Film critic Mark Kermode’s line about 1975’s Slade In Flame has been repeated so many times (often by Kermode himself) as to be taken as a truism. It is, he has insisted on several occasions over the years, “the Citizen Kane of British pop movies”. He also calls it a “grim fable about a squabbling pop group plucked from northern obscurity by money-minded London businessmen”, but it is the Citizen Kane parallel that has stuck.
It is a pithy line, but it is really a form of critical misdirection. Slade In Flame is, in pure cinematic terms, not pioneering or visually dazzling: it is grim, grimy and grubby – and intentionally so. Both films are thematically about fame and success, but there is no yearning in Slade In Flame for a Rosebud and the lost innocence of youth.
In terms of its influence, Citizen Kane is everywhere in cinema. In sharp contrast, Slade In Flame is like a memento mori for pop acts looking to make a film, standing as an instruction manual on what not to do lest it poison your career and irrevocably curdle your fans’ view of the world you inhabit.
Many directors try to remake Citizen Kane. Few musicians want to remake Slade In Flame.
Slade In Flame is a film that says the quiet bit out loud about the callous and cruel nature of the music business: how it chews up and spits out quixotic pop stars, their dreams going up in flames but without the promise of a phoenix-like rebirth. The flames of Slade In Flame are not cleansing and they do not purify; the flames light up the darkest corners of the music business to expose everything as filthy and to condemn it as putrid.
Music writer Daryl Easlea, in his 2023 biography of Slade, described Slade In Flame as “a film of muted palettes and broken fruit machines”. It was filmed in 1974 but is based in the 1960s just as, in the slipstream of Beatlemania, the commercial cooption of youth culture was crunching into action.
The band wanted it set in the recent past so as to make it clear that Flame, the band they play, were not actually Slade, but rather a composite of the bands Slade grew up with on the provincial gig circuit and who were all desperate for an opportunity to break into showbusiness; but their desperation was only rewarded with bands breaking apart and their dreams breaking down.
It could have been so very, very different in both scope and tone. In 1972 and 1973, Slade were one of the biggest bands in the UK. They had four number 1 singles in 1972 and ended 1973 with ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ as the Christmas number 1.
Keen to capitalise on their success and elevate it, manager Chas Chandler (a former member of The Animals and the person who “discovered” Jimi Hendrix) was certain a film was what was needed. He had seen what A Hard Day’s Night (both film and soundtrack) had done for not just The Beatles but also the business of The Beatles in 1964 and so he felt, a decade on, a new pop music movie for a new pop music generation would be Slade’s rocket booster.
The original script idea was a parody of The Quatermass Experiment called, with grim inevitability, The Quiteamess Experiment. It was to be a daft romp, full of prat-falling and gurning, showing the fun side of being in a pop group in 1974. The fact that guitarist Dave Hill would have been eaten by a triffid in the first 15 minutes put him, and eventually, the rest of the band off the idea.
“[W]e decided to do a realistic portrait of the music business, instead of a slapstick comedy,” said drummer Don Powell. He added, “I really wanted a gritty film.”
The many adjectives applied to the film include not just “gritty” but also “grim” and “bleak”. It is an enormously pessimistic film that repeatedly insists that, at every turn, musicians are being ripped off, first by real-world hoodlums and then by the neo-mobsters of the supposedly respectable music business. Charlie (played by Powell) distils the entire narrative arc of the film thus: “You make a few records – that’s all right. The rest is bleedin’ gangsters in dinner jackets.”
The influence of Performance (filmed in 1968 but not released until 1970), and its blurring of the lines between pop music and the criminal underworld, as well as its bleak dissection of the lie of fame, cannot be discounted here.
The band took scriptwriter Andrew Birkin and director Richard Loncraine on the road with them to allow them to get a handle on the reality of a touring band. Ian Hunter had published his book Diary Of A Rock ’n’ Roll Star in June 1974, outlining the tedium of touring, and in October that year Stardust was released in cinemas, a further harsh homily on the despair inherent in pop fame, so there was something in the air.
“I wanted to make a film about the dirty end of the rock ’n’ roll business. I wanted to show the shitty little clubs that these bands have to play,” said Loncraine. “We spent about three weeks, hitting Detroit, and quite hard places like Pittsburgh […] Pretty tacky and down-at-heel hotels. So that influenced the writing of the film.”
As much as Slade In Flame is about the brutal betrayal of fame, it is also about class. There is a hard Marxist theme running through the narrative – where the working classes (featuring backdrops of steel works, bingo halls, greasy spoon cafes, the Kelvin Flats in Sheffield, pigeon coops and plenty of despairing shots of post-industrial cities in decline) are picked up and exploited by the middle- and upper-classes who dominate the music business and media.
The conclusion is bleak in the extreme: the deck of cards is always stacked against the poor ever winning on their own terms and they will be cast back on the scrapheap with no money to show for it. Pop music is no catalyst for social mobility.
Even at the nascent stages of Flame’s career, they understand the game is rigged.
“You’re just second-rate comics working on a third-rate audience,” roars Ron Harding, their first manager, at the band.
“With a fourth-rate agent copping ten per cent,” counters Stoker (played by Noddy Holder).
As the film progresses, certain moments can be read through a neo-Marxist lens, notably the one offered up by Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer who, in the 1940s, wrote a chapter entitled ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ in their book Dialectic Of Enlightenment. Its thesis was that popular culture is both a product and a form of social control. Not only are the workers (in this case the musicians) alienated from the products they produce for the market, the products themselves are templated, superficially different and designed to nullify an unthinking audience.
This is how it plays out in what Easlea calls “one of the film’s key scenes”, when the band meet in the London offices of the Seymour Trust where merchant banker Robert Seymour (played by Tom Conti) has decided he would quite like to move into the music business. That is despite having no previous experience in, or knowledge of, the music business. It is understood that his great wealth and upper-class connections are the only things he needs.
“Do you actually like what we do?” asks Paul (played by Jim Lea).
“My personal preference really doesn’t come into it,” says Seymour. “Let me put it this way … I don’t smoke cigarettes, but I manage to sell a few.”
Tony Devlin, the talent scout who brought Flame to Seymour’s attention chimes in, “You see, it’s all a matter of packaging, Paul … promotion.”
Paul, clearly horrified and indignant, counters, “I’m no bloody fish finger.”
Devlin, coldly lays out what has to happen for the band to at least have a shot when he says, “Yes, but that’s part of the problem – they are a well-known commodity, you are unknown and there are thousands to choose from … we’re just going to make you stand out a little.”
Noddy Holder, speaking to the NME in 1997, explained how the film could be read in different ways, depending on who was watching and what side of the music business/music fan line they stood on.
“It was funny at the [film] premiere, because all the business were sitting upstairs and all the fans were sitting downstairs and it was weird to see the different reactions,” he said. “The fans were laughing in certain places and the business was laughing in totally opposite places, because the business people knew who the stories were really about.”
He does not name a specific scene, but the fish fingers exchange is perhaps the preeminent example that proves his point.
“The film captured the rough seedy side of things,” recalled Hill in his memoirs. He wrote about how it referenced “unscrupulous people in our past” but added that it “ended up being a much darker film than we had imagined”.
Slade’s imperial period was really 1972 and by 1975, when the film came out, the hits were starting to dry up. ‘Far Far Away’ was released as a single in October 1974 to set up the film – the idea being that fans needed to hear the songs first in order for them to want to see the film. That was a number 2 hit, but ‘How Does It Feel?’, released just as the film came out in early 1975, only got to number 15 on the UK charts.
A downbeat song pushing an incredibly downbeat film was seemingly not what the fans expected. They wanted a colourful romp. They did not want hard – and often coruscating – truths about corruption in the music industry and how money and fame snuff out the spark that makes a band great in the first place.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, The League Of Gentlemen comedy series featured a character called Les McQueen, a desperately broken figure still suffering from the betrayal of his ousting from (fittingly) glam rock band Crème Brûlée. He looked like Dave Hill in the wilderness. His catchphrase in the show could have been the strapline on the poster for Slade In Flame. Shaking his head wearily when reminded about his failed music career, he would glumly intone, “It’s a shit business.”
Fans, pepped up on the sugar of glam rock hits, did not want to be told about the tears under the glitter. Slade In Flame, by being unflinching about the harshness of the music business, did not kill Slade’s career, but it did not give them the second wind they needed at the opening of 1975.
As a show and tell, it was like promising the class a guinea pig only to open up the box and tip out a carcass wriggling with maggots.
Hill accepted that the film confused Slade’s fans, running counter to how they imagined the life of a successful band that dressed like glam peacocks and regularly stomped around the Top Of The Pops studios in a miasma of sequins. “We were a good-time group, but this wasn’t a feel-good film by any means,” he said. The film had, he concluded, “a really nasty edge to it”.
Powell recalled that the experience of filming for the band was the antithesis of the end result fans saw on the screen. “None of us took it that serious,” he said. “It was just a bit of fun for us.” He also claimed it was “probably the first film to show the underside of the industry”, somewhat overlooking the fact that Stardust made it to cinemas first. He was absolutely right, however, when he said, “People hadn’t expected that kind of film from us.”
Holder, interviewed by The Belfast Telegraph in 2010, insisted that “[e]very scene in the movie is true, no matter how far-fetched” as the set pieces were all based on things the band themselves had experienced or what they had been told by their contemporaries in other bands trying to catch a break.
“I’d forgotten how dark it was as a movie, in terms of the violence and the things that go on behind the scenes,” he said.
Don Powell claimed that, due to spiralling costs and creative accounting, the band never saw the cut of the film profits they were promised. Once again, the talent gets screwed over by big business.
As it is in art, so it is in life.
Slade In Flame is not really the “Citizen Kane of British pop movies”. With its dissection of the class system, showing the cruelty of controlled wealth and how every proletarian uprising is ultimately crushed by the capitalist machine that co-opts it, it is more appositely the “Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike of British pop movies”.