Here is Slade’s movie musical satire from 1975, a film with all the pungent historical presence of a pub ashtray, about an imaginary band called Flame which looked and sounded a lot like Slade, fronted by Stoker, played by Noddy Holder. It came out a year after the film’s soundtrack album was released, and now gets a rerelease for its 50-year anniversary. Slade in Flame – which is to say, Flame, starring Slade – is regarded by fans and non-fans alike with enormous affection and regard, and it certainly has a weird, goofy energy: the audio mix sometimes surreally privileging ambient sounds such as doors closing and glasses chinking, with the dialogue way in the background.
It’s about an innocent working-class Midlands band getting taken up by creepy adman-type smoothie Robert Seymour, played by Tom Conti, who exploits their raw talent for cash and takes them on a rollercoaster ride of fame, the action regularly suspended while the band sing their various tracks. But then their former manager, dodgy cockney mobster Mr Harding (Johnny Shannon) reappears – a man who never gave a hoot about them in their early days and contributed nothing to their career – demanding his share of the action. So it bizarrely mixes the madcap comedy of A Hard Day’s Night – or a late-period Carry On – with the brutal nastiness of a crime thriller like Get Carter. The effect is striking, in its way, but finally somehow depressing in a way that isn’t entirely intentional, and depressing in a way that actually listening to Slade is not. It also shows the unexpected influence of a particular kind of Brit social realism with a generic loyalty to unhappiness.
