How Noddy and Big Ears made it as rock stars
Whenever the Seventies are depicted as the decade that taste forgot, it’s never long before an image pops up of Slade’s platformbooted, silver-suited lead guitarist Dave hill, whose flamboyant style practically defined ‘glam rock’.
hill’s most singular outfit, zany even by the standards of the era, came to be known as the ‘Metal nun’. he unveiled it on Top Of The Pops in 1973, for a performance of Cum On Feel The noize, one of the band’s six (artfully misspelt) UK no 1 hits.
The get-up was topped off with a flashing metallic wimple, which even the makers of Star Trek might have rejected as too odd by half. Yet we all knew, those of us glued to Top Of The Pops back then, that hill’s headdress wasn’t notably weirder than what lay underneath — a high, savage fringe crowning a distinctly feminine sheen of shoulder-length brown hair.
Slade fans also knew that hill didn’t just save his ostentation for the spotlight; he drove a rolls-royce sprayed gold with the number plate YOB 1 in homage to his self-styled nickname, ‘Superyob’. But it was mostly artifice. As this likeable autobiography shows, the council-estate boy from Wolverhampton, who co-formed the band that eventually became Slade, really wasn’t a yob.
During the band’s short skinhead phase in 1970, their manager booked them into a smart London hotel purely with the intention of getting them kicked out for misbehaving. reasoning that any publicity is good publicity, he wanted to generate some furious newspaper headlines.
But he couldn’t make them rowdy enough. They did devilishly shove some chairs into the hotel lift, but it wasn’t exactly on a par with Keith Moon of The Who reportedly driving a car into a holiday Inn swimming pool.
nor, unlike Moon and most of his ilk, did hill ever do hard drugs. At the height of his fame, he was still living at home in Wolverhampton with his parents. As for his long hair, that originally had a rather sweet purpose: to cover a pair of unusually large ears. In the late Sixties, with noddy holder as lead singer, the band might have called themselves noddy and Big ears — it wouldn’t have been any sillier than the name they did briefly choose: nicky nacky noo.
Mercifully, they dispensed with nicky nacky noo and restyled themselves as Ambrose Slade, suggested by a woman who worked for their record label.
She gave names to everything inanimate that she owned and had a purse called Ambrose and a mirror called Slade. But in due course, they dropped the Ambrose because too many people thought it was the name of the frontman — a mistake frequently made with Jethro Tull.
So now they were plain Slade — not that there was anything else remotely plain about them. And they had a place in the rock firmament even before they released their most enduring hit, Merry Xmas everybody, in December 1973. For millions of us, that song still summons the spirit of Christmas as powerfully as Silent night or even the John Lewis advert.
By the end of 1973, aged 27, hill finally
moved out of his childhood home and into a big house in leafy Solihull.
But living among middle-class doctors and accountants wasn’t really for him.
More uncomfortable still, there was a private girls’ school next door. Every time he arrived home during the day, he would be serenaded through the front door by shouts and screams.
He once came home from an overseas tour to find there had been a break-in. Nothing had been stolen; there was just a smell of cigarette smoke and a note saying: ‘We’re very sorry we got inside your house . . . we are really surprised because we don’t really like your house. We thought you would live in a silver one.’
They weren’t expecting fuddyduddy wallpaper, they wrote. Perhaps by way of protest, they left behind a picture of Donny Osmond.
Eventually, Hill moved back to Wolverhampton. Now aged 71, the man who bought his first guitar from a Kays catalogue for £7 and whose first musical inspiration was Hank Marvin of the Shadows has the satisfaction of knowing that he is an inspiration himself.
Noel Gallagher has provided an afterword for this book, in which he suggests that without Slade, there would have been no Oasis.
But this is not an unvarnished success story. In the Seventies, like plenty of British acts, Slade tried and failed to make it in America. By the time they returned, disco was king and the glam rock era was over.
Soon, Hill (who receives no royalties as Holder and Jim Lea wrote all the songs) was flat broke, reduced to hatching a scheme to rent out his gold Rolls-Royce for weddings, with him as the driver — ‘kind of “rent a pop star for the big day” ’.
Hill went on to suffer panic attacks, depression and a stroke. Yet his appetite for performing is undiminished: he and drummer Don Powell are still on the road as Slade II.
Moreover, he’s still with Jan, whom he married in 1973, and they live not half a mile from where he grew up.
You wouldn’t think it of the man in the metal nun garb, but he’s a conservative sort of fellow at heart.