Daryl Easlea was eight years old when he got the 4A bus with his mate Graham down to the Odeon in Southend-on-Sea to see his favourite rock band make the leap from vinyl to celluloid. After 12 consecutive top 10 singles – including six No 1s – Slade had finally made their first movie, Slade in Flame. It has just turned 50.
What young Easlea saw in 1975 was not the fun-packed adventures of a happy-go-lucky glam rock foursome, but a dour, downbeat film about being chewed up and spat out by the music industry. Easlea, who would grow up to be Slade’s biographer, didn’t care.
“You can’t underestimate how it felt to hear the word ‘piss’ when you were eight,” he says, laughing. “I know it sounds exceptionally shallow, but it felt edgy and dangerous. I didn’t understand the half of it. Films don’t usually start with two blokes having a chat in a loo – that very mundanity reached out to me. They were cheeky and sweary, and it wasn’t like seeing A Hard Day’s Night on the telly.”
Slade in Flame – which is getting rereleased in UK cinemas in May – depicted a fictional band, Flame, who are formed from two squabbling clubland bands in 1967, and attract the attention of a London-based businessman (Tom Conti) who sees the opportunity to package and sell them, as he says, like cigarettes. As they become successful, their thuggish former agent tries to reclaim them. Realising their own lack of agency, the band choose instead to split.
In the process of making it, though, band and film-makers created a Black Country version of Head, the film credited with destroying the Monkees’ career, albeit one more redolent of pints of mild than tabs of acid. Just like Head, the film tanked. And just like the Monkees, Slade suffered.
“Chas Chandler, our manager, wanted us to follow in the footsteps of the Beatles,” recalls Don Powell, Slade’s drummer. “And he said, ‘How about making a movie?’ We said, ‘We don’t want to do A Hard Day’s Night. We want to show the gritty side of the business.’ But it went against us.” He says audiences got confused that “we weren’t Slade in the film, we were all playing different characters.”
To get the film made, Chandler went to Goodtimes Enterprises, headed by David – later Lord – Puttnam, which had made notably darker rock-adjacent movies such as Performance, starring Mick Jagger, and the David Essex vehicles Stardust and That’ll Be the Day. Two twentysomethings – Richard Loncraine and Andrew Birkin – were brought in to direct and write, and the pair of them were promptly packed off on tour in the US with Slade to get a feel for their subjects.
Neither were fans – Birkin had never even heard of Slade, let alone listened to them – and the experience was odd. “They never really managed to crack America, and were playing to a lot of half-empty arenas,” Loncraine says. “I remember an awful lot of dreadful tour buses.”
Birkin adds that in between listening to recordings of Hancock’s Half Hour with singer Noddy Holder – both were Tony Hancock zealots – “it became apparent that you had to base the characters in the movie around their own characters.”
“Andrew spoke to us individually for many, many hours, getting stories,” Powell says. And many of the stories passed around the circuit were re-enacted in the film: Noddy Holder getting trapped in a coffin on stage really did happen to Screaming Lord Sutch. In another set piece, the band visit a pirate radio station operating from a Maunsell Fort in the Thames Estuary. “We didn’t get any permission or anything,” Loncraine says. “We just turned up with 50 people on a boat to find these rusting ladders. We had to get Dave Hill up there and he was terrified of heights. His wig blew off.”
Also true to life, Powell says, was the way the film reflected how bands playing the same gigs would interact with each other off stage. “We always used to meet at the Caravan outside New Street station in Birmingham,” he says of the band’s days on the club circuit. “It sold hotdogs and cookies and coffees. Robert Plant would be there, John Bonham, Jeff Lynne, Justin Hayward – all with our cups of tea talking about where we’d just played.” At least one character bears a close resemblance to a real life counterpart: the agent Ron Harding even has a name notably similar to Don Arden, one of the most feared music business impresarios of the 60s and 70s.
But part of the film’s grimness came not from the band, but from Birkin. “At the time I had a very bleak view of life,” he says. Birkin had been hired by Puttnam to adapt the memoir of Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler’s architect and later armaments minister during the Third Reich, for a feature film. Speer had been released from Spandau prison in 1966, and Birkin spent 44 hours interviewing him, challenging the Nazi about his past. “I was also involved with making a film about internment in Northern Ireland. A lot of that rubbed off on me.”
It was exemplified by a scene in which Powell and his former boss go down to the local canal to discuss the meaningless of life: “It ain’t the same any more,” Powell says, asked if his dreams have come true. “Make a few records. That bit’s OK. Rest of the time it’s a bunch of bloody gangsters in dinner jackets.”
Holder was the most natural on screen, Jim Lea feels barely present, and Dave Hill is, well, Dave Hill. But Powell’s performance is remarkable because in July 1973, a severe road accident left him with acute short-term memory loss. “Don Powell was a sweet man,” Loncraine says. “Is a sweet man. In the mornings I would have to tell him what we were doing, but even who he was as well, because he couldn’t remember much about himself some mornings, or what he was doing.”
“Richard was so helpful to me,” Powell says. “He told me, ‘We only do one or two scenes a day.’ You just need to learn your lines for that scene.’ He said I didn’t have to learn the script, and we just took everything day by day.”
The film was preceded by the album of the same name, released in time for Christmas 1974. The previous two albums had topped the charts; this stalled at No 6. The first single Far Far Away reached No 2, though. Still, it was a departure for Slade – there were no glam rock bangers with misspelled titles, and in Far Far Away and the second single How Does It Feel, there was a melancholy and depth that was a million miles from Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me.
When the film was released, it was largely dismissed (though rather surprisingly, Michael Billington – who reviewed cinema for the Illustrated London News, as well as theatre for this paper – quite enjoyed it). Easlea aside, it didn’t really connect with the band’s young fans, rather inviting the question: did no one ever stop to think they should have made a film for 12-year-olds?
“I don’t remember anyone saying that. Never a single conversation about it,” Loncraine says. Powell agrees, adding: “We said we didn’t want to do a run-around, jump-around film. But it really did go against us.”
“There was some concern,” Birkin suggests. “But Chas Chandler had faith in us and he certainly liked the idea that this would be a different kind of movie.”
Fifty years on, though, both movie and album are regarded as high points in Slade’s career: Mark Kermode even described the film as “the Citizen Kane of rock movies”. Both Loncraine and Birkin think that’s rather overstating things, but they are pleased with its reassessment.
Easlea ended up writing Whatever Happened to Slade?, the definitive biography of the band. He now thinks Slade in Flame is a landmark – “I genuinely think this will be the thing that people will look at for posterity’s sake with the group” – and argues that it rings true because the music industry remains just as ruthless: “You could put it in today’s setting and it would be almost exactly as it was then.”
And, Easlea notes, it maybe wasn’t quite the career killer that has been suggested: perhaps more detrimental to their career at home was the fact they spent most of 1974, 75 and 76 touring America and ignoring their domestic audience.
“I’m still proud of it,” says Powell. “I’m still glad we did what we did.”