(Credits: far Out / Album Cover)
Tue 9 September 2025 10:00, UK
The only thing that’s aged badly about the Slade classic ‘Cum On Feel the Noize’ is its title. Everything else still absolutely rips.
Especially today when their spiritual successors Oasis are with a bullet the biggest band in Britain and have historically had a rollicking cover of ‘…Feel The Noise’ as part of their live set. The Gallagher brothers are arguably more Slade copyists than they ever were The Beatles, but that isn’t the only thing that Brummie glam rockers had in common with the Fab Four.
There’s a convincing argument that Slade are as worthy of the title of Britain’s biggest band of the 1970s as the likes of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. Granted, they never had those bands’ stateside success. The original Slade version of ‘…Feel The Noize’ reached a princely number 98 on the Billboard Hot 100, and wouldn’t be a hit until Glam Metal clowns Quiet Riot got their grubby little mitts on it. However, and this is entirely true, no other band sold more singles in the UK in the entire 1970s than Slade. Not Zep, not Floyd, not The Who, not Sabbath. Slade.
Granted, many of those bands didn’t bother with singles, but that’s still one hell of a feather for Noddy Holder and co to have in their (mirrored) hat. Slade were a commercial titan who have much more to offer than just ‘Merry Xmas Everyone’. They first hit the number one spot on the UK charts with their 1971 single ‘Coz I Luv You’, their fourth single as Slade. For the next five years, a Slade single was a more or less guaranteed hit, with the band replicating a feat that only The Beatles had achieved with ‘Cum On Feel The Noize’.
Said feat doesn’t sound like much today, but at the time, it was absolutely unheard of for all but the biggest artists alive. ‘…Feel The Noize’ didn’t just reach number one, it did so by going straight to number one the very week it was released. It’s very difficult to express just how much this did not happen in the days before the media got as massive as it did in the 1980s. Perhaps the best way of explaining it is to say that the last song to make that feat was The Beatles’ ‘Get Back’ four years earlier. Despite the decade of Beatlemania that had preceded it, that was a feat they’d never done before.
How did Slade achieve this feat?
With all the respect in the world to Holder and co., they would be the first to tell you that the gulf in popularity between them and the actual Beatles was a wide one indeed. Slade were a huge band in their day with hits for days. The Beatles were the biggest band in the world and it wasn’t even close. Even then, The Beatles hadn’t achieved this by simply putting the record out into the world. They’d had to have some extenuating circumstances on their side.
The Fabs achieved this feat on the back of a huge advertising campaign from their label, Apple. One that focused on how ‘Get Back’ was The Beatles back at their purest. The world’s greatest rock band is actually the world’s greatest rock band and not three mercurial songwriters squabbling about who gets their songs on the record (and Ringo). This campaign powered the song to the top of the charts with one week of sales, and in 1973, Slade’s manager, Chas Chandler and John Fruin, the head of their label Polydor, saw a way of doing the same.
Now, the reason this didn’t happen was because singles used to be released on Fridays, with the charts published on Tuesdays. Thus, those singles only had three days to accumulate sales. Slade’s plan was to do what had otherwise been anathema to pop singles, and send the single to radio stations long before its release date. However, they had an ace up their sleeve. The single’s promotion heavily featured a way to pre-order the single so whenever people heard this absolute juggernaut of a song, they could reserve their copy with ease.
Noddy Holder himself wrote about how successful this process was in his autobiography Who’s Crazee Now?. “In the days leading up to the releas,e ‘Cum On Feel the Noize’ got preorders of 300,000. By the following week it had another 200,000. It shot straight to number one. Two weeks later, it was still there, it held T Rex ‘20th Century Boy‘ at number 2, which Dave (Hill, lead guitarist) was particularly pleased about.”
Canny? Absolutely, to the point of being a little underhanded. However, it wouldn’t have worked if the song wasn’t one of the best pop songs of the whole 1970s. The next half-century has proved just that with aplomb.
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