Slade – How Does It Feel?

Chas Chandler Had Been Keeping This Side of Them Hidden for Years — and He Knew Exactly Why

The melody that became “How Does It Feel” was written by Jim Lea around 1970, on an out-of-tune upright piano with half the keys missing. He liked it enough to keep it, tucked away, knowing it wasn’t the kind of thing Slade were supposed to be. Their manager and producer Chas Chandler — the former Animals bassist who had also discovered and produced Jimi Hendrix — understood his band’s commercial identity with surgical precision. Slade were the most successful British singles act of the early 1970s, six number ones in less than three years, the band who made entire football terraces roar along to deliberate misspellings and glam-stomp riffs. Chandler had no interest in releasing something that might confuse that audience. The piano melody stayed in the drawer. Then Slade made a film, the film needed a theme, and the drawer was finally opened. Dave Hill reflected on it years later with characteristic directness: Chandler had been keeping them clear from that kind of thing — keeping the stimulus of the right music for the right people. Whether it helped them in the long run, Hill said, was questionable. “We were maybe cleverer in those early years, which could have introduced us to new things — but it never happened, apart from ‘How Does It Feel’.”

Slade in Flame was not the kind of film Slade’s audience had been expecting. Directed by Richard Loncraine and written by Andrew Birkin — the script largely based on true events from the music business that Slade and other groups of the era had actually experienced — it was a bleak, noir-inflected story about a fictional 1960s group called Flame and the systematic way the music industry consumed and discarded them. Critics loved it. Slade’s fanbase, accustomed to the band delivering a good time, was understandably disoriented. Set in 1966, the film needed a soundtrack with a period feel, which gave Holder and Lea licence to write differently from anything in their existing catalogue. The result was the Slade in Flame album, released November 1974, which peaked at number six — their previous three albums had all reached number one. “How Does It Feel” plays over the film’s opening and closing credits, Holder’s melancholy lyric landing differently against the film’s unsparing portrait of disillusionment than it would have against a backdrop of platform boots and confetti.

The Brass Section Nobody Saw Coming

The recording was built around Arthur Greenslade’s orchestral arrangement — brass and woodwind instruments provided by members of the band Gonzalez — laid over Lea’s piano melody, with Holder singing in a register and at a dynamic level the band had never publicly committed to before. Record Mirror called it “very different from the usual Slade material, with far less reliance on guitars and far more on an orchestral arrangement.” The review noted the gentle piano intro, the almost subdued entrance of Holder’s voice, the way the song builds through what the Bristol Evening Post described as alternating passages of rock and orchestra — “starting slow and sensitive, breaking into heavy and then alternating.” The Cash Box review in the United States captured the paradox most cleanly: “It’s a change of pace for Slade as the English thrashers have come up with an effective, almost ballad-like single that contains the band’s smoke without all the fire.”

Released in February 1975 as the second single from the soundtrack, “How Does It Feel” reached number 15 in the UK and remained on the chart for seven weeks — the lowest chart position for a Slade single since their first charting release in 1971. The first week it entered the Top 100 at number 38, which was poor by any historical Slade standard. At the same time it entered the top ten of most European charts, according to the band’s own fan club newsletter from that summer. The divergence between the UK commercial performance and the continental reception tells part of the story: in Europe, where Slade’s identity was slightly less rigidly defined by the glam stomp years, the song’s emotional register was received on its own terms. In the UK it was filtered through the expectations of an audience who had been sold something specific for four years, and who found the gap between that and this difficult to bridge in the moment. Jim Lea was philosophical. He said it was a much better record than anything they had made before. He was right, and the passage of time has confirmed it.

What Noel Gallagher Heard

The reappraisal of “How Does It Feel” has been long and thorough. In the 1986 Slade fan club opinion poll it placed third for best single of the 1970s — behind the commercial giants but ahead of almost everything else. Classic Rock included it on their Essential Slade playlist in 2010. Def Leppard, who grew up on Slade and have never been quiet about it, recorded a version for their 2006 album Yeah!, released as an iTunes exclusive that introduced the song to an entirely new generation of hard rock listeners. Chris Farlowe had done the same for a 2001 tribute album. In 2025, the British Film Institute marked the 50th anniversary of Slade in Flame with a remastered theatrical rerelease and a Blu-ray edition, accompanied by the publication of a book by fans Chris Selby and Ian Edmundson — all of it returning attention to the song that bookends the film. But the endorsement that most crystallised “How Does It Feel”‘s standing came from Noel Gallagher of Oasis, who in 1999 called it “one of the best songs written, in the history of pop, ever.” Given Gallagher’s habitual reluctance to praise anything unreservedly, that verdict carries weight. The song Chas Chandler kept in the drawer for four years, the melody Jim Lea wrote on a broken piano he could barely play, turned out to be the one that lasted longest.