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.
