Noddy Holder opens up on tragedy that led to Slade’s iconic Christmas hit

Watch Noddy Holder opens up on tragedy that led to Slade’s iconic Christmas hit - The Independent on Dailymotion

Transcript

00:00 Two months before we went in to record it, this was in New York we recorded it,

00:04 but our drummer, we'd just done, we were the first rock band to play Earl's Court.

00:11 It's 18,000, we were at the zenith of our career. We were number one in the charts with Squeeze Me

00:18 Please Me and we were really top of the tree. Five days after Earl's Court, our drummer was in a car

00:28 crash, he's Bentley. He went through the windscreen, as did his girlfriend, his girlfriend was killed.

00:36 They didn't give him 24 hours to live, he was in intensive care. I went up the next, well I got a

00:44 call from his dad in the middle of the night saying Don, Don Powell his name was Don, he's been in a

00:51 car crash, they don't even give him 24 hours to survive. He said if you want to see him you better

00:57 go up first thing in the morning and I went to see him and the mess he was in, he'd shaved all his hair,

01:04 he got pipes out of every orifice, he just looked horrendous and we didn't give him much chance.

01:10 Anyway he's a tough cookie, I mean he's built like brick, a drummer as well. And he came out

01:18 of hospital six weeks later, he had no memory, no taste or smell, couldn't remember any of the songs,

01:27 none of them, didn't know any of the hits and we took him in the studio to see if he could start

01:34 playing. He did start playing and the only song we got to record at that point, this was in a

01:39 blazing hot, the end of a blazing hot summer, it was under 100 degrees outside. The only song we'd

01:46 got ready written was Merry Christmas Everybody and our manager producer Chas Tunnell says well

01:52 let's try and get it down if we can. But Don, he couldn't play the four minutes, the length of the

01:58 song because he couldn't remember the arrangement. So I had to speak down the vocal mic to him,

02:05 there's a drum roll coming now Don, you go ba dibbity bop bop bop bop and we tried to record

02:10 it like that, couldn't, so we had to record it in bits and dabs like a jigsaw.