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Telegraph
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Noddy Holder on the ‘heavy' box-office bomb that blew up Slade
It's July 29 1974, the first day of production on the film that will surely take Britain's biggest singles band to the next level. In The Revolution club in Mayfair, central London, the cast and crew of Slade in Flame are embarking on the six-week shoot that will take this other northern four-piece to Beatles -adjacent success. That, at least, is the plan of band handler Chas Chandler, the ambitious tough-nut ex- Animals bassist and former manager of Jimi Hendrix. 'When we [signed with] Chas, it took two years before we had a hit,' recalls Slade frontman Noddy Holder of the early years of the glam-pop phenomenon who formed as a Mod-like rock band in Wolverhampton in 1966. The 79-year-old and I are talking on the occasion of the 50 th -anniversary of Slade in Flame, which means a spruced-up print, cinema re-release and DVD reissue courtesy of the BFI. 'Everybody was saying to him: 'You got to give it up with Slade, they're not going to make it,'' continues the singer, those mutton-chop whiskers are still present and correct, albeit greyer and wispier and half concealed by a dandy-ish purple fedora. But the fearsome Chandler 'stuck with us because he'd had Hendrix, and the next project he wanted was a four-man band. He followed the blueprint of the Beatles: get to number one, get another number one, get to number one the first day of release. We did that three, four times. 'Course, the next thing the Beatles did was make a movie. So Chas, of course, said: 'I want to make a movie with Slade.'' That, after some script back and forth, meant a dark rock'n'roll fable written by Andrew Birkin (brother of Jane) and directed by 27-year-old first-time film-maker Richard Loncraine. Set in the late 1960s, it was about a band, Flame (portrayed by Slade), and their rise to fame, co-option by a dodgy manager (played, in his first significant screen role, by Tom Conti) and bitter demise. Good times. In The Revolution, the scene being shot involves Flame's first singer, the man who will ultimately be ejected in favour of Holder's Stoker ('a more exaggerated version of me,' Holder tells me. 'Or I'm a more exaggerated version of Stoker!'). He's a theatrically ridiculous warbler – a Midlands Jacques Brel – called Jack Daniels, and he's played by the actor Alan Lake. Even on the first day of shooting, there was some dissension within the ranks of Slade over the film's merits. Mercurial guitarist Dave Hill was already less than impressed. 'Dave was Dave,' Holder says, of a musician who still tours with a version of Slade (Holder hasn't since 1992). 'Dave has said himself that he hadn't got a f------- clue what the film was about. He didn't read the script! He only read the scenes he was in! And when he saw the end-product, he thought it was way too heavy for Slade.' Which brings us back to Alan Lake. Holder gives a high-pitched tee-hee at mention of the actor, who wasn't long out of prison when he landed the part in Slade in Flame. 'He was mates with the Krays and all sorts of people. And he had been in a pub in [Sunningdale, Berkshire] and got into a fight – him and a pop star called Leapy Lee, he had one hit called Little Arrows. Some of the locals in the pub were slagging off Diana Dors – who Alan was married to! So, of course, a fight broke out and Alan stabbed someone. Him and Leapy Lee got jailed.' The extracurricular activities of their co-star, though, didn't deter Slade. 'We got on great, he was just our sort of bloke. We're sitting around waiting for lights and cameras to be reset, he was telling stories about the clink, the East End, all these hard nuts. But: you wouldn't cross Alan. His fatal flaw was, when he was pissed, he got out of control.' Which Lake duly did on that first day of shooting. Sloshed after his lunch break, when the manager of The Revolution wouldn't open the bar for him, 'Alan lost his rag and beat the s--- out of him.' Chandler and producer Gavrik Losey (son of blacklisted Hollywood director Joseph Losey) fired Lake on the spot. But the next day he was back, cap in hand and wife on arm. 'Diana Dors pleaded with them to give him more chance. She guaranteed he would not drink the whole of the rest of the movie. And they gave him a chance. And as far as we know, he never touched another drop the whole of the movie.' That, Holder adds, was indicative of Lake: for all his demons and toughness, 'he was totally reliant on Diana'. That was proved terribly true 10 years later. Dors died from ovarian cancer in May 1984. That October, Lake dropped off their 16-year-old at Sunningdale railway station, returned to the nearby family home and shot himself in the son's bedroom. In summer 1974, Slade have already had an intense 12 months. The previous July, with Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me, their fifth number one single at the top of the charts, they headlined London's Earls Court, a legendary show that was – and would remain – their largest indoor show in the UK. Two nights later, drummer Don Powell picked up his girlfriend Angela Morris from Wolverhampton's Dix nightclub in his white Bentley. In the wee hours of July 4 1973 the car left the road and hit a brick wall. Both were flung from the car. Morris died and Powell suffered catastrophic brain injuries and multiple fractures. He spent five days in a coma in Wolverhampton Royal Hospital. But even for the critically injured drummer, the Slade train didn't stop. Within a few weeks the band were in America, touring the East Coast and recording, in New York's Record Plant, their next single: Merry Xmas Everybody. 'We didn't know whether Don was going to survive – they only give him 24 hours to live when he had the crash,' remembers Holder. 'When he come out of hospital six weeks later, we took him to America, just to see if he could play again. But he had no memory. Couldn't remember the hits. Couldn't remember nothing about his life. Couldn't taste or smell.' Unsurprisingly, a newly written song, no matter how catchy, was beyond Powell. 'We had to talk him through it all. So Merry Xmas was probably the hardest record we ever recorded. We built it up like a jigsaw puzzle. I'd be singing in the booth and with the guitar, and I'd be shouting to Don through his headphones: 'There's a [drum] roll coming now, it's gonna go 'bada-bada-bada'', and he'd go 'bada-bada-bada'! That's how we had to record for two or three years. The same [with playing] on stage.' Learning his lines for the film, then, would also be a challenge. 'That's why mainly in the film Don's got comedy one-liners,' says Holder, who says that he 'loved' acting and went on to star in three series of the sitcom The Grimleys (1999-2001), created by future Line of Duty showrunner Jed Mercurio. 'But Don was a one-liner merchant anyway – he was a drummer, and they're one-liner-type people.' In the summer of 1974, his newbie actors' rusty skills were the least of the problems facing Loncraine, a debutant director who'd later make multiple films and TV dramas including The Missionary with Michael Palin and Dennis Potter adaptation Brimstone and Treacle with Sting. 'Chas was not easy,' says the director of a manager fiercely protective of his 'boys'. Having ponied up the budget from David Puttnam's Goodtime Enterprises and from Slade's record label Polydor, Chandler ruled the film set with a rod of iron. Loncraine remembers shooting a night sequence: Flame are in a car chase with a rival band and police, and their vehicle flips over and catches fire. 'We only had one night to do a lot of work, and I was working at a garage location up the road from the other unit. We were shooting on Panavision's latest camera, which we managed to get it by hook or by crook – I was holding about a quarter of a million quid's worth of camera. 'Suddenly it was grabbed out of my hand, and Chas said to me, 'I want more close-up of my boys, you young c---', and threw the camera in a puddle. He was quite blunt to say the least.' For his part, future Oppenheimer star Conti – 33 at the time and with a largely theatrical background – confesses to blithe ignorance all round. The storied actor, now 83 and deep in the final stages of writing his memoir, admits he had no idea what he was getting into. 'I hadn't heard of Slade, I'm afraid!' the Scotsman says with a laugh. 'It's ridiculous but I was brought up on Mozart and that lot. Popular culture, I really didn't know much about. I knew The Beatles of course. But I didn't know anything about the rock world at all, really. So it was quite fun to be involved with that a bit.' His character, a shady businessman turned manager, was of particular interest to Chandler. As recounted in 1999 by Ken Colley, the character actor who played a talent scout in the film, he'd been told by Chandler that 'when The Animals ended, he had been left in Los Angeles with a broken marriage, bad health and $5,000 in his pocket, and he swore he was never going to let anything like that ever happen to him again. That's why a film showing the contractual scheming and the underhanded side of the music business appealed to him.' Certainly it was more appealing than an earlier script: a spoof of 1950s TV series The Quatermass Experiment, it was called The Quite-a-mess Experiment. Holder was going to be Professor Quite-a-mess, 'and the triffid would eat Dave Hill in the first half hour of the movie,' says Holder. 'And all you'd have through the rest of the movie was Dave's fringe hanging out the triffid's mouth!' All of that is news to Conti. Although he did have his own run-in when he met Chandler for the first time, after the film's premiere, at The Metropole theatre in London's Victoria on February 13 1975. 'There was a slightly embarrassing moment,' the veteran actor begins. 'There was a very pretty girl getting some food [at the after-party] at Morton's, which was a club in Berkely Square. I got chatting to her. Her name was Lynsey de Paul, but I didn't know her or to whom I was chatting. But we took our plates of food and drinks and sat on the staircase and chatted. And somebody said to me later: 'You were taking a bit of chance weren't you, talking to Lynsey?' 'What do you mean?' 'She's just broken up with Chas Chandler.' But there were no repercussions!' Alas, there were repercussions aplenty for the musicians at the heart of it all: Slade in Flame bombed. It turned out that a dark rock'n'roll fable about a pub band being shafted by the music biz – with a moody, only-occasionally-rocking, period-specific soundtrack that was less Cum on Feel the Noize than Cum on Feel the Angst – wasn't a must-watch for Slade's core, teenage, significantly female fanbase. At least the critics were kinder. 'Barry Norman, the big guy at the time, he loved it,' says the puckishly cheerful Holder, still chuffed. 'Which we never expected. But in terms of bums on seats, it didn't hit, because of the seriousness of the subject.' How disappointing was that to Slade? 'Oh, very! Particularly in the situation we were as a band – we were used to number one records. We expected to have a number one film! It definitely harmed our career.' Holder remembers an appearance on Top of the Pops 'straight after the premiere'. The director of the show turned up at the afternoon's rehearsal, 'went up to Dave and said: 'It's a fantastic movie, but you've made a hell of a mistake for your career.' Because it was not what the fans wanted. The fans didn't want to see behind the glamour. They only wanted to see what we were all about, the happy-go-lucky, cheeky chappies. The fans couldn't split the Slade reality from the Flame characters.' Musically, Holder took some consolation from the fact that he and bassist Jim Lea, his co-writer, stretched themselves with How Does It Feel, the film's epic, rock opera-like, six-minute theme song. But that only went so far. 'Fans didn't like it. Chas didn't like it. Dave and Don in the band didn't like it. Polydor didn't like it. Only me and Jim liked it. But we had to bring it out as a single because it was the theme to the movie. We'd already had Far Far Away out [from the soundtrack], which got to number two. But How Does It Feel was the first time we'd missed out on the Top Three since 1971.' That Number 15-with-an-anchor single was the final straw. Drastic action was called for. America was one of the few international markets remaining impervious to Slade's charms. 'So after the movie came out in the spring of '75, we decided to go to the States and make a concerted effort. We'd been many times. But in them days, you had to be there for a year, two years. Zeppelin did it, Sabbath did it, Fleetwood Mac did it. 'So we had to get slogging on the road, and we decided to go for two years. And that's what we did. 'Course, when we came back after two years, the punk thing was happening. We were boring old farts then. So we were way out of favour with the media, weren't getting records played on the radio, nothing. In Europe we were doing fine. But in the UK, dead in the water.' It would take a last-minute and acclaimed appearance at the Reading Festival in 1980, when they replaced Ozzy Osbourne, 'to revamp' Slade and kickstart a new phase of their career. And now? Bizarre but entertaining, Slade in Flame stands up as a curio, a gritty kitchen-sink drama grafted onto the giddy, gleeful world of one of the biggest pop bands of the era. And it's a period piece, albeit of two different periods: the hardscrabble late '60s in the music business, when the deals were shady and the managers shadier still; and the mid-'70s, when cinematic rock fantasias like The Who's Tommy and David Essex's That'll Be the Day were natural, you might say vainglorious, extensions of musicians' activities. For his part, Noddy Holder remains proud of the film, pleased that 'we stuck to our guns and did it how we wanted. I'm not saying the whole band agreed with that. They do now. I think [even] Dave probably does now.' At the time of our meeting in April, Holder said he was unsure whether all four members would convene for a special London anniversary screening in London on May 1. It's been 'a long, long time' since all four did anything together – perhaps, even, 1996, when they got together for Holder's edition of This Is Your Life and Chandler's funeral (those events were unrelated). 'And Dave and Don had a big fall out two, three years ago. I see Dave most out of any of them. If I'm in Wolverhampton, I might call him up and go for a cup of tea. But Jim and Don, I never see 'em.' He mentions a 'f------- great' quote he just read by Liam Gallagher. 'He just makes me laugh. He said: 'You have to have a messiah complex to be the frontman in a band. But once the drummer and the roadie get a messiah complex, you're f-----.' Just genius!' the singer cackles. On that point: Noddy Holder has always said that a band splits up for a combination of five reasons. 'Ego. Next thing is money. Then drink and drugs. Next thing is women. And the last thing is musical differences. And in Slade's case it was all five!'
The Guardian
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Slade in Flame review – Midlands glam rockers offer A Hard Day's Night meets Get Carter
Here is Slade's movie musical satire from 1975, a film with all the pungent historical presence of a pub ashtray, about an imaginary band called Flame which looked and sounded a lot like Slade, fronted by Stoker, played by Noddy Holder. It came out a year after the film's soundtrack album was released, and now gets a rerelease for its 50-year anniversary. Slade in Flame – which is to say, Flame, starring Slade – is regarded by fans and non-fans alike with enormous affection and regard, and it certainly has a weird, goofy energy: the audio mix sometimes surreally privileging ambient sounds such as doors closing and glasses chinking, with the dialogue way in the background. It's about an innocent working-class Midlands band getting taken up by creepy adman-type smoothie Robert Seymour, played by Tom Conti, who exploits their raw talent for cash and takes them on a rollercoaster ride of fame, the action regularly suspended while the band sing their various tracks. But then their former manager, dodgy cockney mobster Mr Harding (Johnny Shannon) reappears – a man who never gave a hoot about them in their early days and contributed nothing to their career – demanding his share of the action. So it bizarrely mixes the madcap comedy of A Hard Day's Night – or a late-period Carry On – with the brutal nastiness of a crime thriller like Get Carter. The effect is striking, in its way, but finally somehow depressing in a way that isn't entirely intentional, and depressing in a way that actually listening to Slade is not. It also shows the unexpected influence of a particular kind of Brit social realism with a generic loyalty to unhappiness. Flame is the amalgam of two sparring local bands, one fronted by tricky geezer Jack Daniels, played by Alan Lake, always conning his fellow band members out of their share of the fee, and the other a comedy combo called Roy Priest And the Undertakers, the lead singer being Holder's irrepressible Stoker. They have a monumental fight which lands them all in the cells, where a grim-faced custody sergeant is shown walking down the corridor, flushing each of their lavatories in turn with a chain that dangles outside. (It's this kind of brutal touch which makes the film a vivid guide to the tough 70s.) They join forces and Daniels is dispensed with. Flame then enjoy the fruits of the Faustian bargain that they don't remember making: packed crowds, screaming girls, lots of money. There's a thoroughly bizarre interview aboard a pirate radio ship in the Thames estuary which is interrupted by gunshots which Seymour may or may not have staged for publicity purposes. But there's a creeping sense that it's all going to come crashing down. The best bits are always the band performing, with Holder's compelling rock'n'roll growl. Slade in Flame is in UK and Irish cinemas from 2 May, and on Blu-ray and DVD from 19 May.
The Guardian
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘The Citizen Kane of rock movies': glam rockers Slade and their bid for cinema greatness
Daryl Easlea was eight years old when he got the 4A bus with his mate Graham down to the Odeon in Southend-on-Sea to see his favourite rock band make the leap from vinyl to celluloid. After 12 consecutive top 10 singles – including six No 1s – Slade had finally made their first movie, Slade in Flame. It has just turned 50. What young Easlea saw in 1975 was not the fun-packed adventures of a happy-go-lucky glam rock foursome, but a dour, downbeat film about being chewed up and spat out by the music industry. Easlea, who would grow up to be Slade's biographer, didn't care. 'You can't underestimate how it felt to hear the word 'piss' when you were eight,' he says, laughing. 'I know it sounds exceptionally shallow, but it felt edgy and dangerous. I didn't understand the half of it. Films don't usually start with two blokes having a chat in a loo – that very mundanity reached out to me. They were cheeky and sweary, and it wasn't like seeing A Hard Day's Night on the telly.' Slade in Flame – which is getting rereleased in UK cinemas in May – depicted a fictional band, Flame, who are formed from two squabbling clubland bands in 1967, and attract the attention of a London-based businessman (Tom Conti) who sees the opportunity to package and sell them, as he says, like cigarettes. As they become successful, their thuggish former agent tries to reclaim them. Realising their own lack of agency, the band choose instead to split. In the process of making it, though, band and film-makers created a Black Country version of Head, the film credited with destroying the Monkees' career, albeit one more redolent of pints of mild than tabs of acid. Just like Head, the film tanked. And just like the Monkees, Slade suffered. 'Chas Chandler, our manager, wanted us to follow in the footsteps of the Beatles,' recalls Don Powell, Slade's drummer. 'And he said, 'How about making a movie?' We said, 'We don't want to do A Hard Day's Night. We want to show the gritty side of the business.' But it went against us.' He says audiences got confused that 'we weren't Slade in the film, we were all playing different characters.' To get the film made, Chandler went to Goodtimes Enterprises, headed by David – later Lord – Puttnam, which had made notably darker rock-adjacent movies such as Performance, starring Mick Jagger, and the David Essex vehicles Stardust and That'll Be the Day. Two twentysomethings – Richard Loncraine and Andrew Birkin – were brought in to direct and write, and the pair of them were promptly packed off on tour in the US with Slade to get a feel for their subjects. Neither were fans – Birkin had never even heard of Slade, let alone listened to them – and the experience was odd. 'They never really managed to crack America, and were playing to a lot of half-empty arenas,' Loncraine says. 'I remember an awful lot of dreadful tour buses.' Birkin adds that in between listening to recordings of Hancock's Half Hour with singer Noddy Holder – both were Tony Hancock zealots – 'it became apparent that you had to base the characters in the movie around their own characters.' 'Andrew spoke to us individually for many, many hours, getting stories,' Powell says. And many of the stories passed around the circuit were re-enacted in the film: Noddy Holder getting trapped in a coffin on stage really did happen to Screaming Lord Sutch. In another set piece, the band visit a pirate radio station operating from a Maunsell Fort in the Thames Estuary. 'We didn't get any permission or anything,' Loncraine says. 'We just turned up with 50 people on a boat to find these rusting ladders. We had to get Dave Hill up there and he was terrified of heights. His wig blew off.' Also true to life, Powell says, was the way the film reflected how bands playing the same gigs would interact with each other off stage. 'We always used to meet at the Caravan outside New Street station in Birmingham,' he says of the band's days on the club circuit. 'It sold hotdogs and cookies and coffees. Robert Plant would be there, John Bonham, Jeff Lynne, Justin Hayward – all with our cups of tea talking about where we'd just played.' At least one character bears a close resemblance to a real life counterpart: the agent Ron Harding even has a name notably similar to Don Arden, one of the most feared music business impresarios of the 60s and 70s. But part of the film's grimness came not from the band, but from Birkin. 'At the time I had a very bleak view of life,' he says. Birkin had been hired by Puttnam to adapt the memoir of Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler's architect and later armaments minister during the Third Reich, for a feature film. Speer had been released from Spandau prison in 1966, and Birkin spent 44 hours interviewing him, challenging the Nazi about his past. 'I was also involved with making a film about internment in Northern Ireland. A lot of that rubbed off on me.' It was exemplified by a scene in which Powell and his former boss go down to the local canal to discuss the meaningless of life: 'It ain't the same any more,' Powell says, asked if his dreams have come true. 'Make a few records. That bit's OK. Rest of the time it's a bunch of bloody gangsters in dinner jackets.' Holder was the most natural on screen, Jim Lea feels barely present, and Dave Hill is, well, Dave Hill. But Powell's performance is remarkable because in July 1973, a severe road accident left him with acute short-term memory loss. 'Don Powell was a sweet man,' Loncraine says. 'Is a sweet man. In the mornings I would have to tell him what we were doing, but even who he was as well, because he couldn't remember much about himself some mornings, or what he was doing.' 'Richard was so helpful to me,' Powell says. 'He told me, 'We only do one or two scenes a day.' You just need to learn your lines for that scene.' He said I didn't have to learn the script, and we just took everything day by day.' The film was preceded by the album of the same name, released in time for Christmas 1974. The previous two albums had topped the charts; this stalled at No 6. The first single Far Far Away reached No 2, though. Still, it was a departure for Slade – there were no glam rock bangers with misspelled titles, and in Far Far Away and the second single How Does It Feel, there was a melancholy and depth that was a million miles from Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me. When the film was released, it was largely dismissed (though rather surprisingly, Michael Billington – who reviewed cinema for the Illustrated London News, as well as theatre for this paper – quite enjoyed it). Easlea aside, it didn't really connect with the band's young fans, rather inviting the question: did no one ever stop to think they should have made a film for 12-year-olds? 'I don't remember anyone saying that. Never a single conversation about it,' Loncraine says. Powell agrees, adding: 'We said we didn't want to do a run-around, jump-around film. But it really did go against us.' 'There was some concern,' Birkin suggests. 'But Chas Chandler had faith in us and he certainly liked the idea that this would be a different kind of movie.' Fifty years on, though, both movie and album are regarded as high points in Slade's career: Mark Kermode even described the film as 'the Citizen Kane of rock movies'. Both Loncraine and Birkin think that's rather overstating things, but they are pleased with its reassessment. Easlea ended up writing Whatever Happened to Slade?, the definitive biography of the band. He now thinks Slade in Flame is a landmark – 'I genuinely think this will be the thing that people will look at for posterity's sake with the group' – and argues that it rings true because the music industry remains just as ruthless: 'You could put it in today's setting and it would be almost exactly as it was then.' And, Easlea notes, it maybe wasn't quite the career killer that has been suggested: perhaps more detrimental to their career at home was the fact they spent most of 1974, 75 and 76 touring America and ignoring their domestic audience. 'I'm still proud of it,' says Powell. 'I'm still glad we did what we did.' Slade in Flame is in cinemas from 2 May and released on BFI Blu-ray and DVD on 19 May
