Noddy Holder answers the phone like a man who’s been yelling over Marshall stacks since the Nixon administration—which, of course, he has. The Slade frontman is promoting a new hits collection, Cum On Feel The Hitz, which he’s quick to point out wasn’t his idea. “It was the record company’s idea, really,” he says with cheerful detachment. “They thought there hadn’t really been a definitive singles collection.”
So now we’ve got the definitive singles collection. Or three of them, depending on which continent you live on. A double CD. A double vinyl. A U.S. single disc. Forty-three songs across 25 years of glam-slathered chaos. “It contains pretty much all the singles that we ever released that were hit singles in Europe,” Holder explains, which politely ignores the U.S. market’s decades-long deafness to Slade's brilliance until Quiet Riot came along and screamed it in their face.
Slade were always louder than fashion and smarter than they looked, blending stompers, anthems, and glam decadence with a kind of pub-rock sneer that turned out to be weirdly timeless. “It was just organic,” Holder says of their sound. “It happened on its own.” Of their first rehearsal: “Even from the first couple of songs we played, it sounded right. It worked.”
That noise went on to shape hair metal and grunge, which feels like a mad-lib but is very real. “Absolutely, I can see our origins in those bands,” Holder says, name-dropping the time young bands in America would corner him after gigs to thank him for making distortion fashionable.
The song that cracked it all open was “Get Down and Get With It,” which Holder originally heard via Little Richard but later found out was a Bobby Marchan joint. “We used to end the show with it every night for years,” he says, “way before we recorded it.” It became their first chart hit after their manager/producer/rock god-whisperer Chas Chandler (yes, the same Chas Chandler who discovered Jimi Hendrix) told them to quit messing around and lay it down in the studio.
And then came everything else: “Mama Weer All Crazee Now,” “Gudbuy T’Jane,” “Cum On Feel the Noize”—a whole mess of songs that influenced more bands than any critic will ever admit. They even managed an ’80s power ballad detour (“My Oh My”) and a big synth-banger exit (“Radio Wall of Sound”) before Holder bailed.
“I already had decided to leave,” he says. “We’d had 25 years as a band with exactly the same lineup… I felt we were on a sort of treadmill, doing the same thing. Album, tour, album, tour. I thought we’d gone as far as we could.”
He gave the band two years’ notice—imagine that—and still managed to be surprised when bassist Jim Lea quit shortly after him. “I didn’t leave them in the lurch,” he insists. “But I needed new challenges.”
Now Slade exists in tribute, kind of. Guitarist Dave Hill had apparently been planning to carry on with a version of the band, though even that version has splintered recently. “They’ve gone their separate ways,” Holder says with the audible shrug of a man who got off the ride just in time.
As for him, he seems content being the voice behind one of the most festive Christmas songs ever written (which went unmentioned here, mercifully), the man in the top hat who blew out a thousand PA systems, and now, the guy with the hits collection that finally gets it mostly right.
“Keep rocking, Kyle,” he signs off. You get the sense he never really stopped.
Listen to the full interview above and then check out the video below.
