Slade – Run Runaway

Run Runaway finally gave Slade an American hit, just as they stopped playing to crowds

By the time Slade played “Run Runaway” for the Rockpop Music Hall cameras on February 18, 1985, the song had done what a decade of British No.1s never managed. It had made America listen. It had climbed to No.20 on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped Billboard’s rock radio chart, and it still stands as the band’s only American Top 20 single. The catch sat in the calendar. The four men from Wolverhampton who had built their name on crowds stamping and singing back at them had, by then, stopped going out on the road.

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The song began as homework. RCA felt Slade’s 1982 sessions lacked a hit and sent Noddy Holder and Jim Lea away to write. They came back with two songs, “My Oh My” and “Run Runaway,” and the label wanted both. Lea later said the melody arrived while he was in the middle of a conversation with someone else. Holder explained the plan in a 1984 interview: they had long wanted to do a jig with the violin going, so they put a rock beat under an old Scottish one. That meant the return of Lea’s electric fiddle, an instrument that had been part of Slade’s sound since “Coz I Luv You.”

RCA brought in producer John Punter, the first outside producer the band had used since Chas Chandler. Punter’s method was to record each member’s part separately. The band came around to it, except Holder, who felt it was wearing away the chemistry that made them a rock and roll band. The results argued with him. “My Oh My” reached No.2 at Christmas 1983, and RCA released “Run Runaway” in January 1984 to push The Amazing Kamikaze Syndrome further up the album chart. The single reached No.7 in Britain, and the album, which had stalled at No.74, climbed to No.49.

America, at last

America arrived through a side door. Quiet Riot’s cover of “Cum On Feel the Noize” reached No.5 on the Hot 100 in late 1983, and the success of a Slade song in American hands prompted CBS Associated to sign the band for its first American deal since the 1970s. CBS repackaged the album as Keep Your Hands Off My Power Supply and led with “Run Runaway.” Its promotional film, directed by Tim Pope at Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire, put the band in front of a tartan-clad audience alongside marching pipers and a kilted man wrestling a caber. MTV played it constantly. The single spent 17 weeks on the Hot 100 and peaked at No.20. Billboard’s rock radio chart had it at No.1, and “My Oh My” followed it into the American Top 40 that August.

Then the stage went away. Slade had finished what turned out to be their final British tour at the end of 1983. A six-week American run opening for Ozzy Osbourne ended almost as soon as it began, when Lea collapsed in the dressing room after a warm-up show and was diagnosed with hepatitis. With Holder’s marriage breaking down, the band agreed to stop touring. A European tour went on sale in the fall of 1984 without the band having agreed to it, and Holder had it cancelled. When “7 Year Bitch” stalled at No.60 in January 1985 after radio balked at the title, Slade had no live dates on which to fight back.

That is the context the Rockpop Music Hall performance captures. Slade Official dates it February 18, 1985, a few weeks after “7 Year Bitch” and less than a month before Rogues Gallery. By then “Run Runaway” was no longer a new single. It was the band’s calling card outside Britain, the record that had finally opened America, and television was one of the few places it was still being played to an audience. The lineup on stage was the one that had been together since 1966: Holder on vocals and rhythm guitar, Dave Hill on lead, Lea on bass and fiddle, Don Powell on drums.

The momentum didn’t survive the silence. Rogues Gallery peaked at No.60 in Britain and No.132 in America, a shortfall tied partly to the band’s absence from live stages, and the new American audience drifted away. Holder and Lea left in 1992. “Run Runaway” remains the clearest picture of what Slade almost had in America: a song built to be stamped along to by a crowd, which arrived just as Slade stopped facing crowds.