Over the years Slade in Flame has been hailed as one of the greatest rock movies (albeit rarely seen or screened), up there with Perfomance and That’ll Be The Day.
Like those films, it has grittiness running through it like barbed wire through a stick of Blackpool rock. It’s raw and dark; very dark. Not glam at all. And wrapped up in its singular brilliance is the grim rather than glam fact that Slade in Flame tanked at the box office and almost tanked the career of the band it – sort of – celebrated.
There was one DVD release in the Noughties, which now goes for around £200 on Amazon. But now, on its 50th anniversary, Slade in Flame is coming to a cinema near you, if there is one, and in a restored Blu-ray/DVD edition with extras. They include a new commentary by director Richard Loncraine and film critic Mark Kermode, a lengthy making-of, a new short with Tom Conti, and an archival short featuring glam tailor Tommy Nutter. So if it comes your way, don’t miss out. It’s Slade, mate; get down and get with it.
Back in the day, Slade were the band that ruled the glam side of the seventies the way The Beatles did the sixties, with mirrored top hats, stacked heels, and a brilliant run of six No. 1 hits.
But after the Glam side came the downside. When Slade in Flame was released in 1975, it’s realism and cynicism about the business of success and failure in the music industry bombed with fans (though not with critics) who wanted and expected a stomping good time.
What they got were the harsh realities of class, power, and exploitation that didn’t really chime with how the band played and sounded on Top of the Pops. It was a vérité take on working-class 1970s England, too, beautifully filmed in all its fag-ash, red diesel glory, and featuring a band of musicians that could actually act.
Loncraine and screenwriter Andrew Birkin were inspired to make the movie while accompaning Slade on one of their US tours, listening to their stories and witnessing the goings-on of a seventies rock 'n' roll tour.
Back in England, the superb location filming by Withnail and I cinematographer Peter Hannan was done largely in Nottingham and Sheffield. Highlights include Nottingham’s Sherwood Rooms for the live footage, the now-demolished Kelvin Flats and the old slums of Hillsborough for peak working-class English grimness, as well as bits of Notting Hill and Willesden (where Noddy Holder’s character keeps his pigeons), Brighton’s Grand Hotel, and the rickety assemblages of Shivering Sands Army Fort off the Kent coast, where Screaming Lord Sutch had set up a pirate radio station in the mid-sixties.
Emperor Rosko and Tommy Vance both play themselves, while in his first screen role, Tom Conti displays some spectacular hair as the silky smooth, upper-middle class villain of the piece. The hard nut agent Ron Harding is played brilliantly by Johnny Shannon, who had portrayed crime boss Harry Flowers in Performance (and also appeared in That’ll Be The Day). Diana Dors’ volatile hubby Alan Lake (infamous for his a notoriously short fuse when drunk) played desperate, doomed club singer Jack Daniels.
With Holder, Dave Hill, Jim Lea and Don Powell ably and unfussily playing themselves – while avoiding even the tiniest hint of poptastic slapstick – Slade in Flame is a cautionary tale of the downsides of pop success. It has a great soundtrack, raw and convincingly shady characters, wonderfully shit-looking cars, teen glam fans in all their weird glory, and the kind of filming that preserves in celluloid what is now a far-distant, long-lost world.
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