Slade in full - Press Awards

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Reviews Rock and pop box sets
By Alexis Petridis
KUBRICK’S
ODYSSEY
It is 40 years since the great director made Barry
Lyndon, his period masterpiece. His longtime
executive producer Jan Harlan talks us through
photos and artefacts from the Kubrick archive
Slade
in full
Some thought Slade
were going to be bigger
than the Beatles – and it
wasn’t as ludicrous an
idea as it sounds now
Slade
Section:GDN TW PaGe:10 Edition Date:151211 Edition:01 Zone:
Sent at 10/12/2015 18:29
When Slade Rocked
the World 1971-1975
SALVO

On location in Ireland
Stanley Kubrick (third left) during
a break in filming one of the
battlefield scenes, with lead actor
Ryan O’Neal (right). Kubrick’s
teenage daughter Vivian is
standing next to the director.
Jan Harlan: ‘Stanley loved Barry
Lyndon. He loved this upstart
from nowhere, a conman, and he
felt very strongly that Barry was
representative of our society.
What you see here is the normal
sort of track they would lay down
to move the camera – there was
no Steadicam in those days. You
had to be careful to point the
camera in the right direction,
otherwise you would film the
track itself’
10 The Guardian 11.12.15
Visualisation drawing
JH: ‘Storyboard is not the right
word for what this is; Stanley
did not construct his sequences
in that kind of detail, but he
certainly prepared himself well.
Barry Lyndon has all these battle
scenes, with lots of action, and
Stanley would say: “How are we
going to do this? I want some
action.” The art department
would then come up with
a visualisation of how to do
a scene. Stanley wouldn’t have
done this drawing himself; he was
not a great pencil illustrator’
Among the coloured-vinyl albums,
double A-side singles and facsimiles of
flexidiscs in this deluxe Slade box set
lurks a copy of George Tremlett’s 1975
pulp biography of the band. The Slade
Story makes for intriguing reading. It
was written in the firm belief that Slade
were about to become the biggest band
since the Beatles. In 1971, Coz I Luv You
had kicked off one of the era’s greatest
runs of singles. Commercially, they had
eclipsed all their peers except Elton
John: three of their singles went straight
in at No 1, and Cum on Feel the Noize
sold 500,000 copies in a week. They had
just made their surprisingly violent and
gritty first feature film, Slade in Flame.
Replicating their British success in the
US seemed a matter not of if, but when.
Tremlett couldn’t have been more
wrong. Two years after the book was
published, the band’s career had
collapsed to such a degree that they
released an album unironically titled
Whatever Happened to Slade? Two
years after that, Slade were reduced to
recording a version of the Hokey Cokey
in a desperate, failed bid to get back in
the charts, and Dave Hill w as hiring
out his Rolls-Royce for weddings, with
the self-styled Superyob as chauffeur.
But listening to When Slade Rocked
the World, you can see why Tremlett
thought global superstardom was a
done deal. Holder and bassist Jim Lea
could write pop singles that permanently embedded themselves in the
British psyche, but their albums tell
a different story. Before taking up permanent residence on Top of the Pops,
Slade had served a classically tough
Look to the
future now,
it’s only just
begun … Slade
THIS WEEK ALEXIS
ENJOYED
Kaspar Hauser –
Pencil Doings
This is fantastic:
murky, noisy, strafed
with luminous
guitars and brilliant
lyrics, a little like
the Fall seen through
a distorting mirror
apprenticeship. The 1972 album Slade
Alive! was the end of that slog, the
sound of an archetypical hard-gigging
early-70s band: lengthy covers of Ten
Years After, Steppenwolf and Little
Richard, endless Yammy-accented
exhortations to clap your hands, more
solo-heavy than you might expect.
Later that year, Slayed? offered the
band’s other extreme: every track clocks
in at around three minutes. An album
that follows the peerless single Gudbuy
T’Jane with a track called Gudbuy Gudbuy, and includes not just Mama Weer
All Crazee Now, but The Whole World’s
Goin’ Crazee, clearly isn’t trying to hide
the fact that it’s written to a formula.
The drums are permanently set to
“primal thud”, the guitars are distorted
and fat with compression, the vocals
doused in echo, and every chorus is
built to be chanted. But the songwriting
is of a uniformly high standard and
performed with relentless ferocity.
Old New Borrowed and Blue, from
1974, confidently pushed at their
boundaries. Not everything they tried
worked, but Holder and Lea’s innate
capacity for pop melodies carried them
through Kinksy music-hall parodies
and pub-piano singalongs. The real
revelation was Everyday, a gorgeous,
regretful ballad that wallowed in the
misery of long-distance relationships.
With hindsight, Everyday was the
first warning that Slade were struggling
to break America. On the evidence of
the soundtrack album Slade in Flame,
you wonder if their hearts were really
in it. Even the rockers are shot through
with a wistful melancholy. The beauti-
ful Summer Song (Wishing You Were
Here) pines for old-fashioned British
seaside holidays: it evinces the kind of
enthusiasm for Blackpool or Llandudno
that can only be mustered by men
going slowly mad as their tour bus
makes its way through the Midwest.
The singles it spawned were fantastic,
but How Does It Feel? was affectingly
world-weary and haunted by the
thought that their time was up, while
Far Far Away just sounds homesick.
The film bombed. Rattled, their
manager Chas Chandler suggested
they move to the US, which only
compounded matters. By 1977, they
were back on Top of the Pops, singing
about doing cocaine in California, with
Hill dressed as a native American. It
just didn’t seem right at all.
Eventually, they would claw their
way back, first as an unlikely adjunct
to the new wave of British heavy
metal then as purveyors of boozily
lachrymose end-of-the-night singalongs. Noddy Holder quit in 1992,
having presumably noted that Merry
Xmas Everybody meant he never
really needed to work again. At the
time of writing, it is assuming its
annual role as a kind of temporary
national anthem. Its deathlessness
has fixed Slade forever in the public
imagination as beloved purveyors of
glittery, raucous pop anthems. They
were more complex and expansive
than that, as When Slade Rocked
the World proves, but never mind.
It’s immortality of a kind: not the one
George Tremlett once envisaged for
them, but immortality nonetheless.
11.12.15 The Guardian 23