Slade – Gudbuy T’Jane

Slade hated it, knocked it out in half an hour at the end of a session, and watched it become their biggest American single of the decade.

Jim Lea was blunt about it years later. Talking to Sounds in 1980 about Slade’s run of hits, he said he had not even liked some of them, and singled one out. “We all hated ‘Gudbuy T’Jane’ when we made it,” he said, adding that it had been knocked together in half an hour at the end of a studio session. This was the record that followed one British No.1 and preceded another, and that got closer to an American audience than anything else the band released in the seventies.

Keep watching: Slade – Coz I Luv You · explore more →

The speed was real, and so was the source. The idea came to Lea on an American tour, while he sat beside a swimming pool in San Francisco, and he finished the tune in an airplane restroom on the flight home. Jane herself was no invention. The band had appeared on an American television show alongside a woman who was there to demonstrate a contraption billed as a sex machine, and she stuck in their minds. Noddy Holder, who completed the lyric, tried turning the title into a greeting, Hello T’Jane. Lea talked him out of it. The goodbye stayed, spelled the way Slade spelled everything.

Nobody rehearsed it. The band had not played the song together until the day they recorded it, and producer Chas Chandler kept the second take. That is the reason it sounds the way it does. Don Powell’s drums open it alone, the guitars pile in, and Lea’s bass line charges underneath as if the whole thing might come apart before the chorus. A more careful band would have smoothed that out over a week. Slade had half an hour and a producer who knew when to stop.

The One Between the No.1s

Polydor released the single on November 17, 1972, a couple of weeks after the album Slayed? had come out with the song already on it. Mama Weer All Crazee Now had just topped the British chart, and Cum On Feel the Noize would do the same early the next year. In between, the Official Charts Company ranked this one at No.2, where it stuck, although the New Musical Express chart had it at No.1. It spent thirteen weeks on the British chart and earned a silver disc. It went to No.2 in Ireland, No.3 in West Germany and No.4 in the Netherlands and Switzerland.

Then there was America, the market Slade never cracked. Billboard’s Hot 100 ranked the single no higher than No.68. That looks like a failure until it is set against everything else they tried there, because no other Slade single of the decade climbed as high. The throwaway was their best American showing.

Germany was a different matter, and the footage shows why. On February 3, 1973, with the single high on the West German chart, Slade performed it on the television show Disco. Holder is in his mirrored top hat, Dave Hill is dressed like nobody else on earth, and the four of them attack a song they supposedly disliked as if it were their favorite. Powell, at least, came around completely. In 1981 he named it among the Slade songs he liked best. The band’s verdict on the day they made it was wrong, and their own performance of it proves the point. The record has lasted because of the haste they were embarrassed by.