FILTER SCREEN
Land of Nod
Remastered anniversary edition of Slade’s brilliant depiction of their own rise and demise.
By John Harris.
Blues from the Black Country: (main) Noddy Holder as Flame frontman Stoker; (insets, from top) Slade as Flame (from left) Holder, Don Powell, Jim Lea, Dave Hill; Powell as Charlie; Hill as Barry with Tom Conti as Flame’s agent Seymour.
Courtesy of BFI (4)
Slade In Flame
★★★★★
Dir. Richard Loncraine
BFI. DVD/BR
H ALF A CENTURY ago, plenty of Slade fans must have turned up at their local Gaumont or Odeon expecting the band’s only film to be some wham-bam glam fantasia. But the first five minutes of Slade In Flame served notice of something utterly different, via a run of startling imagery: a punch-up at a suburban wedding, the end of the day shift at a foundry, and drummer Don Powell – AKA “Charlie” – making his way up a steep street of terraced houses, in the sidecar of a motorbike. The latter journey was filmed in Sheffield: it suggests something almost Victorian, before the camera pans to a tower block, and reveals England in the mid ’70s, replete with a sour sense of shabbiness and disappointment.