Slade in Flame at 50: Noddy Holder, Tom Conti and director Richard Loncraine on the “Citizen Kane of British rock movies”

A gritty rags-to-riches rock musical with a strikingly sour aftertaste, Slade in Flame was a surprisingly bleak cinematic star vehicle for West Midlands glam-pop crowd-pleasers Slade. The film was a box office flop in 1975, but some critics praised its depth and sophistication. Over the last two decades, director Richard Loncraine’s debut feature has earned a growing cult reputation as an unsung classic, a potent blend of tender lyricism and bruising cynicism.

With a pristine new digital print back in cinemas, plus a deluxe new DVD/Blu-ray package, a film once deemed career suicide now packs a powerful punch, not just as a cautionary music-industry fable but as a stark social-realist document of thwarted working-class dreams, all set against a lost Britain of crumbling slum housing, shabby pubs and cramped council flats. Half a century later, Slade in Flame now feels like the first ever kitchen-sink Britpop biopic.

“When the film came out in ‘75, it didn’t really get the ratings we thought it would get from an audience point of view,” recalls 78-year-old Neville ‘Noddy’ Holder, Slade’s top-hatted, turbo-tonsilled frontman for 25 years. “But we knew it wasn’t going to be what the public expected of our quirky, cheeky-chappy image. They expected a comedy, a speeded-up-camerawork, running-around type of movie. What they got instead was a hard-hitting look behind the scenes in the rock’n’roll business, which I think was a bit of a shock for most of the public.”

Shot in 1974, but set in the late 1960s, Slade in Flame is rooted in an unnamed Midlands/Northern steel town. The story charts the rise of fictional band called Flame from lowly pub-rock hopefuls to major pop stars, only to be torn apart by internal feuds and shady businessmen. It was filmed in Sheffield, Nottingham, London and Brighton, in gaps between the band’s touring and recording commitments. 

Slade play slightly remixed versions of their real selves: Holder is boisterous showman Stoker, bass guitarist Jim Lea is moody serious songwriter Paul, guitarist Dave Hill is flamboyant “superyob” Barry, and drummer Don Powell the soft-spoken Charlie. Suave Scottish actor Tom Conti, in just his second film role, oozes Machiavellian charm as the band’s slick corporate manager Seymour. 

“He is the villain, but he doesn’t see it as villainy,” says the 83-year-old Conti. “It’s just business, as they say in the Mafia. He tried to package a rock group like a packet of peas or corn flakes. Of course, that’s tricky to do with humans.” Conti confesses he had never even heard of Slade when he was cast. “I was brought up on Mozart and Beethoven,” he laughs. “I knew Bing Crosby, that was about the size of it.”

Building on a four-year run of number one hits and chart-topping, gold-selling albums, Slade were at their commercial peak when they made Flame. Their manager, former Animals bass guitarist Chas Chandler, aspired to cinematic crossover success in the Beatles mode. Indeed, they initially mulled making a slapstick comedy titled The Quite-a-Mess Experiment, a punning allusion to vintage TV sci-fi series The Quatermass Experiment (1953), scripted by Chandler’s right-hand man John Steele. 

That was soon shelved, partly because Hill objected to his character being eaten by a triffid-like monster in the first act. But also because the band’s core songwriting duo, Holder and Lea, favoured a darker drama. “We didn’t want to make a comedy movie,” Holder explains. “Me and Jimmy particularly wanted to do a hard-hitting movie, something that we thought probably would stand the test of time.”

Chandler pitched the project to Goodtimes Enterprises, the independent British production company headed by Sandy Lieberson, David Puttnam and Gavrik Losey, son of legendary exiled director Joseph Losey. Goodtimes had already made several dark pop-world dramas, including Nic Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance (1970), which featured Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg, plus Michael Apted’s That’ll Be the Day (1973) and Stardust (1974), starring David Essex as a doomed rock superstar. 

Puttnam and Losey enlisted Loncraine and young screenwriter Andrew Birkin, brother of Jane, to craft Slade in Flame. “I guess Slade and Puttnam agreed that we could make something that was the other side of the coin,” recalls the 78-year-old Loncraine. “We were very lucky to get permission because most rock’n’roll companies would have wanted something glamorous, not dirty and dingy as our film was.”

After their initial screenplay was deemed too tame, Birkin and Loncraine were sent on tour with Slade for a crash course in road-hardened rock realism. “Andrew did a first draft, and that was thought to be not gritty enough,” Loncraine says. “So Andrew and I were packed on a plane, went off to America and toured with them for a number of weeks. Slade never really broke America. They were playing to half empty stadiums, which is never great for a sense of confidence. Andrew and I hung around and saw some pretty depressing stuff, travelling around in crew buses.”

“That two hours on stage is the glamorous part,” Holder explains. “The rest can be pretty hairy sometimes. Richard and Andrew came out with us. I think they lasted about two weeks on the road and then came back with nervous breakdowns.”

The final screenplay to Slade in Flame is packed with colourful stories drawn from a lawless era when the music industry was run by thuggish agents and “gangsters in dinner jackets”. Every plot twist, even a dramatic shooting incident at a pirate radio station located on Maunsell Fort in the Thames estuary, was rooted in real events.

“Every scene in the movie is true to some band,” says Holder. “Not Slade, particularly. Some of the scenes were Slade, but some were bands we knew, or bands we’d heard about, which we told Richard and Andrew. That pirate ship story was true. Two rival radio stations were at loggerheads with one another. I think they were a bit dodgy, owned by crooks, trying to get one another off the air. They were openly shot at in the Thames estuary. That did really happen in about 1966, 67.”

Birkin’s script may be bleak, but it is also peppered with deadpan humour. Loncraine is careful to credit the late Dave Humphreys, who went on to work on The Professionals, Minder and London’s Burning. “David wrote some wonderful gags in the film,” he says.

Despite sharing a screen with seasoned players including Conti, cockney heavyweight Johnny Shannon and Ken Colley of Star Wars fame, Slade mostly acquit themselves well as actors. “Noddy has got a sense of camera and a sense of theatre,” Loncraine says. “And Jim was playing himself, because he’s quite grumpy.” Conti, whose long career is garlanded with Oscar nominations and Tony awards, is complimentary about the band’s naturalistic performances. “They just talked, which is really the secret of interesting acting,” he says.

Powell’s zoned-out performance came with a tragic off-screen back-story. At the time of shooting, the drummer was still recovering from a car crash in Wolverhampton in July 1973 which killed his 20-year-old fiancée Angela Morris, leaving Powell in a coma. He struggled to remember his lines on set.

“He’d had this terrible road accident,” Loncraine recalls. “I used to have to tell him not only what part he was playing every morning, but who he was in the morning sometimes. He didn’t quite know where he was. He had a vacant quality sometimes. Actually there was a scene under a railway bridge with the old foreman from the steel mill, which I think they both play really well. Don has a sadness about him, which I think works.”

The shoot was not without its own backstage dramas. In one early scene, the famously pugnacious Chandler grew frustrated with Loncraine for not filming enough band close-ups, grabbing a hugely expensive Panavision camera and tossing it into a muddy garage forecourt. There were also tensions with co-star Alan Lake, a hot-tempered alcoholic who plays the original singer in an embryonic line-up of Flame. On the first day of shooting, he was almost fired for punching a bar owner who had withdrawn his offer of free drinks for the cast.

“Alan Lake grabbed him round the neck to punch him for shutting the bar,” Don Powell recalls in Chris Selby and Ian Edmundson’s forensically detailed book Slade in Flame at 50, published last year. “That’s when Richard Loncraine and Gavrik Losey, who directed the film, were going to fire him.” According to Powell, only a pleading intervention from Lake’s wife, veteran British screen queen Diana Dors, saved him from the chop. “He never touched another drop throughout the whole film after that,” the drummer reports.

Slade in Flame was accompanied by a best-selling novelisation written by John Pidgeon, and a lavishly produced soundtrack album that defied Slade’s upbeat party-band reputation. “I personally think it’s probably our best album,” Holder says today, though it proved a little too sophisticated for the band’s fans at the time, ending their run of chart-topping hits.

The album’s achingly lovely second single ‘How Does It Feel’, a bittersweet Beatle-ish ballad based on a piano melody composed by Lea at the age of 13, is now regarded as a classic, feted by famous fans including Noel Gallagher of Oasis. But 50 years ago, it was seen as a mistake.

“The rest of the band didn’t like it,” Holder shrugs. “Chas wasn’t mad on it. The record company didn’t really want to be putting it out as a single. There were only two people who liked it at the time, me and Jim. It was the first record we had in five years that didn’t make the top 3. It didn’t even make the top 10.”

Released in cinemas in early 1975 by Visual Programme Systems, the distribution arm of Goodtimes Enterprises, Slade in Flame earned mixed reviews, many of them positive, but failed to draw big crowds. Some rock historians blame the film’s alienating bleakness for the band’s commercial decline in the late 1970s, but there were other factors at play too, notably fickle pop fashion and Chandler’s doomed push to finally break Slade in America, which took them out of the UK for long periods.

“It did dent our career,” Holder argues. “But it stands up strong now. After 50 years, people look on it in a totally different light. I don’t think our image any more overshadows the story, the script, and the music in the movie. It’s been looked on with fresh eyes in the last 10, 15 years or so.”

Slade in Flame has indeed enjoyed a positive reassessment in recent decades. Film critic Mark Kermode memorably called it “the Citizen Kane of British rock movies”, though its raw proletarian poetry has more in common with the social realism of Ken Loach, Mike Leigh or Andrea Arnold than Orson Welles. A wistful canal-side exchange between Powell’s Charlie and his former steelworks boss could have been scripted by Alan Sillitoe, while an elegiac scene in Stoker’s pigeon coup is pure Loach. This is pop cinema with a heavy dose of kitchen-sink lyricism.

“What’s nice about seeing a film 50 years later is, it doesn’t hurt as much as it does when you get bad reviews six months after you made it,” Loncraine laughs. “It’s certainly matured. I think there’s an element of nostalgia for people. It’s a bit like looking at black-and-white photographs of the First World War. They don’t have to be very good photographs for them to be interesting.”

“It’s an historical document,” Holder nods. “That’s what was going on in the Midlands and the North of England at the time. The feel of the film, the look of the film, the atmosphere of the film, I think Richard captured it perfectly.”

Slade in Flame is back in cinemas from 2 May and released on BFI Blu-ray and DVD from 19 May.