If you grew up in the 70s in Britain, Slade were unavoidable. If you grew up anywhere else, you probably know them as “those guys who scream It’s Chriiiistmaaas!” once a year and then vanish back into tinsel.
That gap between how huge they were and how casually they are treated by rock history is almost comical. Slade might be the loudest, hookiest British band the classic rock canon still has not properly respected.
Look past the misspelled song titles and mirrored hats and you find a band that quietly shaped glam rock, gave heavy metal its stadium choruses, and inspired everyone from the Ramones to Oasis. This is how four Black Country lifers turned pub rock into a global echo.
From Wolverhampton clubs to UK chart domination
Slade’s story starts in the English Black Country: Wolverhampton, Walsall, smoky pubs, cheap beer and American blues records. By the mid 60s the core four – Noddy Holder, Dave Hill, Jim Lea and Don Powell – had coalesced under names like The N’ Betweens and Ambrose Slade, playing soul, R&B and beat covers in brutal working men’s clubs.
Manager Chas Chandler, fresh from working with Jimi Hendrix, shoved them toward a heavier, chant-driven rock sound, shaved their name down to Slade and turned them loose on early 70s Britain. Within a few years they had racked up six UK number 1 singles and 24 Top 40 hits, plus three number 1 albums, making them one of the decade’s most reliable chart machines.
Tabloid retrospectives have rightly pointed out that in their prime they were being talked about as the biggest British band since The Beatles, with 17 Top 20 hits and six chart-toppers before the decade was out.Tabloid retrospectives For a stretch in the early 70s, the UK charts practically belonged to four lads from Wolverhampton in platform boots.
The sound of controlled chaos
A voice that could lead a riot
Noddy Holder’s voice is one of rock’s great blunt instruments. It is a rasp, a roar and a foghorn, cutting straight through walls of guitars and pub noise, the kind of tone that makes a microphone almost optional.
Holder did not sing to you so much as at you, like a particularly cheerful drill sergeant, turning every chorus into a command. That vocal slam is why songs like “Cum On Feel The Noize” and “Mama Weer All Crazee Now” feel less like singles and more like riots that accidentally got recorded.
Riffs, boots and drunk-choir hooks
Underneath Holder’s bark sat a surprisingly musical engine. Dave Hill’s guitar tone was bright, slicing and almost nasal, designed to sit on top of a football crowd, while Jim Lea’s bass lines were melodic and restless, closer to McCartney than metal. Don Powell’s drumming was pure sledgehammer swing, all snare cracks and stomps.
Crucially, Slade started building songs with the audience already written in. Contemporary accounts of the band note that many of their big 70s singles were engineered for mass participation, with built-in chants and call-and-response sections in tracks like “Get Down And Get With It”, “Mama Weer All Crazee Now” and “Cum On Feel The Noize”.many of their big 70s singles were engineered for mass participation
It sounds obvious now, but deliberately writing rock songs as ready-made terrace chants was radical in a chart world still obsessed with singer-songwriter confessionals and proggy virtuosity. Slade were weaponising simplicity.
Three songs that refuse to die
To casual listeners, Slade often boils down to three unstoppable anthems. Each tells you something different about why this band mattered, and why they keep boomeranging back decades later.
| Song | Year | UK peak | Signature move | Long-term ripple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| “Mama Weer All Crazee Now” | 1972 | No. 1 | Stomping 4-on-the-floor groove with a chorus built to be shouted, not sung. | Blueprint for every bar-band “everybody up” anthem that followed. |
| “Cum On Feel The Noize” | 1973 | No. 1 | Explosive drum intro, gang vocals and huge fuzzed guitars crashing in at once. | Later supercharged by Quiet Riot, dragging Slade’s DNA into 80s metal. |
| “Merry Xmas Everybody” | 1973 | Christmas No. 1 | Pub singalong dressed up as a Christmas carol, with every line aimed at the whole room. | Became one of the best-selling and most replayed British Christmas singles in history. |
“Merry Xmas Everybody” in particular has escaped the usual fate of Christmas hits, which spike once and then slowly die. A 2025 analysis from Primary Wave notes that it shot to number one on release, has sold over 1.2 million copies in the UK alone, and still muscles its way back into the UK Top 40 every December, half a century on.
Very few songs live two lives as both chart smashes and cultural rituals. In Britain, the festive season effectively starts the moment Holder yells “So here it is, Merry Christmas…” over your supermarket’s PA.
From glitter to grunge and metal: Slade’s real legacy
In the shorthand version of rock history, glam rock is Bowie’s alien theatrics on one side and American hair metal on the other, with Slade reduced to a novelty footnote. That version conveniently ignores that serious educators now point to Slade as a core glam act, representing a “back-to-basics rock and roll” strain that brought theatre back to British pop while keeping the riffs brutally simple.
From there the ripples spread everywhere. Scholarly and fan accounts alike namecheck a wild list of bands who took notes from Slade’s stomp and choruses: the Ramones, Sex Pistols, the Clash, Kiss, Mötley Crüe, Quiet Riot, Def Leppard, Nirvana, the Smashing Pumpkins and more, with Joey Ramone recalling that he spent most of the early 70s listening to the live album “Slade Alive!” thinking, “This is what I want to do.”listening to the live album “Slade Alive!”
Their heaviest legacy in the US arrived wearing spandex. In 1983, Los Angeles metal band Quiet Riot cut a cover of “Cum On Feel The Noize” almost against their will, only for it to hit No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and power the album “Metal Health” to become the first heavy metal LP ever to top the US charts. the first heavy metal LP ever to top the US charts That single did for 80s metal what Slade had once done for British glam – it proved that dumb, ecstatic noise could rule mainstream radio.
Even Britpop’s loudest mouth paid tribute. Noel Gallagher wrote in Dave Hill’s autobiography that “No Slade = No Oasis… it’s as devastating and as simple as that”, arguing that their songs felt like they could have been written “at the end of my street”.No Slade = No Oasis When the man who built 90s lad-rock says your riffs and choruses are the blueprint, you have officially seeped into the rock groundwater.
Fame, fallout and the long goodbye
Of course, there is a darker side. A 2024 feature marking the 50th anniversary of “Merry Xmas Everybody” lays out how a band once hailed as the most successful British group since The Beatles – 17 Top 20 hits, six number ones – ended up fractured by musical dead-ends, health scares and brutal business realities.a 2024 feature marking the 50th anniversary of “Merry Xmas Everybody”
That same report paints a bitter contrast: only guitarist Dave Hill now tours under the Slade name, often in smaller venues, while Holder and Lea live comfortably off substantial Christmas royalties and have little interest in getting the old gang back together. The working-class band that sang about everyone being “crazee” now has to live with the very un-rock-and-roll problem of who actually owns the songs that still pay.
In late 2025, the current incarnation – billed as Dave Hill’s Slade – announced “The Final Tour”, with a last-ever UK show booked in Leeds to close out nearly six decades of road work.announced “The Final Tour” It is a strangely low-key curtain call for a group that once made the foundations of Wembley tremble.
Listening to Slade today: where to start
If your only contact with Slade is drunkenly yelling along to “Merry Xmas Everybody” at an office party, it is worth digging deeper. “Slade Alive!” remains one of the great live rock records: raw, slightly out of control, and proof that they could destroy a room without any tinsel at all.
Studio-wise, “Slayed?” and the hits compilations built around “Feel The Noize” show just how strong the songcraft is once you get past the jokey spellings. For something heavier and less obvious, the mid 70s album “Whatever Happened To Slade” – a commercial flop at the time – sounds suspiciously like the missing link between classic British hard rock and late 80s grunge.
For players, Slade are a masterclass in doing more with less. The guitars are not especially fast or fancy, but the riffs are locked to the kick drum, the bass often sings counter-melodies, and every chorus is arranged like a terrace chant. Turn the gain up, scoop nothing, push the mids and pretend you are shouting over a thousand pints being slammed on tables.
Why Slade still matter
Slade were never cool in the art-school sense, and they paid the price for that when fashions shifted. Yet if you care about how rock actually feels in a room – noisy, communal, slightly ridiculous and very loud – they are one of the most important British bands of the 70s.
They proved you could be both daft and devastating, both cartoonish and emotionally direct, and they left behind a body of work that still rattles pub windows and arena rafters alike. Glam rock, metal and Britpop all owe them a round.
Put “Slade Alive!” on, turn it up until the neighbours complain, and you may find yourself thinking what Joey Ramone once did: “This is what I want to do.”
