A sell-out audience enjoyed a special screening of remastered cult classic Slade in Flame in Manchester at the weekend, diehard fans of the Black Country’s Finest getting to rub shoulders and trade tales and memories with Slade legend Noddy Holder, interviewed on stage by revered broadcaster and long-time friend Mark Radcliffe.

Geography defeated your scribe’s attendance, but WriteWyattUK’s discerning spies reported a rapturous response, the latest British Film Institute (BFI)-backed event seeing the 1975 epic – dubbed ‘the Citizen Kane of British pop movies’ by foremost film critic Mark Kermode – shown at premier arts centre HOME on Tony Wilson Place, midway between the Deansgate and Oxford Road railway hubs.

Back out on limited release around the UK – the film cleaned up for a 50^th anniversary re-issue campaign which also involves a first-time joint Blue-Ray and DVD release, as told in more detail in my February 2025 Slade in Flame anniversary feature – the screening was followed by a Q&A session, Mark and Nod proving to be on great form.

And I’m chuffed to hear that Mark, last featured on these pages in June 2019 after his touch and go battle with cancer (with that interview linked here) referred on stage to Wild! Wild! Wild! A People’s History of Slade, which both posed for photos with backstage (thanks there to the lovely Suzan Holder), as confirmed by Lancashire-born and bred, million-selling ‘poet, performer and average ukelele player’ Paul Cookson, who also happens to be Slade’s poet laureate as well as a member – alongside guitarist Les Glover, also on hand – of Don Powell’s Occasional Flames.

Les, featured in both my Slade and Jam books, told me, ‘Noddy did indeed mention the book, and how much he enjoyed it. Great afternoon, Mark Radcliffe was on top form too.’ And Paul, up from Nottinghamshire for the occasion, added, ‘The book was mentioned in more than passing as part of the introduction, Mark saying it was a great book written on behalf of the fans. I think he said something like ‘the people’s book for the people’s band’… and if he didn’t, I’m claiming the quote!’

I’m ‘avin’ that too, not least as it fits neatly with praise for the book  from Noddy Holder in an online interview with Australian broadcaster Sandy Kaye last July, as a guest on her rather marvellous A Breath of Fresh Air podcast (linked here), on the subject of publications about Slade.

Noddy, who of course has also spoken in public about his own battles with cancer, with both hugely indebted to specialist nursing staff at Manchester’s Christie Hospital, told Sandy, ‘There’s one out that I was given that the guy’s put together of all fans’ recollections of gigs they were at, and the book’s called Wild! Wild! Wild! It’s great to read what certain fans thought about you, and it’s very interesting. On this one, I’m getting a whole new perspective on what happened. It did touch my heart, actually. One fan wrote how he came to see us in the later days of the band, before I left in the early Nineties. He’d come to one of the last shows we’d done and was saying we were still as good as ever, and gave us a fabulous review. And he said the thing that touched him now is that it just reminds him of his mates when they were growing up.

“They were at school together and they would listen to the chart every Tuesday lunchtime to see where our record was in the chart, then they’d maybe save all their money to buy the new record, and the sacrifices they made between them – a gang of chaps… or girls included – to actually go out and buy your records, go out to see a gig. And he said all those guys now are dying and it just makes him cry when one of our records comes on, because he remembers his mates. It brings back to him the camaraderie of his mates. And that’s far more important to me than how many records a certain record sold. That was really what we were all about. Us and the audience were as one. It was our thing. It was Slade’s thing.

“It just brings it home to you how important a part we were to people’s lives, especially how gigantic we were at the time. Reading this book, it does bring it all back, because we were in a bubble, don’t forget, me and Dave {Hill} particularly. We couldn’t go out to the cinema. We couldn’t go out to shops or anything like that in those days. We were just too big. It was impossible to live a normal life. We were in this bubble, and we didn’t know really what was going on in the outside world. We knew our records were going to No.1, we knew we were selling out gigs, but we didn’t know to what extent and how big we were. I mean, I didn’t realise it, but today we’re told by statistics we were the biggest-selling UK singles band in the whole of the Seventies – we sold more records than anybody else in the Seventies, apparently including Bowie, Marc Bolan, and everybody else that was around. So, it’s incredible, these facts that come back to you.”

It seems apt too that this post has gone online a dozen years to the day after I uploaded my take on the pair’s May 2013 live date at the Charter Theatre in Preston, with that review linked here.

Furthermore, the day before Mark and Noddy’s event in Manchester, I had a brief catch-up with Slade’s legendary drummer Don Powell, at home in Denmark, after he sent me two lovely photographs of him with my Jam and Slade books.

Don features in both publications, not least supplying an afterword for Wild! Wild Wild! A People’s History of Slade (Spenwood Books, 2023, for which his occasional QSP bandmates and fellow glam legends Suzi Quatro and Andy Scott, of The Sweet, supply the foreword) and first-hand memories of two Jam live shows in Solid Bond In Your Heart: A People’s History of The Jam (Spenwood Books, 2025).

He was in London for the premiere of the newly remastered Slade in Flame at the BFI‘s South Bank base in central London on May 1^st, where Noddy Holder joined the afore-mentioned Mark Kermode, Slade in Flame director Richard Loncraine and accomplished actor Tom Conti, who plays upper crust Flame manager Robert Seymour in the film, in what proved to be his breakthrough cinematic role.

And as well as Don, the audience included fellow Slade legend Dave Hill, who recently announced details of his version of the original band, Dave Hill’s Slade, going out on their final UK tour later this year (after several dates this summer and autumn in mainland Europe), a 10-date festive stint starting at the White Rock in Hastings on November 28^th, Dave and co. bowing out on December 22^nd at the Ritz in Manchester, a short distance from HOME.

While it was beyond the point of ‘waiting for the family to arrive’ when I spoke to Don, a celebration about to take place for his grandson’s 12^th birthday near his home base in Silkeborg, he was his usual engaging self, although I got the impression that his beloved Hanne – the pair having met at a Slade II gig in her hometown a quarter of a century ago – was waiting patiently to start the car and get them on the road.

But the 78-year-old drumming legend still made time to ask about my recent move to West Cornwall, reminiscing about his childhood holidays in the area, then recalling what may have ended up in a disaster during a working holiday with old bandmate Dave Hill, touring with Slade II in 1993.

Don told me, re his childhood Cornish breaks, ‘I’ve a lot of good memories of all that. My schoolmate, who became our road manager, Swinn (Graham Swinnerton), his sister and her husband used to live in Hayle. I can still picture it, just on the outskirts. We used to spend our school holidays there.

‘I can’t remember which beach it was, but it was totally empty, no one there, and we’d go swimming… and the sea was freezing!’

I agreed with Don that it can be cold but told him I’d braved it the day before in St Ives Bay, my first swim of the year, telling him how refreshing it was, the tide out far enough to wander across between two stunning beaches, two of many within half an hour or so from my door.

‘Oh, it’s wonderful, I know, but I couldn’t believe it, and the waves are so high as well. Incredible. That reminds me of the last time we were in Australia…’

I felt a Don Powell anecdote coming on, and I wasn’t going to be disappointed.

‘We were based in Perth, out there for nearly a month, and there were three incredible beaches all within a 10 to 15-minute bus ride from the centre. But that was like getting into a bath, Malcolm.’

Don first visited Australia in early 1973 with Slade, in what turned out to be their most successful year, the band taking to the road Down Under with Status Quo, Lindisfarne and Caravan, amazed to find they were also big names there too, Slade Alive! enjoying a mighty long stint at the top of the Australian LP charts.

Then, not long after Don rejoined Dave Hill a few months beyond the official split with chief songwriters Noddy Holder and Jim Lea, he found himself back in Australia, 20 years after that first tour.

‘On one beach, again totally empty, there was white sand as far as you can see, the Indian Ocean, waves incredibly high, and I went swimming but got caught by this wave. They did warn me, saying, ‘Be careful, the sea is very strong.’ But this wave took me, I was like a little rag doll on this wave, and it broke on my shoulder.

‘Luckily, we had a couple of weeks off. I went back to the hotel and said I might need to see a doctor, went to the pharmacy, and the pharmacist had a look, saying if it does need treatment, they could send me to the hospital. Thankfully there was nothing broken, it was just badly bruised. He gave me some cream, but said, ‘Where did you go swimming?’ I told him and he said, ‘Did no one tell you?’ Oh, shit, what? He told me the sharks come really close inshore, there’s poisonous snakes, and – worst of all – saltwater crocodiles. He told me, ‘If they get you, you don’t get away!’

And there was me thinking you were going to mention the dreaded stingers – the box jellyfish.

‘Yeah, probably them too… and at that point I thought, ‘So that’s why the beach was empty!’ But you know that saying about mad dogs and Englishmen… well, that was me.’

Hardback copies of Wild! Wild! Wild! A People’s History of Slade are still available from myself (private message me) or publisher, Spenwood Books, at https://spenwoodbooks.com/product/wild-wild-wild/ and via various online retailers, bookshops and libraries. And if you’re overseas or fancy a paperback version, try http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wild-Peoples…/dp/1915858070

And for details of remaining UK screening and event dates relating to the BFI-remastered cut of Slade in Flame, and how to get hold of the newly released DVD and BluRay of the film, head here.

With extra thanks to Mark Radcliffe and a couple of mutual friends, to Nod and Suzan, and to Don, Hanne and Occasional Flames Les and Paul. Indebted to you all.