It reached No. 15, which was perfectly respectable. Slade would not see the UK top 40 again for nearly seven years.
No. 15 in the UK Singles Chart, ten weeks inside the top 100. For most bands that is a solid quarter’s work, and for Slade in the winter of 1984 it looked like the run continuing. It was in fact the end of one. Nearly seven years would pass before another Slade single reached the British top 40, and nobody watching them play the song to a German television audience that December had the faintest idea.
They had earned the confidence. The previous two years had given the band a second life nobody had predicted: RCA brought in producer John Punter, Noddy Holder and Jim Lea wrote My Oh My and Run Runaway, and both landed. The first went to No. 2 in Britain and topped the charts in Norway and Sweden. The second reached No. 7 at home and No. 20 in America — the only time Slade ever cracked the US top 20, in a country that had spent a decade ignoring them while buying Quiet Riot’s versions of their songs instead.
Holder and Lea wrote this one too, and Lea’s account of where it came from is characteristically unbothered. He told Record Mirror in 1984 that these things arrived while he was walking: I come up with these on my way down to the chip shop. They cut it at Angel Recording Studios in London with Punter producing, and RCA put it out in November 1984, deliberately timed at the Christmas market by a band that knew more than anyone alive about what the Christmas market could do. The parent album, Rogues Gallery, would not appear until the following March.
December 8, 1984, in front of a German studio audience
The performance on Thommys Popshow extra catches them doing the thing they were always best at, which is making a room full of people sing something back. Germany had been good to Slade for fifteen years, longer and more consistently than America ever managed, and the ZDF cameras find a band in no way diminished — Holder in front, Dave Hill doing what Dave Hill does, Lea and Don Powell holding it down behind. It is a song built for exactly this: a wide, slow, arms-in-the-air chorus with almost nothing complicated in it.
What it was up against back home was the largest collective singalong Britain had ever produced. Band Aid released “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” into the same weeks and took the Christmas No. 1 with a scale of sales nothing else that season could approach. A record called All Join Hands, arriving in the middle of the actual joining of hands, reached No. 15. In that company it was not a poor result. It was simply a small object next to a very large one.
Then the ground gave way. RCA followed it in January 1985 with 7 Year Bitch, which stalled at No. 60 after radio programmers balked at the title, and Holder later put the collapse down to a backlash rather than the song. Two more singles came off Rogues Gallery and the album itself only reached No. 60. The American edition dropped this song from the running order entirely and substituted a four-year-old track. Holder and Lea left the band in 1992.
Which is what makes the December tape worth keeping. It is not a document of decline, because there is no decline visible in it — the band on that stage is the same band that had six No. 1 singles, playing a good song well to a crowd that plainly wants it. The record didn’t fail. The floor moved, quietly, three weeks either side of Christmas 1984, and it took most of a decade for anyone to work out that it had.
