SLADE: IN FLAME
ALBUM REVIEW: Slade are for life, not just for Christmas! There's so much more to this fantastic band than novelty singles...
SLADE: IN FLAME
POLYDOR RECORDS
1974
I have come to die on this (Dave) hill: Slade can effortlessly go nose to nose with The Beatles, Led Zeppelin or any other “premier league” UK rock band of the last 60 years - and be the odds-on favourite, fully capable of knocking their rivals to the canvas in the first round.
You can tell I’m no sportsman, but you get my point.
I find it really irksome that Slade are remembered as a Christmas novelty band with a couple of catchy singles, when in fact they’re statistically one of the greatest bands the UK has ever produced - achieving SEVENTEEN consecutive Top 20 hits and SIX Number Ones singles in the UK between 1971 and 1976! And plenty more chart hits after that run too.
That is the most chart success of any other band in the 1970s - at the time only rivalled by The Beatles for the amount of Top Ten records in a single decade (the Fabs had 22).
Put that in perspective. A multitude of different artists are held high today with just a fragment of the same success - T Rex, Led Zep, The Rolling Stones, Roxy Music… all pale into near significance next to Slade - and yet have a retained a certain credibility and longevity, while Our Boys From Wolverhampton are reduced to “that band with the Christmas song”.
It’s wrong, I tells yer, and all I can suppose is that their Council House Concubine visage hasn’t aged well enough to keep them cool.
Not that they ever were; their gurning grins, mutton chops and really fucking dodgy fringes were wonderfully bereft of any attempt at cool. In fact, they were steadfastly uncool - they were overwhelmingly everyman - happy to be doing what they were doing. They were having a laugh. Not moody. Not dark. Not deep.
No different to us.
Completely devoid of any pretensions; more at home in the Co-op than Harrods.
And that’s their charm - hugely gifted musicians, understanding how to write real tunes - simply and economically, without complexity or challenge.
It’s a significantly overlooked skillset.
Some have recognised it over the years, of course. Kurt Cobain, that dreadful Gallagher fellow, Steve Jones, Marco Pirroni, Joey Ramone, Gene Simmons… just a few who have cited Slade’s influence on their own careers.
So get over the visuals and listen. You will hear melodies that soar, rhythms that rock and music that will touch your soul and stay there. Forever.
Slade are for life, not just for Christmas.
Just listen.
Slade had been in existence since 1966, so were a well-oiled live machine by the time they were reaping the benefits of the road in 1971.
With the success of C’Mon Feel The Noize, Coz I Luv You, Gudby T’Jane and Mamma Weer All Crazee Now between then and In Flame - to name just the big ones - they had had an astonishing number of chart hits, toured the world and were one of the biggest bands on the planet.
In Flame is the 1974 soundtrack album to a fictionalised biopic movie that hit cinemas in January 1975, at the crest of their success.
The movie missed the mark, a bit, with their audience. Critically it was highly praised, but fans, expecting the happy-go-lucky attitude of the previous few years were surprised. The film was dark. Even noir-ish, exposing the seedy underbelly of life in the music business, inspired by many actual events that the band had experienced on their way up from Wolves.
Although the songs themselves aren’t particularly dark, they do take on a more brooding atmosphere in conjunction with the visuals from the film. The two don’t have to be taken together though. In Flame is a super-strong LP regardless of its celluloid accompaniment.
The album is deliberately not packed with singles, but a couple of the songs are, to my mind, the best 45s the band ever released.
There are two songs on the album that don’t stand up as well today as they might have done in 1974. OK Yesterday Was Yesterday and album closer, Standing On The Corner, are fairly uninspiring blues-rock boogie-woogie ditties, despite being played well and fine examples of the form if you like that kind of thing.
I don’t.
So we’ll zip past them and focus on the other eight songs that make up the In Flame set - because (almost) every one of them is a killer in its own right.
Just listen to the delicate piano intro to How Does It Feel and tell me that, alone with Noddy Holder’s clean vocal, it doesn’t send a tingle down your spine. It’s a tune Lennon and McCartney would have been proud of. And just when the accompaniment comes in and descends through the first bridge with Dave Hill’s fuzzed guitar, we get our first taste of Noddy’s gravel… and the song climbs; slowly, melodically and emotionally until we hit the first Jim Lea piano-led chorus.
The structure of the song is great; it climbs and climbs, with more instrumentation being added as we travel through it. Noddy gets more and more pronounced throughout, as horns, flutes and full orchestration end up almost blowing the speakers by the end of it.
“Do you know, know, know what it's like
To be searching and suddenly find
All your illusion, all your confusion is all left behind?”
Then we drop back out and end as we begun.
It would fit perfectly on Revolver.
But that’s over and now we’re rolling into the slide guitar intro to the album’s big rocker, Them Kinda Monkeys Can’t Swing, which to all intents and purposes has a key riff that Mudhoney made an entire career out of.
I don’t know if it’s Dave Hill or Noddy, but midway through we get a blistering guitar solo that shows us exactly why Steve Jones considered them an inspiration.
It’s a genuinely breathless ride, and Noddy’s gravel is full blown.
Christ, the pipes on that lad.
Monkeys is over as quickly as it begun and we’re into So Far So Good.
The song is a perfect example of brilliant pop writing. To think that this is a deep cut and not a single just shows the calibre of the songs that the band were releasing on seven inches at the time. Incredible.
So Far So Good’s chorus resonates with the retrospective cynicism of the film; once success arrives, what does it really give you?
“For twenty odd years I've been working hard to have my say
And now that it's here the fantasy has worn away…”
It would be a career-topping tune for a lesser band.
Unbelievably, it’s beaten by the song that follows it - another album track that could have been the smash hit that any other band was desperately craving for.
Summer Song (Wishing You Were Here) is a superbly simple, uplifting ode to holiday romances that could only come from a UK band. Its intrinsic Britishness is as 70s as Carry On films and On The Buses and its sentimentality is heartbreaking:
“Everybody needs a by-the-sea affair
Where you get the urge from something in the air
Helter Skelter on a mat, "Kiss me Quick" is on my hat
And you do it on the ghost train for a dare…”
Before Nod’s in too deep…
“The last night you dressed to kill
Will you write? You say you will
Sometimes hopes just drift away…Everybody needs to have a sea romance
When the world around just doesn't stand a chance
Candy floss stuck on your nose, and your donkey's name was Rose
What's this cheek to cheek in every single dance?”
I list so many Summer Song lyrics here to expose the nostalgic romance that Noddy Holder and Jim Lea are capable of; it a central theme of their writing - it’s at the heart of Merry Xmas Everybody - and is a big part of the reason it still resonates today:
“Are you waiting for the family to arrive?
Are you sure you've got the room to spare inside?
Does your granny always tell ya the old songs are the best?
Then she's up and rock 'n' rolling with the rest…”
There’s a peculiar provincial tone to their lyric writing that really positions the songs in a time and place that all of us still believe in.
The next banger is my favourite Slade song ever. It’s not got the punch of C’mon Feel The Noise. It’s not got the OTT hooks of Merry Xmas… it’s more of a downplayed, Coz I Luv You vibe, but the lyrics of Far Far Away touch a nerve with me so acutely, it has the power to bring a tear to my eye.
I know what it is to be homesick and to feel that all these things that are supposed to impress fall short of how it feels to close the front door behind you.
“I’ve seen the yellow lights go down the Mississippi
I've seen the bridges of the world and they're for real
I've had a red light off the wrist without me even gettin' kissed
It still seems so unrealAnd I'm far far away with my head up in the clouds
And I'm far far away with my feet down in the crowds
Lettin' loose around the world, but the call of home is loud
Still as loud.”
The dark This Girl follows Far Far Away and takes things down into the gutter with its Stranglers-esque bass funk and organ riff. It’s not an amazing song, but it definitely gives the album more texture and throws a curve-ball as we head into the final furlong.
Lay It Down is a song about… erm… songs. Despite feeling slightly like a scraping of the barrel, it’s a good song that rocks along in true Slade fashion as it lists different elements of songwriting, from bending notes to key changes and bass chases.
Ultimately, it’s fairly forgetable filler, but has its place.
Heaven Knows is the last track we’ll address here. If it’s not a pumping single, it’s a cracking B-Side with its “It’s all a never ending game to play…” chorus sounding like an out-take from a Plastic Ono Band LP. The ghost of John Lennon looms large over a lot of these songs.
The album holds together really well and still sounds vibrant, emotional and rocking 50 years after it was released. The power that the band exuded at this point in their career is genuinely awesome.
What would come next would be a slow decline involving a failed attempt at kick-starting their American career with a move to New York, something that reflected on the band badly with their homegrown fan-base.
Their fame would be briefly resurrected following a stand-in headline performance at Reading Festival in 1980, but sadly, Slade’s time in the spotlight had been and gone by the early 80s and they never managed to reclaim their former glory, despite a couple of pretty strong albums in their latter years.
The band, sans Noddy and Jim, still performs live, but they’ve really become the novelty act that serves to undermine their stellar 70s career.
Noddy went on to do some telly and radio work. He became a National Treasure and cancer survivor.
Jim Lea has basically kept himself to himself with a just few minor appearances and releases in the last twenty years or so.
Dave Hill and Don Powell continue to tour as Slade in various incarnations, and not always together or in the same band. There have been quarrels.
My copy of In Flame is an original pressing from 1974. This means very little, as so many Slade records were pressed at the time, reissues are rarer than the originals are! It’s got a snazzy laminated gatefold sleeve and still sounds as good under the needle as it ever will have done.
I chose Slade In Flame over Old, New, Borrowed and Blue or Slayed? because of Far Far Away, but I urge you to give all three albums a go - and to turn them up LOUD if you want to really feel the sound of the 70s, because there is only one band that personifies that period before punk in a way that everyone can relate to.
That band is Slade and there’s more to them than Christmas.
Great piece, Punyhuman! Here's a Stateside view of the band! From my Texas outpost at the time (I was 18 in '73), I was not only voraciously reading the domestic rock press of the day, but had access (thru a local newsstand) to NME, Sounds, and Melody Maker, so read the UK tabs almost as constantly (I just had to wait the week it took to ship 'em, by boat, from the UK)!
Plus, when they switched labels to Warner Bros, in the states, I had free access to those albums, as well (my dad was in radio, and brought WB promo albums home on a regular basis!). By, 1975, I was fully entrenched in Houston radio myself, with access to my own promo largesse! I've been on Slade as virtually anyone could've been in the U.S., given they were really never afforded much, if any, radio play, and they were but a blip on the domestic radio and sales radar!
BUT, with all that having been said, I recently published my own hat-tip to the band and their marvelous "When the Lights Are Out," including covers by Canadian, Bob Segarini, The Dummies (if you're not aware of The Dummies, who also did a cover, you may be surprised at who's in 'em!), and Cheap Trick!
Plus, this article has a link to an article I co-wrote with 'Stack's own, Nic Briscoe of "The Song's the Thing," who mixed Chas Chandler's Animals' 1983 album, "Ark"!
https://bradkyle.substack.com/p/inside-tracks-29-slade-1974-when Enjoy!--Brad
In the Summer of 2022 Wolverhampton Art Gallery had a brilliant exhibition called 'Black Country Beats' featuring many artists from that area including Slade.
A jukebox included as part of the exhibit had all of their hits and from them all I chose 'How does it feel' IMHO one of the greatest songs by any British band.
Wholeheartedly agree that Slade's influence has been underestimated.