Noddy Holder Interview – July 2006

Speaker key

N Noddy

IV Interviewer

IV: Slade had a long career. A lot of people won’t realise quite how long.

N: We had an incredibly long career. We formed in 1966 and we were 25 years together with the same four guys, which, when you think about it, in the rock and roll business, is an incredible achievement - and 20 years of that was having hit records, basically.

A lot of people think we just had success in the early 70s, but our first hit in the charts was 1971 and our last hit in the charts was 1991, so our chart span took up 20 years of that 25 years. We knew that people would remember us, although our place in history really will always be overshadowed by Merry Xmas Everybody. But people forget we had over 20 albums out and a lot of success with albums. Although we were appearing on TV every week, on Top of the Pops and programmes like that, and we were continually in the charts through the 70s, we weren’t just a singles band. A little bit different to a lot of our contemporaries, we actually had a lot of success with albums, all over the world. We had four number one albums in the UK alone and we shifted albums in great quantities.

People could never pigeonhole Slade. They always tried. Are they a pop act? Are they a rock act? Are they a singles band? Are they an albums act? We had a bit of everything, nobody could put us in one place and consequently that went over to the audiences as well. We had girl fans, we had boy fans, we had skinheads, we had heavy metal fans, we had a real mixture of stuff and that’s what Slade has always been about. And the albums, all these re-releases, it will show the progression that we made from our very first album, Beginnings, where we were thrown into a studio, really, for a week. We were novices but we’d realised then that we could make albums and so it was a great little shot in the arm for us, to get that first record deal. Even though it took us another couple of years or so to get any success, we still continued to work and begin writing.

IV What’s it like being in a band with the same four people for 20 years? I mean most people don’t go to work with the same people for 20 years. Is it kind of like a marriage?

N: Well, most bands don’t last [laughs] two or three years, I mean you are very lucky to stay together that long. It’s hard. I won’t say for a minute that it’s easy but we did get on well together. In the early days it was the four of us against the world. We were allowed to have our arguments and slag one another off, within our circle, but nobody outside was allowed to do it to us. We would close ranks and fend off everything. It was only in the latter years that cracks appeared, which was inevitable. I mean, we’d been together a long time, we’d had a good run and it was inevitable, at some time, that we’d get fed up with working together. And the end did eventually come because, well, because we did tire, we got bored [laughs] with one another I suppose - which you would after that long.

IV: How did your visual style come about, because you had a very unique style at the time, didn’t you?

N: We always were a visual band, especially myself and Dave Hill, the lead guitar player - even from day one when we formed. We always knew we wanted to be a visual act as well as to be about the music. I’d always been visual in bands I’d had before anyway and Dave was just waiting to break out. The original ‘N Betweens that Dave and Don played with had always been pretty much blues-based, so they were pretty sombrely dressed. Dave was just waiting to break out of that, he was just waiting for the chance to break out and become the extrovert dresser on stage that he did become.

I remember that when we first formed, before we ever did our first gigs together, we went to a shop in Birmingham, the four of us, to find some stuff to wear on stage and Jimmy absolutely hated all the flamboyant dressing up and all that, he hated it with a vengeance. Don went along with it all, Jim had to go along with it all, but he hated it and when he saw what we were picking off the racks, me and Dave, and trying on, he could not believe that we were even going to contemplate wearing these colourful, over-the-top clothes. This was in 1966, when nobody was really dressing over the top on stage at all, but me and Dave were determined to be colourful right from the off, and we were. But Jim just had his head in his hands when he saw some of the stuff. And then, as time went on, of course, when we became successful in the glam rock period as it was known, Dave was like all hell let loose then. He had no shame. He would go as far as it took to get his shots on telly, as many shots as he could get on TV, he would go to the furthest extreme, and if he thought somebody in another band was outdoing him in the over-the-top stakes, he’d up the game and go even more over the top [laughs]. But that was part of what this band was all about. Slade was all about that, it was a four-man band and everybody had something to put into the melting pot.

And that’s why we lasted like we did and that’s why we had as much success as we did, because everybody had their own little ways of doing things and it all worked out. This mish-mash all came out into a successful rock and roll band. And that’s the way that the best rock and roll bands always are, throughout history. The best rock and roll bands have good, raunchy songs and different personalities in there that make it work - that’s what makes it exciting.

IV: Slade are also well known for the titles of their songs, with the phonetic spellings - Cum on Feel the Noize and Mama Weer All Crazee Now for instance. How was that idea spawned?

N: Well it really came from the first number one record that we had, Coz I Luv You, which was the first hit that we’d written. We came into the charts in ‘71 with our first hit, which was Get Down And Get With It, which was a cover version of an old rocker song and we got our foot in the charts with that. But for the next single, Chas Chandler, our manager and producer, said, “I want you to write it,” myself and Jimmy Lea, because we hadn’t really sat down and written much before, me and Jimmy. We’d written maybe a couple of songs previously, but Chas said because we’d never tried the combination properly, go off and write a song aimed at the charts, a three minute pop song. And we came up with Coz I Luv You and when we played it to Chas on acoustic guitars and the violin he loved it. He said, “I don’t only think you’ve written your first hit record, I think you’ve written your first number one,” and we said, “Oh, get away with you.” Anyway, within two weeks the record was at number one - two weeks after release. And it gave us incredible confidence, as writers, from then on.

But when we went in the studio to do Coz I Luv You, it wasn’t Slade. When we put it down we loved it, but we thought this is not the follow up to Get Down And Get With It that we need. Get Down And Get With It was all hell let loose and this was a basic pop / rock song, not a bash, bash, loud, raucous song. So we Sladified it, we put the hand claps on it, we put the boot stamping on it, as we’d done on Get Down And Get With It. We gave it our stamp, our mark of approval if you like, and it became a Slade record then - it came alive.

But then we heard it back and we thought ‘we can’t call this Because I Love You.’ We were singing “Coz I luv you” on the record and we thought ‘what can we do here?’

Well, I had my lyric sheet in the studio, and the lyrics were written in phonetic Black Country, our accent from the Black Country in the Midlands, and it was like you’d write the Black Country slang, like you’d write on toilet walls, and it was written Coz I Luv You so that’s what it became..

IV: Have you got a particular favourite Slade album?

N: It’s difficult. I like them all for the period they came out…. When you make an album, you have particular memories of that time. It’s different to being a stranger listening to an album because you put yourself where it was recorded, the things that happened when you recorded it.

I still actually have a soft spot for one of our least successful albums sales-wise, an album called Nobody's Fools. The bulk of it was recorded in New York and it was at a time when we were living there, we were living over there for two years, and it’s a very American-influenced album. It was something very different to what we’d done before. I mean, I don’t sit at home and play our albums particularly any more, you know, but I might hear the odd one and I might find one lying around in the car and slot it on, on a journey, just to have a listen [laughs]. And I did do it once and I remembered Nobody’s Fools and I put it on and I thought, blimey this is not how I remember Slade at all and not how I remembered recording it at all.

Because it was done in America, the style of writing was different and the style of our playing was different because we’d got used to playing in front of American audiences. We’d elongated some of the songs and stuff and it came out in our writing and in our recording sessions. And so, even though I like all of them at the time, you know, that one probably sticks out as being something different, if you know what I mean? It sticks in my memory because it’s totally different to, probably, most of the other stuff we ever did.

Plus I do like the live album as well, Slade Alive! It was our breakthrough album and, for that period, it did sum up totally what we were all about. We were struggling to find our own niche, to get a breakthrough into the charts, in the album charts particularly. And then Chas said, “You guys have such an awesome reputation on the road, the ideal thing would be to put out a live album, because that’s what people want from you.”

So we did it and it stayed in the UK charts for 13 or 14 months and all around Europe and Australia and in Canada and places like that, it was a phenomenal success. I think it was number one in the Australian album charts for six months and it was knocked off by Slayed? Our follow up album knocked it off the top of the charts in Australia. The success of that album really broke us worldwide, on the back of the singles as well.

IV: What’s it like being someone, like you said, from the Black Country having a number one album in Canada and Australia? When it happened, was it mind blowing?

N: Totally mind blowing. I mean, we’d always had incredible belief in ourselves, even when we formed. We knew right away we’d got something different. We knew we sounded different, we knew our way of playing together was different, we knew we’d got something new. We just didn’t know how to channel it, that was all. And from a touring point of view, and a gigging point of view, from 1966 right through to when we first met Chas Chandler, we were gigging and we were developing