Tales of Love and LIght Here, Now, and All Ways by Frank L. DeSilva

Then there was the MTV thing, which didn’t exist before. Kiss were a perfect example of taking our thing to the nth degree – people were waiting for a change, and that worked well for Kiss. Noddy again: “Gene Simmons and Nikki Sixx told us they’d seen us live when they were younger. Interestingly, there were plenty of key figures in the audience taking notes, including future members of Mötley Crüe and Kiss. When we got to America, no one was doing that, really pulling them in and getting them to be a part of the show, singing and stamping and clapping along. We really made that a big part of our act from day one – maybe we even invented it. We were really big on getting the crowd involved live. Instead of playing to a rabble-raising crowd, all you could smell was pot. Lea agrees: “The Americans didn’t get us at all. Instead of playing to a rabble-raising crowd, all you could smell was pot Jim Lea

Visually, I think we probably looked like four spacemen up there.” We were an out-and-out rock ’n’ roll band trying to get audience participation going, but the audience just didn’t have any energy. “Half the audience was out of it they were just stoned out of their trees. “It was a very strange experience,” he says. Holder remembers how different the American audiences were from what they’d been used to everywhere else in the world. Slade made their first earnest attempt to try to break open the world’s biggest market – the U.S. Lea wrote all the music and often came up with key phrases for choruses and titles, leaving singer Holder to fill in the gaps with bawdy tales and a mirrored top hat full of double entendres… Piledrivers A virtuoso violinist as a schoolboy, he abandoned the staid world of orchestral ensembles for the hedonistic joys of the three-minute classic. The secret to Slade’s success was their songs, penned by singer Noddy Holder and bass player Jim Lea, who was the musical brain behind the band.

Tales of Love and LIght Here, Now, and All Ways by Frank L. DeSilva