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Fact #153765

When:

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.)