There’s more to Slade than thigh-high boots and rubbish spelling, says Tim Cooper - they made British music what it is today

Back in the predigital, predownload early 1970s, there was a strict protocol for music appreciation.

You either liked “album bands”, in which case you would wear an Afghan coat and enthuse about drum solos; or you liked “singles bands”, in which case you were an idiot. A group such as Slade — four working-class lads from Wolverhampton belting out rowdy, beer-soaked rock anthems — were never going to find credibility with the music snobs of the time. Their chart-topping, syntax-challenging singles doomed them to be reviled along with their fellow kings of the charts: T Rex, Sweet, Mud.

With hindsight, Slade’s main crime seems to have been that they were clearly having fun — anathema to the serious music fan, who liked his musicians (and he was invariably a “he”) to hunch earnestly over banks of keyboards or double-necked guitars, not dance around in platform boots and glitter. Yet it was Slade, not Yes or ELP, who clocked up four No 1 albums in a row, Slade who branched out into film with the mock rockumentary Flame (1974), and Slade whose legacy has endured beyond that of their prog-rock peers.

Now, with an extensive reissue campaign and the DVD release of Slade in Flame, the band are ripe for reappraisal. Perhaps they will get the credit they deserve: this, after all, is the group whose influence can be heard in everyone from Oasis to Kasabian. And listening to their albums reveals a much wider range than their hit singles suggest. “We loved singles, but we didn’t think of ourselves as a singles band,” Slade’s perennially jovial singer, Noddy Holder, reflects over a cup of earl grey in a Manchester hotel. “Chas [Chandler, the band’s manager and producer] modelled our career on the Beatles. We knew the importance of albums, but we also knew that we were the kings of the four-minute song. We wanted to do what the Beatles and the Stones had done, with hit singles and albums.”

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At the age of 60, Holder looks not so much like a former pop idol as a ruddy-faced farmer. Today, only the flamboyant silk scarf beneath his hound’s-tooth overcoat and a new facial-hair configuration — a Van Dyck-style ’tache-and-beardlet combo — betray an artistic bent. Holder (vocals and guitar), Dave Hill (lead guitar), Jim Lea (bass and violin) and Don Powell (drums) were spotted by Chandler, the former bass player of the Animals, who had moved into management with Jimi Hendrix. Despite a formidable live reputation, forged in the Black Country’s clubs, Slade’s first two albums flopped, so action was needed.

“Chas wanted us to stand out from the crowd,” Holder says. The solution was to customise the “skinhead” look of the time — tight, too-short trousers, big boots, braces and button-down Ben Sher-man shirts — to incorporate an element of music hall, tailoring Holder’s look with loud check suits in homage to Max Miller, platform boots and mutton-chop sideburns grown to preposterous size. “As soon as Dave [Hill] saw that, he said, ‘That look’s for me,’” chuckles Holder. The bucktoothed Hill embraced glam rock with almost surreal relish, creating a series of fantastically ridiculous costumes, involving silver capes and thigh-high platform boots, that reached its apotheosis with what can only be termed a silver niqab adorned with mirrors.

In 1971, with Coz I Luv You, Slade embarked on a five-year run of 16 Top 20 hits in a row, characterised by their deliberately misspelt titles, foot-stomping beats and trebly, echo-laden production, which made them sound louder than anything else on the radio. “Chas would test the mixes through a speaker the size of a transistor radio and see how it sounded, because he said that was where most people would hear the records,” Holder recalls. Not only did Slade become the first band since the Beatles to go straight into the singles chart at No 1, they did it three times in a year.

In 1974, Slade began work on their feature film, Flame. “Not for a minute did we think of ourselves as actors,” laughs Holder, “but the general view seems to be that we got away with it.” The band played a fictitious version of themselves, in a story that charted their rise and fall via a procession of unscrupulous managers, greedy agents and violent nightclub bosses, amid bitter infighting and petty jealousies. At the time, it failed to chime with fans, but now it comes across as a savage satire on the music business. “The names have changed, the look has changed, but the whole essence of the business is the same, except that it’s become even more corporate,” Holder says.

Holder, who left Slade in 1991 to pursue a new and equally successful career in radio and tele-vision, including a five-year stint as a classical-music teacher in the comedy-drama The Grimleys, says he never gets the urge to go back to his old job. “We get offers of a Slade reunion every year,” he says, “and I always turn them down. It seems like another life — a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t live there again.” q

Slade’s back catalogue and a new collection, B-Sides, are available on Salvo Records; the DVD Slade in Flame (1974) is released tomorrow

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article1580113.ece