Goin' Crazee with Noddy Holder (Part 2)
Slade's legendary frontman holds forth on some of the band's biggest boot-stompers
Of all the great mysteries of humans existence, the fact that I somehow managed to live in England during the last four months of 1974 without ever once hearing Slade — or even hearing of them — remains one of the more puzzling.
Though they’d hit their commercial peak the year before (and capped 1973 with their sixth Number One single, “Merry Xmas EveryBody”), Slade were still one of Britain’s biggest bands, scoring three Top 3 singles in 1974 — including the rollicking smash “Far Far Away,” which was released that October while I was grudgingly attending Brockhurst Primary in Leamington Spa, a town only forty miles southeast of Wolverhampton. If that wasn’t “Slade Country,” per se (Leamington Spa was a bit posh compared to the nearby likes of Coventry and Birmingham), it was at least fairly adjacent to it.
And yet, the only musical memories I have at all from those four months of my life are as follows:
1. Malcolm, a local kid I befriended who lived two houses down from us, had a 45 of “Angel Face” by The Glitter Band, which we would sing along to as “Gorilla Face”.
2. The girls at my school were nuts about Little Jimmy Osmond, and wanted to know if I knew him personally (what with me being a Yank and all).
3. Watching British comedy trio The Goodies sing their hit “The Inbetweenies” on some TV show (Top of the Pops, maybe?) while wearing matching outfits that looked like a school uniform and a business suit sewn together down the middle.
4. Hearing Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Live and Let Die” playing in the background at our favorite Indian restaurant in Coventry — which was the first place I ever had Indian food — and my dad remarking that he half expected James Bond to come bursting out of the wall.
I have no recollection at all of hearing my classmates talk about Slade, of hearing their music, nor of seeing any photos of them. I mean, surely a plaid-clad, cartoonish-looking, roof-raising bunch like Noddy Holder and the boys would have made an impression on my fragile eggshell mind, right?
To be fair, I didn’t really care about music yet; I was eight years old, and that particular awakening was still a couple of years away. My main interests at this time were movies, comic books, military history books, my toy soldiers and my G.I. Joe action figures. For me, the most exciting things about living in England at the time were the abundance of castles and museums to visit, the fact that Action Man (G.I. Joe’s UK counterpart) had way cooler gear than anything I could find in the States, and the weekly newsstand appearance of a new war comic called Warlord. My ears or antennae, therefore, would definitely have not been attuned to the likes of Slade.
It wasn’t until 1982, when I picked up a copy of a new photo book called Cool Cats: 25 Years of Rock n’ Roll Style, that I got my first eyeful of Slade. I vividly remember looking at the same photo spread pictured at the top of this post and thinking, “What the fuck is Slade?” They looked exciting as hell, but the snarky photo caption (“…at their platform boot-stomping best — or worst”) made it hard to tell if they were considered cool or not by the UK music cognoscenti, and I wasn’t quite sure what to think… though I did kinda dig the shiny frock coat that the lead guitarist was wearing.
It wasn’t until a year after that, in the immediate wake of Quiet Riot’s hit cover of “Cum On Feel the Noize,” that I actually heard Slade’s music for the first time — and it wasn’t until 1987, when I scored a cassette of Slades Greats from my college bookstore (which for some reason always had a small but intriguing array of import albums and cassettes for sale), that I actually became a budding Slade fan.
But by the time my 2003 interview with Noddy Holder went down, I was thoroughly well-versed in the band and the incredible string of singles (and handful of really strong LPs) that they’d released in the 1970s. So being tapped to produce Get Yer Boots On: The Best of Slade for Shout! Factory — the first-ever collection of Slade hits released in this country in the CD era, and their first US comp since 1973’s Sladest — was a huge honor for me, and getting to chat with Noddy for an hour and a half about his band’s greatest hits was a huge thrill.
As with Part 1 of the interview (which has never run anywhere before), I’m making Part 2 available here in full for my paid Jagged Time Lapse subscribers; Parts 3 and possibly 4 will run sometime in the next week or two. As always, I would like to thank everyone who is keeping the lights on here by shelling out $5 for the monthly subscription or $50 for the annual — and I’d also like to give a special shoutout today to Toni DelliQuadri, who has just very generously signed on as a Founding Member. Love ya, Toni!
And now, let us join the great man himself as we shift to the topic of the band’s third Number One hit, 1972’s “Mama Weer All Crazee Now”…
I recall reading in your autobiography that “Mama Weer All Crazee Now” originally bore a slightly different title…
It was “My My Weer All Crazee Now”. It came from an ad lib on stage, from one of the songs we were playing in the live set — something I’d said on stage at the end of another song — and Jim kept it stuck in his head. He’d actually remembered it, and he thought that ad lib would make a good song. It was another very quick song to write; it was a very, very instant. We played it to the rest of the band, and they loved it. But when we all played it to Chas, we were sort of playing it quite loud, and he mistook what we were saying for “Mama Weer All Crazee Now”. He actually said to us when we finished the song, “I love the title, ‘Mama, Weer All Crazee Now’!” I said, “No, it’s ‘My My’!” And he said, “Mama is much better!” [laughs]