The world is still here and a peculiarly British phenomenon

MG writes:

As far as I can tell, the world hasn't ended, although the only evidence that I have is that the hedge outside my front door and the houses for the disabled beyond still appear to be there and at least one Google and one BBC server would appear to still be functioning; at least they were up until five minutes ago. It would be a little troubling, don't you think, if that were all that was left and I, my records, CDs and my books are somehow privileged to have escaped the global catastrophe; that the entire history of the literature and music of our civilisation is somehow maintained and preserved only through the vagaries of my own taste; that an alien vistation far into the future would surmise that 'Paper Plane' by Status Quo and 'Asterix le Gaulois' by Uderzo and Goscinny were the highpoints of a long lost culture; that the pictorial art of a myriad of peoples is only preserved in a few of my piss-poor sketches of birds. I shall have to venture out later and see if Sainsbury Savacentre and the Tesco Express (open 24 hours) have somehow also survived Armageddon; strangely, for one of my inclinations, I have little desire to be 'the only living boy' (in New York or anywhere else) just yet.

At this time of the year, Yuletide, a quite oddly British phenomenon appears. It is quite recent, only in the last twenty five or so years, but it is as ubiquitous as Norwegian pines, the Queen's Christmas message to the nation, fairy lights, the strains of 'I'm dreaming of a white Christmas' and the gross over-indulgence on turkey and wine. Of course, I am talking of the unavoidability of escaping the sound of 'Slade', and more importantly Noddy Holder, intoning 'Merry Xmas Everybody'. It's played interminally on the radio, is piped through the speakers of every supermarket and store in the land and is always played last and loud at the plethora of Christmas office parties up and down the country.

Slade were the biggest pop group in Britain in the early seventies, only ABBA came close, and were, strangely and rare enough, a corking live band to boot (I saw them once). Looking more like 'Ken Dood's Diddy Men' than pop stars; a lead singer who looked more like some mutton-chopped, Dickensian Mr Pecksniff than David Cassidy; record labels that held the inability to spell correctly as the pinnacle of high art; the singer who couldn't sing, only shout in a black-country, Wolverhampton accent; a guitarist who had a haircut that anyone who was even vaguely sane would not be seen dead in. Despite all of my 'prog', noodling pretensions fuelled by 'Pink Floyd', 'Yes', 'Van der Graaf Generator' and 'Emerson, Lake and Palmer', Slade permuate those musical memories with a soundtrack as catchy and uplifting as it is insiduous. Whatever their gifts, or lack of them, as musicians and songwriters, Slade just make you feel happy!

I say that is a British phenomenon because America, in the early to mid-seventies, just never 'got them'. As Slade were busy pumping out, seemingly ad infinitum, feel-good hits, 'Coz I luv you', 'Mama, weer all crazee now', 'Take me bak ome' to name but three, Britain was experiencing its darkest days since the Blitz. The miner's strike during the worst of the winter; closure of schools nationwide because there was nothing to heat them with; the three-day working week, and resultant three-days a week salary, because there was no electricity to power the machines from the coal-fired power stations; working in the office or shopping by candlelight because four-hour power cuts were a daily occurance; living in Britain during the strike had all the hallmarks of living in a third world country. Into that mix, Slade invested their anthemic 'let the good times roll' songs as though we had any real prospect of the possibilty of seeing  'good times' ever again.

When Slade atttempted America in 1975, it seemed that America too would succumb. The Vietnam war had just been lost and surely America was ripe for a transfusion of Slade's 'feelgood' factor VIII; it never happened. I suspect that America by this time was just too depressed to wake up and 'Cum on, feel the noize' and merely wanted to endlessly navel-gaze at the sorry loss of life and the vast financial cost of a war that they never had any chance of winning or even settling for a draw with those in Hanoi.

Their success, in a way, is even more remarkable, given the dire social circumstances in Britain at the time, as, not five years later, with the winter of discontent in full swing, rubbish piled eight stories high in Leicester Square and job prospects for the young less than zero, the outcome was not a surge in musical popularity for Slade but the very opposite; the despair, nihilism and calls for revolution of the Sex Pistols' 'God save the Queen' and 'Pretty Vacant', the Damned's 'New Rose' ("a deathless anthem of nuclear-strength romantic angst"), the Specials' 'Ghost Town'. Britain had become, almost overnight, a hot-bed of highly politicised anarchists; an excellent advertisement for Richard Hell's 'Blank Generation'! The days of the Blitz mentality, the days of sitting huddled round the fire singing songs of hope had all gone up in a puff of smoke.

Britain has never regained, as a nation, that optimism even during the heady days of Harry Enfield's 'Loadsa Money' and wheeling your end-of-year bonuses home in wheelbarrows.

Incidentally, the film 'Slade in Flame', made purely to cash in on their fame, much like the Beatles' 'Hard day's night' and 'Help!' is one of the best films about the music industry ever made, much better than 'Stardust'.which follows a similar plot line. It was only to be expected. Flame has Noddy Holder, Stardust had to settle for 'pretty boy', 'useless singer' David Essex!