NOIZONE!

Two desk-mikes. Red-back Noddy-books in anticipatory piles. A polished table adjacent to the History/Modern History section of the largest bookshop in Yorkshire. And Naomi, in delectably contoured BORDERS T-shirt, spikes of hair and black-rimmed glasses, obviously flailing out of her depth when faced with publicly interviewing an amiable icon of an age before she was even born. Behind her, as she fiddles with bits of paper that carry suggested questions by other staffers, there s a poster for Simon Clark s exquisitely nasty horror novel, The Fall and another poster announcing Terry Discworld Pratchett s signing-visit to this very same bookshop. And in front of her, a patiently waiting block of Slade fans.
Which current CD do you listen to, Noddy? she begins. Macy Gray s On How Life Is, best album of the year, in my umble opinion he comes back, live in person, with sideburns, to a mild swell of approval. Naomi smiles nervously, obviously encouraged by her success, and ventures If I said to you Who s Crazee Now? , who would you nominate? You for a start, he teases, and probably this lot for coming tonight, indicating the audience, drawing them into the joke. But Crazee bands? Jamiroquai he s crazy. Fun Lovin Criminals like em, but they re on another planet. And Geri Haliwell. She s definitely lost the plot.
So they muddle through, until in a final act of desperation Naomi suggests alright Noddy, now is there anything you want to ask me? He grins mischievously, pulls a lascivious expression. What colour knickers are you wearing, Naomi? NODD-EEE HOLDER!!!!, she gasps in polite shock, before throwing him over to the assembled fans. Lenny is first up. He has a tired Autumn 1972 Tour programme printed red-on-black: Thin Lizzy, Suzi Quatro and Slade. First gig I ever saw, he gushes. Noddy smiles indulgently as he sips his Britvic Clear Tonic Water. And signs it. Behind him, Michael has an original gatefold red SLADE ALIVE vinyl album to sign. How s the book selling? he asks. Noddy brightens. Went in the book charts at no.50, he chirps, now it s up to no.24.

Phew!!! Avarice. Pride. Sloth. Lust. Gluttony. Wrath. And Rock n Roll. Noddy s autobiography Who s Crazee Now? tells it all, travelling from his childhood in the Black Country, through his pre-Slade scuffing bands during the 60s, into Glam-Rock and its aftermath. This literary tour is designed to promote the book through local radio chat-slots, bookshop talks and signings. Right now he s in Leeds, down from Macclesfield. And it s my turn. So come on Nod, be honest, how can this tame literary slog compare with the insane anarchy of a Rock n Roll tour?
It s absolutely different to Rock n Roll tours. A lot more civilised, he gags with a shocked expression. But I ve enjoyed everywhere we ve been. And yes, I ve been asked some strange questions, but nothing I can t cope with.
So try this on for size there s a lot about rock n roll in your book, but very little sex and drugs. Does that mean that sex and drugs didn t happen, or just that you re not admitting to it?
There wasn t drugs in our career, he straight-faces. Slade weren t a druggy band. We were a boozing band. So we never got into that side of the business. We saw too many fatalities among our mates that were doing it they were dropping like flies in the 70s. And we were, in a way, too professional to go that same way. When we were doing an album, or a gig, we were always very focused, we were always on the money. We never partied until the job was done. Then we d go overboard. But we certainly wasn t going to let the partying be the main part of our life.
And sex?
When you re in a successful band you obviously have a lot of female followers chasing you around. And when you re young you make the most of it, don t you? You d be daft not to, wouldn t you? But people think it s all fun and frolics, which generally it is. But the public only get that one side of it, there s a downer side too. You ve got to be careful, certainly in America. I had this one girl who followed me everywhere, today you d call her a stalker, but of course they weren t called stalkers in those days. One day we did a show in Philadelphia and drove back to New York. And when I got back to my hotel she was actually in my bedroom. She d bribed the hotel maid to get in. I said You re going to have to leave. She starts crying and all that business, then she says, can I use the toilet before I go? And I say, Yeah . So she locks herself in the toilet. Twenty minutes she still hasn t come out. I m banging on the door. No sign of her. So I call our tour manager, Swin, we break in, and she d slit her wrists. There was blood everywhere. We had to call the paramedics. She survived. But that s the other side of the coin.
People throw themselves at you, put their lives on the line for you, so you have to be very careful how you treat them. These things happen. It s frightening. It s great being a pop star, being mobbed and all that, and I don t regret a minute, but when you re at the centre of it all, it can be very scary too.
Did you ever throw a TV out of a Hotel window?
No. And I ve never met a band that has. It s a myth. Probably younger bands do it now because they heard somewhere that bands used to do it, so now they feel if you re in a band you re supposed to do it ! But sure, we did our fair share of damage, wrecking rooms now and again, but we always paid for it.
So what was your greatest Rock n Roll excess?
I drove a car into a swimming pool once. Not my own, I might add, he erupts into raucous laughter. And not on purpose. I was under an excess of drink in this hotel car-park, the throttle slipped, I went over an embankment and the car ended up in the pool. That s probably the worst thing that appened to me.

Slade of course, are the quintessential early- 70s band. Rock n Roll without brakes. Sartorial atrocities and rampant innuendo delivered at mega-echo volume. Shiny mirrored hats and more bacofoil that an entire Wal-Mart hyper-store chain. Their Coz I Luv You , knocked Rod Stewart s Maggie May , off the no.1 slot in November 1971, to be deposed by . . . Benny Hill s Ernie, The Fastest Milkman In The West . Crazzee times?!?!?!
And if Marc Bolan was this generation s new Beatles, then Slade were their new Stones. Only louder. Cruder. And more unpretty. Listen to the 21-track Slade Greatest Hits: Feel The Noize compilation now, and it s a solid wall of loutish volume, from the straight-ahead Rock cover that started it all, Get Down And Get With It , laced with Little Richard keyboard runs, to the Pure Pop madness of twelve top five hits, six of them no.1 s with football-chant choruses and graffitiised-titles threatening to corrupt the spelling of a generation. Even a ballad like How Does It Feel , gets a dirty guitar riff slashed across it, while the reflective Far Far Away , opens with a demented Don Powell drum barrage erupting into a vocal delivered at full frontal tonsil-mangling volume.
Later there s the 1980 s post-Reading Festival metal-revival with We ll Bring The House Down , and the mature anthemic My Oh My , which not only became a no.2 hit here in 1983, but also Slade s biggest ever Top 5 USA hit. And all that s before you even get to mention Merry Xmas Everybody which has entered the UK Top 20 no less than seven times. The lives and times of Slade are wondrous tales indeed but never before have we heard it from Nod s own gob. Until now.

Today, Noddy s sideboards are sparser, his outfit less flam-boyant purple shirt, long black drape jacket, stretch-side black boots, with his gold-rimmed spectacles worn on a Larry Grayson black expander-twine around his neck.
Neville Noddy Holder grins. I was born being rowdy . . . I was screaming when I hit daylight. His thick Midlands accent is still intact all the way from Walsall: the opening credits of Coronation Street always remind me of Newhall Street, he says, getting nostalgic for the tin-bath in front of the fire and the outside lav. He saw Little Richard with his bouffant hair, banging away on the piano in The Girl Can t Help It movie, and didn t think rock n roll could get any better.
Soon, early Slade line-ups were moving in a star-system of other stalled 60 s launches. Bolan, Rod Stewart and Elton John were all hanging out with routine loser 60 s bands that never quite made the grade, all relentlessly gigging, and Noddy s pre-chart history follows pretty much the same contours. While around this time, as part of the proto-Slade N Betweens Noddy made his first German trip to play The Star Club, a venue so wild that the waiters packed guns. It was here he ran into fellow wannabe Paul (Gary Glitter) Raven, a Rocker in lots of leather with an Elvis-style quiff . Living in red-light Keil, north of Hamburg on a diet of Glitter-recommended pea-and-ham soup, the band were farting all week .
Then came the hits and new associations, like that Autumn 1972 tour when Slade were supported by Thin Lizzy.
Yeah, they supported us a couple of times, in America as well, Nod nods. Phil Lynott was a madman. Towards the end of that American tour he actually caught hepatitis, the whatcha-callit, the contagious sort? We didn t know until the tour was more or less finished. But when he went back to New York he was diagnosed with it, so everybody who d been in contact with him on the tour had to have tests, all the bands and road crew. Then we all had to have shots. They lined us up in a big row, we all had to drop our trousers, and there was this hideous sight of the bands and road crew showing their arses, and all having this hepatitis injection. Not a pretty sight, as you can imagine. And that was all Phil s fault. Which we never let im forget!
Slade were always a strange band. Bass-player Jimmy Lea a quiet, creative, formally trained violinist and the perfect songwriting foil to Noddy ( to be honest, I think he would rather have been in Led Zeppelin than Slade, ). Don Powell on drums. Noddy. And Dave Hill on guitar, always the most outrageously flamboyant member of Slade, the SuperYob Metal Nun in his all-over silver leather costumes. He was a constant source of amusement for us. His stage-gear was never intended to be a great fashion statement.
But at the height of Glam, wasn t there ever a time when Noddy looked at himself in the mirror and thought what the hell am I doing dressed like this?!?!?!?
No. Never. I mean it was all a big pisstake. We even used to take the mickey out of each other. We never looked on it as anything other than a lot of fun. Probably the only one in the band who wasn t into all the dressing up part of it was Jimmy. It wasn t him at all. He went along with it because he had to. But it wasn t his bag. And he ll admit it. He wanted more of that serious musician -type-thing. With the other three it was different, we weren t interested in that at all.
But I d always interpreted the lyrics of Cum On Feel The Noize a song later revived by Oasis as an answer to hostile critics. After all, Noddy is singing So you think I ve got an evil mind?/Well you should know better . . ./So you think my singing s out of time?/Well it makes me money . Was I right?
Erm, no, it was more a statement than a come-back to the critics. We never had no problems with critics really, they were never harsh. Although they never took us seriously as a band. As serious musicians. We realised that at the time. They thought we was just disposable Pop, which all Pop is in a way. But now people look back and realise we wrote some classic Pop songs and made some classic Pop records.
Given that, isn t it bizarre that Merry Xmas Everybody is probably Slade s most enduring contribution to chart history?
Yes, it s probably the one everybody will always think This is the one , even though I personally don t think it s the best record we ever made. Funnily enough it doesn t actually get re-released. It s just never been deleted. It s been on sale continuously for 26 years, it just goes on and on and on. Yet I wrote that lyric all in one night ! I d been down the pub, got a bit pissed up, couldn t drive ome. So I stayed over at me Mam s ouse. I d already got the first two lines are you hanging up your stockings on the wall, , but I wanted to get the rest finished. Me Mam d got a little bottle of whisky in the sideboard. So I sat down at 1 o clock in the morning, got that bottle out, and by 4 or 5 I d finished all the lyrics to the song. I d set out to get a Working Class Christmassy-type feel to it. So I thought of all the Working Class Christmassy-type things I could think of to cram into the song.
And probably two of the best lines lyrically that I ever did are in that song. Which are does your Granny always tell you that the old songs are the best/then she s up and rock n rolling with the best, and we ve all ad it. Your Granny comes round at Christmas. You put a new record on and she says ah, that stuff s not as good as it was in my day . But give er a couple of sherry s and she s up and twisting and showing her knickers. It happens in every family. It s those sort-of things I wanted to capture. And I think it works. Yet if you listen to the record, there are no Christmas gimmicks on it, no sleigh-bells, no jingle-bells at all. The only thing Christmassy about it are the lyrics. It s a straight-forward Pop-Rock song, that happens to be about Christmas. It s probably the only Christmas hit that s ever been like that. And funnily enough, in France, it got to no.1 at Easter!

So, looking to the future as the song advises, will there be new Noddy Holder recordings? I don t know, people keep asking me, but I haven t planned anything. After I did a couple of acoustic songs in the last series of The Grimleys all the record companies were coming onto me to do an album. But that would mean getting used to the corporate structure of the business again. And it s awkward for me to take that on board. Cos I m a bolshie so-&-so. You get record company A&R men who are, like, 25, and they re telling me what to do, as though I m a new artist and I don t know what I m talking about! And I have to say, Look! I ve been in the Music Business for over 30 years! I ve been through the mill a few times. I know the structure of things, and how things work .
I m hoping I ll have time to write some new stuff next year, and then maybe record it the year after. But at the moment I m just happy doing the things I m doing. I m acting with The Grimleys. I ve written the book. I m doing a lot of music for TV-adverts, I m doing voice-over stuff. I ve got my own radio show in Manchester. So I ve got all these things going on. And I know what makes me feel right. Even if I don t sell one copy or not one person watches it. I can t help that. That s out of my control. It s not a case of how many records I sell or whatever, it s more that, at the end of the day if I think I ve done that work to the best of my ability, and if I think it s turned out good, then, to me, I m successful.

Naomi shuffles the few remaining unsold, unsigned red-back Noddy-books into a neat pile, and bins the empty Britvic bottle, as Noddy watches the last of the Slade fans contentedly dispersing through the History/Modern History section and back out into the Leeds Briggate precinct beyond. His book is not a complex one. There s little depth or insight. But he can be a man of unexpected contradictions. A one-time Glam-Rock animal who played to a sold-out Earls Court Stadium, yet is now happy to perform to a rabble of fifty fans in a bookshop and enjoy their uncritical adulation. He once wrote a song that went many years from now there will be new sensations/and new temptations . . . many years from now/there will be new tomorrows/How Does It Feel?, It seems that now those new tomorrows are here he s quite content to simply enjoy them.

Noddy ON OASIS COVER OF COME ON FEEL THE NOIZE
It was good. I like it it helps keep the band s name alive, and the Slade back-catalogue too. It s made me a few bob, so I m not complaining. I went to see Oasis when they played Maine Road, Manchester. They invited me up to see the show and Noel Gallagher actually sent Meg his missus, up to the place where I was watching them to take a photo of me just to see my reaction when they did that song. They did Cum On Feel The Noize , as the encore and she took my picture. It was great 40,000 kids going mad to a song me and Jimmy had written 20-odd years before, y know? It shows the song is still valid. So now we ve got the recognition we deserve. It s took us 20-odd years to get that recognition, but it s come eventually.

Who s Crazee Now?: My Autobiography by Noddy Holder (with LISA VERRICO), (Ebury Press, #16.99.
ISBN 0-09-187075-5)