JOE COCKER, Sheffield, January 1971

Fifty-three years ago last month Melody Maker got word that Joe Cocker, who’d spent most of 1970 on the road with Mad Dogs & Englishmen, had returned to his home town of Sheffield and, unlikely as it might seem, was back living with his mum and dad. Editor Ray Coleman suggested I drive up to Sheffield, find out where ma and pa Cocker lived and pay him a visit. 

Joe was a big star then. In the current era it is unheard of for a music writer to simply roll up at a big star’s home uninvited and knock on the door. It was taking a bit of a liberty even then but Ray liked to subvert convention so I did as he suggested. I drove up the M1 very early on a Saturday morning, discovered his address in the Steel Bank area of Sheffield by inquiring at a music shop where, luckily, someone knew him and knocked on the door. He was still in bed but his mum and dad roused him. While his mum made him breakfast, we spent about an hour chatting before strolling down the street to his local pub and chatting some more. I left him on the corner of the street where he lived and drove to Skipton, spending the night at my dad’s house before driving back down to London. Back in the office on Monday, this is what I wrote for the January 16, 1971, edition of MM. It was trailered on the front page as Joe Cocker: What Can I Do Next? 

Joe Cocker’s turned full circle. Los Angeles, the Mad Dogs & Englishmen, the Woodstock nation and bad trips are a far cry from the backstreets of Sheffield. But Joe’s come back. He’s living at home with his mum and dad and that’s where he’s content to be – for the time being at least.

    Tasker Road is stretch of terraced houses. Mr and Mrs Cocker and their son Joe live at number 38. There’s a brand new Rover 2000TC standing outside. The shiny new motor looks a bit of out of place against the shabbier ’64 models parked around it.

    Joe’s dad answers my knock. He is surprised to see me which isn’t surprising because he didn’t know I was coming. Neither did Joe, who is in bed, and is equally surprised that Melody Maker is visiting him at his Yorkshire home. “He was a bit late in last night,” explains father Cocker. “Went to a friend’s house. Unusual for him. First time he’s been out in a while.”

    Five minutes, a chat with dad about the weather and Joe appears, grinning. He’s grown a beard and his untidy curly hair reaches his shoulders. The pot belly is still there. He seems genuinely pleased to see Melody Maker on home ground. In his red polo neck sweater and blue cords – no familiar tie-dyed vest up here – he confesses he hasn’t much to say. 

    We’re in the small living room, huddled around a gas fire. It’s one of those houses where the front room is reserved for weddings and funerals only. MM interviews aren’t in that class.

    “I came home about three weeks ago,” Joe tells me. “I had been in the States since March. I wanted to come home for Christmas. I don’t know why.”

    “Tell me about Mad Dogs & Englishmen,” I say.

    Joe lights a cigarette, his first of the day. “Well, the reports in the papers about it were pretty true,” he says. “I just went to America to meet Leon Russell with the intention of getting a group together. I met Chris Stainton and Leon and they got all their buddies to join. It finished up with us all going on tour together. Somebody filmed it and they are supposed to be putting this two and a half hour film out. They had 60 hours of film.

    “I don’t know how many cities we visited. We just worked seven days a week and kept going. They kept putting in dates here and there. The band kept changing because nobody could stick it all the down the line. At times there were about 40 of us, musicians, socialisers and choirs going from place to place in a plane. A girl in the choir had a dog that used to come up on stage with us most of the time.

    “After the tour we made the album. Somehow, I can’t think it about now but everyone made a big fuss about it at the time. I liked the idea of getting a big band together to make a living with but everybody got too closed in about it.”

    Joe sits in silence, his mind somewhere far away. It seems he doesn’t really want to talk about the Mad Dogs. It’s over – according to Joe – and it won’t happen again. After Joe’s mum had served us another cup of tea I asked Joe about his plans for the future?

    “I’ll be living in England for a while now,” he says. “I’m looking for a house near London and I’ll be rockin’ on all right. Right now, I’m having a rethink. I seem to have gone the full circle and now I’m back in Sheffield.

    “As far as playing goes, I’m just not there at the moment. These days everyone seems to analyse lyrics and that annoys me. I start singing and people pick up the lyrics and make side-waves (sic) from them. I despair when people are thinking too much about what you are singing. Audiences will say anything, no matter what you are. I’m going to try and sharpen up my diction a bit so people can hear me. I don’t know when I’ll go back on the road again. I’m getting my own things together but there’s a bit of a delay. Just before I came back to England I was in the studio at Muscle Shoals doing some new stuff with Chris. There as Wayne Perkins, a nephew of Carl, on guitar and Jim Keltner on drums. We just composed as we went along.”

    Any chance of you teaming up with Leon on his upcoming British tour?

    “No, there’s not much chance of that. I don’t fancy the idea of just getting up and messing about. He’s touring right across the country and I’m sure to see him somewhere along the line. There was talk at some time that Leon and the whole Mad Dogs crew would all fly to Britain for some shows but it didn’t work out. 

    “The feeling at the end of the tour was entirely different from the start. My attitude changed a lot. If you have a group of five people, they are all on the same thought wave but when you have that many people on stage everybody is thinking different. I mean some people’s heads weren’t on stage at all times. When it was finished I was quite happy it was all over.

    “The change in me will show eventually but I’ve got to sit down and think about it first and I don’t know how long that will take. I know I don’t want to go out and do the same songs again, although the audiences expect me to sing them. I want to write some new stuff. We must have performed some 60 dozen times and that’s too many times for me.”

    By now it was opening time and the pub down the road seemed inviting. Joe is no stranger to the Mason’s Arms. Old men twice his age greet him over the racing pages of the daily papers, puffing at pipes and frowning into the froth on their pints.

    “Now then Joe lad, o’reet?” says the chap behind the bar. 

    “Aye, not so bad,” Joe replies.

    “On ‘oliday Joe lad?” asks another gent.

    “Aye, that’s right,” says Joe.

    We take our pints to a corner table and talk about the current music scene. Joe doesn’t seem to have any favourites at the moment. “Nothing has zonked me out recently,” he says. “Although I saw Procol Harum and they made a big impression on me.”

    We discussed a few bands, the Who, Deep Purple, Beatles and the wave of heavy groups who all seem to sound like Led Zeppelin. Joe doesn’t say much, just nods, grins and smokes cigarettes. After three quick pints he’s ready to go. He used to play in Sheffield pubs like this before the world heard about him.

    I don’t think he’ll ever sing in places like this again. In fact, it may be a long while before he sings anywhere again. But don’t worry about Joe. He’ll get by – with a little help from his friends.

The Last Dinner Party – Prelude To Ecstasy

I am far more than 10 minutes fashionably late for this particular dinner party but until I read about The Last Dinner Party, a quintet of women who perform, dress and behave most extravagantly, I was unfamiliar with the term ‘industry plant’. Turns out it is a derogatory expression meaning an act that has been calculatingly nurtured for instant success by power brokers in the music business, managed by a heavy hitter, signed to a label with clout and given the sort of VIP fast-lane treatment that assured wealthy Tory spivs of lucrative contracts to supply PPE equipment during the 2019 Covid outbreak, the most prominent of whom is the shameless Baroness Michelle Mone. 

    In my day ‘industry plant’ was called hype, and once this label attached itself to an act they had a hard time overcoming it. It took Brinsley Schwartz several years to live down the decision to fly music writers to New York to see them at the Fillmore in 1970, and among others that spring to mind are Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Transvision Vamp and Gay Dad, all of whom fell by the wayside pretty quickly. Then again, when you look at the circumstances surrounding their arrival, Led Zeppelin had all the advantages of an ‘industry plant’: powerful management, Atlantic Records and plenty of publicity. The big difference, of course, was that Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones were seasoned musicians. And they did it the hard way, by gigging like fuck. 

    The members of The Last Dinner Party sound like seasoned musicians too. Their guitar player Emily Roberts paid her dues in a Queen tribute band while keyboard player Aurora Nishevci – and I hope to hell that’s her real Christian name – sounds like no stranger to the conservatoire. The focal point, however, is singer Abigail Morris, a Helena Bonham Carter lookalike, who channels Kate Bush and Florence Welch in athletic grace while reaching for high notes like Dusty, who always seemed to me like she was plucking them from the air above her beehive. 

    They’ve been around since 2021, sensibly putting in the work – and gathering a following – before recording Prelude To Ecstasy, their debut album, which was released to some fanfare earlier this month, and it’s shot into the album charts at number one, hence the ‘industry plant’ allegation. By all accounts, however, they honed their craft during Covid lockdown and emerged as fully-grown birds of a feather, drawing attention to themselves with their flamboyant period dress sense, all flounce and ladylike, Bennet Sisters meet Emma Stone in Poor Things, with added quirkiness.

    The music they produce is as flamboyant as their look, a careful blend of prog rock, sweet(ish) harmonies and songs with unexpected twists and turns, Sparks meets early Roxy Music with Kate Bush taking over from Russ and Bryan. The first time I heard ‘Nothing Matters’, their single rising in the charts, however, I thought it was Abba, or at least Frida, letting loose on a variation of ‘Our Last Summer’, until it reached the chorus, a rip-roaring singalong that’s quite irresistible. “I will fuck you, like nothing matters,” sings Abigail, and I’m still trying to work out whether this means she’ll do so with extreme vigour or without a second thought, or both. Either way, it’s an impressive, seductive debut, and for safety’s sake they deliver a more decorous G-rated version – “I will hold you, like nothing matters” – where appropriate.  

    I first saw TLDP performing ‘Nothing Matters’ on Jools a couple of weeks ago and was struck by their look as well as its hook. I’ve now invested in the album and I’m not disappointed. It opens and closes with dramatic, orchestral fanfares, a bold start, like arriving on stage on a zip wire, which I wouldn’t put past them, or something like that. The songs that follow are produced to an exceptionally high standard of clarity by James Ford, whose CV reads like a Who’s Who of the best of this century’s British pop, and who has injected a dollop of Florence Welch’s melodrama into TLDP. There’s a gothic, slightly tragic quality to the lyrics, plenty of blood, some throat ripping, and while none of the choruses are as immediate as ‘Nothing Matters’, it’s growing on me, especially ‘Our Lady of Mercy’, ‘Burn Alive’ and ‘Beautiful Boy’, with its lilting melody and a touch of Godfather soundtrack in its haunting intro. ‘Gjuda’, sung in Albanian, is a choral wash that leads directly into the pulsating ‘Sinner’, another likely stage favourite. 

    A glance at TLDP’s website tells me they’re booked up to October when concerts at what used to be the Hammersmith Odeon (it’s called the Eventim Apollo now and holds 5,000) are already sold out. Before that they’re touring heavily in Europe and the US, all of which leads me to believe that they are approaching their calling by performing anywhere and everywhere. I take my hat off to them for doing it the hard way. As Led Zeppelin and a few of their peers knew, nothing matters beyond gigging like fuck. 

MUIREANN BRADLEY – I Kept These Old Blues

If, like me, you were out on the lash on New Year’s Eve and as a result missed Muireann Bradley on Jools’ hootenanny I can only hope that, like me, you took the trouble to record it in the hope that a gem might be lurking among the more predictable turns. Seems I did the right thing for about half way through, after Rod Stewart and others, the stage was cleared and the lights dimmed for a single spotlight to pick out a shy looking teenage girl sat on a stool, her long dark hair solemnly centre-parted, her acoustic guitar looking way too big for her. 

Moments later she was picking away like a lonesome old blueswoman, midnight on a Mississippi porch with nuttin’ but a jar of moonshine and a hungry bobcat for company. ‘Candyman,’ she sang in a high-pitched, girly voice, ‘salty dog,’ repeating those lines two or three times, shifting up to a higher register now and then, while her fingers did the business. Three and a half minutes later she closed out the song with a nifty little bent note up on the fifth fret. ‘I wish I was in New Orleans, just sittin’ on a candy stand.’ The applause was the loudest of the night.

Muireann turned 17 in December. According to her notes on I Kept These Old Blues, her debut album, which I ordered on January 2, she grew up steeped in old blues thanks to her dad, who played this style of music on his guitar and, starting when she was nine, taught his daughter to play too. She honed her skills during Covid when her preferred pastime of combat sports was curtailed by lockdown. Beyond the health benefits, it’s hard to pinpoint how lockdown advanced lives but Muireann’s accomplished guitar picking is certainly among them. 

Researching ‘Candyman’ I got confused. It’s the title of a song by Mississippi John Hurt (1893-1966) but what Muireann played was ‘Candyman Salty Dog’, a tune by the Rev Gary Davis (1896-1972), a blind bluesman much admired by Bob Dylan and others. It’s the opening song on her record, 12 tracks in all that show off her dexterity and, to an extent, playfulness among blues and ragtime classics by Hurt, Elizabeth Cotton and others, her arrangements inspired by Stefan Grossman, Dave Van Ronk and John Fahey, whose records I’ve savoured since the early seventies when I was given one to review. In an era dominated by bland televised talent shows, there’s something enormously reassuring about how this music has been interpreted so wholeheartedly by a teenage girl from Ballybofey in County Donegal. 

Grossman has evidently given Muireann the nod of approval, which isn’t surprising as her Travis picking style is way up there on the instrumentals ‘Vestapol’ and the quicker ‘Buck Dancer’s Choice’. Also, it’s rather charming to hear one so young sing, “All my life, I’ve been a travelling gal” on ‘Police Sergeant Blues’, while the expressive strength she brings to ‘Delia’, a song about the murder of a 14-year-old girl covered by Bob Dylan and, of all people, Pat Boone, belies her age too. The closing track is a beguiling take on ‘Freight Train’, ever so cleanly picked, which I first heard in 1957, aged ten, by Chas McDevitt’s Skiffle Group, sung by Nancy Whiskey. On the internet, though not on this CD, you can see her tackle ‘When The Levee Breaks’  by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy, famously covered by Led Zeppelin, not that their version sounds remotely like Muireann. 

        While the CD might open Muireann to accusations that her work is little more than an imitation of the musicians that have inspired her, her friskiness suggests otherwise. Here and there she jumps out at you with an unexpected lick or vocal tease. To me, the record is more a tribute, while her skills suggest it won’t be long before she creates her own body of work in this style. If I’m still on the porch with my moonshine I’ll be buying it.

BEE GEES: Children Of The World by Bob Stanley

“The Bee Gees didn’t fit in,” observes Bob Stanley at the start of Children Of The World, his new biography of the Gibb brothers. He’s quite right. In my own dealings with them for Melody Maker in the first half of the seventies I felt they were removed from the mainstream of pop life, in a parallel world but somehow apart, somehow cloistered by their familiarity with one another. This created within them an ‘us against the world’ attitude which, coupled with an adolescent, slightly naïve, arrogance, meant they would never be fashionable, never cool, never given the respect their hit-making track record deserved. “In spite of their great success, they seemed somehow easy to mock,” writes Stanley, drawing attention to a lack of self-awareness that invited cynicism, especially from music press staffers who enjoyed bursting balloons.   

    Bob Stanley knows his pop. A founder member of St Etienne and a dedicated convert to all things indie, he writes about music with the air of someone unafraid to offer judgements unlikely to sit well with accepted theory, ever keen to challenge, ever keen to seek out an undiscovered gem. To write a substantial book about The Bee Gees that analyses their music admiringly, most especially dozens of songs that weren’t hits, might be considered courageous – but for me to say that is to slip into the trap that Stanley identifies early in his book, the back-handed compliment, the suggestion that whatever good reviews the Bee Gees received were “distant”. “No other group has had to consistently defend themselves, their approach and their music,” he writes.

    Children Of The World does its best to rectify this. Stanley is clearly a fan but is unafraid to investigate the fault lines in a musical career that began on a Manchester stage in 1957 when Barry was 11 and twins Robin and Maurice eight, and continued until 2003 when Maurice’s death brought the curtain down. In between times they sold more than 250 million records in all kinds of styles, wrote numerous hits for others, filled the world’s biggest stadia on the road and, until Michael Jackson’s Thriller, were the principal contributors to world’ best-selling LP, the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever.

    In 2001 I commissioned and edited Tales of The Brothers Gibb, a 730-page doorstopper whose three authors investigated every facet of the Gibb family to produce what I thought was the definitive Bee Gees book that couldn’t be bettered. What it lacked, however, was the critical nous that Stanley brings to Children Of The World, and also his literary ability to compress the endlessly fascinating biographical details of the Gibb’s life into a book just over half that length. Furthermore, his understanding of the bigger picture enables him to place The Bee Gees into context, comparing their fate with fellow-travellers, to which end he opens each chapter with the top ten for that particular moment, and to draw judicious comparisons with that other group of three brothers, The Beach Boys. 

    We follow the Gibb family from extreme poverty – Barry, Maurice and Robin really were juvenile delinquents – to unimagined wealth that enabled them to sue manager Robert Stigwood for $200 million in 1980, only to be countersued for $300 million. (It was settled out of court.) We learn about their nomadic early life, from Manchester – where the family often did a midnight flight to avoid the rent man – to the Isle of Man to Australia and back to the UK, to London, thence to LA and finally Miami. We learn about their lack of education – Maurice and Robin left school at 13, as did tragic younger brother Andy – and how this contributed to the slightly disjointed lyrics in their songs, which – as with Abba – did them no harm at all. We learn about their brotherly intuition, how they were able to finish one another’s sentences, and the occasional fall outs, usually instigated by Robin’s stubborn diva tendencies, or Barry’s oppressive ‘big brother’ controlling manner, with Maurice often in the role of calming arbitrator. 

    But most of all we learn about their resilience, how they were able to mould their songs to the times, to pick themselves up and start again after setbacks and, most importantly, to fall back on their skills as songwriters to see them through periods when it looked like we’d seen the last of them. “We’re durable, persistent little buggers,” says Robin. 

    It’s an epic tale of highs and lows well told, not without the odd error but a book those slightly strange, deeply sensitive, immensely talented Gibb Brothers deserve. It contains 27 pages of discography but no photographs, for which I’d dock it one star, but this is no doubt due to financial constraints on the part of the publisher. 

FLY AWAY PAUL by Lesley-Ann Jones

Earlier this year I reviewed The McCartney Legacy Volume 1 – 1969-73 by Allan Kozinn & Adrian Sinclair, a 700+ page book that covered this period of Paul McCartney’s life in extraordinary detail, perhaps too much so, though I was sure obsessive fans would love it. Now along comes Fly Away Paul which, to a certain extent, covers the same period, albeit in a far more reader-friendly fashion, with less emphasis on the minutiae of recording sessions and more on how events, both past and present, shaped the life and personality of the former Beatle who turned 81 in June, most especially how he coped with losing the group he loved.

Not too well, according to Lesley-Ann Jones, a prolific writer of books about musicians in which she seeks not so much to tell their story as psychoanalyse their characters through scrutinising their past, their loves and their music. Paul McCartney, robbed of his mother at 14, precociously talented, ever anxious to please yet somewhat of a control freak and foil for the caustic jibes of John Lennon, serially promiscuous until he found The One, offers fertile ground for investigation, Jones’ speciality, inherited from her journalist father, a distinguished sports writer, and honed during an ongoing career writing feature articles for national dailies. 

To this end, Jones delves deeper into the personal and domestic life of the McCartney family than is to be found in other McCartney books on my shelves, which serves to make it considerably more interesting than the album/tour/year off and around again cycle that fills page after page of too many duller rock books. Thanks to Jones, I now know all about the history of ownership of High Park Farm, Paul’s Scottish hideaway, a remote and austere abode, its climate unforgiving, where the first Mrs McCartney not only coped with Spartan furnishings, but nursed her man back to life after a nervous breakdown brought on by all the fussing and fighting. 

In Jones’ telling Linda, with whom she was on first name terms, was precisely what the footloose McCartney required, a home-maker unconcerned with outward appearances whose inner strength delivered to Paul the antidote to the madness that surrounded The Beatles, to wit much needed stability in the form of a ready-made family of one daughter, soon to be augmented by two more, followed by a son. For the most part, Fly Away Paul dwells on the closeness that Paul and Linda enjoyed during an unusually long and happy marriage in a business where separations and divorce are all too frequent, and how she faced down negative comments over her role in her husband’s post-Beatle group Wings. Linda’s passing, which occurs towards the end of the book, is dealt with sensitively, while Paul’s subsequent ill-fated relationship with Heather Mills, outside of the book’s dateline, is mentioned only briefly, as is the infinitely more suitable wife number three, Nancy Shevell. 

        Clearly a fan, Jones is generous in her appreciation of McCartney and Wings’ music, correctly identifying the song ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ and 1973 LP Band On The Run as the stand-out items in an ever-lengthening post Beatles catalogue, but she’s generous to other LPs too, citing them as marker points in her teenage life. The formation of Wings, their early concerts and McCartney’s desire that, even with him on board, they could somehow start from scratch offers plenty of opportunity for comment on Paul’s rather naïve optimism. 

Though much of the biographical information in Fly Away Paul can be accessed in Beatle and McCartney literature elsewhere, Jones has a way of conveying it to suit her mission. It’s not communicated chronologically – there are leaps that would stump a pole-vaulter – but it all makes sense in the context of her rather spiritual book. She’s not above bringing herself into the story when her paths cross with the McCartneys and while this might be perceived as a bit of name-dropping, there’s rhyme and reason for these diversions and if nothing else they serve to authenticate her opinions, which are liberally scattered throughout, sometimes in the form of questions she answers herself, at other times left hanging. If there is a flaw, it’s unwieldy detours into areas only tangentially connected with McCartney: among them several pages on the topic of session musicians, Scottish pipe bands and even the fate of Jo Jo Laine, an appealing, high-spirited girl of immodest disposition who set her sights on Paul but ended up marrying Wingman Denny Laine and, before her death in 2006, engaged in a sex act with a transsexual in the Cabinet War Rooms. (Paul wasn’t present.) 

        Oddly, Fly Away Paul opens with a sort of memorial, a list of deceased, beginning with those associated with The Beatles and following on with a random bunch, the purpose of the exercise seemingly to comment on Paul’s longevity. “Why me?” Jones muses, assuming the mind of her subject. Happily, it closes with her wishing him many more years of ‘extraordinary odyssey’. “Long may the Beatle dwell among us,” she concludes.

        The not overlong 265-page book has an eight-page photo section, and a further 73 pages with an up-to-date McCartney timeline, extensive chapter notes, random quotes from interested observers (including this writer) and an index. 

THE BEATLES: NOW AND THEN

There is no escaping the tenderness of ‘Now And Then’, the ‘new’ Beatles single; a melancholy hankering for the era when The Beatles were young and happy and close and in love with the music they were making, above all making it together. John, its principal vocalist and the writer of the song, acknowledges the group’s closure with sadness in his heart. “Now and then I miss you,” he sings. “Now and then I want you to be there for me.” It’s almost as if he intended that one day the others might hear it and read within its lyrics a simple message to the three of them: for all we’ve been through, for all we might have said, for all the fussing and fighting, it’s been great to have you alongside me. And I’m still here if you want to call. That he wasn’t there to be called adds a further level of poignancy to this parting shot from the group who changed everything. 

Rightly, ‘Now And Then’ has been lauded as a vast improvement on ‘Free As A Bird and ‘Real Love’, the other two songs resurrected from the demo tape that Yoko gave to Paul when he was seeking something new to add to the Anthology albums The Beatles released in the 1990s. By all accounts ‘Now And Then’ was deemed unsatisfactory at the time, with George the principal naysayer, but advances in technology since then, largely the result of methods pioneered by film producer Peter Jackson on the Get Back film, have enabled Paul and Ringo to rework the song, overdubbing guitars and additional vocals on to John’s piano and lead vocal. Paul had added a slide guitar solo and fills reminiscent of George’s distinctive keening style, the guitar that gently wept. 

George’s reluctance to pursue the song seems difficult to understand now. The simple, wistful melody of ‘Now And Then’ is on a par with ‘Imagine’; the ringing acoustic guitar that joins John’s keyboard in the opening lines reminds me of George’s acoustic strumming in ‘My Sweet Lord’; Ringo’s metronomic rimshots cement the melody into place, adding muscle; and when Paul joins John on the chorus the wonderful choral landscape that lifted so many of the songs they wrote, or were credited with writing, together is recreated as if by magic. Just after the half way mark there’s a harmonic chorus, surely Paul double-tracked, maybe with Ringo, that sounds as if it was lifted from outtakes from Abbey Road. It launches the guitar solo, enhanced by strings, the production now full and fat, setting the scene for John’s closing vocal. By the end it’s as if we’ve been listening to a song that could have graced any of the Beatles post-1966 LPs. 

Of course, it’s quite possible that John intended this to be a love song to Yoko. He was writing hymns to her a lot during the period he made this demo, but like all the best songs its meaning is ambiguous. It can mean what you want and in the minds of the Beatle fans in Liverpool who queued up overnight to buy it first thing yesterday morning it can mean only one thing: John still loved his fellow Beatles after he abandoned the group as much as he did during the 1960s. 

There’s an assumption that ‘Now And Then’ finally closes the door on The Beatles story. I don’t think it does. Paul will still sing Beatle songs for as long as he tours. Ringo will sing ‘Yellow Submarine’ if called upon to do so. Both will continue to be asked questions about this period of their lives (whether they like it or not). We will all continue to mourn John and George. When all four have passed their music will live on, continually inspiring young musicians. Books will continue to be written. Their story will be told again and again. The Beatles will always be now, as well as then.

A top-quality video has been produced to accompany ‘Now And Then’ which features footage of The Beatles at various stages in their career, cleverly positioning them as if they are playing the song, its lovely closing sequence is a sort of fast rewind, all the way back to when they were children. You can view it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opxhh9Oh3rg

WHO'S EXHAUSTED? Is "Too Much of Everything"... too much?

I have known Tony Fletcher since the mid-1980s when he wrote his first book for Omnibus Press, on Echo & The Bunnymen. He's since written many more, of course, among them Dear Boy: The Life Of Keith Moon, also published by Omnibus, which many regard as among the greatest rock biographies in print. Most recently Tony has posted some of the interviews he did for Dear Boy on Substack, which can be accessed here: https://tonyfletcher.substack.com/

Tony has also written a great review of the recent Who's Next Super Deluxe box set which he has suggested might find a home on Just Backdated, so with his approval I have posted it below (web link:https://tonyfletcher.substack.com/p/whos-exhausted). 

Back when I was writing Dear Boy, tracking down rare recordings by The Who was detective work, and I loved it. On the days that someone would send me a cassette in the mail of something never officially released, I’d have an extra spring in my step. Alternate versions were a bonus elitist treat, though I had a more humbling discovery when I found a collection of just about every UK Who 7” single ever at a shop in Newquay, bought the lot – they were fairly priced and in excellent condition - and quickly discovered that the “I’m A Boy” and “I Can See For Miles” that I had grown up with on the seminal compilation Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy were not, in fact, the original 7” versions.

After the book was published, tapes started showing up more regularly. A very good person with a very generous heart and possibly the most extensive collection of Who live recordings on the planet took it upon himself, as a mark of gratitude for my contribution to Whodom, to send me VHS tapes of rare shows, including Tanglewood 1970, and the San Francisco Cow Palace 1973, legendary filmed concerts both, though for very different reasons. But then he moved onto CDs, and my mailbox started to groan under the weight of new packages containing home-burned live Who discs. While it was wonderful to feel so appreciated, I eventually had to beg him to stop; even in my late 30s, I knew that there just weren’t enough eight-minute blocks left in my life to listen to yet another live version of “Won’t Get Fooled Again”…

…Which is probably how even the most ardent of Who fans felt upon seeing that a new Who’s Next/Life House (Super Deluxe) package was to drop in mid-September, with a 10-CD plus BluRay plus 172 page graphic novel plus 100-page extensive liner notes book with contributions from Pete Townshend but of course as well as from Andy Neill and Matt Kent, plus various so-called souvenir paraphernalia for those who have around $250-$300 to spare, and with all nine-and-a-half hours of music nonetheless provided on the streaming platforms for those of us who don’t. Me, I have spent a lot of money on the Who over the years – contrary to what you my think, the limits of my relationship with the group is that I occasionally get access to their own block of prime-seating concert tickets, which of course comes at a prime-seating price – and I balked at the prospect of shelling out this kind of lump sum for physical copies of bonus recordings that I may or may not already own, even if there was the prospect that somewhere within that 172-page graphic novel and 100 pages of liner notes, we might all now finally discover what Lifehouse was meant to be all about.

Certainly, nobody but Townshend himself knew at the time, and it was incumbent upon producer Glyn Johns to insist to the band’s composer and all-round genius visionary that he climb down from his lofty ambition of a cosmic rock opera to topple Tommy and instead, with his bandmates’ full-throttled endorsement and encouragement, get on with selecting and recording the best dozen or so songs from an extensive catalogue of demos and abandoned Kit Lambert productions in New York (more of which later), go into Olympic Studios in London for a fresh session, and see where it left them.

Where did it leave them? Only with the Greatest Rock Album Ever, of course. Just nine songs eventually, clocking in at what was then a maximum hi-fidelity LP’s length of 43 minutes and 45 seconds. Nothing superfluous, no bonus cuts, no over-riding concept, not even a gatefold sleeve, just a  picture of four blokes pissing against an obelisk and with it, a new blueprint for rock. We should leave it there in turn.

But we won’t. Because naturally, and if only because The Who means more to me than any other band on earth, I have waded through all eight hours and 45 minutes of new Super Deluxe bonus material, and found that sure enough, amidst the music that was never intended for original release, and amidst all that which has trickled out on other previous Deluxe packages though now assembled in correct contextual place, there are enough absolute gems to merit a 12-song playlist –a Single Bonus CD if you can find one that will run 84 minutes. (The Spotify playlist follows at the end of this article.) My thanks to the person who sent me Andy Neill’s extensive track-by-track notes for six of the nine additional discs, which has helped me dig down and cherry-pick from the following categories:

1: Pete Townshend demos: For the most part, Townshend was a consummate enough songwriter and musician that he typically supplied the band with completely finished arrangements, requiring of the rhythm section only that they improve upon his rudimentary playing – and being that the rhythm section was John Entwistle and Keith Moon that wasn’t a tall order. When it came to the vocals, however, there was always the awkward truth that Townshend was (and remains) a superb singer, and that for many listeners, his softer, more yearning tone, if not always preferable to Roger Daltrey’s, certainly supplied the crucial counter to the front man’s classic roar. Where would “Baba O’Riley” truly be, for example, without Pete singing the “teenage wasteland” breakdown?

Indeed, for all those who refer to that song as “Teenage Wasteland” because it seems so obviously the song’s natural title, it turns out that Pete originally felt the same way. Intriguingly, his early demo of the song that would become Who’s Next’s opening track starts not with the defining organ refrain, but piano and acoustic guitar, the “Out here in the fields” opening verse afforded an entirely different melody, as is that eventual middle section “Don’t cry, don’t raise your eye…” Indeed, the song is halfway through its seven-minute workout before we finally get a recognizable Who’s Next melody – the “Sally take my hand” line. Until then, it is effectively a different song entirely, albeit one with familiar lyrics.

Only later did Townshend develop the metronomic, arpeggiated refrain on his Lowry organ (not on an ARP synthesizer as commonly believed) that would become one of the most recognizable riffs of all time. And when he did, he blissed out on it – wouldn’t you? - laying it down as a 13-minute instrumental entitled “Baba O’Riley” that is mind-blowing for being so far ahead of its time, Townshend toying with EQ filters about twenty years before the first techno DJs and artists took such ideas onto the nightclub dance floors.

Listening to the two demos back-to-back, as I place them on my playlist though they come at opposite ends of CD2 on the Super Deluxe package, offers a fascinating insight into the songwriting process, for at a certain point it obviously occurred to Townshend to set the former composition to the latter’s arrangement, change tunes accordingly, and edit that lengthy bliss-out into something more closely resembling a rock song. The rest, as they say, was history.

Also on these two discs is a beautiful, and remarkably complete demo of what was then simply called “Too Much,” a song performed live at the time of the sessions, duly recorded for Who’s Next, but not released (as “Too Much of Anything”) until Odds And Sods in 1974. In case you didn’t already know or merely guess as much, the song’s concluding chorus line “Too Much of Everything… is too much for me” served to inspire this article’s subtitle.

Pete’s early demo of “Behind Blue Eyes” also merits inclusion because of its tenderness and for how, my earlier comment about finished arrangements aside, the song does not kick into fourth gear with the famous middle section (“When my fist clenches…”), but rather continues in the same gentle vein, Pete harmonizing with himself where Daltrey later soared solo. Historically, it is hard to argue against a Who’s Next rock rendition that formed part of the 1970s rock canon and my own musical education with it, but there are reasons to claim that this is a more emotional and satisfying rendition.

2: Unreleased Songs: There’s an obvious temptation to say that if Townshend’s songs weren’t good enough to make it into the studio or live show at the time, they probably weren’t good enough, period, and in the cases of “Mary,” “Greyhound Girl” and perhaps even “There’s a Fortune In Those Hills,” I am tempted to agree. But “Finally Over” – not to be confused with “The Song Is Over” – is an absolute treasure, proof that Pete Townshend’s toenail clippings are better than most songwriters’ career masterpieces and, perhaps, an opportunity missed.

3: Record Plant recordings: This is the supposedly disastrous week-long session in New York, with manager/producer Kit Lambert ostensibly at the controls but emotionally AWOL. Again, the argument against releasing this these cuts (though many already have seen light of day on earlier Deluxe packages) is that if the Who rejected them at the time, why subject us to their confessed failures this far down the line? And it’s true, most of these preserved takes – the pick of the week’s crop, according to the sleeve notes - are inferior to Who’s Next, lacking cohesion, concentration and drive.

Nonetheless, I actually prefer this rendition of “Love Ain’t For Keeping” with Leslie West on lead guitar along with an uncredited organ player from Patti LaBelle’s band: it’s harder, more direct, less frivolous, evidently benefiting from being recorded live-to-tape.

Ditto “I’m In Tune” as it was then known, for similar reasons. Additionally, there’s a particular melodic vitality to John Entwistle’s bass playing on these New York sessions that I would argue is superior to the eventual recordings at Olympic Studios in London. Compare this cut with the “Getting In Tune” from Who’s Next and tell me you don’t agree.

4: Alternate edits: There’s a good reason that most songs have vocals on them, and there’s an equally good reason that some are edited down. Still, for those of us who came of age marveling at the majesty of Nicky Hopkin’s piano playing, being afforded a version of “The Song Is Over” stripped of all vocals allows that majesty to shine with all due regality. And for those like me – and admittedly there may not be many – whose first exposure to The Who was the 1972 single “Join Together” and who then was subjected to a ten-year quest to find a physical copy of the non-LP 45, having an extra 90 seconds of music here makes up for lost time. A little.

“Join Together,” btw, was just the third in a series of once-a-year non-LP singles that started with “The Seeker” in 1970, added “Let’s See Action” in ‘71 and concluded with “Relay” in ‘73, though you can factor in “Long Live Rock” too, which was recorded in the same period and eventually released in 1979 to promote the documentary The Kids Are Alright. All five A-sides and their generally excellent B-sides are included here in various official and bonus forms. “Join Together” is still the only Who cut I have ever dared to DJ for a nightclub dancefloor – and only once at that; where was the 13-minute “Baba O’Riley” instrumental when I needed it?

5: Live recordings. By this point in their unending career, we the dedicated followers of fashion have surely had enough official Who live recordings to take us through not just the rest of this life but the next one, too. Nonetheless, four of the nine bonus CDs here are culled from two distinct, lengthy concerts. The first was at the Young Vic Theatre in Waterloo, London – not the rehearsal shows with which Townshend originally hoped to cement his vision of audience engagement, but rather one consigned to tape via the Stones’ 16-track mobile studio on April 26, 1971, halfway through the recording process as an attempt to document their current state of play. Reviews I’ve read of the box set have repeated Andy Neill’s sleeve note assertion that the performances are “tentative” and to an extent that is true, but the actual arrangements are far more developed already by this point than that might lead you to believe, and the fact that they have not yet reached the Epic, Classic Rock status is occasionally a winning argument.

As proof, I offer up both “Naked Eye” – a song that just failed to make the album at the time – and, perhaps controversially, “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” I really like this version: it is more relaxed, loose, and raw than it would soon become, not yet acknowledged by an arena-sized audience as an Anthem of a Generation, and there is a reason to adopt it as a personal keepsake going forwards; the definitive studio recording version will show up on your local classic rock station soon enough anyway.

The last two CDs are given over to a concert at the Civic Auditorium in San Francisco eight months later, on December 13 1971, parts of which have been released officially over the years, and which in its entirety here is already being held aloft as a peak period piece, The Who at their early-1970s unrivalled in-concert best. It’s hard to disagree – the band are absolutely on fire – and for all that I have had a copy of this concert on the aforementioned gifted CDs for the last 25 years or so, it turns out mine was only a truncated edit of the show, absent much of Tommy (which is not relevant to this particular conversation) and the truly incendiary nine-minute version of Holland-Dozier-Holland’s “Baby Don’t You Do It.” A live staple at the time, and one that showed up on the back of “Join Together” in deftly edited fashion, it serves to remind everyone that for all the legend around the writing, recording and performing of Who’s Next/Life House, at heart The Who were an R&B band brought up on Black American music, and that nobody, but nobody, butchered it – in the most professional sense of this vegan’s reluctant used of the verb – better.

And with this, we can only hope that The Life House Song Cycle Saga is, indeed, finally over. Whatever Lifehouse was imagined to be, and however much Pete Townshend may have felt his inability to capture it at the time represented some sort of Epic Fail, he can now hopefully retire in the knowledge that he put everything out there eventually, 172-page graphic novel and all. His extensive efforts at the time to rewire popular music were hardly in vain: not only did they give us Who’s Next, the Greatest Rock Album Ever, but a series of non-album A-sides and B-sides equally unrivalled during the early 1970s. Along the way, The Who transformed additionally into the Greatest Live Band Ever as well, and it’s to the Super Deluxe package’s ultimate acclaim that, despite its frighteningly obsessive and overwrought breadth and depth, it renders these claims not so much of a subjective opinion as an objective fact.

Tony Fletcher, October 2023.

[i] Of the various reviews I have read to help me along, Alexis Petridis on Super Deluxe Edition – yes, there is a website of that name – sums up the confusion surrounding Lifehouse best. “Retold in the box set’s 100-page book, the saga of Life House’s making is so extraordinarily convoluted and confused, so filled with cross-purposes, misunderstanding and – occasionally – straightforward sabotage, that this writer confesses he ended up frantically taking notes: not as preparation for this review, but just in a desperate attempt to try and keep up with what was going on… The best moment in the book may come when Townshend furiously protests that “when people say I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about, what they’re actually doing is revealing their own complete idiocy because the idea is SO FUCKING SIMPLE”, which, with all due respect, sounds remarkably like something you’d say if you had succeeded in completely confusing yourself.”

THIS GUITAR HAS SECONDS TO LIVE: A People’s History Of The Who by Richard Houghton

It’s a poster, a t-shirt and now a book cover. This Guitar Has Seconds To Live is the name bestowed upon a famous photograph taken at an infamous Who concert. The photographer was Nigel Dickson who was on hand at the Odeon Theatre in Newcastle on November 5, 1973, Bonfire Night no less, to witness a Pete Townshend meltdown of colossal proportions. Incensed at the failure of the Quadrophenia backing takes to function to his liking, Pete demolished everything in sight, tapes included, and assaulted long-suffering soundman Bobby Pridden, causing a 25-minute stoppage before the concert resumed, Quadrophenia abandoned.

Also on hand were Who fans Bill Monks, Peter Smith, Jim Robson, Ian Potts, Colin Petersen, Brian Dickinson, Brian Goulden and John Robson, all of whom offer their accounts of the concert and its aftermath in this book, which is in fact a new edition of Richard Houghton’s The Who: I Was There, published by Red Planet in 2017 and reviewed on Just Backdated here: https://justbackdated.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-who-i-was-there-by-richard-houghton.html

Of all the fans, the most loquacious is Peter Smith who reports that during Quadrophenia, “[They] got as far as ‘5.15’ [about half way through – CC] when things started to go wrong. The backing tapes they used to play along with weren’t working correctly, and apparently not at all during ‘5.15’. Pete went crazy, totally losing it. From upstairs we could see him shouting at someone to the side of the stage; he then started punching the guy and smashed his guitar to the floor of the stage. He started ripping wires out of their equipment. Roger, John and Keith were just staring at him, wondering what on earth he was doing. The theatre obviously realised that something was going seriously wrong, and they dropped the big white safety curtain.

“We sat in darkness for 15 or 20 minutes until the band reappeared. The Who launched into ‘Magic Bus’ followed by a lengthy jam and finished by playing ‘My Generation’ for a second time. Pete was in a wild, strange mood, swearing at us all, calling us ‘fucking bastards’. I recall being very upset with him and shouting back at him, as did many others. He then smashed his Gibson guitar, threw one of his amps to the ground and Keith crashed through his drums, knocking them all over the stage. They received thunderous applause as they left the stage.

“It had been a strange, surreal and brilliant night. We went home on the train, everyone talking about what they had just witnessed.”

By all accounts Bob Pridden walked out of the theatre after the incident, hotly pursued by manager Bill Curbishley and lighting man John Wolff who persuaded him to return. To add insult to injury, Pridden was obliged to stump up for a new Gibson Les Paul because he was the only one in the entourage with sufficient cash on him to buy one from a Newcastle instrument shop. 

The following night Pete and Keith appeared on the local TV show Look North, confirming that the two other shows booked at the Newcastle Odeon would go ahead as planned. Pete was a bit sheepish and didn’t say much but when Keith was asked if he felt that fans were disappointed, he replied: “Well, nobody asked for their money back, did they?”

The new, retitled edition of The Who: I Was There is much improved, a large format hardback with 368 pages, printed on art paper which enhances the photographs, many of them carried forward from the old book. 

IMMEDIATE – The Rise & Fall of the UK’s First Independent Record Label by Simon Spence

The major theme of this book about Andrew Oldham’s Immediate Records bears a striking resemblance to the rise and fall of the Tory government led by Boris Johnson. In charge of both were reckless, over confident ne’er do wells who arrived with the wind in their sails, squandered vast amounts of money and goodwill, and left with their tail between their legs. Both relished disorder, made enemies galore and had a lasting impact, not necessarily for the better, on the milieu in which they served. And both profited enormously from the mess they left behind. 

“Oldham was terrible,” says music journalist and PR Keith Altham. “He was rude, obnoxious, bad-tempered. He humiliated people and he was dreadful.”

Much the same thing, of course, can be said of man who occupied 10 Downing Street between 2019 and 2022. The big difference is that while Johnson has left behind a heap of nothing, Oldham’s legacy is a heap of great music. 

        Andrew Loog Oldham – the Loog was the surname of the father who was killed before he was born, Oldham his mother’s name – shook up the complacent sixties British record industry by throwing two grenades into its midst, then sat back to watch the chaos he engineered. He threw the first by promoting The Rolling Stones, whom he managed during the early part of their career, and then, even more impishly, threw another when he and his partner Tony Calder launched Immediate Records, the UK’s first truly independent exclusively pop-focused record label, the precursor to them all – Track, Chrysalis, Island, Charisma, Stiff and many others. Fearless and unrestrained, Oldham changed the record industry from a comfortable berth for middle-aged men in suits to a free-for-all populated by rebels like him, spivs in their twenties, duckers and divers, free thinkers and free loaders, and brilliant mavericks with nowhere else to go.

        Simon Spence’s very readable book, which explains how all this came about, has had an erratic publishing history since it was first published as a large-format illustrated title in 2008. Simon updated it in 2012, and it will soon be available again, text only, through Backstage Books, a small publisher specialising in music titles in which he has a vested interest. It is immensely detailed insofar as it mentions just about every record that Immediate ever released, and chronicles in equal detail the irresponsible behaviour that brought about the label’s downfall. It features a cast of luminaries from the world of rock from Mick and Keith of the Stones on down, not least Jimmy Page who was for a time Immediate’s A&R man and go-to guitarist for studio work, often alongside arranger John Paul Jones. Then there’s the saga of The Small Faces, covered equally well in All Or Nothing, Simon’s warts-and-all oral biography of Steve Marriott, and other hit makers like Chris Farlowe, Amen Corner and PP Arnold.

        Oldham’s motive for launching Immediate was his dissatisfaction with the UK’s major labels, principally Decca to whom the Stones were signed, which reflects the origins other indies insofar as The Who’s managers launched Track, Jethro Tull and Ten Years After’s managers launched Chrysalis and The Nice’s manager launched Charisma. Unlike the men behind those labels, however, Oldham was unable to bring to his label his biggest client, the Stones, and thus ensure a solid foundation. Instead he went out and signed everyone and anyone that caught his ear, with the result that the label’s policy seemed scattershot; adventurous certainly but hardly likely to bring in the cash that commercial success would ensure. For that he relied on his own ability to gather up funds wherever and however he could, not always with probity uppermost on his mind. 

        Oldham’s dreams and schemes are the meat of Simon’s book. While it’s all very commendable to read about all the acts and their records (and the numerous detailed biographical footnotes), it is Oldham’s erratic, often cocaine-fuelled behaviour, aided and abetted by the more restrained Calder, that make this a page turner. What’s more it didn’t pay to cross him. During the sessions for Own Up, an ambitious album by an Oldham hopeful called Twice As Much, members of a string ensemble were overheard disparaging the group’s work in the toilet. Writes Simon: “Oldham obtained all their names and booked them again on a really hot day, turned the air con off and had nothing for them to play. He just sat in front of them for three hours.”

        This is but one of many eye-opening anecdotes recalled in the book. Oldham would blame Immediate’s ultimate demise on everyone around him, mostly the inability of Columbia Records to promote the label’s acts sufficiently in the USA, but the truth was he was out to lunch most of the time, let potential stars slip through his fingers and threw good money after bad. “Oldham was never a dishonest person, just nutty,” says Ken East, manager director of EMI at the time Immediate went under. “He was just so up in the air about everything.”  

        Just like that straw-haired PM. 

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.