28/06/2025
SLADE
THE BOOTBOY BEATLES
Margraves of the Midlands, guardians of pit-grit glam, Noddy Holder & co defined the three-day-week anarchy 'n' melancholy of pre-punk '70s Britain. John Harris discovers the soul behind the stomp.
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO...
THE LIKELY LADS
SHOT TO FAME, BUT SCORCHED BY ITS AFTERGLOW, SLADE'S '7OS SUPREMACY SHROUDED STRIFE AND SELF-DOUBT. AS A NEW BOX SET REVEALS THE POP GENIUS BEHIND THE BACOFOIL AND BRACES, JOHN HARRIS MARVELS AT A STORY OF TENACITY AND TRAUMA BEYOND THE CALL OF DUTY.
I'M FREE!" EXCLAIMS JIM LEA, Slade's erstwhile bassist and co-songwriter. "From all the neuroses that I carricd around like a great big sack of spanners and anvils. It's like I'm a complete human being. It's fu***ng great to be alive." Squinting into the sun outside a central London branch of Café Rouge, Lea explains how 20, years of therapy have finally healed the psychic damage incurred by his band's crazy heydar: He's intcrrupted by a man at a nearby table, keen to tell him that Slade's Greatest Hits is "one of the best things on my iPod", but Lea is unfazed. You see, in the past, I'd have hated that," he says. ""Now, I'm all right with it."
Noddy Holder, who sits for his MOJO interview in a Kensington hotel suite, is an altogether less complicated presence. These days, the life of Slade's onetime singer and rhythm guitarist- some of whose family presumably call him Neville - revolves around bringing up a 10 year old son named Django, and occasional work as a TV presenter and actor. Long adjusted to a life n which the guitar is something only picked up for fun, he last played in front of an audience a couple of years ago, joining a reggae band at a private party, for a ska reading of his own Merry Xmas Everybody.
Lead guitarist, Dave Hill, and drummer, Don Powell, by contrast, are still members of a group called Slade: a diffusion-line version, fronted by a singer named Malcolm McNulty; and managed by the ex-husband of 70s glam siren Suzi Quatro. Powell, these days resident in Denmark, sees it as his weekend job", though Hill takes it a bit more seriously: His worldview places him somewhere between the Hard Rock Cafe and Steve Coogan's Saxondale, and in the course of the two hours we spend in the foyer of Wolverhampton's Novotel (dress: Japanese policeman's shirt and snakeskin boots) he compares Slade, both past and present, to figures as diverse as William Wordsworth, Madonna, Rod Stewart, Charlie Chaplin and - on several occasions - The Beatles.
"I always think of Slade as a marriage that broke up," declares Hill nobley; "but we had children. And the children are our records."
IF THE PAST IS ANOTHER COUNTRY, SLADE'S PEAK PERIOD CAN seem like something that happened on different planet: four men from the industrial West Midlands, as well versed in stagecraft and showbiz as they were in rock 'n' roll, soundtracking a time of doubt and declines with cranked-up anthems and a long-underated sideline in wonderfully affecting melancholia befitted a group whose run of hits made them virtually ubiquitous they were regularly chased up and down Britain's high streets in a dole age re-enactment of A Hard Day's Night. By the time their star began to fall, their music was scratched into the lives of millions, and British music's DNA. Twenty years before Oasis acknowledged the parallel with a respectful cover of their 1973 Number Cum On Feel The Noize, Slade infused gonzo rock with an unabashedly English working-class accent. Arguably nobody ever did it any better. In 1970, however, Slade were in an uncertain place. Formed in a beat group milieu centred on Wolverhampton, they signed to the Fontana label as The N'Betweens, only to be told that the name was, in a pre-metal sense, "a bit AC/DC". They reluctantly became Ambrose Slade, two words thrown together at random by their label boss, one Jack Baverstock.
Their debut album, Beginnings, founded on an array of covers from sources as diverse as Frank Zappa, Ted Nugent's Amboy Dukes and Jeff Lynne's pre-ELO vehicle Idle Race, had been recorded in a week, and they were getting used to a life that centred around provincial ballrooms, all-night drives, and acquaintances with such hard-grafting contemporaries as Free and Status Quo. In Baverstock's view, management by a Wolverhampton policeman and his wife was rather holding them back. Via friends of friends, he made contact with Chas Chandler, the former Animals bassist who had cut his managerial teeth with Jimi Hendrix. Chandler arranged to see Ambrose Slade play at a subterranean West End dive called Rasputin's and, impressed by a power hardened in the Midlands, Hamburg and the Bahamas, offered them a deal that night. The Wolverhampton cop was paid £400, Jim Lea was told to stop using call boxes and issued with a a home phone, and - in theory, at least - they were off. Having taken charge of their affairs and insisted that they cut their name down to a single word, the more vaudevillian side of Chandler's brain began whirring. Intending the advice as a joke, their then-publicist Keith Altham suggested that Chandler link his new charges with the burgeoning skinhead cult. By the time he discovered that Altham wasn't entirely serious, Chandler had sent Slade to the barber's. ""When he told us about the skinhead thing it was, Oh no, it's taken me five years to grow this, says Don Powell.
"But we thought if we didn't do it, he wouldn't want anything to do with us. So we agreed."
Jim Lea watched his locks tumble to the floor with mountng horror, as did Dave Hill.
"The way Dave figured it, he'd got big ears, says Lea. ""George Harrison had big ears, and he looked crap, but he grew his hair over his ears and got all the birds in the world And Dave was woman-mad. He had so many women, it was unbelievable. So for him to have all his hair cut off was really not good medicine. But Nod and Don were into it. Don looked Dickensian, like he'd slit your throat. He scared people."
As Slade put on their freshly-bought braces and Doc Marten's and began promoting the second album, Play It Loud - almost as stylistically scattered as the first album, but heavier on original material - they found TV producers reluctant to book a band who carried the whiff of thuggery On the road meanwhile, genuine skinheads would take umbrage at, as Hill| puts it, a band, with a violinist, who covered Nights In White Satin."
Over the next year, the crops grew out, though some aspects of the skinhead wheeze, braces and boots, and the underlying idea that Slade were merchants of what is these days called anti-social behaviour - remained. For Chas Chandler, however, there was one pressing concern: how to simulate the atmosphere of their shows ("terrifying", according to Don Powell) in the studio. The solution lay in their show-stopping rendition of a rock 'n' roll standard chiefly associated with Little Richard. "We had Get Down And Get With It," says Noddy Holder. "Chas saw that it was going down a storm on-stage and said, 'Well, let's try this. It's what you're all about. Let's see if we can capture the excitement.'
He'd found what he was looking for. The stamping, clapping, the vocal sound on it - the other day, I heard someone say it sounds like Hooligan Spector. That's exactly what it was!
IN JUNE 1971 THE TURBOCHARGED 12- bar of Get Down And Get With It struck an unprecedented Number 16, whereupon Chandler issued a watershed dictat. If they were to stand any chance of sustaining the success, cover versions were no longer enough; their next single would have to be a Slade original. Play It Loud had suggested that the dominant songwriting partnership in the band was Lea / Powell, but it was a Holder / Lea song that would take Slade to the next level.
With its roots in a dressing room ritual where Noddy and Jim emulate the Hot Club jazz of Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli, the result was surprisingly sophisticated: a pop song in a would minor key laced with Lea's serpentine violin part, traceable to his chassical training and teenage membership of the Staffordshire Youth Orchestra. Chandler, with typical restraint, declared it 'their first Number 1'; the only problem was the title. It was called Because I Love You which sounded weedy, says Jim Lea. "I thought we were going to look like a pop band. So the idea came up of misspelling it It was carrying the yobby thing we'd got into the records."
Coz I Luv You arrived in the charts at Number 26, a week later it was at 8; seven days after that, having knocked aside Rod Stewart's Maggie May, it sat at the top. The key was the TV show on which Slade would become de facto House Band. "If you were on Top Of The Pops, you were King' says Lea. "We walked in there the first time, and I said to Don: We can rule this situation. It was all held together with bits of string, Pan's People looked bedraggled in the morning - I realised it was sticky-tape and make - believe. All you needed was good songs, and you could walk on and take over."
Music, however, was only one aspect of Slade's armoury. As they fell into a run of 12 Top 5 hits - Coz I Luv You was succeeded by Look Wot You Dun and Take Me Bak 'Ome, followed in turn by the jaw-dropping trilogy of crunching rock that took in Mama Weer All Crazee Now, Gudbuy T'Jane, and Cum On Feel The Noize, that would take them well into 1974, they decisively affixed themselves to the times, via the sartorial flash of Holder and Hill. As well as tartan outfits inspired the music hall godhead Max Miller, the former's key contribution was a coachman's hat covered in circular mirrors, inspired by the sight of Lulu wearing a similarly decorated dress. On TV, it was eye-grabbing but on-stage, when venues were plunged into darkness and a single spotlight was focused on the singer's head, it worked its magic.
"It was like having a dozen torches on my head, Noddy says. It was just mindblowing. You could hear the crowd gasp."
Hill meanwhile, excelled himself. Long keen on distinguishing himself from the herd ("Even when he wasn't famous, he'd be walking around Wolverhampton in a cape." says Holder), he delivered two masterstrokes. First, there was his haircut, brutally razored across the top of his forehead, with perfectly-straightened bangs hanging down each side.
"It allowed me to put a bit of glitter on my forehead," he says. "Marc Bolan was doing the tear under his eye; I copped that, and did my own thing. He was a very attractive man with amazing hair and I sort of developed a similar look, but a bit more rock."
Meanwhile, Hill worked with two Midlands design students called Steve and Barbara Megson on a succession of costumes that at first suggested a sci-fi spin on androgyny, before spiralling into full on, foil wrapped, absurdity
"'We didn't know what he was coming up with next, which was part of the fun of it,'" says Holder. "'Usually, the unveiling wouldn't at a gig. He'd have to test them on TV first, because they might be too cumbersome. Top Of The Pops was where it happened. He didn 't want us to see it going on a bit at a time, so he'd go in the bog to change, and he'd be in there for hours. You could hear all the taps running, and all this scuffling about. And then things would quiten down, and we knew he was almost ready. We'd shout, Come on! Reveal all! And he'd come out in the new thing. He had this Cleopatra type headpiece with this gown, and we used to call that one the Metal Nun. Foghorn Leghorn was probably the funniest. That one, we did not expect. It was like a spacesuit with feathers coming out. Huge feathers. Every time we saw it we pi**ed ourselves."
One member of the group was slightly less amused. "I always thought the wacky side would come to haunt us," says Jim Lea, whose reputation with Slade's roadies had earned him the nickname 'Midlands Misery`. "It made us look as if we weren't serious about what we were doing, and it just got wackier and wackier. I walked out of photo sessions. It was, We can't do this, it's stupid. I was very heayweight with my opinions. It was, 'F**k that!' So we'd end up with one shot with Dave in his chicken suit, and one without.'
It is perhaps part of life in what Noddy calls "Dave Hill-world" that, even now, the suggestion that the guitarist's attire was in any way ludicrous is met with mild offence. When I mention Lea's disquiet, Hill says that such memories are part of "a conversation we don't need to develop"- ""We all had our roles," he ex- plains, "It's like me criticising one of his songs. I was doing what I thought was right. And I was convincing. If you wear something you don't look right in, then you look a bit of a twit. People mention the costumes with a smile, but they don't mention them with negativity. "It was all about major impact to me," he says. "If I was on Top Of The Pops, I was going to be more noticed than anybody else. I knew what I was doing. Which was my favourite? Christmas 1973 It was all white, with silvery bits, and boots on with big red dollar signs on them. It looked like next year, rather than the tired year that had just finished," he adds, with obvious pride. "It looked like, I'm ready for tomorrow.'
BY THE SPRING OF 1973, SLADE WERE VAST: A seemingly immovable part of the UK's pop culture so ubiquitous that they were familiar not just to their fans, but anyone with a television set. This was not just down to hit singles; having cemented their success with the compelling Slade Alive!, recorded in front of an invited audience in October 1971 and released the following March, they closed 1972 with Slayed? Ten tracks largely founded on the smash-and-grab approach that had defined their hits, but whose consistency served to dismiss the idea that they were a fly-by-night chart act.
And even in 1973, tabloid star status meant vastly reduced privacy, as Dave Hill discovered when he used his new wealth to purchase a house. "When I bought it," he, says. "I thought there was mansion next door- but it was girls' school. They'd hide in the garden; there'd be puffs of smoke coming from the bushes at break-time. And they broke in once. They didn't do any real damage, but they got in, slept the night, and left me a message: they said where I lived was crap because it was old-fashioned, and I should be living in a silver house."
"The idea of being screamed at by little girls. it made my skin crawl,' grimaces Jim Lea. "It was vile. Suddenly it'd be A Hard Day Night: running into shop 'Excuse me I'm in Slade. Can Iuse your back door?' I was very psychologically disturbed by it."
The hysteria escalated until, in June 1973, there came truly catastrophic news. In the wake of selling out Earl's Court and with Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me their fifth Number 1, the group were allowed a precious outbreak of downtime. All four were back with their families in the Midlands - when, in the small hours, their telephones rang. "lt was Don's dad," says Noddy Holder. "He said, 'Don's had a car crash.' I thought he'd just pranged his car or something. He said, 'And the doctor's don't think he's going to last the next 24 hours.' I said, What? He said, 'He's dying He's not going to last.' The shock that hit me, it was like a hammer had hit me in the face."
In the white Bentley Powell had bought with his first sizable cheque, he had picked up Angela Morris, his girlfiend, from a Wolverhampton club. On the way home, the car swerved off the road and ploughed through a wall, propelling both of them through the windscreen and inflicting almost identical injuries Angela died; Powell survived, but when he came round, he had no sense of taste or smell, no recollection of the crash or his relationship with Angela, and his short-term memory seemed to have completely disappeared. "He was lying in this Oxygen tent thing," says Holder, "tubes coming out of every hole of his body, his mouth, out of his ear, up his arse, everywhere. They'd shaved all his hair off, he'd got this huge gash in his head that they'd sewed up. He was conscious: coming round, intermittently He recognised me. But he just looked such a mess."
"It was frightening, says Powell. "I was totally smashed up, and just didn't want to do anything. Mentally and physically, I had no confidence whatsoever. But Chas sent a brain specialist to check me out, and he said there was nothing that could be done about the amnesia, I'd just have to adjust to it. He said, 'I think you should get back to work as soon as possible.' I said, 'That's the last thing feel like doing.' He said, 'Do it now, or you never will.'"
In Holder's opinion, Powell responded "like a fu***ng Ox". He was on a tour of America inside four months, feeling "very insecure, like a loner", and adjusting to the fact that "the road crew used to have carry me on-stage and take me off again".
He would regularly forget his drum parts, so Jim Lea was stationed next to the drum riser,where he would cue Powell into the songs. Holder took charge of re-acquainting his col- league with the day-to-day aspects of touring, "You had to be tough on him, Holder says. "He'd call up and say, 'What time are we meet- ing in the morning?' I'd say You've got to be in the lobby at 9.30 SoI'd go to sleep, the phone would ring again: 'What time are we meeting tomorrow?` Don, I've just told you. Ten min- utes later: Dring dring What time are we leaving tomorrow? (raised voice) Don, for f**k's sake! And this was about everything. He could not keep itin. In the end, we'd say, Don - fu***ng write it in your diary. On-stage, things often became darkly comic. "One time, we were getting an encore," says Lea, "and we decided to do Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me. We were walking on and Don collared me: Jim! How does it go?` He was terrified. I said, 'I'll count you in --just play Cum On Feel The Noize and I'll tell you when to stop.' And we did it."
Amazingly, Slade were just about to reach their commercial peak. In September 1973, at New York's Record Plant studio, they recorded a song based partly on a discarded Holder composition, Buy Me Rocking Chair. Most of their previous work had been put to tape live, but this time they built it up from scratch, its drum part re- corded piecemeal as Powell took cues from the control room. If the method threatened to rob Slade of their essential clout, it did not seem to matter: inside three months, Merry Xmas Everybody would be at Number 1, to be tightly stitched into the national consciousness, "I knew exactly what I wanted in it," says Holder. "I didn't want a children's choir and sleighbells. I wanted it to be a working class British Christmas song, And it fitted right with the political and social things going on at the time. It was very grim: there was the three-day week, Power cuts at 10 o'clock at night, television finished early because there was no electricity, there was a miners' strike... the whole country just before the Christmas of 73, was in turmoil, That's why I came up with the line, 'Look to the future now/It's only just begun.' That's what everybody had to do. The country couldn't have been at a lower ebb. In times like that, people always turn to showbiz. Looking back, I'm sure that was one of the reasons why glam rock was so big, because it was total fantasy-land."
But, for Slade at least, fantasy-land had its limits. By 1974 their formula, spangled costumes, knowingly anthemic songs, was no longer unique, and Jim Lea was to experience depressing revelation with the arrival of the Bay City Rollers. "I can remember listening to [Radio One reviews show] Roundtable, and someone saying [the Rollers] were on Slade territory," he says. 'You what?' I was so angry anyone could even think that we were being pigeonholed in the wrong hole."
Part of the solution, in Chas Chandler's estimation, lay in Flame, the celluloid story of a rock career laid waste, that went into production in early 1974. Slade were divided on the film from the start, with Jim Lea dead set on an "X-***ed film, like That'll Be The Day, only heavier", while Dave Hill fretted that the plot would only demystify the group. I wasn't overly keen,"' says Hill today "You: saw a band form, become successful, and then argue and break up-I'm not sure that was what the fans wanted to see.'
To an extent, Hill was proved right: Flame has since been acclaimed as, one the greatest meetings of rock and movie making. But very modest box ofhce business seemed to suggest that Slade had misjudged their audience, yet their music had never sounded better. Holder and Lea were writing songs that sounded homesick, as if the frenetic pace of their lives was catching upwith them. On the Flame soundtrack, there were two pearling examples. Far Far Away, was built from a lyric written on the balcony of a Memphis hotel, was a sighing admission that despite being repeatedly flung around the planet "the call of home is loud" It was trumped, however, by Slade's masterpiece: How Does It Feel?, six minutes of music that captured the dizzying pace at which they had arrived, though in Holder's mesmerising vocal performance there was the sense of a mind suddenly perfectly still, calmly realising that achieving your dreams can bring an inexplicable sadness.
"We reached a point, especially after Don's accident, when ne thought, This is the time to take stock," he says. "That's what I remember from that time: We can't carry on with this mayhem."
As if to prove Slade were creatively boxed in, How Does It Feel? got no higher than 15, hinting at the fate predicted by Lester Bangs in a Creem review of the 1973 compilation, Sladest. The big question, as he saw it, was whether "a band, predicated so formulaic, can long endure, or top, the tumescent rum-running track flayers here gathered."
UP IN SMOKE
(Slade In) Flame's grim, gnarly aesthetic make it the best rock film ever, says Mark Kermode.
THE NAME says it all: Slade In Flame - flickering with the promise of Britain's favourite pop act on fire with success while ominously suggesting some sideburn- singeing crash-and-burn conflagration. The film's official title may have been merely Flame, but that 'Slade In...' prefix was emblazoned on all the posters, and fizzled across the screen during the film's molten opening credits. Scenes of the band in white suits with projected infernos licking away at their lapels added to the sense of sacrifice, with Noddy, Dave, Jim, and Don, lit up on stage, like some Wicker Man style funeral pyre. Despite those infernal warnings, nothing prepared fans for the incinerating grimness which consumed their heroes in the darkest, toughest, and frankly best British rock movie ever made The origins of Flame were inauspicious. Having topped the charts with a string of Number 1 hits, Slade were persuaded by manager Chas Chandler to follow The Beatles lead and expand into films. An early treatment for a romp entitled 'The Quite A Mess Experiment' ("Quater- mass Experiment --geddit?) featured Noddy as the eccentric professor, and had Dave Hill killed by a triffid in the first 15 minutes. But the band had hotter ambitions, opting instead for a story which would expose "the reality, rather than the myth" of superstardom. Director Richard Loncraine and screenwriter Andrew Birkin (brother of Jane) joined Slade on tour in America, using their adventures to fuel a down and dirty tale of bickering wannabe pop stars, snapped up by a soulless advertising magnate,and sold to the public as a pre-packaged product ("I"m not a bloody fish finger," complains Jim Lea in one memorably caustic moment.) The fictional band were Flame', not Slade. But the proximity of these on-screen icons to their real-life counterparts was too close for many fans, who were shocked to see their idols mired in such miserable reality (lavatories feature in several key scenes) blithely pi***ng on each others feet of clay. Early drafts of the Flame script (bolstered by 'addtional dialogue' from David Humphries) were sweary enough to earn an X-rating, acclaim supported by John Pidgeon's savagely readable novelisation. To secure a wider audience, the filmmakers reined in the language, but kept the rough-and-toughness of the action. In its finished A-rated cut (the equlvalent of today's PG), Flame retained its vicious streak, with the scumbags of the music business personified by greyhound - racing manager-cum-thug, Mr Harding (Johnny Shannon, cast because of his role in 'Performance') and slimy salesman, Mr Seymour (screen newcomer Tom Conti). Ex-con, Alan Lake, was enlisted to play pub circuit loser, Jack Daniels, a role he researched with a liquid lunch that got him fired on his frst day. Following assurances that, his formidable spouse, Diana Dors would police his sobriety, Lake was reinstated and earned his keep; a scene in which he is dragged, semi-naked into a darkened street, to have his toes smashed in with a shovel remains a wince-inducing highlight of Flame, closer to the hardcore nastiness of Get Carter than the food, fight, fun, of Never Too Young To Rock.
AS FOR THE BAND, THEY PLAY the dark side of the rock'n'roll dream with a commitment which borders on the kamikaze. Holder and Lea provide the dramatic core, scrapping and squabbling their way from pubs and clubs to studios and stages (A typical on-stage exchange: "Will you shut up." "At least I was in tune!"). Don Powell is the sympathetic drumming dork, the learning of his lines made harder by the car crash which had left him with amnesia. Dave Hill, meanwhile, plays Flame's k**b of a guitarist Barry with a frighteningly relaxed naturalism which suggests that he was either a) a really good actor; or b) just being himself.
And then there's the music, a retro-fitted brand of Slade's signature sound augmented by a mighty wind section which adds a nostalgic orchestral air to their glam rock stomp. Like David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust days, Slade produced their best work while pretending to be another, made-up band. From the sway-along sadness of Far Far Away, to the Lennonesque melancholia of How Does it Feel? (the theme song for Flame) via the slide-guitar strut of Them Kinda Monkeys Can't Swing, Holder and Lea never put a foot wrong. The teenybop fans may have been baffled, but the Slade In Flame soundtrack album outranks Old New Borrowed And Blue as the band's most adventurous, accomplished, and (crucially) coherent long player. Like the film which spawned it, it is a genuine masterpiece, the smouldering dark heart of a blistering movie which remains, the Citizen Kane of British pop pics.
THROUGH 1975 AND `76, SLADE MOVED THEIR BASE of operations to the USA, set on breaking into a market that had delivered pockets of acclaim - in Philadelphia and San Francisco they could sell out 20,000-seat arenas without offering dependable national success. But the breakthrough never came, thanks partly to the disjunction between Slade's loud showmanship and the lingering seriousness of the counterculture (Jim Lea says the impact of their gigs dissipated in "a cloud of dope smoke"). That said, they were surely miffed by the rise of Kiss who, with echo-laden vocals and singles that celebrated the gig ritual, appropriated much of the Slade aesthetic. "Slade were certainly our greatest influence, not only in the crafting of rock songs but also as performers, Gene Simmons later confessed. In the American market, perhaps, a mirror-encrusted top hat and metal nun outfit were not enough; to truly make it work, you needed to approximate the look of a kabuki troupe from outer space.
Having returned to the UK to be faced by the upsurge of punk, they found themselves, as Holder puts it, "back at square one". Partially reborn via a last-minute offer to play 1980's Reading Festival, which launched a new career split between hard rock and the power balladry exemplified by lachrymose Number 2 hit, My Oh My, their profle never properly recovered. After the glory of their peak, their decline seems sadder than most. Peruse the wealth of Slade material on the video site YouTube, for example, and you will find a wondrous 1975 clip of them performing How Does It Feel? at San Francisco's Winterland, next to altogether more depressing footage: a throwaway single, You Boyz Make Big Noize, being promoted on 80's Saturday morning show, Get Fresh, via a mimed performance in the English drizzle and a brief encounter with Alarm roadie-turned-TV presenter Gaz Top.
There'd been a last glimmer of hope in the US. In autumn 1983. Poodle - Metal band Quiet Riot scored a Top 5 hit with a cover of Cum On Feel The Noize. Six months later, Run Runaway, Slade single pitched somewhere between Big Country's celtic rock and a barn dance, was a Top 20 US hit. Having parted with Chas Chandler in 1981, they placed themselves in the care of Sharon Osbourne and set out on a 1984 tour with her husband, though they lasted only one date. Jim Lea had contracted hepatitis. They were also battling the tensions that came from increasingly different lives: as Noddy Holder crisply puts it in his autobiography "Jim was seeing a psychiatrist, Dave became a Jehovah's witness, and Don was drinking heavily"'
The end of their lives as a touring band came on a snow-bound night in Chicago, where they had flown in from San Francisco. "Here we were - we'd been one of the biggest bands on ther planet,' says Lea. "We couldn't find cab, but we eventually got in this limo. All the guitars were piled on top of us, and I turned round to the others and said, 'Is this what we made it for?' There was silence. It was just understood. We came back home, and we never walked on-stage ever again. We were supposed to go on a three-month tour with Ozzy, but the moment had come. It was like the last scene of the movie,"
SLADE RELEASED THEIR LAST SINGLE IN 1991. The four have not played together since, nor communicated much. Talking to Hill and Holder, you sense some bad feeling, though neither will be drawn on the suggestion "I don't know whether you'd call it tension," says Holder. "It's just been so long now, I think we've just got nothing in common."
Perhaps the largest division is financial. Holder and Lea still receive handsome rewards from having written their incredible run of stampeding rock songs, plus the British equivalent of White Christmas ("Not so much a record as a pension," in Lea's words), So Powell and Hill remain on the road in the simple need to make a living.
Still, they have the occasional pleasure of rediscovering just how global their group's impact has been. "When Dave and l started doing the Slade thing again, we went to Australia," says Powell, who still keeps the next day's arrangements in a diary next to his bed "We went to places that aren't even on the map. One day, we had a 12 hour drive across the desert. We were in the middle of nowhere, the driver pulled over, and we were having a p**s against a bush, and a fist came through it with 'S-L- A-D-E' written on it, It was this aborigine guy: he just said, 'Alright, Sladel'"
Still pole-axed by the memory, he pauses for thought. "I mean, that's weird, isn't it?"