Goin' Crazee with Noddy Holder (Part 4)
The Slade frontman discusses some of the band's last big hits, and names his favorite Slade song.
Greetings, Jagged Time Lapsers!
All good things must eventually come to an end, and today brings the final excerpt of my epic 2003 chat with legendary Slade frontman Noddy Holder. It’s been a real pleasure to revisit this interview again, and to finally put it out there in the world in its entirety for my paid subscribers to dig. If you missed the first three parts of our interview, you can find them here:
And if you still can’t get enough Slade content, by all means check out the episode of the CROSSED CHANNELS podcast that
and I recently recorded, wherein we delved deep into the glory that was Wolverhampton’s finest.
We now pick up with the band in 1974, right as they’re about to make their big screen debut in Slade In Flame, a film which now has a definite cult following but which unfortunately marked the beginning of Slade’s slide from chart domination — even though “Far Far Away,” the first single from the film’s soundtrack, was a #2 hit in the UK…
Tell me about “Far Far Away”.
Well, “Far Far Away,” that was a song where we’d been on tour for virtually 18 months nonstop, and we were playing in Memphis one night. And after the show, we were in the hotel, and myself and Chas and a couple of other people were sitting on the balcony of the hotel room, sipping some alcoholic concoctions and looking out on the Mississippi River. And I said to Chas, “Here we are, four Wolverhampton yobboes” — you know what “yobboes” mean? It’s like kids off the street; “yobboes,” we used to call ourselves — “We’re four Wolverhampton yobboes, and here we are. We’ve been all around the world, and we’re sitting on a balcony, in Memphis, looking at the Mississippi River.” There was a paddle steamer coming down the river, all lit up. And it was like, “How did we ever get to here?”
You know, when you’re growing up as a kid in this industrial area of the Midlands in Britain, you would never, ever envisage that you would go to New York or Japan or San Francisco or Australia or France or Germany; you never in your wildest dreams would ever think that you would go to these places. And it was only through the fact of being in a successful rock and roll band that enabled us to get there.
And we'd done this 18-month tour, and we’d got about another maybe two months to go on the road. So after being away from home for that long, at this point you are getting homesick because you’re doing night-after-night one night stands all around the world. So you see the light at the end of the tunnel, you know? You can see the end of the tour is in sight. And as much as you love it on the road, after that long on the road you’re looking forward to getting back to your families and spending some time at home.
So we were sitting on the balcony of this hotel overlooking the Mississippi, and I started to sing this song — the first three or four lines just came out me mouth. “I’ve seen the yellow lights go down the Mississippi/I’ve seen the bridges of the world and they’re for real.” And Chas said, “That sounds great — go to your room, now, and write the rest of it!” I said, “But I want to have a drink! We’ve just done a show!” [laughs] He said, “It’s gonna be a great song — go to your room and write it!” And I did!