IPSWICH BATTERED
SLADE BLITZ IPSWICH CROWD AT REARRANGED GAUMONT GIG
SLADE / IPSWICH GAUMONT 28/5/1977
I'm no different to most Slade fans, I don't mean those people out there who maybe bought a few of the records and had a little liking for the band, I mean the fans, those of us who stuck with them through thick and thin, the good times and the bad, we stayed true and loyal while all around us found it more than odd! If we could convert someone along the way, then that was great, but most of the time, the bands image, mostly in fairness Dave Hill's image meant that people just wouldn't give them a proper listen. No, it was never easy being a Slade fan, and it was much worse in particular when the band were suffering their worse popularity crisis since they hit the big time. We all had to put up with the mostly good natured jibes and banter from friends who just didn't get Slade at all. It was more than irritating!
It was however certain sections of the serious music press that reserved the most sneering and snobbish remarks and reports for the band, this was 1977 and the New Wave of music was sweeping across the land, the snobs, the failed art students that plied their trade as hacks writing drivel for the music press loved punk, hated Slade as they represented all that was wrong with music, and they should be swept away, discarded and forgotten about.
Slade hadn't helped themselves either, they had abandoned these shores and headed off to America two years previously. I had last seen Slade live way back in 1975 at their two New Victoria Theatre 'farewell' shows in London. Two shows and then they were gone, off across the Atlantic to find that the streets were not paved with gold discs after all. By 1977, they had been gone for two years trying, and failing to conquer the American market.
The long hot summer of 1976 came and went, bands like The Eagles, 10 CC and Peter Frampton ruled the airwaves. Mainstream radio, previously the home of Slade barely played any of the bands releases these days and held no interest for me, It was down to Pirate radio station Radio Caroline, transmitting from the good ship 'Mi Amigo' anchored off the coast at Harwich to throw up an occasional Slade album track, they mostly played wall to wall Zeppelin and Rolling Stones records, but at least it was rock and roll and not snotty nosed pimply spikey haired talentless dirgemeisters....Slade, were gone, out of sight, out of mind.
Each week I would religiously visit W.H.Smiths and scour the weekly music press searching out any snippet of information or news about the band, there was nothing, save the odd two line mention of them from America. It really was a bleak and desolate landscape in which to be a Slade fan, it really did feel like we had been abandoned. Too old to like the chartsters that had usurped Slade from their throne and too young to be interested in the pomp of the Zeps and their ilk it was left to bands like Thin Lizzy and AC/DC to tickle my fancy.
I had been broadening my musical tastes and experimenting by listening to the likes of Streetwalkers and Boston, who were being played to death on Caroline when news broke that Slade were returning to the UK with a new album and tour. That was great news and in the days before mobile phones and the internet these things trickled down to the fans very slowly and you might get a few lines in one of the music papers about it and then not read a thing about it for months. I remember having to pre order 'Whatever Happened To Slade' and going in to town to pick it up on the day of release. I sat on the bus and read every word of the lyric sheet, looking at the groove on the LP trying to work out if the track was fast or slow, a rocker or ballad! It was a rather brilliant album I thought, save for a couple of clunker tracks that seemed to have been rushed and didn't quite live up to the rest, those being 'Big Apple Blues' and 'Dead Men Tell No Tales', the banality of the lyrics still irritates me to this day!
That said, we all listen to the same things but with different ears, and it was a good album and I could not wait to see them once again on the tour that was promoting it's release, they were even coming to the Ipswich Gaumont which was for me the nearest venue
The day of the gig arrived, but Slade didn't, seems that Noddy Holder ( 'Nobby Hooker' as the aged doorman at the Gaumont described him) had lost his voice and the gig was being rearranged for a couple of weeks hence. What a let down...but we did steal most of the LP covers that had been stapled to a billboard inside the theatre foyer once he had disappeared, a mixture of WHTS covers and some rather nice ones from the support band 'Liar' that featured a stockinged thigh being branded with the groups name.
The gig was re-arranged for the end of the month and in the ensuing two weeks I eagerly lapped up the reports in the music press, although all seemed to be saying that Slade were basically crap and too old to rock and roll anymore, the press generally had always given Slade good copy, but now, some of them couldn't wait to lay into them. Regardless, I managed to convince one of my 'Kiss' loving friends to come along to the Gaumont to give him a chance to be converted! As for me, the iffy press just re-galvanised and enhanced my affection and loyalty for the band and I could not wait to see them live again after a two year absense.
The day of the gig came and me and my old China Dave Wyllie, an arch Kiss fan and complete sceptic accompanied me to the Gaumont in the early afternoon where we managed to waltz in through the side doors and sit quietly in the shadows as we watched the roadies setting up the stage equipment. No one bothered us and after 20 minutes or so one of the roadies came over and gave us three £1 notes (remember them?) and asked us to nip out and buy as many sausage, pie and chips as it would buy which we did!
Sausage, chips and a couple of pies safely delivered gave us the opportunity to walk about inside the Gaumont and mingle until H and Jim appeared on stage, Don soon followed and all three started running through parts of 'One Eyed Jacks'. We scuttled off to one side of the stage just in case we were chucked out now that some of the band were there. It was incredible to be inside an empty theatre smack bang in front of Slades huge stack of equipment with Lea's Bass notes leaving his huge speakers and physically hitting you in the chest, it was tangible!
After a while Noddy arrived and ambled slowly down the centre aisles from the back of the hall,wearing jeans and a red T shirt with a leather jacket slung over his shoulder he was greeted and beckoned on stage by Jimmy who said into the mike..."Finally! Hello ...come and have a wank Nod!" All four were soon on stage running through various bits and pieces it was a fantastic privilege to be able to sit and watch.
With the soundcheck over and the band free, we managed to get to chat with them all and get various pieces of paper, cigarette packets signed although Jimmy tried as hard as he could not to have to chat with us, and the sum total of Holder's contact was a quick 'hello lads, have you come far' as he signed whatever we had thrust in front of his nose to be autographed. Dave and Don stayed longer and chatted properly telling us they had been touring in Germany on a bus with The Rubettes of all people since the last show was cancelled but that it was going to be a great show tonight as they were fresh after having had a week or so off since returning, their batteries fully charged it was going to be better than a few weeks before.
Once they had departed we turned our attention to the mixing desk that was an island of technology in amongst the seats smack bang in the middle of the auditorium. I wasn't that interested but my mate Dave was so we chatted at length with 'Charlie' Newnham, the bands long time sound engineer, a rellay nice bloke who had a lot of time for us. He also told us that the show was going to be recorded through the mixing desk for possible inclusion on a double live album that the band were thinking of releasing the following year. (That ended up being Slade Alive Vol II) he told us to make sure that we made a lot of noise as they wanted a great crowd sound for the evening! When it was time for us to go, we were asked to do one more job and we readily agreed. We were each handed a wad of flyers advertising copies of 'The Slade Papers' which wee to be offered for sale for a knockdown tour only price of 75p. It wasn't easy to get one of these pieces of paper onto the tip up seats, but we did our best and then it was off back out into the late afternoon Suffolk sunshine to find a wimpy bar!
The Gaumont was a 1500 seater, and at the time, was just about the only venue this side of London in East Anglia that any name bands played at, so no matter who was playing it was nearly almost always a sell out, you had to be pretty bad not to sell out the Gaumont. The first thing that was noticeable was that the audience queuing to get into the venue looked different from the last time I had seen Slade. At the New Vic gigs in 1975 the audience was a fair mixture a lot of teeny bopper girls who semed unsure whether to still be following Noddy and the boys, or the then new kids on the block 'The Bay City Rollers', and young males. This time around the majority of those patiently waiting for the doors to open were male and older, the 'screamers' just were not there.
When the doors finally opened it was clear that the bouncers employed on the night were not going to have it their own way, we were not only an older crowd, we were bigger and not so easily pushed around anymore!
Once inside the Gaumont the crowd gradually filled the seats both in the circle and stalls, each seat had a flyer on it advertising 'The Slade Papers' which were quickly folded into paper aeroplanes, squadrons of which filled the air until either the crowd got bored or they became so trampled and crumpled that they became un-airworthy!
The original gig was to have had 'Liar' supporting, this time they had been replaced by a ridiculously dodgy band called 'Cock Sparrer' a bunch of psuedo punks from London who did themselves no favours by swearing AT the audience and telling us all that Slade were shit...needless to say their set didn't go down too well and they were roundly booed off when they finally ( mercifully) left the fray. All I really remember about them was that they were plugging a new single called 'Running Riot' or similar, notable only for its shitness. They also bored everyone rigid with an excrutiatingly bad and overly long version of the Stones 'Starfucker'
The Gaumont had filled up nicely and there was already an air of excitement as the assembled throng, salivating with nervous anticipation, readied itself for the arrival of Slade On Stage. Rocky Mountain Way boomed out from the house PA. The odd paper aeroplane was found and relaunched into space, some floated down onto the stage. one or two made their way right to the back of the stage and landed precariously balanced on the cloth covering Powell's kit! There wasn't much else to see, but as Joe Walsh skilfully picked out the last few notes of his classic 1973 guitar epic, the house lights started to dim and as they did in unison the noise from the audience rose in a cresendo to a full on Anfield Spion Kop roar as the dark shadowy figures of a gaggle of roadies could be seen through the gloom on stage removing the black cloth covers from the wall of amplifiers and Don's gleaming silver custom built Ludwig kit.
I don't know to this day what it was about that night, the very sight of the stage being readied sent the crowd mental, really, it was some sort of collective shared hysteria, excitement...something! The crowd were going absolutely bonkers, really mental and were generating enough primal electricity to power East Anglia and the band hadn't even walked onto the stage yet, it was truly incredible to be a part of it, the air crackled as the silver chrome of Dons kit picked out every scrap of available light. The red LED lights on the front of the equipment were glowing brightly in the blackness of the stage and the bouncers were already fighting a lost cause trying to get people back into their seats, no one was taking any notice, it never got heavy as it had in the past occasionally, if it had, they were onto a hiding to nothing, people just wanted to be ready....and then it happened
First up through the murk came Don Powell, dressed all in white, taking up his position behind his kit, a couple of taps on the bass drum followed by a paradiddle on snare confirmed he was really there. It was now pandemonium in the crowd at the front of the stage as row after row of seats were vacated as the fans spilled into the aisles and ran to the front of the stage, in doing so completely taking out the half a dozen or so bouncers that tried manfully to hold us back in the darkness, they were absorbed Borg like into the crowd and were barely seen again for the rest of the evening!
Without further ado, the rest of the band entered the stage, plugged in and we were off. The opening bars of 'Hear Me Calling' boomed from Holder's SG, filling the theatre with a malevolence, easily drowning out the whoops, hollers, whistles and cheers of the crowd. A pinky purple spotlight picked out just his head and shoulders. The sound was so crisp, perfectly mixed as first Hill and Powell joined in...this was really it, the two year wait was over as the opening bars gave way to an explosion of noise and pyrotechnics as lights, strobes and dry ice meant it was well and truly game on!
It was hard to know where to look first, it was harder to try to stay in one place as the crowd surged,jostled and surged again at the front of the stage. Jimmy Lea, dressed in a red and blue paisley patterned satin jacket, light blue jeans and bluey grey cuban heel boots, topped off with a red and white handkerchief in the waistband of the jeans was stage left, bouncing around with that Gibson EB3 slung from his shoulder involving every one of the multitude that were in front of his part of the stage! The opposite side of the stage belonged to Dave Hill, completely bald, leather clad and studded sporting a gigantic hooped earring, he was already leering and gooning around playing to the adoring crowd. The man at the back was wearing a white vest and was just smashing the shit out of his kit as he always did....But most of all it was of course Noddy Holder that held the attention.
Centre stage, Holder was THE man, the showman supreme of the band, gone were the jeans and T shirt of earlier in the day, they had now been replaced by a three quarter length blue satin frock coat, sporting a bicorne hat he stood square in the middle of the stage looking more like an effeminate Napoleon than a rock icon! He was armed with that phenominally loud and dangerous sounding cherry red Gibson SG junior which disgorged chordage so powerfully it almost melted the bone marrow of those at the front, it was absofuckinglutely fabulous!
The spectacle was awesome, really, there is no other word for it. Slade had always been a shit hot live band having learned their trade slogging the show around for years before it paid off, they knew how to rock, they knew how to produce, and they did. America may not have warmed to Slade, but from the first minutes of this show it was clear to see that their stint in America had turned them into an incredibly finely honed rock machine. Tight as a cod's arsehole, they tore through 'Hear Me Calling' the Ten Years After track that they had made their own, the best, in my humble opinion, opening track that the band ever employed bar none, a true proper clarion call to arms to those who were there to pay homage! That heaving manic mass that had already absorbed the bouncers and occasionally disgorged one from the rear end...they could be seen enjoying the show as they sucked in the remnants of the cold dry ice that was still swirling around as they escaped the scrum!
As soon as Hear Me Calling was over they were straight into 'Be' the first new song of the evening and the opening track from 'Whatever Happened To Slade' It was incredibly powerful and to see Nod and Jim share the mic to belt out the tongue twisting lyric was something else. I tell you this, when Holder got to the 'Stand Up, stand up, stand up and be yourself' bit those that were still seated at the back of the hall all seemed to get up and run down to the front of the theatre on command, many even some from upstairs, quite a lot actually from upstairs also made their way down into the main theatre and most gravitated to the stage area to get as close as they possibly could, it was a really really wild scene. Without a break between the two, 'Get On Up' was next which gave Jimmy the first opportunity of the evening to wow us all with his fretboard dexterity.
With 'Get On Up' finished Holder took a few moments to survey what was going on underneath him before "Good to be back in Ipswich again" and then immediately corrected himself by saying "I don't think we've ever played here before....let's do a little bit of Take Me Bak Ome...." cue more complete mayhem from the crowd as the familiar strains of this well known band classic and 1972 #1 began bludgeoning everyone present. Hill, grinning, pogoing and goofing around the stage was no longer the perambulating Christmas tree of old, but a shiny domed whirling dervish lapping up the adulation and devotion of those assembled who had come to pay homage.
'Take Me Bak Ome', played at 1000 miles per hour, gave waywithout a break to 'My Baby Left Me' where Holder uttered the immortal words "Take It Grasshopper" as Dave Hill goofily played his little guitar break! Then it was 'One Eyed Jacks' from the new album before Holder decided it was time for him to do his customary "It's hot in here innit" and bottles of beer were swigged from and then tossed into the crowd. The band took a breather and while Nod was having his bit of banter with his adoring fans, it was time for both Hill and Lea to strip off to the waist and for Holder to discard his coat and show us all his frilly shirt. Once the interlude was over, the new album plugged...."In your shops now folks" we were treated to a storming rendition of 'Gypsy Roadhog' followed, as on the LP immediately by 'Lightning Never Strikes Twice' which was with it's false endings, multiple echoed vocals and a few wolf howls thrown in for good measure was brilliantly played live, Hill in particular excelled himself climbing up on to the speaker stacks and throwing himself around without missing a note, It was pure theatre, pure spectacle and we loved every second of it. There was a point during the song that it seemed the band and crowd became synergetic, we were all as one, working together and each enjoying the other, needing the other.
Fuck me, what a band this lot had become, they were a tour de force, an unstoppable juggernaut who were feeding off the audiences pure unadulterated joy at being in the same space as them. There was definitely something in the air that night, the band, the crowd, we were all in it together, it was becoming a joyous night of balls to the wall rock and roll being dished up for all by the best rock band ever to play live, no band ever could walk on to a stage to the same manic reception as Slade had done without playing a note...I know I keep saying it, but it was abnormously mental, magical.
Time to slow it down a bit and let us all gather our collective breath as Holder announced it was time for a 'sing song'. 'Far Far Away' gave the crowd a chance to wave their arms aloft in unison and belt out the chorus as one. But this was Slade, and one ballad, one sing song was always enough.
"Right then right then right then....from now on in it's a rockin' all the way....'ere's an oldie but goodie.....we'll try a little bit of Gudbuuuuuy t' Jaaaane....a one, a two a vun two tree for.." and with that Slade battered Ipswich with crowd favourite 'Gudbuy T' Jane', which was, like 'Take Me Bak 'Ome' earlier blasted out at a thousand miles an hour before we were treated to a heavy heavy version of ' Burning In The Heat Of Love' featuring 'Grasshopper' as Noddy was now referring to Dave Hill.
It was relentless, " The Soul, The Roll and The Motion" followed giving Lea his customary fiddle solo. He played that lime green Barcus-Berry violin behind his back, through his legs, upside down, on his back on the floor, while running back and forth across the stage. he was on his back when Holder and Hill returned....'Keep a rollin'...Yeah....keep a rollin...yeah etc....... An hour had gone by, all too quickly, and now it was time for the traditional show closer, 'Get Down and Get With It'. As before, it was bedlam, that was the first time that night I saw a seat being hurled into the air, it was picked up half a dozen times and tossed around between fans as Holder extolled the virtues of clapping your hands and stamping your feet at the same time .......madness ensued.
"You'vvvve been really wonderful, You'vvvve been really great, You've been Rrockin and Rrollin in Ipswich tonight, You've been a Rrockin and a Rrollin in Ipswich tonight, You've been rrrockin.......and rrrollin and pissing it up in Ipswich tonight.....We've gotta go now........Aaaaaaalrrriiiightttttt........ The band stood before us, all four together saluting the crowd who were saluting them, Don threw his towel into the heaving mass and it was swallowed up immediately....the whole night had been fucking magical. As we, as one, saluted them, the first chants of 'We Want Slade' 'We Want Slade' 'We Want Slade' started and carried on as the band exited the stage, it got louder and more intense, we all knew they were coming back, but we wanted them to know that we demanded it! it was echoing around the theatre, reverberating off of the walls, I am sure everyone, EVERYONE in attendance was baying for their return.
They didn't let us down, the band returned for three separate encores that night, each more appreciated than the one before! We had 'Mama' first...next it was the mandatory 'Give yourselves a big cheer' and a rendition of 'You'll Never Walk Alone" before 'Cum On Feel The Noize.' Finally a seemingly unending rock 'n' roll medley featuring a run through of Holders favourite Little Richard tracks, culminating in 'Born To Be Wild'.It truly was a night to remember, and today some 45 years later it is still as fresh in my memory now as it was the moment it happened.
When it was over and they had finally gone for good, with Gene Kelly's 'Singing In The Rain' filling the hall and the house lights up, the scene of devastation down the front of the theatre was plain for all to see, at least the first three rows of seats were mangled with many broken, it really had been Bedlam at the sharp end!
We made a dash for the side stage doors and were allowed backstage by Swinley and the other roadies whom remembered us from the afternoon, the band were in a rush to get away, but did stay long enough to sign some autographs for those that had managed to get that far. Jim asked us what we thought of the show, Nod and Don were looking around for cigarettes before all four left by the window and were driven off into the night. Because the band had played three lengthy encores and we had gone backstage for half an hour or so we had managed to miss the last train home to Colchester, so we waited for the milk train at Ipswich station and read every word at least three times in my newly acquired, but creased 75p special tour price Slade Papers!
My ears were ringing, a ringing that was to last three full days as Slades mind numbingly loud volume completely discombobulated my ears for that long. It was, in the words of my newly converted mate Dave Wyllie...."Fucking brilliant"
In my time I saw Slade before, during and after their heyday, but there was never a night anywhere to rival that gig. I will always think those first five tracks belted out one after another that night was the best opening to any gig I ever witnessed anytime, anywhere and by anyone.
That night, we loved them, and they loved us. It was a different Slade for sure, but that night my lifelong affection, fidelity and affiliation for the band was well and truly cemented in place. While they had been away I had seen Priest, Lizzy, Nugent, AC/DC and even Kiss, in fact just about every new 'thing' to come along, only AC/DC and Lizzy gave shows that were worth mentioning, but no one, no one EVER came close to Slade Live. No One.
Slade were something else.
Slade were the Guvnors.
DAVID GRAHAM, SLADE IN ENGLAND......You Know It makes Sense!