With the release of a new box set of Slade live albums, Noddy Holder looks back over the band’s glittering career and recalls the shows that delivered the magic.

Words: Dave Ling

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Noddy Holder and (inset) Jim Lea recording at Command Studios, London, October 1971.

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By Noddy Holder’s own admission, Slade were “a bunch of show-offs”. But boy could they write a hit tune. Between 1971 and ’76 alone, the fourpiece from the Black Country notched 17 consecutive UK Top 20 smashes, including six Number Ones.

Just as importantly, they knew that live performance is what separates the men from the boys, and the women from the girls. Now, a newly compiled boxed set, All The World Is A Stage, which adds three never officially released performances – including a now-legendary rebirth at the 1980 Reading Festival – to a pair of existing live albums – reminds us of Slade’s peerless capacity to excite a live audience.

“Fans have been badgering us for years for things they hadn’t heard, and I’m really thrilled by the three tapes that were found, because not only is their quality great, they also sum up the various eras of Slade,” Slade’s former frontman Holder says. “For people that don’t know what we were about, here’s the place to start.”

If the exclusion from the box set of the band’s second live album, 1978’s Slade Alive, Vol 2, is confusing, then Holder is quick to explain: “We’ve already had a package that was a part of, and we could only include five discs. You know, some people have claimed that Volume 2 was done in a studio. Which is complete rubbish.”

With the discovery and release of those ‘lost’ tapes, might there exist other gems somewhere in the vaults?

“No,” Holder says immediately, then with a laugh: “Mind you, I didn’t think there were any before. So obviously I was wrong about that.”

Classic Rock joined the still whiskered Holder to look back at the early days of Slade and at those still electrifying live recordings.

Slade Alive!

Recorded at Command Studios, London, October 1971

As future generations of musicians will probably realise only with hindsight, there’s really only one way to become a good live band, and that’s by getting out there and playing live. There’s no substitute for getting in a van, playing gigs no matter what size and to whom, and learning how to make them better.

“Jim [Lea, bass and violin] came to us straight out of school,” Holder recalls. “But even before the line-up that people know us for, Dave [Hill, guitar] and Don [Powell, drums] had been in bands before, and so had I. I’d been playing live for three years. In the late 1960s, as the ‘N Betweens we played solidly for five years, and we would take any gig we could get, often for terrible money. We’d play ballrooms, pubs, universities and Working Men’s Clubs – anything. We went up to Scotland once every month – so often that it was sometimes assumed we were a Scottish band. One of the main reasons was they paid us in cash. Occasionally there were two gigs a night, sleeping in the van. But that’s how we learned our chops.