Slade – Rock N’ Roll Preacher

It was only ever a single in one country — and it was the song they opened every show with.

RCA put this out as a single in Germany and nowhere else. It reached No.49 there in the spring of 1982 and that was the whole commercial life of the record — no British release, no American one, nothing anywhere else. Which makes it strange that for years afterward it was the first thing Slade played when the lights went down, in every country they went to, in front of audiences who could not have bought it if they had wanted to.

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The song came off Till Deaf Do Us Part, their tenth album, released in November 1981. Noddy Holder and Jim Lea wrote it, the band produced it themselves, and it is about as direct as Slade ever got — a hard rock record with a preacher conceit and a title that shouts its own punchline. When RCA decided on the German release, the album version had to come down to something a radio station would play, and the editing was done in-house by Lea, Holder and drummer Don Powell rather than handed to anybody else.

Kerrang!, reviewing the album, said it came close to capturing what Slade were actually like live, with “Holder chortling wickedly through every line.” That is precisely why it ended up opening the shows. It does the job an opener has to do, which is to establish within about four seconds that the next ninety minutes are not going to be polite.

Germany kept them

Slade’s relationship with German television is the reason a lot of this band’s best footage exists. They played this song on Musikladen on March 11, 1982, around the single’s release. Two and a half years later they were back, and the performance on this page is that second one — Thommys Pop Show, broadcast on ZDF on December 8, 1984.

By then their situation had changed completely, and not in the direction anyone expected. 1984 was the year Slade finally broke America. Run Runaway and My Oh My both reached the US Top 40, a decade after the band had first tried and failed to crack the country, and a six-week arena tour supporting Ozzy Osbourne was booked to capitalize on it.

Jim Lea collapsed after the first night. He was diagnosed with hepatitis and the remaining dates were canceled. At the same time Noddy Holder’s marriage was ending, and the band made a decision that effectively closed the second half of their career: they stopped touring. They would keep making records — Rogues Gallery was being assembled through the back end of 1984 — but the live act that this song had opened for years was finished.

What the footage is

So what you are watching is a band on German television a few months after losing the thing they had spent ten years chasing, playing a song that only Germany had ever been sold. Holder is not visibly carrying any of it. Whether that is professionalism or the fact that Slade were incapable of playing this particular song at less than full commitment is a question the footage does not answer.

AllMusic’s Geoff Ginsberg wrote later that the track is “so blistering, one wonders just how heavy these guys can get.” Slade are remembered in Britain almost entirely for Christmas and for the glam singles of 1972 and 1973, and there is a whole second band underneath that — louder, harder, and largely undocumented outside the German broadcast archives. This is four minutes of it.