slade’s
peers also failed across the Pond – Bolan, The Sweet, Roxy Music and Thin Lizzy
to mention just a few.
When
Slade returned home in May 1977 to promote their new album Whatever Happened to Slade the musical landscape in the UK had
changed considerably under the onslaught of Punk. Even though the band were
tighter than ever and the album was a stunning return to form (often hailed as
their best), audiences and sales were moving in ever decreasing circles.
Through ’78 and ’79 the group were kept afloat on publishing royalties and
sales from the back-catalogue along with touring in Europe where they were
still successful. But by the end of 1979 Dave Hill had effectively left the
band and Jim had started his own off-shoot with The Dummies. The decline would
have been complete had it not been for an offer to play the 1980 Reading
Festival as a replacement to Ozzy Osbourne. Dave didn’t want to play it and
Noddy failed to talk him around – but Chas’ persuasive powers were too much and
on the 31st August Slade took to the stage for what was expected to
be the last time. Their storming performance that day has passed into rock-lore
as they trounced the other acts and catapulted themselves back into the arms of
the British public and back into the charts for a comeback that would last until
the end of the decade.
When
asked “If Reading had not happened, was
there a game plan?” his answer is remarkably candid – “We would have finished. I would have carried on as a solo artist, made
a solo album and got a little band and gone back on the road. I would have
probably started accepting some of the work I was getting offered in TV and
stuff like that, and I was also getting offered work from the West End stage.
That’s what I would have had to have done.” I then seize the moment to ask
Nod if he writes anymore – he frankly replies: “Occasionally when I get commissioned but not as a matter of course,
no.”
Although
Noddy finally left Slade in 1991 the seeds to that decision were sown back to
1984. “The point at which I knew I had to
approach things in a different manner – I didn’t want to leave the band – we
couldn’t just be doing album-tour-album-tour round and round and round and
round was when we went out to America on the strength of ‘Run Runaway’. We’d
done six warm up shows on our own, top-of-the-bill, small venues – 5,000
seaters – we’d sold them all out, we’d played great. Then we had to join the
Ozzy Osbourne tour and, um, Jim got hepatitis after the first show in San
Francisco. We came of stage, Jim collapsed – so we obviously had to come home.
We stayed on for another couple of weeks because he was too ill to travel and
we stayed in a Sunset Marquee in LA while I went out on the road doing
promotions for radio… On the way back the record company had set-up a showcase
in Cleveland which was absolutely disastrous… and basically when we got on the
plane to come home after that I thought I’m not going back and doing this
anymore. It’s not what I want to do anymore… I got home and my marriage was
pretty much on the rocks because of the pressure – my Missus didn’t think I’d
be going back out to America and spending months there again which would have
happened, so she wanted to call it a day. All these things were spiralling all
at the same time. My dad was very ill at the time as well – plus the fact that
I didn’t want to go back to being the opening act again in America after all
that time – I didn’t want to go back ten years and do the same thing all over
again… It didn’t feel right. Nor did I want to go out on the same treadmill
doing ‘Cum On Feel The Noize’ for the next ten or twenty years.”
Once
Slade had stopped touring the band continued to record albums up until 1987 – Rogues Gallery, Crackers and You Boyz Make Big Noize – “I think we made
some great albums in the Eighties but it wasn’t what I was in a rock’n’roll
band for. When we worked with Chas Chandler it was very much four blokes in a
studio playing as a rock’n’roll band and bringing out records – very fast. When
the CD revolution came everything took forever – it took three days to get a
drum sound, everything was done separately, in layers – we didn’t really play
together in the studio… I used to call it “recording by numbers”… I have no
interest in sitting around in a studio for three days listening to Don getting
a snare drum sound! The essence of Slade to me was ‘feel’. I had been in the
band at that point for twenty-two years, same four blokes… we were beginning to
get stale…”
Towards
the end of the interview Noddy added: “It
would have been no good the four of us staying together anymore, we weren’t
getting on like we used to when we were a young gang – I’m glad I left and I’m
glad I did it at the time I did it… if I had to be truthful I should probably
have done it five years before, maybe even ten years before, because the offers
I let go by I sometimes regret – I did have some very good offers for
television stuff and that, which I let go by-the-by. I never really saw myself
going past forty in rock’n’roll bands anyway… after twenty-five years I didn’t
want to carry on working with the same four guys anymore. They got miffed when
I said I was finishing but I’m sure, if they’re truthful to themselves, they
too wouldn’t have wanted to play for the rest of their lives as the same four
guys together… So Jim’s happy doing what he’s doing now and I’m sure Dave and
Don are happy with what they’re doing.”
Unhappy
with the drift of the band Noddy felt that it was time to investigate the
offers of work being made to him from out with the Slade bubble. He finally cut
the cord in 1991 after the single Universe
failed to chart (though Nod liked it) – this was probably due to poor promotion
and to the fact that it had already appeared on the 1991 Wall of Hits compilation some months earlier. “With the failure of ‘Universe’ I decided it was time to knock-it on
the head.”
As
Noddy leaves I find myself shaking the hand of a man who rode the rock’n’roll
rollercoaster for far longer than many but knew when to get off and choose a
new direction – and I admire him for that. I do miss Slade though… and often
hear the refrain of Cum On Feel The Noize
echoing down through the decades reminding me of a time when rock was a
wonderful cocktail of passion, energy… and, most importantly, fun.
©
John Haxby 2007
