Decade of Slade

Get away, it`s not that long. Oh yes it is.

Vivien Goldman (the one with clean feet), talks to the Slade boys (the ones with smelly feet).

 

SLADE are a nice bunch of lads. They’ve retained their blunt Midlands characteristics to an almost music-hall extent. Meeting them it seems absurd that these instantly classifiable chappies, with the air of being fresh from Bill Tidy’s ‘Everyday Saga of clog dancing folk’ have been through a classic series of modern-day images and stances — from hard-core working-class skinheads (a threat to middle-class pot smoking hippies) transmuted seemingly overnight into hard-core hippies, laden with Indian arts and crafts, with the fragrance of stale incense seeming to hang over their publicity shots even in 1976. Now to the occasion of our meeting, O my brethren. `Twas in their management offices, Barn, in a road near Baker Street. The setting: a spacious room with a glass wall overlooking a minute frond — and palm filled patio. And the reason for our meeting (that is to say Noddy Holder, Don and myself): the next day was to be Slade’s tenth anniversary. Yes, folks, they’ve made it through to their wedding anniversary. Pretty impressive, huh. .

Not to Don though. — Cue In Don — “Christ knows how we stayed together.”

Figgers.

“I think it was all the shit we went through in the early days. Every group that’s been together for a long time, like a group that’s forming now, has to go through a lot of shit, before they crack as it were. “There is something to be said for sticking together for ten years — we all know each other so well, like musically, personally, everything. When we come to perform or record, it all comes a lot more quicker (sic). “Mind you, you don’t really think about it. It’s only when people say to you, ‘How long ya been together?’ that you say to yourself, ‘Ten years, that’s a long time…” “We’ve had some great times. We all know whose feet smell and that kind of thing…”

Terrific.

You can tell that these Slade lads are real down-home types. Their conversation remains a strange Midlands lilt, a sing-song intonation you’d normally associate with Welsh. To anyone not from the British Isles, any English-speaking personage, that is — they’re totally incomprehensible.I’ve got to admit that I found myself straining at times, and I’m a Londoner born and bred. The conversation centred around the Slade progress. Being a tenth birthday ‘n all, it seemed proper to lay emphasis on the past for a quick recap before looking ahead. Let’s flash back through the mists of time and reveal the birth. Any pangs? Easy delivery?

Noddy: “It was a good night actually.”

Terrific. Tell us all about it.

“It was on April 1st ten years ago.”

That would make it — uh 1.4.66, right?

“Right. It was at Walsall Town Hall, April Fool’s Day, and we’d been rehearsing two or three weeks, that’s all. I should say there was about 600 or 700 people there. “We went down great, we played mostly Tamla. We used to do all the old soul stuff — `Ride Your Pony’, R&B… Hey, Don, what were the songs we did at our first gig?”

” `Joomp Back, Baby, Joomp Back’, ‘Ain’t Too Proud To Beg’, ‘My Girl’.”

“Yes, and we used to do the Four Tops – ‘Reach Out and I’ll Be There’.Noddy heaves a nostalgic and satisfied sigh. “Ooh we used to do all ’em, di’n we…

” What did you look like way back then?

“Ooh, yes, moddy clothes, trousers always too short for us, hipsters with wide belts, white leather belts, tab collar shirts… hair that like started in the middle of the head and sort of came down, rings and bracelets…”

Don: “Then after that we went into our flower-power scene.”

Noddy: (wryly) “Our heads changed.”

Don: “In Wolverhampton:”

Me: “Too much Newcastle Brown?”

Don: “No, I got beat oop by a coal miner!”

(Laughter and general hysteria.)

Said Noddy, “We used to follow every sort of trend that was going, like every time a new trend coom along, we used to be on it like… flower power, psychedelic lights…”

Do I detect that old psychedelic influence, LSD?

(Both in unison amazement) — “NO!” Strictly boozers, Slade.

“We used to read the music papers and find out what was happening in London, and we did it in Wolver’ampton.” Noddy cackles. “I think Dave had a foam-backed caftan.”

A foam-backed caftan? Ye Gods! And it was in one of those tacky Indian cheapo paisleys, I’ll bet.

“Yeah! And he used to put mirrors all over his rope sandals.”

Yup, that makes sense.

Noddy settles comfortably back into the leather sofa, stares comfortably at his highly-polished Italian shoes, and sighs. “We used to do daft things in them days. When you’re young and influencable. We look at pictures we had in them days and we look funny, don’t we? Oh yes, flower power. Then we used to play Moby Grape and some of the Mothers of Invention.”

Don, “Ooh, we got really deep.”

“We even got into Steppenwolf!” Noddy rolls his eyes in mock amazement. “We used to play so many different sorts of stuff, we could do anything, really. We could actually do a three-hour show and not repeat one number.”

You meantasay you couldn’t do that now?

NO WAY! We can get about an hour and a half set together, and that’s about it. After that we get exhausted. We’re getting old now.”

“Yes, we’re shaving now,” pipes up Donald. “And remember, when we did them three or four hour sets, there weren’t none of them guitar solos, any of that stuff.”

Too right, sailor.

Noddy speaks. “We didn’t used to take drugs, but we took them pep pills, purple hearts, you used to get five of them for tenpence… all nighters at the Whisky in Birmingham, you needed them to just stay awake, silly days, silly days.

“Dave and meself have been together for twelve years. y’know,” (Don speaking) “I really remember us doing the crafty thing — reading in the music papers that satins were in in London, so we used to play crafty and sneak down to London about once a month, we used to go down to the Carnaby Cavern like, and back to Wolverhampton, and go to bars in our satin things. We’d lean against the bar playing hard to get — sometimes it worked — and get beaten up by the skinheads.

“S’pose that’s why we became skinheads, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” Noddy waxing philosophical. “Everybody in our area was skins

(a 60’s social phenomenon, featuring young working-class lads in cropped hairdos, stompin’ Dr. Martin’s boots, braces, and a generally ugly scowling expression. In London they listened to reggae. There don’t seem to be a lot of them about these days; they felt the same way about the hippies that the rockers did about the mods.)

“I mean when we were doing ballrooms and clubs we’d have all skin audiences, and that’s how it was, that sort of music, the boot-stomping, hand-clapping stuff, and that was, y know, the way we used to do all our shows. That’s how we got our first hit record, ‘Get Down And Get With It’. There was great atmosphere, great…”

Rapport?

“Yes, that’s the word I was thinking of. Even in the first three years of record success we was still living up in Woolver’ampton, and still going to the same clubs and everything. We still do now when we go back to Wolverhampton, it’s a good laff. It’s great going back and seeing your old oppos and getting them to buy you a drink,” rubbing his hands.

The scene, geographically speaking, now makes a swift change to the exotic far-flung Bahamas, where the lads went for a touch of sun, sand, sea, and whatever else might come their way.

“We spent 14 weeks there. We got ripped off for all our money, but we had a great time. Don used to be combination compere, stage hand, roadie, and also play in four sets a night. “Remember the female impersonator?”. They dig each other in the ribs, metaphorically speaking.

“It was a disco nightclub called the Tropicana. From 10 to 1.00 in the morning we’d play to the white kids, and from 1.00 to 5.00 we’d have the black audiences…”

Back in England, the momentum starts picking up like billy-o. In the Bahamas, the band was still called the Inbetweens, a name they’d adopted from Don and Dave’s earlier band. But for a new streamlined image, the name was changed yet again to Ambrose Slade.

“But everybody kept on getting the Ambrose wrong — calling us Arm’ole Slade, that kind of stuff. So we dropped it. Anyway, we decided to really go for a record deal, we got a brand new act together, and went to Fontana Records (Noddy pronounces it just like Montana). “The first album we ever did they just stuck us in a studio, no producer or nothin’, just an engineer and us, and we’d never been in a studio before. But we got it together, and they said to us, well, you got a record contract, now do you write any of your own songs? We said no, which we didn’t, except a couple of 12-bars we used to call our own that we pinched from someone. One was called ‘Roach Daddy’, and one was called ‘Mad Dog Coal’. Both classics of their time. We’re still doin’ em now, just putting different words to ’em (ho ho).”

“Yeah,” Don’s chipping in, “One’s called ‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’!”

Wot mirth and jollity.

Noddy again. “It was at the time when we were recording for Fontana that we met Chas Chandler, and from then on he sort of started producing us and managing us, and it was uphill all the way.”

When was that again?

“Around 1970.”

Suffering Succotash! That must have been around the time I saw Slade live at the Coventry Locarno, supporting Chuck Berry and the Pink Floyd....That was the night we recorded ‘My Ding A Ling’!”

Yup, that’s the one. You meantasay you didn’t hear me singing on it?

“You’re singing on it? We’re singing on it too! Hey Don, dja hear that? We’re all on the record!”

Mutual backslapping and approbation. I bet Chuck Berry and Slade didn’t realise they’d cut a single with me… probably the Floyd on there too somewhere. That’s something for ’em all to boast about, eh?…

Back to reality.

“Anyway, Chas coom in t’studio and heard these tapes we’d been doing, and he said I wanna see ya live, so he got us a gig at this little poky club in New Bond Street called Rasputins, there were only about 50 people in there. He coomdown t’stairs and we were going halfway through our first set. “There weren’t many people there but we were all ‘aving a laff. Like we hit it off with the audience, we were taking the piss out of them and Chas liked that because at the time everybody was really into, errr, doing their thing, y’know. So Chas signed us up the next day. “He said just carry on doing what you’re doing, you’ll never survive in this business if you change radically, you’d never be able to live with it 24 hours a day. “Chas got us to start writing. He said its the best thing in the business if you’re able to write, you get the publishing royalties as well then, y’see. We didn’t have any confidence in our own writing y’see. We’d only just started. We had our first hit, ‘Get Down And Get With It’, that was a Little Richard number we adopted for ourselves (In fact, it was a Bobby Marchan song that he had the first hit with in the early 60’s, Little Richard scored with it later on.).“We wrote ‘Cuz I Luv You’ specifically as a follow-up to that. We wrote it, recorded it, everybody was pleased with it and it was released and went to number one in two weeks. We couldn’t believe it, that really gave us confidence.

I can dig it. It’d make me more confident too (sigh).What gave you the idea for the brilliant mis-spelling in your titles?

When we wrote ‘Cuz I Luv You’ it was all spelt normally, but it wasn’t as heavy as ‘Get Down And Get With It’, and we thought we needed something to put it across to the public… the spelling was like everybody used to write on the bog walls in Wolver’ampton… one of the best ones I ever saw was at a gig once, ‘Les Paul didn’t know what he started’.”

Titter titter.

“We used to do chats on the Beeb education programmes about phonetics, y’know,” Noddy is tickled by the irony of the situation. “Phonetic spelling ‘n that. We’d play our records to illustrate it — some schools teach phonetic spelling these days? It was just a gimmick really, but everybody latched onto it.”

Noddy appears to be still vaguely bemused by the success of their little caper. But it ain’t surprising when you think about it — if I was a sociologist, ther’d be a whole bunch of erudite things I could say about the sociological significance of a kid homing in on a record whose title is spelt just the way he thinks. Luckily for you, I’m just a journalist. Talking about roots let’s zoom in on the old times in Wolver’ampton. What does your dad do, Noddy?

“Me dad was a window cleaner; “but he’s retired now.”

Don?

“My dad works in a factory, he’s still working. Me mum works in a factory too, she’s an electrical coil winder, or something.”

That’s rather unusual, isn’t it? I mean, I’d have thought they’d be nicely set up in a villa in the South of France by now.

Noddy and Don hoot derisively in unison.

Back to the Slade Saga. We got as far as you creating your own hits, and generally scoring Number One with monotonous regularity.

“Yeah, we wanted to get out of the skin thing, get out to the masses, ‘cos like you said, to take an example, at the Locarno gig everybody hated our guts. We just wanted to put on a show, not just the music but also the visual thing, give people summat to look at. “After we got the first number one, the whole thing just snowballed. We did the Lincoln Festival in ’72, we walked on stage and everybody thought what the fucking hell are this lot doin’ on? There was Joe Cocker, the Faces, the Beach Boys, Monty Python, and it’d been raining for two days. Of course. We was in our colourful skin’ead period then, y’know, we had the top hat with the mirrors on… we come on and the sun broke through, and the crowd went BOOOO! But by the end there was 80,000 people with their arms in the air for `Get Down And Get With It’. We went down a storm, that was a magic night…”

Some people would say the culmination or final seal of approval was when Good-times Enterprises asked the band to star in ‘Flame’.

`Yeah, but we couldn’t think of doing that again for a long time. It took nine months in all, what with editing and then promotion. It was hard graft getting up at 6.00 in the morning…”

Ah, the trials and tribulations of stardom… What about NOW though, chaps? You have this new album out, ‘Nobody’s Fools’, not to mention the new single, `Nobody’s Fool’. That hasn’t zoomed straight to the top, has it? And come to that, although you’ve been spending so much time in the States, it would appear you haven’t broken over there yet. Howzat?

“Well, first of all we didn’t expect this single to get to number one. We’d have liked it to, of course, but we’ve been out of the country for a long time. And live-wise we’re doing great in the States, but we can’t get the airplay — mind you, this new one’s picking up airplay, people are beginning to know our name now. “There’s some places, like New York and Boston, where we head the bill. Otherwise we’re supporting bands like Aerosmith in those big stadiums.”

Doesn’t it perturb you that you’re about to go back to the States for another tour when you’ve just admitted that being away harms your record sales, loses fans?

“Not really, (it’s still Noddy speaking) because we wanted the band to get a new lease of life, and that’s what’s happening for us in America. Just listening to the radio in New York opened our ears to a lot of things, that’s why there’s a soul-influenced track on the album, and another that’s almost country, and another that’s kind of electronic. We recorded it at the Record Plant over there, y’see. “With this new lease of life we’re bound to benefit in the long run, so I don’t think we’ll lose any fans, really…”

Noddy glances idly up at the wall above his head. It’s liberally studded with gold singles, gold albums all their own. (“Me Mum’s living-room is covered in ’em, that’s all she’s got in there.”) “We can’t go on playing `Mama Weer All Crazee Now’ for the rest of our lives, now can we, people would get fed up with it. “And besides, (in a voice of sweetest reason and a devastating grin), “we’d get bored with it ourselves.”

Not still crazee after all those beers. Obveeuslee.