A football match in fancy dress

JULIE WEBB

NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS ~ 13 JANUARY 1973

 

HE’S A WORKING-CLASS hero with a lecherous grin. Not that tall, he’d be considerably shorter without the four-inch platform soles he wears. His shoes are green, the socks are clearly visible because his tartan trousers (held up by blue braces) fall four inches short of his boots. He knows he looks good — even if it is all for show..

The red shirt is garish, especially with the silver on the pocket and on his head is a black top hat, decorated with silver discs. Glittering, shimmering tinsel flays from the back — looking, as the lights pick it up, similar to showbiz spaghetti. He speaks with a broad Midlands accent. He’s arrogant, and loud mouthed. He is, after all, a follower of Slade, waiting — along with a few hundred others — outside the Palladium on a cold damp night.

Few people could have foreseen how huge Slade would become in the past twelve months. For only this time last year they were rated alongside other new to the charts bands, no better, no worse.

Perhaps only their manager Chas Chandler, was fully confident. “You wait, they’ll be enormous before you know it,” he said. And people laughed to themselves — for doesn’t every manager think that about his group?

“He was confident” Noddy Holder echoes. “And no one argues with Chas cause he’s so much bigger than everyone else. We didn’t think it would snowball so fast – well, we only did our first concert tour in May.”

Yet at the end of the year Slade cleared the most points in the NME chart survey — beating T. Rex, Elvis and The Osmonds in the singles chart. And their album, “Slade Alive”, was second (in the album charts table) only to the indomitable “Bridge Over Troubled Water”.

A Slade gig is now an event. You don’t just go along in your scruffy jeans to sit down and listen to the band. It’s more like going to a football match in fancy dress. More and more Slade fanatics are emulating their heroes. Hours of work must go into the construction of the top hats worn at gigs. Usually covered in silver discs – or silver foil paper — they are also adorned with cut-out pictures of the band. Scarves are daubed with slogans written with felt tips pens — knickers and bras are carefully embroidered before being thrown stagewards.

After the gig, the roadie carefully picks up the gifts from the side, back and front of the stage and brings them up to the dressing room. There are over a dozen top hats — and some very strange-looking pieces of underwear. “We’ve got enough to open up a shop,” Holder comments, while a photographer feasts his eyes on the flimsies and gets Holder to drape them over his hat. “Is it an exclusive picture?” he asks Nod. And Holder, looking more ridiculous than ever laughs lecherously and says “Sure… yeah… anything you like.”

“Where did they come from” a middle aged lady asks, looking disbelieving. Then she’s informed they were thrown during the gig says “Ooh is it always like that?” Yes, madam, it is. Dave Hill`s dad is planting a kiss on a young ladies` cheek. ” ‘Ave you met Dave’s dad?” I’m asked. Well now. I know where Dave gets it from. AND IN the midst of the bizarre situation, Slade are trying to dress — or undress – wiping the sweat from their faces. An expose again? No, Slade are one band who don’t seem to have suffered from a surfeit of exposure and publicity.

I suggest to Holder that too much publicity was perhaps responsible for Bolan’s recent demise? “Ah, but we’re not a Faces or a T. Rex. They’ve really got just one guy doing interviews — either Marc Bolan or Rod Stewart. With us it’s four guys so we can split all interviews four ways and give our own different points of view. The band may become over-exposed but we want four of us to come over strong.”

Slade never were — and never will be — a band for the music intelligentsia. Holder is aware of that. “You can never please 100 per cent of the people 100 per cent of the time — we just go out to please the masses, not the minority. If they say we look a load of dicks on Top Of The Pops that’s up to them. We don’t think we do. You can`t sell records unless you appeal — and we approach every medium in the same way. Through records, television and the press we`re just trying to appeal to the masses. “We’ve been knocked for not being an album band – for solely being a singles band. But that’s become comical now. The last album sold well and we had 150,000 advance for the new one. The biggest criticism comes from people who knock our music, those who think we are musically rubbish. But we know we can play, and we write songs to fit the group.

“We have, in the past, written some ballads – but for a band like us they haven’t come off. When we wrote “Take Me Bak ‘Ome”, Jim and I wrote it with ringing Spanish chords — in fact we wrote it with Spanish guitars but as soon as the group arranges a song it adapts to the group style.” A change in musical policy, I suggest, would perhaps not be amiss in ’73. “We shan’t change deliberately, if something different comes up then we’ll do it. We don’t reckon our records are all the same — in fact the only two that are similar to our mind are “Take Me Bak ‘Ome” and “Mama”. A change in personality is something that is bound to evolve in the band as so much has happened for them. Holder agrees:

“I hope the success we’ve got won’t change me as a bloke. I am what I am and if people don’t like me I don’t care. I don’t want to be any different. So many people tell me I’ve got very arrogant but if I have I don’t mind. You need to be arrogant. You have to have a hard shell in this business. If you take the hassles you meet seriously it can get on top of you. We just go along in our own sweet way.” Sometimes, just sometimes, it hurts. “Reaction from old friends is still the same but people I didn’t know very well at home now have a completely different view of me. Like, if you offer to buy them a drink then you’re being flash — and if you don’t buy them a drink they think you’re a miser.”

They have, however, managed to retain a certain amount of sanity by staying in their own neck of the woods around Wolverhampton. “We never felt the need to move to London though Chas always wanted us to. He always said we’d never be big if we didn’t. But even he now thinks that having contact bak ‘ome has helped the group and our music.” ’73 is the year Slade wish to conquer America, yet retain their appeal in Britain. “We don’t want to get stale in England – we’d like to do gigs where the place is big — where there are a lot of people and there are good vibrations.

“The small club circuit in Britain is now dead I think, and I think the college and university circuit is not as it was when we were up-and-coming. The only way a new band can get the right kind of exposure now is by supporting a name act on tour.” And finally a word about those people who do knock Slade. “Let people dig the Moody Blues or Yes — nobody’s going to knock it. And let people who want to rave come and see us. There is after all, room enough for everybody.”