Published in Shindig! Magazine in 2016
Beginning in 1966 four blokes from the West Midlands set about turning themselves into the voice of urban working class youth. These were the days when the word aggro found common usage and Saturday nights meant drinking, shagging and fighting. As the post war settlement of full employment and social order disintegrated they would hone a sound that came to capture the popular zeitgeist. Noddy Holder talks to Shindig! about hard work, creativity, playing in cages and the timely intervention of the music supremo that was Chas Chandler.
Slade nearly did not happen at all. The initial approaches by Dave Hill and Don Powell to bring Noddy Holder into their band the N’ Betweens were met with rejection. Noddy liked Don but was not sure about Dave, who seemed aloof. Noddy also harboured a desire to be the sole front man, which was the reason he left his previous band, Steve Bretts’ The Mavericks. The N’ Betweens already had a vocalist in place, a blues man called Johnny Howles, but it quickly became clear his days were numbered. “For a short time we had two vocalists. There was the original N’ Betweens vocalist, who was a great vocalist, but he was a blues man. He carried on doing that material in the band and I came in fresh to do the other half of the show. The was some friction because they’d split the original band up so the vocalist was just there to see out the contracts they’d already got booked in. Once that was over, after about the first three or four months or so, he left and I took over all the vocal duties then,” explains Noddy. Eventually Noddy also came to realise that Dave’s manner was nothing personal but simply his personality. It was how he was with everyone.
Over the next few years they would pursue the often grim task of earning a crust as professional musicians with the commitment it demanded. This was model that Noddy knew well already. “When I played in earlier bands, before the N’ Betweens, and we played in Germany you could, over a weekend, be playing fourteen sets a day. Saturdays you’d start off at two or three in the afternoon and you’ve be going till four or five the next morning, playing forty five minutes on and fifteen minutes break. So your earned your crust and learned your chops and in that way the bands learnt to play tight. And that carried on to when I joined Don and Dave. They’d already auditioned Jim and got him in to the band. He was still at school at the time. Don and Dave were think of and breaking away from the blues that they had been playing with the original N’ Betweens. In those days to make a living if you were a professional musician you had to do a little bit of everything and everything to get as much work in as you can. Certainly there was a big circuit of places you could play all around the country. If you wanted to survive and you’d obviously got higher purchase on your guitar and amplifier. You always wanted to update you equipment. You had to buy new tyres for the van and whatever else and repairs. So you keep working to earn money. So you tried to get in as many gigs as possible and even in those days, when we formed the line up that eventually became Slade in 1966 and we could be playing anywhere: local town halls, ballrooms working men’s clubs, sometimes factory dos at the local factory christmas ball or at the local university freshers or Christmas ball. But really you had to have long sets and in those days we were doing sometimes two one and half hour sets a night. Depending on the venue you were in,what sort of audience you’d got that night and how long you had to play, you had to have a vast repertoire of material that suited all shapes and sizes and all genres of music.”
Clothes, something that would serve to crystallise the band’s image, for better and for worse, in years to come, was an early priority for the new N’ Betweens. “The first thing we did was shop for new outfits. We didn’t want people to think we were the old band and we needed a new look. The N’ Betweens had always worn the blues uniform of checked shirts and waist coats but we ditched those and went for something no one else was wearing. We wanted to shock people. Jimmy was flabbergasted when he saw what Dave and I bought. He thought we were joking. We egged each other on choosing the most garish, far out clothes we could find, the most colourful. I of chose some sort of a long tartan jacket thing and I think Dave got this purple coat made of velvet with a turned up collar,” says Noddy of their crazy shopping trip.
“At that time we were doing R&B, Motown, Stax songs, interspersed with some pop songs and chart hits of the day. Some James Brown, Chuck Berry, Little Richard Songs all sort of different stuff just to cater for the particular audience we were playing to. I was used to doing that because of the bands I’d had previously. I could actually vocalise on all this material, the whole gambit really.” This variety found its first natural home in the pubs and clubs of Walsall. It was here that the band began to develop the audience participation that would become both a hallmark of their shows and a driver of their success. A lively and well established tradition already existed in the local working men’s hostelries of the Black Country for mixed cabaret shows. Here music, stand up, dancing, strippers and a range of other entertainments all kept the punters happy. In addition to what Holder describes as the “bread and butter gigs”, at pubs like Walsall’s George Hotel and the Parkhall and Connaught Hotels in Wolverhampton, the N’ Betweens often put on special Sunday shows called The Sunday Service. For these Holder would come on stage dressed as a vicar and tell dirty jokes between the songs. “These dirty gags got the audience involved, but we stayed clear of the cabaret stuff other bands were doing, such as impersonations,” explains Holder. “I always encouraged audience participation. We were pretty raucous and I’d get punters on stage to sing with us.”
Things were not always congenial, however, and violence and fights were a fact of life as the good mood and bon homie could quickly evaporate. “You encountered fighting all round the country. The lads were out from work and people were let lose from their working week on a Saturday night. They wanted to spend their wages and all they wanted to do was drink and shag and fight. In the Midlands there was one venue where we actually played in cage but there was fighting in a lot of venues. You could set your watch by it. There’d be a certain point in the night where someone would an argument in the crowd over a girl, where somebody had danced with someone else’s girl and the boyfriend would take umbrage. The fight’d break out and it would be like a wild west fight. There’d be chairs going across. But we were used to it and it stood is in good stead for later on, because if you can play a Saturday night in a Black Country pub that’s a rough pub and you can handle the crowd in a pub like that you can handle a crowd anywhere in the world,” explains Holder. The bands first big gig came when they played support to Cream at Wolverhampton Civic Hall. After this they could be found on the bill with most the big names that swept through the Black Country, including The Move and John Mayall’s Blues Breakers.
Gigging regularly around the country the N’ Betweens built up a solid following for their live shows and, with the departure of Johnny Howles, they became a four piece for the first time in Plymouth. Their exposure to other groups was a learning experience and it quickly became apparent that a key factor was gear. A clever piece of technical trickery, advanced for the time, would solve the problem of rudimentary equipment and help create what would become their trade mark sound. “We still had pretty basic gear. Our volume had been flat out since the beginning because the audience loved it. Our aim was always to hit people right between the eyes. That was when we came up with a brilliant trick. And it was a very simple idea actually. Me and the roadie who drove us around at the time, Graham Swinerton, or Swin, who came up with it really. Because we couldn’t afford two amplified speakers each side of the stage each we thought we’d just take a speaker out of each cabinet and have a wire going across and wire the speakers up to the amplifier. So Dave, in his cabinet would have one of my speakers and one of his own and on the other side of the stage it’d be my amp and I’d have one of Dave speakers and it was the same with all of us. So wherever you were standing, and don’t forget we were doing small places at this time, people didn’t understand how, if they were standing near the stage that the could hear all the sound. Because most bands, if you stood in front of the bass player all you could hear was the bass player and the same with guitar and drums. With this set up it was possible to hear all of us wherever you stood in front of the stage. And it was just simply that we’d linked the speakers up in each cabinet, like an early stereo system. We carried that on all through our careers. It was a dead simple idea but people never sussed it. Other bands used to watch us and ask how do you do it? People couldn’t understand how we managed to be so loud with such small equipment and how the sound was interspersed across the stage.”
Alongside these sneaky, back stage interventions, ground breaking musical arrangements were also to play a significant in the emerging power of the band, with a plan to play using bass and guitars, to all play lead in harmony, in a different way to anyone else at the time. “That was the original idea in the formation of the band. Dave and I discussed it right at the beginning. He said he liked the idea of having more than one lead player. Dave wasn’t your standard guitar player. At the time he had a Burns Split Sonic guitar which the top three strings and the bottom three strings, on the pick ups, were amplified separately within the workings of the guitar. And he used to play a lot of octave work. The Split Sonic sound gave you a different sound from the top strings to the bottom strings because the pick ups were wired that way. It was revolutionary thing that Burns guitars did. So he’d play the lead like that. Also I’d play the licks, because I’d been a lead guitarist in my previous band, and in addition to this you had Jim who played bass like a lead guitar. The idea was that the three licks were all going at the same time. A lot our arrangements were based on that sort of format. So for example, we’d be doing a Motown song and we’d be doing the orchestra parts and the brass parts on guitar licks. And it became a sort of style that we developed. Same if we did rock and roll or anything. All three of us would be playing in harmonies and unison and so it gave this big thick, multitrack sound. And then I’d break off for the singing parts and with Motown type material I’d be doing the off beat with my guitar. So all our arrangements were gauged for the instrumentation that was on the record but adapted to guitars. That was how we developed. We could it with any material and that became our style when we eventually came to write our own material. Early on we weren’t writing any of our own stuff in those first two or three years that we were together.”
Their skill as musicians, coupled with their unique and powerful live sound, attracted the attention of one of music’s great impresarios in the form of Kim
Fowley, who reputedly described the N’ Betweens as being the best live band around in 1966, on a par with The Who. Noddy describes their encounter with a flamboyant and eccentric figure who had plans for the band from the moment he saw them: “He was a typical show biz guy. He was a great guy. We’d only been together six months and we went and played this club in Oxford Street called Tiles. It was an all nighter. And we were opening at that time for Chrispian St Peters who’d had a hit. Again, we were doing two or three sets. In the middle of the hall, which was a long narrow ballroom type place, we see this tall skinny guy freaking around, doing freaky dancing and wearing freaking clothes. And we thought, who is this guy, showing off in the middle of the club? Anyway he came back to the dressing room after the set to meet us and we got chatting and it was then that we realised it was Kim Fowley. He introduced himself and he was saying: “You guys are fantastic. I love what you do. You’re so unusual to any other band that’s around. You project.” That was his thing “project”. He wanted to make us big stars. He wanted to take us to America. He’d got all the chat and everything and he took us down to Regent Sound in Denmark Street for a day to cut some tracks, one of which was our very first single as the N’ Betweens. It was a song called ‘Called You Better Run’, which was a Young Rascals record which had been a monster hit in America but never was a hit the UK. We got on like a house on fire. He was our sort of guy. He as flamboyant, he was go getting and he got us a deal for the single to come out on EMI. The single made it to number one in the Midlands charts but we had no idea. We hoped it would make us famous. We were very green but we were pleased just to have record out on a label after such a short time together. Kim said to us: “I’m gonna take you to America and you’re gonna be Them!” And we said: “Oh no we’re not!” It was a thing people did at the time. It wasn’t unusual for bands to go over, if the original band had broken up and new band would come in their place. So it wasn’t unusual, but we said no way. We’re gonna do what we are gonna do. We’re not going to go out and be somebody else. But we got on great with him and he thought like a pop guy who thought in terms of record sales and mass radio play. We rarely saw him after our day in the studio and he was back in States before the single came out but we met him lots of times afterwards over the years. In a hotel in Munich once and the lift doors opened and there was Kim. At the time he was producing Nana Mouskouri and he come out and he’d got a suit on and everything. Nothing like we knew him as. He come out and he went: “You guys! I told you you’d make it. You project!”
The EMI deal was dependent on Kim Fowley’s involvement and with him out of the picture and back home in the States they lost interest. The N’ Betweens did get one more taste of what life with EMI could have been like when they were taken to Abbey Road to cut a couple of tracks. As soon as they got there they knew the Beatles were in the building because their black Minis were outside. “We didn’t see them, but we could hear all this weird stuff coming out of the control room next door. They were experimenting with tapes. It just sounded really bizarre to us, but we were thrilled to be in the same studio as them.”
The foreign gig circuit beckoned and the N’ Betweens found themselves heading for Germany and the Star Palace in Kiel. A popular venue with English bands the N’ Betweens followed a well trod route, taking a ferry to Holland followed by a long drive to Hamburg and then north to the coast. Made in the group’s beat up old J2 van called Betsy, Holder describes the trip as being “hell”. Once they arrived conditions did not improve. Due to over crowding at the in-house dormitory at the club, which were shared with other acts, the band had to sleep on a stairwell. In addition to this the club owner was reluctant to pay and often sought excuses for docking the groups pay. A violent scene, with gun shots fired in the club and fights regularly breaking out on the dance floor Noddy, Don, Dave and Jim hoped they could rely on their high volume sound to keep audience in check. Unfortunately, and this is probably where all the money meant for the bands had gone, the club owner had bought an back line of expensive Fender amps that he was keen to protect. “He used to call them his boxes. They really were his pride and joy. He kept telling us to play quieter and to look after his boxes. He accused of breaking them and used this as an excuse for not paying us. He tried to give us dribs and drabs to keep us happy, but never gave us what he owed us. We worked from 8pm to 4am playing an hour on and an hour off, with another band.” Frustrated the band decided to leave for home early, but not before Noddy wrought his revenge on the owner’s little boxes by puncturing the speaker cones and fixing the fuses so they would blow.
Since the days of the original, pre Noddy, N’ Betweens the band’s booking agent had been Maurice Jones, who was with the Astra Agency. He later went on to form MCP. Always the black sheep of the agency, due to their raucous sound, choosing the right venue took a great deal of care, but soon a strange opportunity was to come the band’s way. “I was at home, at my mum’s, in the Midlands, when I got a call from Maurice. He had an offer of work. When he told me where, I thought I hadn’t heard him right. Someone wanted us to go out to the Bahamas. The Bahamas! We were taken out there by a guy from the West Midlands who was living there and he knew the band from before. We arrived and it was fantastic. All our food and accommodation was paid as well as a fee for playing there. We checked into this hotel. We’d never been in a place like this in our lives, we were four lads from the Midlands and we’d never stayed in such a posh hotel. You can imagine what it was like, right on the marina and Frank Sinatras yacht was parked outside the window and we had two big suites there with two of us sharing each suite. On the night we arrived we went to the local disco and there was an English band playing there and we thought that it was fantastic. The chicks at the disco were fantastic looking, great looking girls and it looked a great place to play. Including in the band on stage was Andy Scott who was later in Sweet. We thought we were going to playing in that sort of venue but come the next day they took us to the other end of the island where the local black people lived and where the black clubs were. This was where we were playing and it was literally a massive shack in the middle of a field. But it was popular venue where everybody went. We did long hours there again. Early on in the night up until about 11pm we’d play to the white American kids and tourists. So you’d be playing the pops of the day and few light R&B type songs. We’d be backing the limbo dancers and local singers and there was guy who painted himself silver.It was like a cabaret. Then at 12pm there was a curfew and all the white people would have to go back to their hotels and where they lived in the white section of the island and then the black audience would come in. In this club there was a jukebox in the corner full of James Brown, Otis Reading, Aretha Franklin. The black men and women in the Bahamas had never seen a band play this stuff live. Well this had been our bread and butter stuff for years. We knew all this material on the jukebox and of course they were flabbergasted walking in this club and a) seeing this band of white and b) the way we were dressed and c) we were playing this R&B material which they loved. James Brown was god on this island and we were doing James Brown stuff. So, we went a storm. We were learning so much. The American kids would bring us American records that they wanted us to learn to play. I mean we picked up Steppenwolfs Born To Be Wild and eventually brought that back to Britain. I hadn’t been out in Britain then. People thought it was one of our songs. A lot of stuff. There was Amboy Dukes songs. And we’d be bringing back some black stuff that hadn’t been released in the UK either. We came back with tons of new material,” says Holder.
Unfortunately, the promoter disappeared from the island, leaving the N’ Between’s large hotel bill unpaid. The band had to stay for a further three months, paying down their debt from the money they earned gigging and living in one small room in the staff quarters of the hotel. On their return to the UK, however, they had amassed a catalogue of new material, as yet unheard by the home audience, that would play an important role in the next phase of the bands development. With a new agent, “a local blagger” called Roger Allen, the band’s fortunes were about to improve. They now had new songs and a tight, intricate, powerful sound, that few bands could match live. Their new agent, who knew how to get into the offices of the music industry’s top people, soon worked his magic when he managed to get the band into the Marble Arch offices of Jack Baverstock the MD of Fortuna Records. They were immediately offered a week in the studio to record some of the songs they played on stage. “We recorded a couple of our own songs but mostly we played our favourite songs from our set. We were left to get on with it wight eh engineer. Jack would come down once a day for a few minutes to check up on us. We thought we were recording a demo but at the end of the week he announced he was going to release it as an album. We were flabbergasted. It was a right miss mash of material, not consistent at all. There was some Zappa, some Moody Blues, some Motown and some ballads. He told us nobody anywhere sounded like us, the way we played with the harmonies and intricate playing. He loved it.”
The thing that had to change was the name. In Baverstock’s opinion the name N’ Between made the band sound like they were bisexual. A few alternatives were suggested, including Knicky Knacky Noo, but eventually a name suggested by Baverstock’s secretary was chosen. That name, Ambrose Slade, came about due to the secretary’s peculiar habit of naming things like her handbag, her notebooks, even her pens. Although Noddy, Don,
Jim and Dave never found out which objects Ambrose and Slade were, they were so desperate for a proper record deal that they agreed to the name.
Thus far Ambrose Slade, as they now were, had remained resolutely a Midlands based band with a Midlands agency. Baverstock knew that if they were to be successful it was important to have a London agent at the very least. Roger was paid off with £300 and John Gunnell, who represented Georgie Fame, Alan Price and Geno Washington was asked to represent the band. Gunnell visited Fortuna’s offices to meet the band and brought with him a figure who was to be crucial in the next stage of the band’s career.
“We recognised Chas from the moment he walked through the door, from the Animals and Hendrix. As soon as they heard our album, Beginnings, they loved it and John said straight away that he was going to be our agent and fix us up some London dates. Chas said wanted to see us play live, but at that point we had no idea why. Later we found out that Hendrix had gone back to the States and that he was looking for new acts to manage. They’d just formed an agency and a management team together, working under the Robert Stigwood flag. Chas thought our music and that it isn’t like anything that is going around at the moment. But he said he wanted to see us play live. So he put us in this little club in New Bond Street called Rasputins, which was basically a disco. In those days bands would play in discos and the audience danced to the bands, not like they would in the rocky beat clubs. But in the discos they danced to the bands. He came down half through. He was walking down the stairs, it was an underground club, in the basement of this building, and he thought the records were on when he came in. But it was us half way through our set and he walking into the club and he saw that we were on stage. But the audience were all clamouring round us. They were dancing, but they were clamouring to the stage. It was an audience participation act even in those days, which nobody was doing that in London. He was flabbergasted and he said he hadn’t seen a reaction for a band in a club like that for years. And he said he sign us up the next day which he did.”
Beginnings was not a commercial success but this did not matter. It was regarded as a good first effort and helped the band secure better gigs. With Chas Chandler as their manager Ambrose Slade had stepped up a level and with the press agent, Keith Allen, on board efforts began to shape the image of the band to match and hone their sound. “Chas wasn’t bothered by the album’s lack of success. His interest was in singles. He told us we could be kings of the short pop song. His guidance was crucial after that. We were four naive lads from the Black Country. We’d done the rounds of playing live by that point so we knew what we were doing on stage and were well versed in how to handle an audience and how to work live and to get gigs. But from the point of view of taking the next step, of becoming professional in doing an album and using a recording studio as it should be used and getting hits, that was what Chas had the experience of that he could teach us.