DVD/Blu-ray: Slade in Flame

Over the years Slade in Flame has been hailed as one of the greatest rock movies (albeit rarely seen or screened), up there with That’ll Be The Day or Performance.

Like those films, it has grittiness and realism running through it liked barbed wire through a stick of Blackpool rock. It’s raw and dark; very dark. Not Glam at all. And wrapped up in its singular brilliance is the grim rather than glam fact that Slade in Flame tanked at the box office and almost tanked the career of the band it – sort of – celebrated.

There was one DVD release in the Noughties, which now goes for around £200 on Amazon, and now, on its 50th anniversary, Slade in Flame is coming to a cinema near you, if there is one, and in a new restored blu-ray-DVD version, with extras (a new commentary by director Richard Loncraine and film critic Mark Kermode a lengthy Making Of, a new short with Tom Conti, an archive short featuring Glam tailor Tommy Nutter). So if it comes your way, don’t miss out. It’s Slade, mate; get down and get with it.

Back in the day, Slade were the band that ruled the Glam side of the Seventies the way The Beatles did the Sixties, with mirrored top hats, stacked heels and a brilliant run of six No One hits. But after the Glam side comes the downside, and when Slade in Flame was released in 1975, it’s gritty realism and brutalist cynicism about the business of success and failure in the music industry bombed with fans (although not the critics) who wanted and expected a stomping good time. What they got were the harsh realities of class, power and exploitation that didn’t really chime with how the band played and sounded on Top of the Pops. It was a verite take on working class 1970s England, too, beautifully filmed in all its brutalist, fag-ash, red diesel glory, and featuring a band of musicians that could actually act.

Director Richard Loncraine and screenwriter Andrew Birkin had joined Slade on one of their US tours, listening to their stories and witnessing the goings-on of a 1970s rock n roll tour. The superb location filming, under Withnail’s cinematographer Peter Hannan, was done largely in Nottingham and Sheffield. Highlights include Nottiongham’s Sherwood Rooms for the live footage, the now-demolished Kelvin Flats and the old slums of Hillsborough for peak working class English grimness, as well as bits of Notting Hill and Willesden (where Noddy Holder’s character keeps his pigeons), Brighton’s Grand Hotel, and the rickety assemblages of Shivering Sands Army Fort off the Kent coast, where Screaming Lord Sutch had set up a pirate radio station in the mid Sixties.

Emperor Rosko and Tommy Vance both play themselves, while in his first screen role, Tom Conti displays some spectacular hair and proves to be the silky-smooth, upper-middle class villain of the piece. The hard nut agent Ron Harding is played brilliantly by Johnny Shannon, who’d played crime boss Harry Flowers in Performance (and also appeared in That’ll Be The Day), and Diana Dors’ volatile hubbie Alan Lake (infamous for his a notoriously short fuse when drunk), played desperate, doomed club singer Jack Daniels.

With Noddy Holder, Dave Hill, Jim Lea and Don Powell ably and unfussily playing themselves – while avoiding even the tiniest hint of poptastic slapstick – Slade in Flame is a cautionary tale of the downsides of pop success with a great soundtrack, some raw and convincingly shady characters, some brilliantly shit looking cars, teen Glam fans in all their weird glory, and the kind of verité location filming that preserves in the aspic of celluloid what is now a far-distant long-lost world.

• Slade in Flame is a BFI Blu-ray/DVD (Dual Format Edition)
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