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?