By Paul Loader

Can I say, right from the outset, as prefix for this review, that on BBC4’s ‘Pop on Trial’ with Stewart Mahoney, the 70’s were voted by the panel after a long debate as the most influential decade for popular music.

I say this because our illustrious Editor in Chief is regularly taking the proverbial out of me because of my taste in music. 

Well, all I can say is that BBC4 is generally for people who have a modicum of taste and intelligence and they reckon the 70’s were ace.

True, you could argue that the greatest thing to come out of the 70’s was punk. However, in that I came from a good home where the worst thing that happened to me was that I was not allowed to wear high waisters with those great patch pockets that you could cram all your school books into, I didn’t in fact have enough to be angry at to be a truly great punk!
 

So for me, the best band to come out of the 70’d (apart from Mott the Hoople, Deep Purple…the Jam…The undertones…oh the list is endless) was Slade. 

Now for most people of the modern generation, their concept of the mighty Slade was that flaming Christmas song, which aside from offering a fairly healthy pension plan to Jim Lea and Noddy Holder who wrote it, went and killed Slade’s historical reputation as being a really good rock band.

I know, cos I’ve seen em! I saw them four times live in the 80’s (when I was actually old enough to go to gigs) and saw the reborn Slade that had blown Def Leppard off stage at the Reading Festival (and DL were also a great band), and to be honest Slade still remain probably one of the best live bands I have ever seen. Probably only Greenday, Queen and Whitesnake are bands that I would put in the same category for sheer entertainment value as Slade.

So what of the film I hear you cry, after all, this is meant to be a film critique as opposed to a hard sell for a much maligned Glam Rock band.

Flame (or Slade in Flame as it was more widely known) was released in 1975 and I remember my mate Martin Clamp and myself queuing to see it at the Gaiety Cinema in Knowle. Yes queuing! I don’t remember the queue being as long for Star Wars.

I remember that as a kid of 14 I don’t think I really got it. It was probably to down to earth and gritty for me to really understand, but it held great affection for me as one of my images of the 70’s. It was accompanied by a B film (remember them?) which was documentary called ‘Let the good times roll’, which for a restless teenager bored the socks off me and seemed to go on for ever.

I have been tempted to buy Flame on DVD recently, and was delighted that it was recently aired on channel 4, so I set up the old HDD box to record it. 

Boy did the memories of being a 14 year old lad fly back. 

Right, the basic premise of the film is simple. A bunch of blokes from the Black Country form a band that plays on the club circuit. They get picked up by a business entrepreneur (a young Tom Conti) looking to make a fast easy buck, who makes them famous (the band is called Flame incidentally).

Up crops the villain of the piece in the form of a grubby, violent club owner (Johnny Shannon) who was also the manager in one form or another of the four members of Flame, and he wants what he believes to be rightfully his. 

Ugliness ensues until Tom Conti is terrorised into giving up the rights to the band, Flames original  singer (Alan Lake) loses his toes whilst still in his underpants, and the band get tired of it all and knock it on the head, leaving the original manager clutching a hard fought for, but now utterly worthless contract. 

Believe it or not, the original idea for a Slade flick was going to be a weird Sci-Fi movie. That was until they realised that teen heart throb and guitarist Dave Hill was to get killed off in the first half hour. Not a great idea. 

So director Richard Loncraine went on tour with Slade and the script for Flame was devised. 

The beauty of Flame is that it is as about as far from the platformed booted, glitter jacketed, top hatted Slade of ‘Merry Christmas Everybody ‘as you could get. It has about it a gritty realism that suggested ‘real’ people, playing in a ‘real’ band. 

There are some great moments, which are more to do with snippets of dialogue between the characters, which feel more like the Beatles in ‘A Hard Days Night’ than rock movies of later years. Don Powell (drummer) commenting that there was so much sewerage in the local river that as a child he would sit and count the “turds as they floated by like barges”. Jim Lea (bass player) trying to persuade Noddy Holder (singer) to take a chance on signing that big management deal, whist Holder talked to his pigeons (real blokes in a real situation). 

The real poignancy coming from Jim Lea’s wife berating Holder when he suggested that they should move to a bigger house now they had made it as they could now afford it. Her telling him that they were happy where they were and that they should know their place.  

Basically I find Slade in Flame to be a little gem amongst some of the dreadful ‘glam’ films that were around at that time (there was one with Mud, The Reubettes and The Glitter Band that I can’t even find mentioned on IMDB….truly awful). 

True, Flame may not be as polished and big budgeted as say, David Essex in ‘That’ll Be the Day’ and ‘Stardust’, but it felt very much quintessentially British, and with the fore runners in gritty realism films such as ‘Billy Liar’ and ‘The Loneliness of a long distance runner’ making such a come back in the DVD market, maybe Flame can find a place.   

The best quote I can find for Slade in Flame was “like Spinal Tap….but real”. 

Now ‘Cum on fell the Noize!'