Noddy Holder interview: ‘We lived like rock ’n’ roll stars – and I don’t regret it’

“I’ve been playing guitar again,” says Noddy Holder. “Well, there’s nothing else to do, is there?”

The 74-year-old former Slade star has spent the past few months stuck at home with his wife in Macclesfield, Cheshire. “I’m in high-risk over-70s lockdown. We live on the outskirts of Manchester, so we’ve been locked down and re-locked down.

“I’m bored with it now. I’m brushing up on my guitar technique, going back to my roots, the stuff I used to play in the Fifties: country, rock ’n’ roll and R’n’B, even some jazz; songs that turned me on as a kid and made me want to be in a band.”

I wonder what his neighbours make of it? Even talking on the phone, his voice still sounds gritty, raw and so loud he might as well be shouting. “I still have a very powerful voice,” he laughs. “I had to be loud, ’cause I had an incredibly loud band behind me and they weren’t going to turn down just so the singer could be heard!”

Holder surely has one of the greatest voices in British rock. Yet since he quit Slade 28 years ago in 1992, he has never made a solo record, or even gone on tour again. “Well, never say never – I might do it now,” he declares mischievously. “If they ever let me out of the house.”

He even has some songs. “I have a stockpile written over the years. I didn’t just stop, bang, and that was the end of the story. I still have moments, when I get the inspiration. But I couldn’t do it night after night, year after year. Slade were a heavy-gigging band. I got off that treadmill, and no regrets.”

Formed in Wolverhampton in 1966, Slade became a powerhouse glam rock quartet whose anthems still reverberate through popular culture. Their Seventies imperial period saw them score 17 consecutive top 20 hits, with six number ones including Coz I Luv You, Mama Weer All Crazee Now and Cum On Feel the Noize. The deliberately misspelt song titles were intended to evoke the West Midlands accent, which Holder proudly retains, saying “Orroight” for “All right”.

Their seasonal classic Merry Xmas Everybody sold over a million copies in 1973 and has re-entered the charts every year since. He has described it as his pension plan, and, unlike many other festive traditions, should remain unaffected this year, despite tough Covid restrictions. “It’s Christmas every day round me!” he says. “I honestly don’t think a day’s gone by when I’m out on the street and somebody hasn’t shouted ‘It’s Christmas’ at me. Even now, if I’m out for a bit of fresh air. IT’S CHRISTMAAAASSSSS!!!!” Holder laughs with all the relish of a manic elf. “Hee-hee-hee-hee! I love it!”

A new compilation, Cum on Feel the Hitz, celebrates Slade’s 20-year career, from their breakout 1971 single Get Down and Get With It to their 1991 swan song Radio Wall of Sound. Rip-roaring rockers are interspersed with the jaunty singalongs (My Friend Stan, Far Far Away) and anthemic power ballads (My Oh My) that made them such an influence on Oasis. “A rock ’n’ roll band with a great frontman, great guitar player, you can’t beat that. From Buddy Holly all the way to Oasis and that young lot, The 1975. It’s a primal feeling. It gets inside your body. There’s nothing better.”

Holder first sang on stage aged seven in 1953 and started gigging professionally in the early Sixties, sometimes playing six-hour sets, and double that on weekends. “I don’t know how my voice stood up to it,” he cheerfully roars. “In the whole of my 30 years on stage, I only cancelled three or four dates.”

He relates a tale of how his voice “packed up” during a Slade concert in Texas in the mid-Seventies, following 18 shows in a row. “They sent me to a voice coach in New York. I’m sitting in the waiting room, and I could hear a piano player and somebody going through their scales. She came out and it was Rita Moreno from West Side Story. So I went in for my turn and there’s this little grey-haired chap sitting at a grand piano.

“He hadn’t got a clue who I was, and he said, ‘You have problem with your voice?’ like a German professor. I said, ‘It’s packed in.’ He said, ‘Can you give me an example of how you sing?’ I did the opening bars to Get Down and Get With It and he asked, ‘How long have you been singing like this?’ I said, ‘Probably 13 or 14 years.’ And he went, ‘Then there’s nothing I can do for you! Go away!’ ” Holder laughs infectiously. “That was all the voice training I ever had.”

Growing up in Walsall, Holder briefly worked as a roadie for Robert Plant in the days before Led Zeppelin, driving his group Band of Joy around in Holder’s father’s window-cleaning van. “Many’s the time I was sitting in the driving seat, waiting for Planty to finish on the job with a young lady in the back, all my dad’s buckets and ladders rattling. We had fun in those days.”

The offstage behaviour of classic rockers is not always looked on so kindly these days. “Working-class kids, coming out of the Midlands, never been on aeroplanes or anything like that, we are going to go berserk. We wanted to be rock ’n’ roll stars. So you fly first class, stay in first class hotels, you get ladies everywhere you go, the world is your oyster. “To me, if you didn’t live the lifestyle when you had the chance, you’ve wasted the chance. It was great.”

But he insists Slade have nothing to regret. “We’ve all done bad stuff in our time, we’ve all gone over the top, especially on the road in America. We’ve all come to the edge, all of us, but we know when to pull back.”

Holder and the band’s bassist, Jim Lea, wrote all of Slade’s hits. “Jim wasn’t a rock ’n’ roller at all. He didn’t like the colourful outfits. It was like Yin and Yang with me and him.” He recalls guitarist Dave Hill making an appearance in an outrageous costume they called the Metal Nun. “Jim’d say, ‘I’m not going on with him dressed like that.’ Dave goes: ‘You write ’em, I’ll sell ’em!’ ”

Holder laughs a lot talking about Slade. “We never had punch ups or fell out even, but the dynamic changed.” He quit in 1991, pursuing a successful career in acting and voice-overs, but always thought Slade would get back together one day. “But it actually got worse.” There was a meeting in 2010 to discuss reforming. “Within half an hour, we were arguing about the same things we argued about the day we split up, as if it was yesterday.”

He remains friendly with Hill, who has continued to perform in a greatest hits band, Slade II. “If I’m in Wolverhampton, I pop round his house for a cup of tea. Dave’s eccentric but that’s why we get on.” Holder hasn’t spoken to former songwriting partner Jim Lea “in donkey’s years. He seems to have cut himself off from the three of us.” Drummer Don Powell now lives in Denmark and recently had a public falling out with Hill.

“It gets my goat that we can’t all sit round a dinner table and have a laugh about the old days. You’ve got to let that silly schoolyard stuff go. In the great scheme of things, we were a fantastic band, we had fantastic songs, we made fantastic records, we were fantastic on stage, that’s the bottom line. All the other crap is incidental.”

Slade: Cum on Feel the Hitz is released by BMG on Friday