Fact #153765
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Short story:
Filming begins on the rock movie Slade In Flame, starring glam rock band Slade, on location in the UK. The film's £400,000 budget is largely raised by a combination of cash from Slade's manager Chas Chandler and from their record label, Polydor.
Full article:
John Steel (Director, Barn Productions) : Chas Chandler and me had been mates since the days when we were both in The Animals, so when he formed Barn Productions, I went to work with him on Slade as well. We were both big film fans, but the movie was really Chas's baby. The band had just had an amazing year with three No1 singles, so it was the perfect time to hit up Polydor for the money. I seem to remember £250,000 from them, but it was like money for toys because it was just something we really wanted to do.
Jimmy Lea (Slade) : As I understand it, Chas put a lot of his own money into the film as well, because the budget ended up being something like £400,000.
John Steel : We approached David Puttnam's company, Goldcrest, because they'd just done That'll Be The Day and that seemed to Chas and me more like what we wanted to do than the traditional rock movie. We wanted the real experience of working class lads from a northern town, going out and hitting it big, which was exactly what had happened with The Animals and with Slade.
Noddy Holder (Slade) : People wanted us to do a sort of slapstick Hard Day's Night type comedy but we really weren't keen. It seemed too obvious, so Chas commissioned a lot of script treatments. One of the first things we considered seriously was from John Steel, who came up with the idea of doing a spoof on the Quatermass films. I would have been Dr Quite-a-mess, which I was very keen on, but the monster killed Dave Hill in the first fifteen minutes so that ruled it out.
John Steel : Once we had Puttnam on board, he put us in touch with a young director, Richard Loncraine, who had only done adverts up to then, and Andrew Birkin, the brother of Jane, who came up with the script.
Jimmy Lea : They were both not long out of university and clearly didn't understand anything about us. Richard was so public school, I took an instant dislike to him.
Noddy Holder : We weren't happy with Andrew's script at first because it didn't feel authentic. It was an outsider's view of what life in a band was like. So we took him and Richard Loncraine on tour with us in America for six weeks so they could see it first hand.
Jimmy Lea : The first night they saw us play was in Cleveland and they came backstage afterwards. The first thing Richard did was apologise. He said, 'I had no idea how powerful you were'. From then, we started to build up a relationship.
Noddy Holder : After that, we would sit round and tell them stories of real things that had happened to us and things that happened to other bands, and they added all that into the original script to make it more realistic.
Jimmy Lea : By the time we got back to England, there was a mutual respect which hadn't been there at first. They set about knocking the script into shape while we were writing and recording the songs. Nod did lyrics and I would put the music together. Far Far Away was something he came up with in America. He had that line about the Mississippi and he was planning to call it Letting Loose Around The World because Far Far Away didn't come in until near the end, but I convinced him we should change it.
How Does It Feel was the very first song I'd ever written, years earlier, but it came in perfectly for the film with the addition of a middle eight that I came up with while sitting on the loo. John Lennon was doing Walls And Bridges in the next studio when Chas was mixing Standing On the Corner at The Power Plant in New York. One evening Lennon stuck his head round the door and said "Is this your new band, Chas? I like the singer. He sounds like me."
Noddy Holder : Once we thought the script rang true we went into production with it. I had reservations about it ending so bleak at first, but as it went on I really got into it. The basic story of a band, Flame, with working class roots making it big was definitely us and even things like the scene where I get trapped in a coffin really happened, except it was to Screaming Lord Sutch.
Jimmy Lea : I've always hated being recognised in public, hated the whole fame side of success. So, the night before we started filming I didn't sleep a wink. I was terrified of having a camera focussed on me. I've never been so scared in all my life, but I never let on to the others.
Noddy Holder : The roles were tailored to our own personalities. Jim couldn't stand doing publicity stunts in real life, so he was given the same trait in the film. My character, Stoker, was very easy-going at the start, which is much the way I am, but as the film gets darker and more violent towards the end, the character changes so that's where I actually got to do some proper acting.
Ken Colley (actor) : Chas Chandler was quite a commanding presence on the set. He told me that when The Animals ended, he had been left in Los Angeles with a broken marriage, bad health and $5,000 in his pocket, and he swore he was never going to let anything like that ever happen to him again. That's why a film showing the contractual scheming and the underhanded side of the music business appealed to him.
Noddy Holder : Because Chas had raised the cash, and he saw it as the pinnacle of our career, he was on the set every day and he ruled with a rod of iron. He would be having big bust-ups with Richard, and with the backers, but we were kept away from all that.
Gavrick Losey (line director) : One of the main disputes was between Chas and Richard over the logo for the film. Richard had a background in design and he felt it was too heavy and static, but it had been designed by one of Chas's friends, and he just wouldn't let go of it.
John Steel : Chas and I threw ourselves into it. We were constantly chipping in at the script meetings, changing things to make it real. The violent Northern manager, for example, had a lot in common with The Animals' manager Mike Jeffries, who always had a lot of heavies around him that you didn't mess with. The film people wanted the heavies to be stereotypical thugs with broken noses and cauliflower ears but we remembered how the most dangerous guy in Newcastle was Mike's head of security, a bloke called Dave Finlay who was good looking, sharp dresser, a real hit with the ladies. So we got that changed. The film production people called us 'the money' and they definitely resented that we insisted on having control over it but we couldn't let them do it their way. It wouldn't have been right.
Gavrick Losey : I had discussions with David Puttnam, while we were making Flame, that it was in effect the second part of what could have been a trilogy showing the whole classic progression of a rock band. That'll Be The Day is a band becoming successful, Slade In Flame is the band falling apart at the peak of success, and Stardust is the dominant member of the group going on to his solo career.
Don Powell (Slade) : At first, we were very worried that the professional actors might look down on us but it wasn't really like acting, more just talking among ourselves. When we were with the actors it did seem a little strange at first and for the first couple of days we found ourselves fluffing lines and missing cues because of it.
Noddy Holder : As we weren't trained actors, it was all written so that we didn't have any long speeches to deliver in one go. I took it all as a bit of a giggle but Jim got very intense about his character.
Ken Colley : I was quite pleasantly surprised by how well the band coped. They were playing parts that they understood very well from real life, four young men on the crest of a wave, so a lot of what they knew about how it really was ended up in the film. As much as them learning from us, I think we learned a lot from them.
Jimmy Lea : It was pretty hair-raising because Chas and John would be up with Andrew the night before re-writing the script to make the dialogue sound like the way we speak. So we literally wouldn't know our lines until the day we said them. It was bad for all of us but, after his accident in 1973, Don had been left with no short-term memory so it was almost impossible for him to learn his lines.
Noddy Holder : It was fascinating to work with proper actors, like Alan Lake, who was married to Diana Dors. Him and Leapy Lea had just come out of jail (outlaw) for knifing someone who had attacked Diana, but he was the one who kept us all laughing in the long boring bits on the set when nothing was happening.
John Steel : There was a scene early on in The Revolution Club in London which was the first day of shooting for Alan. At lunchtime he went out for a beer with the band and when he came back, he had totally changed. The drink turned him into this nightmare character. For no obvious reason, he took a dislike to the owner of the club and got him in a headlock. This bloke was spluttering and turning purple and we were all terrified. It was Richard Loncraine who eventually talked him down, and then Chas and a couple of others restrained him.
Jimmy Lea : We had to give him an ultimatum that if he did anything like it again, he'd be off the film and he'd never work again. He was good as gold after that.
John Steel : I had a cameo role as the drummer in an early version of the band. They were playing at a wedding with this crap cabaret singer, Alan Lake's character. One of the guests thinks Alan is making a pass at his wife, so he dives at the stage and crashes into my drumkit. They wanted a shot of me in pain amid all the debris, but every time they zoomed in on my face I was cracked up laughing. We re-shot it umpteen times but in the end we had to do without a close up.
Tommy Vance (deejay) : I used to go and see Slade in the clubs in Wolverhampton when they were still called Ambrose Slade, so when there was a part in the movie for a deejay, my old mate Chas Chandler rang up and offered me £100 a day. He always was a tight bastard, Chas, but we loved him. I seem to remember he bought me one Newcastle Brown Ale in the whole three days I was involved in filming.
John Steel : Tom Conti, who played their manager, was really quite unknown. I remember talking to him on the first day of shooting and he said "Do you mean this is actually going to be released in the cinemas?" Everything he'd done before was, like, little art house movies.
Noddy Holder : I had to pick up quite a few extra skills. I had to learn to play the spoons for a scene where we get sent to prison. Then there's a scene where I'm auctioning plates in a street market and I had to go down the East End of London one Sunday morning and learn how to throw the plates up and deliver all the patter at the same time. I was also supposed to be a pigeon fancier, but I'd never touched a pigeon in my life, so I had to go off to a pigeon loft and learn how to handle them. I ended up totally covered in pigeon shit for my trouble.
The hardest thing to get used to was the early mornings. We weren't used to getting up in time for a 6.30am make-up call, and it was incredibly confusing at first to realise that scenes would be shot in the wrong order, and that you had to do cutaways and reaction shots and all that.
Jimmy Lea : I've always believed that creative people need their sleep and getting up early made me ill. I remember going berserk at one of the production crew one day because we were there at the crack of dawn and nobody else had turned up, so we could do nothing except sit round and drink tea.
Tommy Vance : Richard Loncraine was very willing to take notice of our suggestions. The first day I filmed with them was in a studio off Portobello Road. We did interiors for a scene where a pirate radio station is attacked by gunmen. I had to lie down on ·the floor with this actor while bullets riccocheted above our heads and little explosive devices went off around us. The actor had to say "Gimme that mic," and according to the script I would just pass it over. But I pointed out that, for a deejay, his microphone is second only in importance to his penis and no jock in his right mind would ever give up the microphone at such a historic and newsworthy moment. So we changed the script to make the guy wrestle the mic away from me. It got quite a laugh at the premiere.
Noddy Holder : Having the pirate station attacked by gunmen may seem a bit far-fetched but, again, it was based on a real incident that Chas knew about.
John Steel : It actually happened in 1966 to Radio City, which was owned by a rock band manager called Reg Calvert, who ended up dead of shotgun wounds a few days after his station was invaded.
Tommy Vance : The day after doing the interiors, I was flown out on a helicopter to a disused fort in the Thames Estuary. There was still evidence of it having been a radio station, but it was long since deserted and quite spooky. The boys had to be seen arriving on a boat, so they came on a tiny pilot launch and, believe me, they didn't look too good as they clambered on board.
Noddy Holder : That was the scariest thing, going out to the pirate station. We all climbed into this little boat but the water was really choppy and when we got to this old tower, we had to get from the boat onto this rusty iron ladder and clamber up. We all found it nerve-wracking but Dave was terrified of heights so he really hated it.
John Steel : One of the guys from the crew literally had to push him up the ladder. As if that wasn't bad enough, the film people had built a mock-up helicopter landing pad out of wood, painted to look like a proper steel one. The chopper pilot refused to land on it and just hovered in the air above it. So now Dave had to go out onto the highest part of the platform, on this rickety wooden pad, blown about by the downdraft and try to jump up into the helicopter. He was petrifed.
Noddy Holder : Once we started going out on location, Andrew Birkin kept disappearing off to visit local graveyards. He had some sort of morbid fascination and he kept urns on his mantelpiece with the ashes of dead people in them.
Johnny Steel : There was a car chase where one car was supposed to end up upside down. It was this vintage pink Cadillac which you could barely get to go, but it looked great. It was so heavy that the ramp kept collapsing, and it just wouldn't turn over. They kept building higher ramps but the car always righted itself.
Jimmy Lea : In the end, the stunt drivers rather sheepishly admitted defeat and it was Gavrick Losey, the producer, who got in and did it. He didn't turn it right over, but he did get it to end up on its side and burst into flames, which must have been embarassing for the stunt drivers.
John Steel : We shot a lot of exteriors around Sheffield, and in particular at a ghastly, run-down block of flats where Don was supposed to be living. I'll never forget we were trying to shoot one scene, out in the cold, and this woman came by with a baby in a pushchair. She looked at us in amazement and said "You wouldn't want to take pictures of it if you had to live here."
Jimmy Lea : For the big concert scenes, which we did at The Rainbow in London and The Hammersmith Palais, we sent a letter out to the fan club and told them just to turn up on the day for a free Slade gig. The road crew was our real crew and the scenes of mobbing and fans being got off stage were all for real.
Noddy Holder : One thing I thought was totally over the top was that I had a microphone that shot flames out of the end of it. It seemed ridiculous. No way would I ever have done anything like that, but then two years later Kiss started doing exactly the same thing on stage except that the flames came out of a guitar. The oddest thing, though, was that the characters started to take us over. We all start off fairly easy going, which is how we really were, but as the film gets blacker, we start arguing all the time, and we found that we got to be like that off the set as well. We'd be having dinner and we'd start to fight about nothing at all, just like in the film. I suppose if you do this character day in and day out, you just eventually get to be like it. My favourite scenes are the ones near the end, going up in the lift at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, with me and Jimmy deciding that we have to split the band up. And the next morning when I'm waking up after the big party in this eerily lit bedroom.
Jimmy Lea : The lift scene had quite an effect on us. I actually cried when I was delivering that line "I've had enough". I think there's quite a difference between actors and pop stars though. On the last day of shooting, a lot of the crew came up and said they'd never worked with anybody like us and I think that was because we'd queue up for pie and custard with them and just muck in. They weren't used to that.
Noddy Holder : We had problems with the British Board of Film Censors. They wanted to give it an X rating for violence, which would have meant we couldn't reach the audience we wanted. We had to chop out some of the more graphic stuff from a scene where Alan Lake got his feet smashed in with shovels, and some more from a bit where the heavies break into Tom Conti's house and splatter slogans in blood all over his kids' bedroom walls.
Jimmy Lea : Soon after we finished filming, I remember seeing the rough cut of Stardust, which Puttnam was making around the same time and thinking "Oh God, we've made the same film." I had a real argument with Puttnam about it, but he insisted there was no similarity. We were all worried. After all, if it went badly, it could really damage our career.
John Steel : We'd been seeing rushes every day and they looked OK but somehow, when it was all edited together, it was a bit of an anti-climax. I felt like we'd ended up with a b-movie.
Jimmy Lea : The day before the premiere, I was sitting in the Portman Hotel with my mum, when Barry Norman came on the tv and said "For all its failings, Slade In Flame has a gritty realism that you can't escape." I breathed a huge sigh of relief.
Noddy Holder : We arrived at the premier, in the old Astoria at Victoria, on a fire engine. Esther Rantzen, Diana Dors, Roger Daltrey, all kinds of people were there.
Jimmy Lea : I ran into Alan Lake that night and asked him what all that business had been about in The Revolution and he said it was nerves. He'd been so wound up about appearing with a bunch of rock stars and that was his way out of it. That was weird because I'd never thought of us as being intimidating at all.
Noddy Holder : What really amused me was that the balcony was full of music business people and the stalls was fans, so the laughs and the gasps from upstairs were totally different from downstairs. The fans enjoyed it on the level of it being a good film but the business types were recognising who the people in the film were based on.
Jimmy Lea : There's a scene where Tom Conti fluffed one of his lines. He was supposed to talk about making a deal with Polydor but, by mistake, he said CBS. All the Polydor people at the premiere gave quite a gasp at that. The next day, we did Top Of The Pops and the producer, Robin Nash, bounced up to us and said "Hello, Slade, I saw your film last night. Everyone came to laugh, but they couldn't. Even so, I think you've made a mistake. It's not what the public wants. Mark my words."
John Steele : When I look back, I realise we achieved a lot. The critics were very good to it. We even got one over on Barry Norman. Time Out said it was "tightly scripted and directed" but apart from anything else, it launched an amazing number of careers. Tom Conti has become one of Britain's best known actors, Andrew Birkin went on to write one of The Omen movies and The Cement Garden, and Richard Loncraine has just done Richard III with Kenneth Branagh.
Jimmy Lea : I remember Chas saying to me afterwards that he thought Richard Loncraine would love it if I left the band in real life, like I'd done in the film but the strange thing was that right after filming ended, we went off on a tour of Europe and whenever Noddy and I would be in a lift together it was like we were re-living that scene. For a while, it began to feel like the film had taken over our real lives.
(Source : interviews and research conducted by Johnny Black for Q magazine in 1999. This is an extended version of the feature which appeared in Q.)
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Jimmy Lea (Slade) : As I understand it, Chas put a lot of his own money into the film as well, because the budget ended up being something like £400,000.
John Steel : We approached David Puttnam's company, Goldcrest, because they'd just done That'll Be The Day and that seemed to Chas and me more like what we wanted to do than the traditional rock movie. We wanted the real experience of working class lads from a northern town, going out and hitting it big, which was exactly what had happened with The Animals and with Slade.
Noddy Holder (Slade) : People wanted us to do a sort of slapstick Hard Day's Night type comedy but we really weren't keen. It seemed too obvious, so Chas commissioned a lot of script treatments. One of the first things we considered seriously was from John Steel, who came up with the idea of doing a spoof on the Quatermass films. I would have been Dr Quite-a-mess, which I was very keen on, but the monster killed Dave Hill in the first fifteen minutes so that ruled it out.
John Steel : Once we had Puttnam on board, he put us in touch with a young director, Richard Loncraine, who had only done adverts up to then, and Andrew Birkin, the brother of Jane, who came up with the script.
Jimmy Lea : They were both not long out of university and clearly didn't understand anything about us. Richard was so public school, I took an instant dislike to him.
Noddy Holder : We weren't happy with Andrew's script at first because it didn't feel authentic. It was an outsider's view of what life in a band was like. So we took him and Richard Loncraine on tour with us in America for six weeks so they could see it first hand.
Jimmy Lea : The first night they saw us play was in Cleveland and they came backstage afterwards. The first thing Richard did was apologise. He said, 'I had no idea how powerful you were'. From then, we started to build up a relationship.
Noddy Holder : After that, we would sit round and tell them stories of real things that had happened to us and things that happened to other bands, and they added all that into the original script to make it more realistic.
Jimmy Lea : By the time we got back to England, there was a mutual respect which hadn't been there at first. They set about knocking the script into shape while we were writing and recording the songs. Nod did lyrics and I would put the music together. Far Far Away was something he came up with in America. He had that line about the Mississippi and he was planning to call it Letting Loose Around The World because Far Far Away didn't come in until near the end, but I convinced him we should change it.
How Does It Feel was the very first song I'd ever written, years earlier, but it came in perfectly for the film with the addition of a middle eight that I came up with while sitting on the loo. John Lennon was doing Walls And Bridges in the next studio when Chas was mixing Standing On the Corner at The Power Plant in New York. One evening Lennon stuck his head round the door and said "Is this your new band, Chas? I like the singer. He sounds like me."
Noddy Holder : Once we thought the script rang true we went into production with it. I had reservations about it ending so bleak at first, but as it went on I really got into it. The basic story of a band, Flame, with working class roots making it big was definitely us and even things like the scene where I get trapped in a coffin really happened, except it was to Screaming Lord Sutch.
Jimmy Lea : I've always hated being recognised in public, hated the whole fame side of success. So, the night before we started filming I didn't sleep a wink. I was terrified of having a camera focussed on me. I've never been so scared in all my life, but I never let on to the others.
Noddy Holder : The roles were tailored to our own personalities. Jim couldn't stand doing publicity stunts in real life, so he was given the same trait in the film. My character, Stoker, was very easy-going at the start, which is much the way I am, but as the film gets darker and more violent towards the end, the character changes so that's where I actually got to do some proper acting.
Ken Colley (actor) : Chas Chandler was quite a commanding presence on the set. He told me that when The Animals ended, he had been left in Los Angeles with a broken marriage, bad health and $5,000 in his pocket, and he swore he was never going to let anything like that ever happen to him again. That's why a film showing the contractual scheming and the underhanded side of the music business appealed to him.
Noddy Holder : Because Chas had raised the cash, and he saw it as the pinnacle of our career, he was on the set every day and he ruled with a rod of iron. He would be having big bust-ups with Richard, and with the backers, but we were kept away from all that.
Gavrick Losey (line director) : One of the main disputes was between Chas and Richard over the logo for the film. Richard had a background in design and he felt it was too heavy and static, but it had been designed by one of Chas's friends, and he just wouldn't let go of it.
John Steel : Chas and I threw ourselves into it. We were constantly chipping in at the script meetings, changing things to make it real. The violent Northern manager, for example, had a lot in common with The Animals' manager Mike Jeffries, who always had a lot of heavies around him that you didn't mess with. The film people wanted the heavies to be stereotypical thugs with broken noses and cauliflower ears but we remembered how the most dangerous guy in Newcastle was Mike's head of security, a bloke called Dave Finlay who was good looking, sharp dresser, a real hit with the ladies. So we got that changed. The film production people called us 'the money' and they definitely resented that we insisted on having control over it but we couldn't let them do it their way. It wouldn't have been right.
Gavrick Losey : I had discussions with David Puttnam, while we were making Flame, that it was in effect the second part of what could have been a trilogy showing the whole classic progression of a rock band. That'll Be The Day is a band becoming successful, Slade In Flame is the band falling apart at the peak of success, and Stardust is the dominant member of the group going on to his solo career.
Don Powell (Slade) : At first, we were very worried that the professional actors might look down on us but it wasn't really like acting, more just talking among ourselves. When we were with the actors it did seem a little strange at first and for the first couple of days we found ourselves fluffing lines and missing cues because of it.
Noddy Holder : As we weren't trained actors, it was all written so that we didn't have any long speeches to deliver in one go. I took it all as a bit of a giggle but Jim got very intense about his character.
Ken Colley : I was quite pleasantly surprised by how well the band coped. They were playing parts that they understood very well from real life, four young men on the crest of a wave, so a lot of what they knew about how it really was ended up in the film. As much as them learning from us, I think we learned a lot from them.
Jimmy Lea : It was pretty hair-raising because Chas and John would be up with Andrew the night before re-writing the script to make the dialogue sound like the way we speak. So we literally wouldn't know our lines until the day we said them. It was bad for all of us but, after his accident in 1973, Don had been left with no short-term memory so it was almost impossible for him to learn his lines.
Noddy Holder : It was fascinating to work with proper actors, like Alan Lake, who was married to Diana Dors. Him and Leapy Lea had just come out of jail (outlaw) for knifing someone who had attacked Diana, but he was the one who kept us all laughing in the long boring bits on the set when nothing was happening.
John Steel : There was a scene early on in The Revolution Club in London which was the first day of shooting for Alan. At lunchtime he went out for a beer with the band and when he came back, he had totally changed. The drink turned him into this nightmare character. For no obvious reason, he took a dislike to the owner of the club and got him in a headlock. This bloke was spluttering and turning purple and we were all terrified. It was Richard Loncraine who eventually talked him down, and then Chas and a couple of others restrained him.
Jimmy Lea : We had to give him an ultimatum that if he did anything like it again, he'd be off the film and he'd never work again. He was good as gold after that.
John Steel : I had a cameo role as the drummer in an early version of the band. They were playing at a wedding with this crap cabaret singer, Alan Lake's character. One of the guests thinks Alan is making a pass at his wife, so he dives at the stage and crashes into my drumkit. They wanted a shot of me in pain amid all the debris, but every time they zoomed in on my face I was cracked up laughing. We re-shot it umpteen times but in the end we had to do without a close up.
Tommy Vance (deejay) : I used to go and see Slade in the clubs in Wolverhampton when they were still called Ambrose Slade, so when there was a part in the movie for a deejay, my old mate Chas Chandler rang up and offered me £100 a day. He always was a tight bastard, Chas, but we loved him. I seem to remember he bought me one Newcastle Brown Ale in the whole three days I was involved in filming.
John Steel : Tom Conti, who played their manager, was really quite unknown. I remember talking to him on the first day of shooting and he said "Do you mean this is actually going to be released in the cinemas?" Everything he'd done before was, like, little art house movies.
Noddy Holder : I had to pick up quite a few extra skills. I had to learn to play the spoons for a scene where we get sent to prison. Then there's a scene where I'm auctioning plates in a street market and I had to go down the East End of London one Sunday morning and learn how to throw the plates up and deliver all the patter at the same time. I was also supposed to be a pigeon fancier, but I'd never touched a pigeon in my life, so I had to go off to a pigeon loft and learn how to handle them. I ended up totally covered in pigeon shit for my trouble.
The hardest thing to get used to was the early mornings. We weren't used to getting up in time for a 6.30am make-up call, and it was incredibly confusing at first to realise that scenes would be shot in the wrong order, and that you had to do cutaways and reaction shots and all that.
Jimmy Lea : I've always believed that creative people need their sleep and getting up early made me ill. I remember going berserk at one of the production crew one day because we were there at the crack of dawn and nobody else had turned up, so we could do nothing except sit round and drink tea.
Tommy Vance : Richard Loncraine was very willing to take notice of our suggestions. The first day I filmed with them was in a studio off Portobello Road. We did interiors for a scene where a pirate radio station is attacked by gunmen. I had to lie down on ·the floor with this actor while bullets riccocheted above our heads and little explosive devices went off around us. The actor had to say "Gimme that mic," and according to the script I would just pass it over. But I pointed out that, for a deejay, his microphone is second only in importance to his penis and no jock in his right mind would ever give up the microphone at such a historic and newsworthy moment. So we changed the script to make the guy wrestle the mic away from me. It got quite a laugh at the premiere.
Noddy Holder : Having the pirate station attacked by gunmen may seem a bit far-fetched but, again, it was based on a real incident that Chas knew about.
John Steel : It actually happened in 1966 to Radio City, which was owned by a rock band manager called Reg Calvert, who ended up dead of shotgun wounds a few days after his station was invaded.
Tommy Vance : The day after doing the interiors, I was flown out on a helicopter to a disused fort in the Thames Estuary. There was still evidence of it having been a radio station, but it was long since deserted and quite spooky. The boys had to be seen arriving on a boat, so they came on a tiny pilot launch and, believe me, they didn't look too good as they clambered on board.
Noddy Holder : That was the scariest thing, going out to the pirate station. We all climbed into this little boat but the water was really choppy and when we got to this old tower, we had to get from the boat onto this rusty iron ladder and clamber up. We all found it nerve-wracking but Dave was terrified of heights so he really hated it.
John Steel : One of the guys from the crew literally had to push him up the ladder. As if that wasn't bad enough, the film people had built a mock-up helicopter landing pad out of wood, painted to look like a proper steel one. The chopper pilot refused to land on it and just hovered in the air above it. So now Dave had to go out onto the highest part of the platform, on this rickety wooden pad, blown about by the downdraft and try to jump up into the helicopter. He was petrifed.
Noddy Holder : Once we started going out on location, Andrew Birkin kept disappearing off to visit local graveyards. He had some sort of morbid fascination and he kept urns on his mantelpiece with the ashes of dead people in them.
Johnny Steel : There was a car chase where one car was supposed to end up upside down. It was this vintage pink Cadillac which you could barely get to go, but it looked great. It was so heavy that the ramp kept collapsing, and it just wouldn't turn over. They kept building higher ramps but the car always righted itself.
Jimmy Lea : In the end, the stunt drivers rather sheepishly admitted defeat and it was Gavrick Losey, the producer, who got in and did it. He didn't turn it right over, but he did get it to end up on its side and burst into flames, which must have been embarassing for the stunt drivers.
John Steel : We shot a lot of exteriors around Sheffield, and in particular at a ghastly, run-down block of flats where Don was supposed to be living. I'll never forget we were trying to shoot one scene, out in the cold, and this woman came by with a baby in a pushchair. She looked at us in amazement and said "You wouldn't want to take pictures of it if you had to live here."
Jimmy Lea : For the big concert scenes, which we did at The Rainbow in London and The Hammersmith Palais, we sent a letter out to the fan club and told them just to turn up on the day for a free Slade gig. The road crew was our real crew and the scenes of mobbing and fans being got off stage were all for real.
Noddy Holder : One thing I thought was totally over the top was that I had a microphone that shot flames out of the end of it. It seemed ridiculous. No way would I ever have done anything like that, but then two years later Kiss started doing exactly the same thing on stage except that the flames came out of a guitar. The oddest thing, though, was that the characters started to take us over. We all start off fairly easy going, which is how we really were, but as the film gets blacker, we start arguing all the time, and we found that we got to be like that off the set as well. We'd be having dinner and we'd start to fight about nothing at all, just like in the film. I suppose if you do this character day in and day out, you just eventually get to be like it. My favourite scenes are the ones near the end, going up in the lift at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, with me and Jimmy deciding that we have to split the band up. And the next morning when I'm waking up after the big party in this eerily lit bedroom.
Jimmy Lea : The lift scene had quite an effect on us. I actually cried when I was delivering that line "I've had enough". I think there's quite a difference between actors and pop stars though. On the last day of shooting, a lot of the crew came up and said they'd never worked with anybody like us and I think that was because we'd queue up for pie and custard with them and just muck in. They weren't used to that.
Noddy Holder : We had problems with the British Board of Film Censors. They wanted to give it an X rating for violence, which would have meant we couldn't reach the audience we wanted. We had to chop out some of the more graphic stuff from a scene where Alan Lake got his feet smashed in with shovels, and some more from a bit where the heavies break into Tom Conti's house and splatter slogans in blood all over his kids' bedroom walls.
Jimmy Lea : Soon after we finished filming, I remember seeing the rough cut of Stardust, which Puttnam was making around the same time and thinking "Oh God, we've made the same film." I had a real argument with Puttnam about it, but he insisted there was no similarity. We were all worried. After all, if it went badly, it could really damage our career.
John Steel : We'd been seeing rushes every day and they looked OK but somehow, when it was all edited together, it was a bit of an anti-climax. I felt like we'd ended up with a b-movie.
Jimmy Lea : The day before the premiere, I was sitting in the Portman Hotel with my mum, when Barry Norman came on the tv and said "For all its failings, Slade In Flame has a gritty realism that you can't escape." I breathed a huge sigh of relief.
Noddy Holder : We arrived at the premier, in the old Astoria at Victoria, on a fire engine. Esther Rantzen, Diana Dors, Roger Daltrey, all kinds of people were there.
Jimmy Lea : I ran into Alan Lake that night and asked him what all that business had been about in The Revolution and he said it was nerves. He'd been so wound up about appearing with a bunch of rock stars and that was his way out of it. That was weird because I'd never thought of us as being intimidating at all.
Noddy Holder : What really amused me was that the balcony was full of music business people and the stalls was fans, so the laughs and the gasps from upstairs were totally different from downstairs. The fans enjoyed it on the level of it being a good film but the business types were recognising who the people in the film were based on.
Jimmy Lea : There's a scene where Tom Conti fluffed one of his lines. He was supposed to talk about making a deal with Polydor but, by mistake, he said CBS. All the Polydor people at the premiere gave quite a gasp at that. The next day, we did Top Of The Pops and the producer, Robin Nash, bounced up to us and said "Hello, Slade, I saw your film last night. Everyone came to laugh, but they couldn't. Even so, I think you've made a mistake. It's not what the public wants. Mark my words."
John Steele : When I look back, I realise we achieved a lot. The critics were very good to it. We even got one over on Barry Norman. Time Out said it was "tightly scripted and directed" but apart from anything else, it launched an amazing number of careers. Tom Conti has become one of Britain's best known actors, Andrew Birkin went on to write one of The Omen movies and The Cement Garden, and Richard Loncraine has just done Richard III with Kenneth Branagh.
Jimmy Lea : I remember Chas saying to me afterwards that he thought Richard Loncraine would love it if I left the band in real life, like I'd done in the film but the strange thing was that right after filming ended, we went off on a tour of Europe and whenever Noddy and I would be in a lift together it was like we were re-living that scene. For a while, it began to feel like the film had taken over our real lives.
(Source : interviews and research conducted by Johnny Black for Q magazine in 1999. This is an extended version of the feature which appeared in Q.)