Slade – Coz I Luv You

Jim Lea carried a violin to Noddy Holder’s house, and half an hour later they had written the song that made Slade famous and that both of them despised.

The violin was the whole idea. One afternoon in 1971, Jim Lea turned up at Noddy Holder’s house carrying it, having heard a track called Nine By Nine by the John Dummer Blues Band and decided Slade should try something with the swing of Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli behind it. Chas Chandler had been pressing the band to stop covering other people’s records and write their own. Lea got the structure, Holder filled the gaps, and the two of them finished it in half an hour. Lea later said it was the only song they ever wrote that way.

Keep watching: Slade – Take Me Bak ‘Ome · explore more →

They played it to Chandler acoustically the next day and he told them they had just written their “first hit record,” then went further and named the chart position. He booked Olympic Studios in Barnes immediately and the recording took two days. That is the entire distance between an idea and a No.1 single: one afternoon, one audition, two days in a room in southwest London.

The band hated it. Measured against Get Down and Get with It, the Bobby Marchan cover that had broken them into the UK top 20 that May, this sounded thin and polite to them. Lea told Sounds in 1980 that it was “namby-pamby to us, a throwaway for an album,” and that when it went to No.1 the band’s reaction was disbelief rather than triumph. Their fix was to stomp on the floor and clap their hands all over it until it sounded like something that could survive a Slade audience. The rhythm that came out of that repair job is what the record is now remembered for.

Spelling it the way it was said

The second repair was the title. It had been written as “Because I Love You,” which nobody in the band thought looked like them, so Holder respelled it in Black Country dialect. Polydor released it on October 8, 1971, and it went to No.1 in Britain and Ireland, top three in the Netherlands, top ten in Belgium, Australia and West Germany, and stayed inside the UK top 50 for fifteen weeks. Cotillion put it out in America that December, where it did nothing at all. It was the first of six British No.1s, and the misspelled titles carried on for a decade: Look Wot You Dun, Take Me Bak ‘Ome, Cum On Feel the Noize, Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me. Schoolteachers complained. That was arguably the point.

No promotional film was made for it, which matters more now than it did then. The song exists on camera because television booked the band: Top of the Pops twice in Britain, including the 1971 Christmas edition, Popshop in Belgium, and in Germany both Disco and Beat-Club. The Beat-Club appearance was broadcast on November 27, 1971, during the song’s run at the top.

Beat-Club is the reason a great deal of early-seventies British rock survives in watchable form. Radio Bremen ran it from 1965 to 1972 under Mike Leckebusch, who treated a television music show as something other than a sales aid — bands played, the cameras experimented, and the tapes were kept. British broadcasters of the same period wiped theirs. A band whose first No.1 had no video at all ends up preserved by a German regional broadcaster with an unusual attitude toward its archive.

What the clip documents is a group that had not yet worked out what it was going to be. The boots and the mirrored top hats and the Christmas record were all ahead of them, and the song being performed is one the band considered a mistake right up until it changed their lives. Lea was still calling it wet nine years later. He was also still playing the violin part, because the thing he had brought to Holder’s house that afternoon turned out to be worth more than his opinion of it.