Songs of hate and sadness take over as a most joyful band splits

In contrast to most modern pop, Slade could induce ‘sweating, shuddering ecstasy’ in fans, writes Aidan Smith

It’s all over now, baby blue. The sad songs have won. New research has found that while pop music once echoed to a generally happy refrain, it’s all gloom and despair these days, often worse.

The study reveals a decline in positive words in lyrics such as “love” and “joy”, while down is on the up. Negative words like “pain” have become ever more popular and “hate” rears its ugly head at five times the frequency of 15 years ago.

How’s it come to this? I think back to my youth club discos and the DJ knowing the precise moment to pop Nilsson’s Without You onto the turntable – knowing that the clomp of fast-exiting platform shoes, leaving behind the faint waft of Charlie perfume irresistibly mixed with Bazooka Joe bubblegum, meant I’d been chucked again and that the refrain “Can’t live if living is without you” would be the perfect soundtrack to my vale of tears.

But these Friday nights always ended with an upbeat 45. A choon to send everyone home smiling and optimistic that soon – the very next Friday, perhaps – there would be someone new, somebody else to skweeze. No group, at that time or since, has done upbeatness better than Slade.

Imagine my shock, then, when on the day the study was published Slade announced they were no more. At first I wondered if the two things were linked – that the band still capable of cheering me up after almost half a century, to the extent that I would contemplate a fringed mullet even now, had decided that if all people wanted was mawkish self-obsession, bitterness and bile, they might as well clomp off themselves.

The truth, as is often the case, is more prosaic. Dave Hill has sacked

Don Powell, the only other remaining original member. In future there will be two Slades – Dave Hill’s Slade and, wait for it, Don Powell’s Slade – but really, the band as fondly remembered by me and anyone who skweezed their first plooks to the glam-rock stomp, are finished. It’s gudbuy to Slade.

Do you know how the end came? Via email. Which self-respecting rock star does that? We, the poor saps stuck in offices live by email so four working-class hooligans who can’t spell but know the secret of thundering No 1 hits, don’t have to. This may be bigger than just the demise of Slade. It could be the death of classic rock ’n’ roll behaviour.

I suppose, though, that Slade, while making an almighty din like classic rock ’n’ roll, didn’t always behave according to the hoary rulebook in their early 1970s heyday. Just as fellow glammers Roxy Music, those world-weary aesthetes, would redecorate hotel rooms rather than trash them, so Slade never threw a TV into a pool, with the band’s obits revealing that singer Noddy Holder used to carry a tool-set to fix faulty electrics and wobbly furniture, so leaving the place “nice” for the next guests.

They never suffered any of the time-honoured musical differences, at least not until now. Hit parade rivals Sweet were the ones for fights, flouncing-off and feuds which simmered for years. Glasgow-born singer Brian Connolly was the half-brother of Taggart actor Mark Mcmanus, he of the “there’s been a murder” catchphrase. The Sweet story turned very dark, but even though the other Slade originals, Noddy Holder and Jim Lea, quit back in the 1990s, this didn’t seem to involve any rancour.

So, it’s distressing to we fans that