HOW DOES IT FEEL? SLADE AND BEYOND by Jim Lea (with Daryl Easlea)

It’s no surprise that Jim Lea waited until after the other three members of Slade had written memoirs – not that he’ll have bothered to read them – before writing one of his own, but it did come as a surprise to me when, about a year ago, I learned he was writing a memoir in the first place. 

        Fiercely independent and warily protective of his privacy, Jim was the ‘quiet one’ in Slade, like George in The Beatles, John in The Who or JP in Led Zep, the member of the group who kept himself to himself, who wasn’t interviewed or photographed much, who thought being famous was a pain in the ass, who let his musical skills do the talking even if they weren’t necessarily appreciated by the world at large. He knew his value and that was all that mattered to him.

Slowly but surely, and perhaps inevitably, Jim has become exasperated by this situation. Meanwhile, Noddy Holder has been elevated to the status of national treasure, cropping up on TV chat and game shows played for laughs; Dave Hill is still out there, fronting an ersatz Slade group, promoting it for all he’s worth, unchanged from the sprightly little chap who was once trussed up like an oven-ready turkey; and Don Powell is celebrated as a heroic survivor, enduring all that a mean world can throw at him, always friendly, always with a grin on his craggy face. But Jim? Who knows? Whatever Happened To Slade?, the title of Daryl Easlea’s wonderful Slade biography, published in 2023, might just as well be applied to their reticent bass player.

How Does It Feel? goes some way to answering that question in respect of Slade’s most naturally talented yet most retiring member, their multi-instrumentalist, occasional singer, arranger and 50/50 (as credited) co-writer of all their hits bar the first, ‘Get Down And Get With It’. Here is whatever happened to Jim Lea, in bite-sized, easily digestible chunks, a strange, non-linear format for an autobiography devised by co-writer Easlea to which Jim consented, no doubt eagerly, because he invariably opts for the unorthodox. Thus, his book isn’t about Slade per se, it’s about Jim, his life and loves and music, how he felt about all that was going on around him and how he dealt with it, what he did before, during and after the group and, in spades, the immense value he places on his relationship with Louise Ganner, the pretty-as-a-picture childhood sweetheart he met aged 16 and married in 1973, the mother of his two children, still the love of his life after 53 years and to whom he wrote scores of affectionate letters while away from home, many of them reproduced in his book’s pages, kisses and all. 

Nevertheless, the book is sequenced chronologically. It is divided into five sections, beginning with Jim’s birth in 1949, and closing long after the group has ceased to function with Jim ruminating on Slade’s legacy, not least the enduring loyalty of their fans. In between are over 100 ‘chapters’, some no more than a few lines, all prefaced with the words How Does It Feel as in, to give three examples, How Does It Feel To Meet Chas Chandler or How Does It Feel To Go To America or How Does It Feel To Be Asked If Slade Will Ever Reunite. The answer to that last one, by the way, is, “Bored, and no.” 

        ‘How Does It Feel?’, of course, is the title of a song from the 1975 film noir Slade In Flame in which the group starred but which somehow fell between two stools, too dark for fans, too light for non-believers. As Easlea pointed out in his Slade biography, its lyrics “simultaneously induce pathos, despair, poignancy and hope”, adding that both Noddy and Jim (and Noel Gallagher) regard it as the best song they ever wrote and recorded, an opinion I share. As a single, it reached no higher than 15 in the UK charts, their worst showing in four years and, though its poor chart performance is unlikely to have troubled Jim, the song itself clearly still means a lot to him. 

By and large, the feelings that Jim expresses to Easlea for inclusion in his book are similar to feelings he has communicated to me over a 56-year friendship that began when I met the members of Slade for the first time in 1970, developed while I wrote about them for Melody Maker and, later, while researching my 1983 Slade book Feel The Noize!, and flourished after the group disbanded. The older and wiser Jim got, the more he told me about what really happened inside the band, sometimes with brutal honesty, unafraid to offend anyone, least of all the other three, with much of what he said diametrically opposed to the old showbiz tradition of constantly putting a positive spin on things. 

        These conversations about the inner workings of Slade began when he and I used to meet up in the 1990s, often for a pint or two in a pub near where he owns a flat close to London’s Marble Arch. I never took notes – these weren’t interviews, just informal, but not necessarily confidential, chats – but I felt he was conveying a sense of injustice and some of what he told me would subsequently inform Slade-related posts on this blog, which I launched in 2014, well after these discussions. I was somehow under the impression that this was what Jim wanted, that I was the conduit of his thoughts to the wider world, and what I wrote was occasionally confirmed by his younger brother Frank, to whom he remains close. Either way, it seemed to me that sharing some of the things he said strengthened our friendship. We even exchanged Christmas cards. 

Jim’s chief complaint was that he didn’t receive the credit he thought he deserved for his role in Slade, most especially as the group’s principal composer. Tellingly, he states in his book that he wrote “most” of ‘Coz I Luv You’, Slade’s first number one hit, but that… “Chas [Chandler] put names as Holder/Lea on the credits. I said, ‘Well hang on, I wrote most of that song’ but Chas… wanted it like that because he didn’t want me to be in front of the band… I was fuming.” Eighty pages later Jim is still fuming when he learns that Holder has told Cub Koda of the American band Brownsville Station that he wrote all the songs. “I told Nod that if he ever said that again, he’d be looking for a new bass player and a new songwriter. I was not happy.” Reading between the lines, and noting comments elsewhere in the book regarding the construction of songs, among them ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’, we are left to assume that the 50/50 writing partnership was actually weighted more in Jim’s favour. Louise Lea, we are told, even wrote the couplet that opens ‘Everyday’, the perennially popular Slade ballad.

Frustrated, too, that others in the group continued to attract more attention than him, Jim would shrug when I suggested it was his own fault, that it was his decision to maintain a low profile, to avoid the spotlight, so what did he expect? He knew it was probably true. Well, How Does It Feel? represents an about-face in this regard, not only insofar as Jim has finally taken it upon himself to speak his mind for the benefit of the public, not just those close to him, but that he draws back the veil on a pop star life quite unlike what that public might imagine it to be. Not only was Jim the odd man out in Slade, he was an odd man out in the music world in general, as reflected in awkward encounters with other musicians, among them David Bowie, Ray Davies and John Bonham, his curiously offhand attitude towards success and his decision to go into psychotherapy which, in turn led to him to study counselling and psychotherapy himself. 

In 2014, Lea was diagnosed with prostate cancer, from which he has thankfully recovered, and in 2018 Holder too was diagnosed, though this wasn’t made public until 2023 by which time he, too, had recovered, equally thankfully. However, this shared misfortune does not preclude Jim from suggesting a few pages later that during chat shows Holder is economical with the facts, albeit admitting ruefully that “a tale is always far more interesting than the truth”, and condemning his former song writing partner for blaming Slade’s split on “one of five reasons [all groups split]: egos, money, drink and drugs, women or musical differences… and with Slade it was all five.” 

        “With all due respect to my old bandmate, that’s bollocks,” writes Jim. “We split because Nod had simply had enough… he wanted to diversify into DJing and acting and I felt no one was appreciating the work I was putting into crafting our records… so let’s hear less of the five ‘reasons’.”

It would be wrong to assume from these gripes that Jim’s book is all about petty point scoring. He’s fulsome in his praise for Holder’s showmanship and magnificent singing voice and also Powell’s drumming – “When we locked in together we were sticking people against the wall” – though he hasn’t much to say about Hill beyond how embarrassed he was by some of the guitarist’s OTT outfits. There’s a good deal about the Lea family, all positive, and it is touching to read about how Jim cared for his elderly parents. 

        Nevertheless, parts of the book stirred up a degree of nostalgic melancholia for me, not totally unexpected. The Slade I knew and wrote about during the first half of the 1970s was a tight, friendly, fun-loving rock and roll showband of the highest rank, masters of their stages, led by a strong, savvy and hands-on manager. It’s therefore poignant, even disheartening, to read the chapter How Does It Feel To Finish The Band. “Nod, Don, H [Hill] and I have met in public* three times since we called it a day,” writes Jim. “Twice in 1996 – one sad, one happy – Chas Chandler’s funeral and Noddy’s This Is Your Life, and in 2002 when Wolverhampton University gave us honorary degrees,” adding later that after the degree ceremony, “I couldn’t wait to leave. Nod wouldn’t have an interview done with us… I buggered off. I don’t know what the others did.” That last sentence, I thought, spoke volumes. 

        Once upon a time I thought their bond was unbreakable, their camaraderie steadfast. Now I know how it feels to be to be wrong. I must therefore advise fans that though How Does It Feel? Slade And Beyond is an essential Slade book, the most truthful they’ll ever read and as important for fans as Easlea’s biography, they’ll need to brace themselves before opening its pages. Sometimes the truth hurts. 

        The book has 301 pages, a timeline, a comprehensive Lea and Slade discography (in that order!) and is packed with pictures, including two eight-page plate sections, mostly colour, and facsimiles of letters and postcards written by Jim to Louise from far, far away. There’s also forewords by Francis Rossi and Roy Wood, and an afterword by Paul Weller. It will be published by Omnibus Press in late October. 

*Jim once told me that at least one private meeting ended in a blazing row, with doors slamming and one member, who shall remain nameless, fleeing the room. 

SLADE & STEELY DAN – AN UNLIKELY PAIRING

For reasons that continue to baffle their fans, Slade and America were uneasy bedfellows during the period when they achieved their greatest success in the UK. My theory is that it was simply bad timing. In 1973, the year they first visited the US, the counry wasn’t prepared for Noddy Holder’s showmanship, the ‘audience as part of the show’ style that subsequent rock acts, most notably Bruce Springsteen, employed, or, quite simply, the clothes they wore. Instead of being too little too late, they were too much too soon.  

        Reading my Just Backdated memoir not so long ago, Don Powell, Slade’s indefatigable drummer, came across a quote from Steely Dan’s Walter Becker that implied Slade weren’t among his group’s favourite acts. “How they ever managed to get enough money together to come here and tour is a miracle,” Becker told me when I interviewed him and his partner Donald Fagen in April of 1974. 

Slade, of course, were pals of mine in those days and I’d done my best to promote their interests in the columns of Melody Maker, mostly on the strength of their live shows. Now MM’s man in America, I had waited ages for an opportunity to interview the notoriously reticent Steely Dan men, and thought it best not to come to Slade’s defence lest Donald and Walter walk out on me. 

        “Steely Dan doesn’t have a, nice word to say about us, do they?” Don emailed me earlier this week. “I remember when they supported us. I think, they experienced the wrath of our notorious road crew.”

        In the event Slade were amongst a host of acts Becker and Fagen didn’t much like, among them Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. They described Black Oak Arkansas and “absolute trash” and grudgingly admitted that Yes and ELP were skilled musicians, even though their music was not to their taste. “I will grudgingly admit that English bands are more polished performers,” said Becker. “Their recordings are more carefully made… but I can’t understand how that is.”

        My email exchange with Don on this matter prompted him to do a bit of research that unearthed the promotional advert at the top of this post and also that on May 5 & 6, 1973 Slade appeared on a three-act show, in between bill toppers Humble Pie and openers Steely Dan, at the Winterland Arena in San Francisco. Although Humble Pie and Slade seems like a reasonable mix to me – both boasted fantastic guitar playing singers – whoever though it was a good idea to have Steely Dan open up this show needed their head examined. Clearly this would have been the Slade gig at which Becker and Fagen watched from the wings, horrified at the antics of Noddy and his boys. 

        Slade’s American adventure, especially the period when they lived in New York, roughly between 1975 and 1977, is generally dismissed as a something they’d prefer to forget. They slogged their guts out on the road for scant pickings, failed to generate much in the way of record sales, lost a good deal of money and returned to the UK with their tail between their legs. 

But America wasn’t entirely indifferent to Slade, as the advertisement above – albeit it a concert from before they went to live in the US – demonstrates. In those days the Philadelphia Spectrum held around 18,000, and Slade topped the bill there over the Eagles and others “quite a few times”, according to Don. It's interesting to note that Lou Reed, of all people, opened the show. Another city where Slade drew big crowds was St Louis where I saw them twice, and you can find my report on an early 1974 show here: https://justbackdated.blogspot.com/2014/08/slade-ambassador-theater-st-louis-mo.html

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO SLADE?: When The Whole World Went Crazee by Daryl Easlea

At last! At last an author with insight, sympathy and commitment has written a substantial book about Slade that dissects the highs and lows of a career that is unique in the annals of British pop. During the first half of the 1970s Slade were enormously successful, multiple UK chart-toppers that drew 18,000 fans to a show at Earls Court, yet they somehow lost their way, briefly found it again, then lost it for a second time. Try as they might, they never really recovered, and certainly never achieved the recognition they were due. “Slade have slipped between the cracks of pop history,” notes Bob Geldof in his Foreword to this book, but author Daryl Easlea is probably more on point when he writes: “[Slade] frequently appeared out of step with the time they were in and their position in the music industry in the 1970s.”

How did this happen? It’s the conundrum upon which Whatever Happened To Slade? focuses and one I have wrestled with for years but first, before looking at the book in detail, I must declare an interest. The immediate benefit of joining the staff of Melody Maker in 1970 was the opportunity to rub shoulders with my rock heroes, John Lennon and Pete Townshend in particular, but more lasting satisfaction came from discovering rock heroes for myself. Slade weren’t exactly unknown when I first encountered them but their fortunes were a bit shaky and needed a boost. An album and single released in 1969 went nowhere. When former Jimi Hendrix-manager Chas Chandler found them, an ill-advised and rather hasty image change to skinheads backfired, and the first three singles and album he produced for them also failed to set the world alight.

I entered their story in October 1970, as things were getting desperate. Identifying them immediately as a terrific live band, well-drilled and bursting with energy, I wrote about them in MM accordingly. This was eight months before they had their first chart hit, so I was in at the beginning of their rise to glory if not the formation of the group, which can be traced back to 1966. Once within their orbit, however, I clung on for a topsy-turvy ride that lasted about five years. I don’t think any music writer wrote more about them than myself. I observed their extraordinary chart success, watched them grow as performers and saw them on stage many times in the UK, Continental Europe and America. I became their ‘official’ biographer in 1983, and contributed sleeve notes galore for both vinyl and CD albums, all the way up to 2005. 

        The four members of Slade, Noddy Holder, Jim Lea, Dave Hill and Don Powell, and Chandler, became good friends of mine insofar as music writers can become friends of musicians, but it always seemed to me to be more meaningful than a mutually beneficial relationship contingent on my support in the media. (They were, incidentally, the only group of note ever to visit me in my homes, both in the UK and US.) However, I always knew that if I crossed an unspoken line the relationship might wither, as it may have done more recently, albeit not from the point of view of everyone involved, that is all four members of the group and their current management. 

        I mention all this to set the record straight; an explanatory preamble to reviewing Whatever Happened To Slade?, the first biography of substance since my own which, in the meantime, has been joined by Holder’s two volumes of anecdotal memoirs and one each from Powell, which I commissioned and edited, and Hill. Whatever Happened To Slade? is bigger and better than any of them, far longer, far more detailed, far more considered, with far more attention paid to their music, and it is bang up to date, having been completed earlier this year after a lengthy gestation*. Furthermore, I was interviewed by its author, sent an early draft of the manuscript to ‘fact-check’ and my name appears in it 97 times.

Your man from Just Backdated with the four members of Slade at Gatwick Airport, April 17, 1973. Noddy is doing his best to obscure me. 

My copy of this shot is credited to Syndication International, a photo agency operating at the time. 

        So, I’m hardly impartial, but I can state without hesitation that what we have here is not only the nearest thing we are ever going to get to a definitive Slade biography but a book that, unlike my own, gains immeasurably from having been written with the benefit of hindsight; that takes into account perceptions and trends in popular music that did Slade no favours in the long term. Having worked within the music business as well as writing extensively about those who create the product on which it depends, Easlea knows how it operates and is therefore well placed to analyse the highs and lows of Slade’s frankly bizarre career. He’s also good at setting the scene, placing them (and how they dressed) within everything else that was happening in the 1970s, political, social and musical. Although the book isn’t ‘authorised’ per se, I happen to know that two members of the group, sympathetic to its aims, assisted in its research, and he’s spoken to numerous people who observed their ups and downs, several fellow musicians, some of whom appeared as support acts to Slade in their heyday, others who admire them greatly as well as present-day music critics and industry figures. Nevertheless, the two most important support staff who might have helped his inquiries, manager Chandler and long-serving tour manager Graham ‘Swin’ Swinnerton, died in 1996 and 2015 respectively. Specialist music industry accountant Colin Newman, who has handled their business affairs since Chandler gave up the reins in the early 1980s, has not been involved. 

        It’s unnecessary for me to go into detail about their career, but Daryl Easlea covers all the bases: how the four eventually found one another from among the West Midlands beat group scene of the mid-sixties, bonded while playing hundreds of semi-pro (and then pro) gigs as The ’NBetweens, including a four-month season in the Bahamas that has echoes of The Beatles in Hamburg, and stumbled into an early record deal that went nowhere. In 1969 they were taken on by Chandler and, two years later, had a minor hit with ‘Get Down And Get With It’, a raucous cover of a Little Richard bone-shaker. Once they’d got their foot in the door, however, there was no stopping them. With Chandler producing, Lea composing the music and Holder the lyrics, a glorious run of stomping hit singles with calculatingly misspelt titles followed: 12 top ten placings between 1971 and 1974, including six number ones, and three number one LPs, which positions them statistically and unequivocally as the top UK chart act of the era. 

        Simultaneously, their five-year stage apprenticeship ensured scores of concerts were not only instant sell-outs but knees-ups that raised the rafters in theatres of ever-increasing size throughout the UK and elsewhere. Holder, with his powerful voice, and the never-underdressed Hill were zealous OTT showmen; Lea, an accomplished multi-instrumentalist, and sturdy drummer Powell, a strapping, unswerving backbone. The sum of it all was one of the UK’s greatest ever rock’n’roll showbands, unforgettable performers to their legions of fans. Easlea covers all of this in fine and entertaining detail. 

        Slade’s ascent reached its apex at that legendary 1973 Earls Court concert, almost immediately after which Powell was seriously injured in a motor accident in which his girlfriend was killed. By a slightly macabre quirk of fate, this event marked a turning point in the group’s fortunes and, thereafter, things would never be quite the same. Slade In Flame, their movie, was brave but uncharacteristically bitter and hit the wrong note, and no sooner had Powell recovered, at least partially, than they opted to relocate to the US in a forlorn attempt to replicate their UK success there. When after 18 months they abandoned their American dream, the UK had gone cold on them. 

        The period that followed is, to my mind, more interesting than their rise, and was certainly more appealing to Lea, a theorist distrustful of the celebrity thrust upon him. With their backs against the wall, Slade fought doggedly against a tide of indifference, heroically refusing to concede defeat. In the eyes of many, this perseverance was as impressive as their run of hits, and Easlea tracks their bumpy progress well, not least in terms of analysing the music they continued to produce, much of which, he correctly points out, was as good as anything they’d recorded earlier. Trouble was, Slade was passé and few were listening. 

        Then, out of the blue, there was the renaissance that followed a barnstorming appearance at the 1980 Reading Festival, bringing about a resurgence in popularity that didn’t quite match their earlier triumphs but was certainly well earned. By this time their influence was being felt by others, most notably Kiss and Cheap Trick (and possibly even Bruce Springsteen), who saw in them a template for mixing rock chops with high-spirited showmanship. All of this might even have translated into success in America at last were it not for a bit of bad luck, bad timing and ill-health. 

        Slade last toured in 1984 and though new records, some produced by Lea, continued to be released for the remainder of the decade, enthusiasm in the ranks was on the wane. While no official announcement was ever made, the group ceased collective endeavour following an impromptu appearance at a fan convention in Walsall in April, 1991. Holder, who hadn’t wanted to do it, was furious at being coerced into appearing on stage and, ever since, has resolutely opposed a reunion. 

        The final chapters cover all of this and beyond and, in part, answer the question posed by the title: whatever happened to Slade? But the reality is far more complex and, after covering the post-Slade activities of the individuals, Easlea concludes his book by dipping further into the Slade quandary, drawing an astute analogy between their fate and the name by which they were known before they became Slade, The ’NBetweens. “[It is]… exceptionally apt for the group they became,” he writes, “in between genres, in between fan groups, too English for America and when they ‘got serious’, they were in between the sombre music heads and their teenybop fans; their film was too grim for the majority of their followers, yet unseen by those who should have seen it; in between the class divide of the music industry; they were the real thing, and, as a result, somehow almost totally eclipsed by others who were far less popular than them in the day.” 

        If the book has a flaw, it is the author’s tendency to downplay anything disreputable or contentious. There’s plenty of rock’n’roll in the book but not much sex and drugs, and while Slade were hardly in the same league as Led Zeppelin or The Who when it came to on-the-road indulgences, there were occasions when their behaviour was maybe less than saintly. Perhaps more significantly, in a commendable attempt to remain impartial, apart from a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to Lea playing guitar parts in the studio, Easlea has side-stepped any mention of the division of labour within Slade, a prickly issue that has plagued inter-band relationships in recent years. In the 1990s Lea told me, “They didn’t play a note I didn’t tell them to,” a quote that appears elsewhere among Slade posts on this blog (which the author was invited by me to reference at will in his book), and the fact that Lea wrote almost 100% of the music while Holder the lion’s share of the lyrics, is not made clear. Similarly, there is no mention of Lea’s ongoing displeasure at newspaper articles in which Holder is invariably described as the ‘writer’ of ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’**, nor of his spats with Ray Davies and John Bonham, both of which Lea has talked about in the past. Also unmentioned is the disparity in wealth – Holder and Lea are rich, Hill and Powell aren’t – that has driven a wedge between them in the past two decades. Furthermore, unlike disappointed fans, he declines to comment on the merits or otherwise of ‘Slade’ groups fronted by Hill, of which both Holder and Lea have been dismissive in the past, and the two eight-page picture sections, which lack images of Chandler and Swinnerton***, are miserly to say the least.

        Of greater significance, however, is the book’s crucial contention, which I share, that a profound injustice has been perpetrated upon Slade. They have never received a Brit Award, let alone a Grammy. Holder and Lea have never been nominated for an Ivor Novello Award, traditionally given to hit songwriters but also to those who have made an outstanding contribution to British music – like having 25+ top thirty singles, not to mention penning the country’s favourite Christmas song, perhaps – and the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland has stubbornly ignored them (despite attempts on my part to bring Slade’s achievements to their attention). Some lesser awards may have gone their way but apart from Holder’s MBE, awarded in 2000, they have been persistently snubbed by the music industry establishment.

        Whatever Happened To Slade? does its best to rectify this. It’s a terrific read, in-depth and thoughtful over 480 pages, with an extensive discography and bibliography, index and an afterword by Jim Moir, aka Vic Reeves, who impersonated Noddy Holder in Reeves & Mortimer’s hilarious Slade spoof. Most importantly, the book bestows upon Slade the long overdue re-appraisal this great British rock band unquestionably deserves. Finally, I should add that Slade fans, as loyal a group of fans anywhere, anytime, ever, now have a new bible. They’ll know what I mean.

__________

* Contracts for this book were exchanged in 2016. 

** The inspiration for ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ came from Lea’s mother-in-law who suggested he write a Christmas song. Initially reluctant, Lea came up with the chord sequence and proposed Holder fashion lyrics with a Christmas theme. 

*** Inexplicably for a book of this scope, pictures of Slade with busking bagpipe player Victor Herman (who played on their recording of ‘Auld Lang Syne’), with an underdressed ‘singing telegram’ girl, and a Slade tribute act are preferred over shots of Chandler and/or Swinnerton. 

THE FIRST (AND SECOND) TIME I SAW SLADE

In the course of writing extensively about Slade for Melody Maker during the first half of the seventies, I watched them perform many times, in the UK, Europe and America. I saw them in pubs, clubs and concert halls, all the way up to their legendary Earls Court show in the summer of 1973, and what was probably their biggest headlining US gig, at Keil Auditorium in St Louis in June two years later. 

        The first time I saw them on stage, however, was at Samanthas, a club/disco in central London, but I haven’t been able to pinpoint the precise date, probably because it wasn’t advertised. Even Slade uber-fan Chris Selby, whose archive of Slade gigs is second to none, can’t locate it either.

        I believe it would have been in late September or early October 1970, but I can’t be sure. What I do remember quite clearly is that there was hardly anyone there, and that no one who was there looked like they had gone along to see Slade. It was more the kind of place where you’d find soul music played for dancing, where singles went to hook up and, hopefully, leave as one half of a couple. 

        Samanthas was down a flight of steps at 3 New Burlington Street, off Regent Street, very dark inside, and Slade were deafeningly loud in a small room that wasn’t designed for 100-watt stacks. Chas Chandler, their imposing manager, had coerced me along and while they played he bought me endless scotch and cokes and yelled into my ear about how they were a breath of fresh air, which he pronounced ‘eayer’. After their set the four boys came over and introduced themselves, a weapons-grade charm offensive that worked a treat. They were well pleased to make the acquaintance of an MM writer, and I thought they were hilariously funny, like a four-man comedy act. Their thick Black Country brogue and Chas’s strong Geordie meant I – a Yorkshireman yet to lose my own regional twang – was exposed to a bewildering variety of accents that night. 

        More importantly, I was struck by how good Slade were on stage, a tight, well-drilled rock’n’roll band with a knockout singer, full of confidence too, casually proficient in the art of stagecraft. As I would soon learn, this degree of expertise had been honed during at least three years of gigging around pubs and dance halls in the Midlands, on a season in the Bahamas and even trips to Scotland, which meant they had the same familiarity with one another’s skills as The Beatles had from their time in Liverpool and Hamburg, and The Who as The Detours in the clubs and pubs of West London. I still believe you can’t beat this sort of experience in the real world of rock’n’roll, the world where instead of appearing on a televised talent contest you gig regularly for at least a couple of years before seeing the inside of a recording studio. 

        Two years and umpteen shows later I recalled that night in the sleeves notes Chas asked me to write for Slayed, their fourth album, released in 1972 as they were approaching the height of their popularity in the UK. “It was Samantha who first introduced me to Slade,” I wrote, trying to be witty. I also recalled the night in Feel The Noize!, the Slade biography I wrote with their co-operation in 1983, mentioning how Chas – a big man well capable of handling himself in a tight corner – sang their praises pretty forcefully to anyone who would listen, making it unwise to take a different point of view, not that anyone was likely to after hearing them play. 

        All of this came back to me this week when I was asked for some Slade memories by the music writer Daryl Easlea, whose long-awaited book on the group is due to be published later this year. Daryl’s inquiries caused me to surf the internet to refresh my memory of Slade in 1970, and in a vain attempt to pinpoint the precise date of that night at Samanthas I came across this cutting, from Melody Maker’s Raver column dated 31 October that year. 

        It actually refers to the second time I saw Slade in action, and I’d completely forgotten about it. It was another unadvertised gig that the formidable Chris Selby won’t have been able to add to his archive, at least not until now. Chas had invited me along to a private show he’d booked for his boys at a posh ballroom in the City of London, the financial district, very late on a Saturday night/Sunday morning, for an audience of well-heeled debutantes and Hooray Henrys, all dressed to the nines, probably celebrating some Lord or Lady’s 21st birthday. 

        The attraction was a decent pay packet – I think Chas told me they got £400 (just over £5k today), a windfall in 1970 – and all the booze they could drink, beer, wine, champagne, spirits, the lot. They’d given me the address and told me to get there around midnight, and tell anyone who asked that I was ‘with the band’, which I did. Earlier that night – Chris Selby and I have now established it would have been on October 24 – they’d played a gig at The Temple in Lower Wardour Street in Soho and they were supposed to be on stage at the ballroom at about 1am, so they had plenty of time to get across London. When I arrived, the crew had already set up their gear and Chas and his boys were tackling a vast amount of booze in the dressing room, a daunting task they approached with characteristic enthusiasm.

An ad for Slade’s Temple gig the same night, courtesy of Chris Selby

         Suitably refreshed, on they went. I can’t remember much about the set, only that – as ever – they were deafeningly loud, so much so that someone in charge asked them to turn down and got short shrift from Chas. Bear in mind this was late 1970, almost nine months before Slade hit the charts with ‘Get Down And Get With It’, so they would have been a completely unknown quantity to everyone there. I have no doubt the set was liberally sprinkled with covers, plenty of easy-to-play 12-bars too. 

        Nevertheless, they would have given their all and more besides, and thoroughly satisfied their generous paymasters, for afterwards the dressing room was swamped with well-wishers, high-born girls in long, off-the-shoulder ballgowns with low necklines who talked to us in cut-glass voices, watched over by young men in bow-ties and dinner jackets who grinned uneasily as the booze flowed. No doubt these debby girls, the ‘fillies’ as the boys called them, thought it was ‘sooper’. 

        Happily, no one disgraced themselves by making a lewd suggestion to any of them, not even Noddy who was the chief culprit when it came to this kind of thing, sometimes even from the stage. I watched it all in a spirit of intensifying euphoria and left hopelessly pissed at around 3am, staggering into the dark night of the City where cabs were few and far between at that time on a Sunday morning. I’d wandered down the Embankment and was approaching Blackfriars Bridge before I found one.

        Back at work on Monday I must have mentioned my weekend’s intemperate adventure to Chris Welch who was in the midst of writing the weekly Raver column, hence the snippet above that inspired me to write this post. 

        And isn’t it odd how Slade, of all people, were pioneering the private gigs so popular amongst the megastars of today who collect a cool million or two by playing at parties thrown by billionaires with money to burn? 

CHAS CHANDLER INTERVIEW - October, 1972

This is the interview I did with Chas Chandler that was published in Melody Maker in October, 1972. 

“We gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do.

"We gotta get out of this place, girl there’s a better life for me and you.”

— Written by Cynthia Weill & Barry Mann, recorded by The Animals, 1965.

Brian James Chandler, who will be 34 in December and who has been called Chas since his schooldays, is learning to play the guitar again.

        His reason this time around is simple — Father Christmas is bringing his three-year-old son a guitar next Christmas and Chas has to be the teacher. Chandler Junior is already well into rock: he can sing along to Slade and some of The Beatles, but he doesn’t seem to like Jimi Hendrix. He likes Ray Charles but only because dad recommends it.

        It’s not surprising that Chandler Senior has this influence on his son. Chas Chandler was the original bass player with The Animals which taught him as much about the rock business as Georgie Best knows about football. From there he went on to discover, produce and manage Jimi Hendrix and now he’s managing Slade, the hottest property to arrive on the rock scene for a long while.

        For a one-time docker in the Newcastle shipyards, Chandler has put a real meaning into the words of the old Animals’ hit. Now he lives in a rambling country mansion on the road to Eastbourne and has offices in Mayfair.

        He lives, he says, for the present and the future but it’s the past that has taught him all he knows. He can recall a list of names of businessmen to trust and with whom he has dealt – and he can reel off a bigger list of characters who are crooks, swindlers and conmen. It would be very hard to swindle Mr Chandler today.

        In his youth Chas’s main preoccupation was avoiding conscription. To this end he enrolled for engineering college where he learned to design power stations. On the day conscription ended he quit college and worked on the docks. He was docking by day and playing in a variety of Newcastle clubs by night.

        Various combinations of the five musicians who became The Animals played together before the band was formed, and docking seemed much less attractive. Eventually docking occurred on Sunday afternoons only — with double pay for the same amount of work.

        Towards the end of 1963 The Animals came down to London to find work. Eight months previously Chas had been sacked from the shipyards for irregular hours. He’d play music all night and go straight to work in the mornings and work suffered the most.

        On arrival in London, the Animals met Mickie Most who wanted to produce their records. The first one ‘Baby, Let Me Take You Home’ was a hit and three years of being an Animal began. It was, says Chas, three years of total lunacy – working every night, touring all the time and never knowing who to trust.

        “We were green, so green we hardly knew what was happening to us. We just did what we were told and so long as we had enough money to live on it didn’t matter.”

        ‘House Of The Rising Sun’ was their second record and biggest hit. It was also a massive hit in America and The Animals became the third British group to cross the Atlantic – after The Beatles and The Dave Clark Five.

        “We spent the money so fast we never had time to sit down and count it. We were screwed here and screwed in America. We had a big turnover but no capital and we always stayed in the best hotels. Then, one day in Ireland, we just decided to drop the whole thing.”

        Alan Price was the first Animal to leave. Price has a phobia about flying and he opted out of a Scandinavian tour at the last minute and went home to Newcastle. Mick Gallagher was brought in as a temporary replacement and Dave Rowberry, who is with The Kinks today, became Price’s permanent replacement. Next to go was Johnny Steele, the drummer, who went home to Newcastle and who, today, is Chandler’s assistant.

        “Eric (Burdon) and I were starting to get wise to things,” says Chas. “We had done our own production deal by this time but the whole thing was still crazy. One night we just decided to quit – we would carry out all the engagement booked and no more.

        “I didn’t want to stay a bass player all my life or play one ever again at that moment. I hadn’t a clue what to do but we all knew The Animals were over.”

        The last few months of The Animals, says Chas, were their best days. There were no tensions or arguments as all the band knew it was over. It was during this period that they made what Chas considers to be their best record ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’.”

        “During the last eight months our only objective was really to make some money while we still had the chance. It was a question of grabbing what we could before it was all over.”

        It was during the last Animals tour of America that Chas met Jimi Hendrix. “I was asked to go to the Cafe Wah? in Greenwich Village and see him and that was it. I had thought about producing records and this was the man I wanted to produce.”

        When The Animals finally split Chas came back to New York and brought Hendrix back to London. He had just £1,400 to show from his days with the group and he grabbed most of this during the closing months.

        During the next three years he managed Hendrix and produced his records until a point was reached where Jimi no longer wanted to work. They parted company amicably and Chas, who had improved substantially on his £1,400 by this time, was out of work again. In the three years with Hendrix he was married and his wife, Lotte, was expecting Chandler Junior. For most of the time he had shared a flat with Hendrix which was rented from Ringo Starr, but the time was now ripe to move out to the country.

        After four months Chas joined the Robert Stigwood Organisation with no specific role. “By this time I had become very hardened and learned a lot about the business. I was supposed to look for new acts with Stigwood and do some record production.

        “One day I had a call from a guy who told me about this group called Slade and that they wanted a manager. I went down to see them at the Rasputin Club in London and they knocked me out. I was as impressed when I first saw Slade as I was when I first saw Jimi Hendrix.

        “I wanted to find something different from the blues. The Animals had been mainly blues, and Jimi was the same thing but Slade just had a ball on stage. After watching them work I had to sign them.”

        Chas signed them up and shortly afterwards left Stigwood to form his own company and concentrate entirely on Slade. He has no plans to manage any other acts.

        “Slade were very young when I first met them – much younger than the Animals when we came to London – and they were getting screwed just like we had been. As far as publicity was concerned they weren’t very successful in the early days but they were still earning good money. The business took every opportunity to knock them because of the skinhead thing, but they were slowly building up a very big following.”

        Slade, originally on the Fontana label, switched to Polydor and the rest of the story is too recent to recount again. America is Slade’s next goal and already they have received rave reviews around the country – unlike T. Rex. 

        “Slade are far and away better musicians than The Animals ever were,” says Chas. “Hilton Valentine couldn’t play a guitar like Dave Hill and I could never hope to be able to play bass as well as Jim Lea. I have a guitar now and I bring it out once a year.

        “My attitude as a manager is to get as much success and as much money for the act I am managing, and my experiences as a musician have helped me a lot. I never try to analyse my own actions which are mainly inspirations based on experience. That’s how I picked up Slade.”

CHAS CHANDLER – 25 YEARS SINCE

Chas Chandler, right, with Johnny Steel, the Animals' drummer who became Chas's right-hand man when Chas managed Slade. Photographer unknown.

Referencing Chas Chandler in a Slade-related Facebook post a few days ago led me into thinking more about Slade’s larger than life manager and to seek out an interview I did with him in 1972 when Slade were riding high. Headlined ‘Slade Driver’, it was published in Melody Maker in October that year, by which time Chas and I had become good friends. I’ll post it verbatim tomorrow, but first a few thoughts on the Slade Driver. 

        Of course, my friendship with Chas wouldn’t have arisen had I not been on the staff of Melody Maker and he hadn’t been managing one of the most successful bands in the UK, but in the time I knew him – roughly from 1970 to 1976 – I came to like him a lot. I admired his ‘never-give-up’ attitude towards managing Slade, his relentless positivity and dedication to their cause. He was a big bloke, well over six foot and brawny with it, and while not as confrontational as, say, Led Zep’s manager Peter Grant, it would be unwise to utter a disparaging word about Slade in his presence, especially if he’d had a few drinks.

        “They’re like a fookin’ breath of fresh eayer,” he kept telling me the first time I encountered Slade at that Samantha’s disco off Regent Street in 1970. He was yelling that into my ear all through the gig. He had to yell. The band on stage were always deafeningly loud. 

        “The band bloody worshipped Chas from the word go,” tour manager Graham ‘Swin’ Swinnerton told me when I was researching my Slade book. He was right. Hanging around with the five of them in the early seventies, especially before the hits started coming, it was easy to detect the group’s admiration for their manager, this devoted Geordie who would scream about them from the rooftops if he thought it would advance their career.

        “He was strong at dealing with us and he was strong at dealing with the record company,” Noddy told me in 2005, a decade after Chas had left us. “He had so much confidence in us it wasn’t true.” When Chas told him and Jim to buckle down and write some songs they did just that, fearful that Chas might drop them if they didn’t. “We’d have done anything to avoid that,” added Nod.

        “He was one of those big men with unlimited energy who’d sweep you along with the force of his conviction,” wrote his great friend Keith Altham in an obituary that appeared in Mojo magazine. At Chas’s funeral Keith told the congregation about a plan Chas had to link Perth and Sydney by canal. No project, however unlikely, was too big for Chas to contemplate.

        Chas Chandler was a man of the world, well-travelled, well versed in the ways of the music business and pretty much fearless, well able to look after himself in a tight situation. He told me he once spent a night in jail in America after punching a cop backstage at a Jimi Hendrix concert. Another time, in New York, we were riding around in a limousine together when he asked the driver to take us down to the Bowery where he might find a lady of the night to keep him company. He knew precisely where to find such a companion but failed in his mission, largely because his thick Geordie accent was incomprehensible. “Alreet luv. ’Ow’s it gan hinny?” he said to the startled girl. “Are ya doin’ buzzziness?” She looked at him like he was from Mars. I had to laugh. 

        Like Peter Grant, Chas was a manager from the old school who led from the front, placed a high premium on the security of his charges and didn’t like to miss a gig. Equally importantly, he was always one for the big gesture, something that would attract publicity, a move that would get Slade noticed. “Ya can be the best fookin’ band in the fookin’ world but if no one knows about it who gives a fookin’ toss?” he said. 

        That was why, at PR Keith Altham’s suggestion, he persuaded them to become skinheads in late 1969. He knew the papers would latch on to this as a story and although there was a bit of a backlash, it worked. Then again it might not have worked had Slade not been such an experienced, well-drilled live act. A gimmick and a bit of silly press can only get you so far but if you don’t have the chops to back it up you’re doomed. Slade had chops to spare. 

        In 1972 Chas lived with his lovely Swedish wife Lotte and young son Stefan in a fine detached house at Lingfield, about 25 miles directly south of London, not far from Gatwick Airport. I remember driving down there to do this interview on a Sunday afternoon, eating dinner and spending the night chez Chandler since the booze we drank rendered me hopelessly incapable of driving back to London. Chas liked his booze and fags, and he liked to smoke joints, big ones too, but I never saw him do any stronger drugs. 

        Although he was the bass player for The Animals he didn’t rate himself much as a musician and once told me he’d be embarrassed to play in front of Jim Lea. He looked on his time with The Animals as an apprenticeship for a far greater mission, managing Jimi Hendrix and then Slade. Like many acts in the sixties, The Animals were ripped off wholesale and he made sure the same thing didn’t happen to Slade. 

        I stood next to Chas at the side of the stage at Earls Court on July 1, 1973. He’d been made aware of the problems that David Bowie suffered in the same venue on May 12, the first time Earls Court had hosted a rock show. Bowie’s PA system was inadequate, the acoustics were terrible and the band performed at floor level, all of which led to serious crowd disturbances and could probably be blamed on Bowie’s management skimping on costs. Chas was having none of that for Slade, who became only the second act to headline Earls Court. Midway through the show, as we gazed out at 18,000 Slade fans having the time of their lives, he was yelling into my ear, just like he did way back when at Samantha’s: “All yee’ve got to do in a place like this is to build a big fookin’ stage and light it properly. And get a decent fookin’ PA. It’s as fookin’ simple as that.”

        As everyone knows, the night was a triumph. 

        The last time I saw Chas was around 1994 at Champneys, a private health club on Piccadilly in central London. He’d lost weight, was pasty faced and looked much older than I remembered him. If he was unwell, he certainly wasn’t there to improve his physical fitness – heaven forbid – but because it had a posh members-only bar and restaurant. Keith Altham had set up a meeting, the purpose of which was an attempt on my part to persuade Chas to write his life story. (Keith had set up all the interviews for my Feel The Noize! book.) I knew Chas read a lot, science fiction mostly, and I half succeeded insofar as he promised to think about it. In the event he died two years later and it never happened but I often wonder whether he made a start on it. If he did, it never came to light. 

        By this time Chas had moved back to the north east and settled down with his second wife, Madeline Stringer, a former Miss UK, with whom he had two daughters, in the coastal town of Cullercoats. A few miles east of Newcastle, this was where I attended his funeral on July 22, 1996. He had devoted the last few years of his life to his role in the creation of what is now the Utilita Arena Newcastle, the largest concert and exhibition venue in the North East, which had opened in 1995. By all accounts he put as much effort into this as he did as Slade’s manager, learning all about the construction business with the same dedication he put into handling their career. 

       Unfortunately, no one thought to erect statue of Chas outside. 

I’ll post my interview with Chas tomorrow. 

SLADE – CUM ON FEEL THE HITZ

I have resisted buying Cum On Feel The Hitz – The Best Of Slade, the most recent hits compilation by my favourite Wolverhampton band, largely because I already have three hits CDs by Slade, all of which are accompanied by my sleeve notes, but they didn’t ask me this time around. I know I am out of favour with their management for crimes against what I’ll term 21st Century Slade Revisionism but, in any case, I’d probably have found it hard to write something different from all the other sleeves notes I’ve written in the past.

        My part-time job as Slade's go-to man for sleeve-note writing began in 1972 with Slayed, on the back of which were the first I did for anyone. Chas paid me £20 by cheque, which is about £250 in today’s money, not bad for about 300 words. Then came the hits albums, the first Slade: Wall Of Hits, released in 1991; the second Slade Greatest Hits: Feel The Noize (1997); and the third The Very Best Of Slade (2005), this last one – like the most recent – a double CD. This had my most extensive notes of the three and benefited from an interview I did with Noddy in the bar at the Landmark Hotel on Marylebone Road in London. I think he’d come down from Cheshire specially to meet up with me so I could cobble together something new. Nevertheless, I was pissed off when the CD came out because whoever designed the booklet had opted to use tiny white type on a silver background, thus rendering my notes illegible unless you used a magnifying glass. Art direction and design were credited to someone who went by a single name – ‘Peacock’ – so if anyone knows who he or she is, please communicate my displeasure. 

        Come to think of it, my Slade sleeve-note tally could arguably amount to five because a quote from me, dated 23/12/70, appeared on the fold-out sleeve of the original Slade Alive! “… on stage Slade are one of the few groups who work hard to entertain an audience, they have a long future ahead of them and plenty of time to develop their exciting style.” That’s actually a bastardised version of my prediction in Melody Maker – recently posted here on Facebook – that Slade would be one of 1971’s top bands. (Trivia fans might like to know that a couple of inches below that is a quote from Leon Hickman of the Bradford Telegraph & Argus. In 1968 Leon and I worked together on the T&A and between us we produced the paper’s first ever weekly pop page, my first stab at music writing.)

        In considering whether or not to buy the new compilation I spent an hour looking over the other three Slade hits CDs on my shelf, all of which were probably given to me by Slade’s record company in return for the notes I wrote, along with progressively larger remuneration. And though I say it myself, I’m still quite proud of my notes for the first of these for Wall Of Hits (not Hitz!). It was 39 years ago that I first identified an issue that still rankles with me and many Slade fans today. 

        “As the pop music industry reaches its hi-tech but insecure and rather overcrowded middle age,” I wrote, “statistics from earlier eras take on truly insurmountable proportions. Did The Beatles really have 22 top ten hits – including 17 chart toppers – in the seven years that followed their chart debut in 1963? Yes, they did. And in the decade that followed did Slade come the closest anyone ever has to emulating that? Yes, they did: 16 top 20 hits between 1971 and 1976 that included six number ones, three number twos and two number threes. No other UK act of the period, not T. Rex, not David Bowie, not Elton John nor any other ‘superstar’ act enjoyed such constituency; nor is such consistency feasible today.

“Two decades after the event, Slade remain the only act ever to enter the UK chart at number one with consecutive releases, a feat they accomplished three times in all.

“Despite these statistics, rock historians have been less than charitable to Slade. Their happy-go-lucky, good humoured personalities, their complete lack of pretension or political motivation and their generally irreverent attitude towards the art of rock were never likely to appeal to serious music critics, and there seems to have been a post-Slade conspiracy to place them in the file marked ‘trivial’; little more than an amusing footnote in the story of glam rock.

“This is unjust, not least because their success was by no means confined to their extraordinary run on the singles charts. Three of their albums topped the LP charts between 1972 and 1974 and a fourth, Slade Alive!, reached number two and stayed on the charts for an astonishing 58 weeks. Simultaneously Slade concerts filled the largest halls in the country, including a memorable sold out show at Earls Court that drew 18,000 fans. They were without question one of the most popular – and most competent – live rock acts this country has ever seen.” 

The charts don’t mean much now. In the 39 years since I wrote all that, Slade’s achievements have been surpassed by all and sundry. The boy band era that began with Take That saw all manner of fiddles – sorry, marketing strategies – that enabled single after single to enter the charts at number one. At one point it was so common that not to enter at number one was regarded as a failure. Sales of singles are a fraction of what they once were and when Top Of The Pops bit the dust no one much cared anymore. Still, it was nice to see Cum On Feel The Hitz – The Best Of Slade doing as well as it did, even if I didn’t buy a copy myself. 

By the way, who wrote the sleeve notes? 

SLADE IN AMERICA, 1973.

Eighteen years ago last week I saw Slade on stage in America for the first time, in Los Angeles at the Long Beach Arena, supporting The J. Geils Band. It was the same night I found myself in a delicate situation with Faye Dunaway, an incident I recall elsewhere on Just Backdated, but that’s another story.*

  Noddy, Jim, Dave and Don visited me in my West Hollywood apartment on Rangely Avenue, the only musicians of any stature to do so during my stay in LA, and the following day I went to their hotel – the Los Angeles Hilton no less – to chat with them. My interview included what may well have been the first ever reference to a “special Slade Christmas single”, though its title wasn’t revealed. Also, intriguingly, Dave mentions “the film of our Earls Court concert”.
        This story that I wrote for Melody Maker (3 November, 1973 issue) focuses on their status in the USA; an attempt to put their situation into perspective without erring in either direction. As we now know, they would face an uphill struggle in America but optimism was high in 1973, as it was the following year when I saw them play again, this time in St Louis.**

        

No compromise, says Noddy. No compromise at all. America will just have to go crazee, feel the noize and get their boots off just like everywhere else.
        It may be the biggest most important and most lucrative record market in the world, but that doesn’t make one iota of difference. Slade do it just the same as they do anywhere else.
        At the weekend, Slade were second on the bill to the J. Geils Band, now a major attraction in the US, at the giant Long Beach Arena in Southern Los Angeles.
        It was a big gig for Wolverhampton’s rock and roll ambassadors, a concert hall that stops just short of London’s Earls Court, full to the brim of Americans who’d turned up to see J. Geils at their best – which they were.
        Slade weren’t at their best. Sound problems bit hard into their music – the harsh treble which they use to such good effect never came over, and Noddy received a series of shocks through the microphone as the set progressed.
        It was their last show of a five-week US tour, and one they’ll probably want to forget. But despite it all they won a lot of friends in Long Beach.
        They came back for an encore which the applause justified and they managed to achieve something like the audience participation that has become a matter of course back home.
Some reports have suggested Slade were rocking across the States, picking up multitudes of disciples in much the same way as they did in Europe. Others have written them off completely with reports of bad shows, audience lethargy and a tag of being “far too English” to succeed.
        Neither are true. What happened in Long Beach has given me a reasonably clear insight as to Slade’s current standing in the USA.
        They are neither huge nor tiny: they are simply another British band working all out to succeed in this vast country, a task which they are approaching in the time-honoured fashion of playing as well and as often as they can until that magic bill-topping arena-playing stage is finally reached.
        They’re on the way up, but they’re not there yet. Whether they will or not is difficult to guess, but there’s always been a fierce will to succeed within Slade.
        All I’m certain of is that Slade will break their backs in their attempts to achieve the same kind of success here.
        The record situation may well change now that they have switched to the mighty Warner Brothers label, whose promotion campaigns for British acts are legendary.
        The Long Beach show was encouraging in many respects. There was a huge cheer when they arrived, dressed as they do in England with Noddy in red tail jacket, check trousers and vest, Dave Hill in his Egyptian ensemble, and “superyob” guitar, Jim Lea in a pale blue suit with-knee-length shorts that just reached his high boots, and Don Powell – who’s still not completely recovered from the effects of the car crash – in bold stripes from head to toe.
        They played for an hour and with the exception of the football chant section, the act was identical to their British one.
        Two days before the Long Beach concert, I talked with the band at the Beverly Hills Hilton, sat out by a pool in the annexe where they were staying.
        It seemed a trifle grandiose for the band that’s been christened working class heroes, but the surroundings hadn’t altered their blunt responses.
        They are not exaggerating the success of their American operation themselves. “What we’re finding,” said Noddy, “is that it’s happened here in the same way it did in England. The provinces are happening more for us than the big cities.”
        The shows with J. Geils – at St Louis, San Francisco and the one at Long Beach – were the only ones on which Slade didn’t top the bill. “The fans seem to know the material more now than they did before, especially in the provincial areas where we’ve had airplay.”
        I mentioned that much criticism in America centred around their repeated urging for the audience to join in, whereas US audiences often don’t need – or want – encouragement.
        “We don’t take any notice of any critics whatsoever,” replied Noddy, more than a little emphatically. “We’ve done some shows here and gone down a storm with three encores, and we’ve picked up the paper the next day to read the reviewer saying the group received no enthusiasm from the audience.”
        While in America, Slade have mixed their next album, as yet untitled, which will be out next month.
        With one exception – their version of ‘Just A Little Bit’ – it’s all new material written by the group, and it includes their first ballad and a pub sing-along number which Max Bygraves may be covering.
        There are also tentative plans for a special Slade Christmas single, with a Christmas theme.
        This week Slade left the States, stopping in England for just one day before setting off on a European tour. In December they’ll be back here again.
        The more popular they become, the harder they work – a ratio which is often reversed in the rock and roll game. They won’t be playing in the UK again until next year.
        “With Don’s accident,” said Noddy, “we had to cancel an American tour and everything has been put back three months, I don’t think we’re ignoring Britain. We’ve done two major concert tours, and the Earls Court and Empire Pool. We haven’t neglected England.”
        “After Earls Court, it’s difficult to go back to doing an odd show at the Rainbow,” chipped in Dave Hill whose attempts to get a suntan were repeatedly thwarted by the ever-increasing shadow of the tall hotel.
        “We shall probably do one big tour of England next year, and we promise it will be a big one.
        “What we’re hoping to do here is to have the film of our Earls Court concert shown on the In Concert TV show. That will really show the States what we’re like, and that’s very important to us because the ratings on that show are phenomenal.”
        “What is beginning to happen,” said Noddy, “is that the fans are beginning to emulate us a little like they do in England. We’ve seen a few top hats, and a few bras and pants have been chucked on to the stage.
        “I know people are saying that Slade haven’t cracked America and enjoy saying it, but this is only our third tour. People expect it to happen overnight because they think it happened in England overnight, but it didn’t.
        “There was three years of hard graft on the road before we had a hit record in England and this country seems a million times bigger. Things just don’t happen like that here.
        “Every city has to see us as a live band before we can hope to sell records. It’s all building slowly, and we never expected it to happen quickly. It’s happening exactly the same for us here as it did in Europe. It’s the same pattern everywhere.”
        “We like the challenge,” said Dave. “America is something we can get our teeth into. There’s only America left. The rest of it we just go back to.”
        Don Powell, it seems, is still having difficulty remembering his drum parts. He can’t remember things that happened a week ago, and is still not allowed to drink alcohol.
        “He’s only just getting back into the stage show as it was before the accident, so we really couldn’t try to introduce any new numbers until he was better,” said Noddy.
        “We shall introduce some new stuff into the act when the album is out. There’s plenty of material on it for playing on stage.”

(I found the photo on the internet, photographer unknown.)

* http://justbackdated.blogspot.com/2013/12/faye-i.html

** http://justbackdated.blogspot.com/2014/08/slade-ambassador-theater-st-louis-mo.html

SLADE SPLIT!

I was disappointed to learn last week that Slade have finally split up – after 50 years together according to The Sun, the newspaper of record for those with short memories. Other papers have carried the story but there’s nothing like Britain’s best-selling red top tabloid to get to the heart of the matter, and it would be remiss of me, their official biographer, not to comment. 

         Firstly, along with the group themselves, their many fans and probably everyone else not employed on The Sun’s news desk, I had been under the clearly mistaken impression that they split up about 30 years ago. The precise date of their disbandment is hard to pin down insofar as it was a gradual separation but Noddy Holder, Jim Lea, Dave Hill and Don Powell last played a (paying) gig together in 1984, and since then – apart from that Fan Club appearance in April, 1991, at Walsall Town Hall, undertaken in somewhat fraught circumstances – the group has been absent from the stage. New recordings by them had also petered out by then, though odd releases under a variety of combinations and aliases continued to appear.

         Secondly, that quartet first teamed up as The ‘N Betweens in 1966, so that’s 54 years ago and not 50 as The Sun would have you believe.

         Now that that’s been cleared up, I feel duty bound to explain that the reason for Slade’s sudden and needlessly sensational re-appearance in the headlines is that guitarist Dave Hill has apparently dispensed with the services of drummer Don Powell in his group Slade II, a pronouncement greeted with dismay by fans, not least because Hill informed Powell of his decision via e-mail. This is a sad state of affairs when you consider that Hill and Powell first played together back in 1964 in a Midlands group called The Vendors.

         It is evidently Hill’s intention to continue to promote himself as Slade II with three other (waged) musicians, while Powell has signalled his intention to form a new group, which will include at least one defector from Slade II, and call it Don Powell’s Slade. No one but a die-hard curmudgeon would wish Don – one of the most amiable men it’s been my pleasure to know – all the best in this venture. I wish I could say the same for Hill.

         Having two groups with the same or similar generic-style name led by former members of the mothership is nothing new. Yes managed it, as did The Searchers and a few others from the ‘beat boom’ of the 1960s, not to mention countless black vocal groups whose personnel fluctuates like the sexual inclinations of popular TV presenters. A clever lawyer could argue that Paul and Ringo have been doing the same thing with The Beatles for years now, but the standard of musicianship they apply is on a vastly different level to that of Hill, which leaves much to be desired, at least from what I’ve seen of Slade II on YouTube.

         I don’t think this will end happily. Don has evidently told Dave he can’t continue to call his group Slade II, only Dave Hill’s Slade. Hill won’t like that. Either way, absent Noddy Holder’s irreplaceable, sparkling voice and Jim Lea’s compositional and multi-instrumental skills, any 21^st Century version of Slade lacks considerably more than 50% of its potency. Sadly, this seems not to be a consideration when the need earn a living is paramount.

         Which brings me to further revelations from our friends at The Sun. If they are to be believed – and I have my doubts – Noddy is worth £20 million and earns £250,000 a year from ‘Merry Christmas Everybody’, as does Jim whose fortune is not disclosed. I would imagine it is greater than Noddy’s, if for no other reason than, unlike Jim, Noddy is no longer married to his first wife and nothing diminishes a rock star’s wealth like a divorce. “While Noddy and Jim, 70, have been living in luxury, Dave and Don, 73, have been performing at Butlin’s and the festival circuit to make ends meet,” The Sun tells us. “The unglamorous venues are a far cry from the stages the rock icons graced in their heyday.”

         They got Noddy and Jim’s ages wrong but far worse, later in the story, was the sentence: “There were no scandals or tragic accidents [in their past] and they rarely touched drugs.” I would invite them to look up their back issue for July 4, 1973, and read Don’s book.

         I rest my case.