Cum On Film The Moise

A long time ago, in a galaxy Far Far Away, SLADE rewrote the rulebook when it came to movies about rock bands. On the eve of a new DVD release of their classic Flame, the band shared their thoughts with TERRY STAUNTON

 In the wake of the success of The Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night, an unwritten formula emerged in the 1960s for the making of a British pop movie. Having scaled the dizzy heights of the charts, the likes of Gerry & The Pacemakers, The Dave Clark Five and Herman’s Hermits followed the Fab Four’s wacky template and offered filmgoers their own take on comic japes and high jinks.

The trend continued to a degree over the next decade, with Gary Glitter’s Remember Me This Way and the knockabout comedy Never Too Young To Rock (featuring Mud, The Rubettes and The Glitter Band), but all that changed in 1975 with the release of Flame. Perhaps ironically, it took the biggest singles band of the early 70s, who probably had more to lose than their contemporaries, to move the goalposts. Slade sacrificed the slapstick shenanigans that had gone before and went straight for the jugular with a gritty kitchen sink drama, with undertones of the violence of films like Get Carter or TV hits like The Sweeney.

Flame was where rock fantasy met real life, where the main players weren’t mugging to camera and a happy ending was far from guaranteed. In industry parlance, it’s fair to say the movie ‘under-performed’ on its initial release, but more than 30 years later …

by Terry Staunton
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