Issue #162 – Slade In Flame
SLADE IN FLAME celebrates its 50th this year, but it was just one of the gritty pop culture flicks made by maverick production company Goodtimes Enterprises in the early ’70s. Cue Performance, Melody, That’ll Be The Day, Stardust and Lisztomania.
THOMAS PATTERSON talks to Flame’s director Richard Loncraine and screenwriter Ray Connolly
“Slade In Flame began filming just as we were finishing Stardust,” says Ray Connolly . “They were more realistic with their stuff on the road than we were. They were better at that. Flame was a really good film.”
The impetus for Slade In Flame came from Slade’s manager Chas Chandler: former member of The Animals, ex-Hendrix manager, and a head-bashing bruiser in the classic rock biz tradition. Slade were riding high as the chart kings of the era, and just as teen-friendly pop groups from previous eras like The Dave Clark Five had done, the natural step was to make a movie. Slade had apparently been slated to shoot a parody of the Quatermass films called The Quite A Mess Experiment, but instead of heading down the throwaway route, Chandler approached Goodtimes, perhaps inspired by the financial success of That’ll Be The Day. Ideas were batted around, and directing duties were handed to a young man who’d had an art show at the ICA alongside Yoko Ono and Allen Ginsberg while in his late teens before becoming a filmmaker: Richard Loncraine.
“It was my first movie, I was in my early 20s and very inexperienced,” Loncraine explains. “I went to art school and then got into The Royal College Film School and became a documentary maker. I’d only directed documentaries for the BBC on Tomorrow’s World and Radio Wonderful. Chas Chandler asked David Puttnam to make a film about Slade, and I came onboard. Originally, it was going to be a puff piece, and I wanted to make something grittier, something that wasn’t about the glamorous side, because there was nowhere to go with that story. To their credit, Chas and David both said, ‘Yeah, let’s go for it.’”
With Chandler and Slade signed up, Puttnam hooked Loncraine up with Andrew Birkin, who’d previously written The Pied Piper for Goodtimes. “Andrew lived in a semi-derelict pub in South London. He didn’t eat. He looked like a cadaver because all he would do was smoke cigarettes and drink black coffee all night. He was quite a strange creature but a very talented man.
“We both went to America and bummed around with Slade touring for a few weeks. Got some idea about what happened, and then got the script concocted.”
Based around Slade’s tour exploits and tales told to them by Noddy and the boys, the movie Birkin and Loncraine came up with involved a fictional band called Flame, full of band rivalries and scenes of still shocking brutality. “The script was so violent and heavy that there was pressure to lighten it up. I pulled in a very comedic man called Dave Humphries and he wrote some wonderful stuff.”
The film was shot on location, with devastating footage of the terraces of Sheffield being demolished in the name of progress. Production was overseen by producer Gavrik Losey, son of storied American director Joseph Losey, helping corral Slade members Dave Hill, Jim Lea, Don Powell and Noddy Holder into displaying proper acting chops. “Slade did very well, considering none of them are actors,” Loncraine agrees. “Noddy was the best. Don was difficult because he had had a very serious road accident where his girlfriend had died and he’d had some brain injuries, so some mornings he didn’t know not only who he was, but what part he was playing.”
Despite Don’s difficulties, the band are all terrific. Plaudits also go to Tom Conti as a smooth industry bigwig, and Cockney actor Johnny Shannon doing a riff on the same shady character he’d already played in That’ll Be The Day and Performance.
Recorded at Olympic Studios in Barnes, the soundtrack remains a marvel, anchored by barnstormers like ‘Them Kinda Monkeys Can’t Swing’ (more blistering than anything else in Slade’s catalogue), and in the wistful ‘How Does It Feel’, the greatest opener of any ’70s British movie (and a song that Oasis have clearly rinsed for all their ballads). The soundtrack hit shops in the November of ’74, a few months before the movie, while a novelisation written by journalist John Pidgeon had a print run of a whopping quarter of a million, giving fans the chance to check out the story in advance. The public was still unprepared.
“Slade In Flame was received quite badly,” says Loncraine. “It was the wrong movie for Slade because their fan base were teenage girls, who weren’t interested in the shitty side of the music business. The band were very brave in making it. I think they were happy with the film; they just weren’t happy that it didn’t increase their stature.”
To read the full article order issue #162
