Noddy says no to AC/DC
QUESTION Did Slade lead singer Noddy Holder almost join AC/DC?
Noddy Holder was famously asked to try out for the Australian supergroup, but never really considered it.
After the death of AC/dC lead singer Bon Scott from alcohol poisoning in 1980, the rest of the band decided to keep the show on the road.
As well as Noddy, several singers were considered, including Buzz Shearman of Canadian rockers Moxy, Alan Fryer of Australia’s Heaven, and Terry Slesser, formerly of Back Street Crawler.
Auditions were held in london, and it was Brian Johnson, formerly of the rock band Geordie, who won over the band.
‘yes. It is true. I was approached,’ said Noddy. ‘AC/dC did offer me the job and I turned it down. So they got the guy from the band Geordie, Brian Johnson, who sounds exactly like me anyway.’
Micky Smith, Birmingham.
QUESTION Which U.S. town appeared in the film In The Heat Of The Night?
oNe of the quirks of the 1967 film In The Heat of The Night is that it was set in the fictional town of Sparta, Mississippi, but filmed in Sparta, Illinois.
The film was directed by Canadian Norman Jewison, who had been blown away by a script that had been sent to him by Stirling Silliphant. It was an adaptation of a 1965 novel by John Ball about a black police detective who gets caught up in a murder investigation.
In the original novel, Virgil Tibbs is a homicide cop from Pasadena visiting his mother in Wells, South Carolina.
Stirling and Jewison relocated Virgil to Philadelphia, with the action taking place on a visit to his mother in Mississippi.
The first time we see Tibbs, he’s sitting in a railway station and all we hear is: ‘on your feet, boy!’ It’s a powerful opening line.
Having cast Sidney Poitier as Tibbs and rod Steiger as police chief Bill Gillespie, Jewison needed a filming location.
He ran into a problem as Poitier refused to go south of the Mason-dixon line — the traditional division between the former slave-owning states of the deep South and the free North.
In 1964, Poitier and his great friend, the singer and actor Harry Belafonte, had delivered $70,000 stuffed into a doctor’s bag to f und Mississippi’s Freedom Summer, a registration drive aimed at increasing the number of black voters.
The pair narrowly escaped a lynching, being chased by armed Ku Klux Klansmen while leaving Greenwood airport. Though they would later joke about the adventure in interviews, the incident clearly left its mark on Poitier.
looking for a suitable filming location, Jewison and his production team came across Sparta, Illinois, which had the right Southern feel.
Jewison recalled one of his production team complaining: ‘look at these water towers! They’ve got “Sparta” written all over them. It’s gonna be a job to try to paint over all of these.’
Jewison resolved the issue by changing the name of the fictional town from Wells to Sparta.
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