The Fragile Bravado of Letting Go: Slade’s Bittersweet Reflection on the Vanishing Yesterday
In the mid-1970s, as Slade stood at the crossroads of their glitter-drenched superstardom and a more mature artistic chapter, the haunting “OK Yesterday Was Yesterday” emerged as one of the band’s most emotionally charged moments. Released in 1975 as the B-side to “How Does It Feel”, and featured on their ambitious film soundtrack Slade in Flame, the song captures a turning point in both their sound and their spirit. It never scaled the charts like their earlier anthems — no roaring Top 10 triumph or crowd-stomping chorus this time — but instead, it revealed a band peeling back the layers of its public persona to show the cost of chasing dreams, fame, and identity.
For a group often defined by the flamboyance of “Cum On Feel the Noize” and “Mama Weer All Crazee Now,” “OK Yesterday Was Yesterday” feels startlingly introspective. Built around Dave Hill’s piercing guitar lines and Noddy Holder’s gravelly yet deeply human vocal delivery, the song shifts from the exuberance of youth to the sobering recognition that time moves forward with or without us. The title itself is almost a mantra of reluctant acceptance — a phrase muttered at dawn after a night of reflection, when the glamour fades and yesterday’s applause becomes a memory.
At its core, “OK Yesterday Was Yesterday” is a study in emotional reckoning. It belongs to that rare breed of 1970s rock compositions where the spirit of excess meets the weight of self-awareness — a dynamic that artists like Bowie, T. Rex, and The Faces were also confronting as the glitter began to tarnish. Slade, through their own raw Midlands honesty, distilled this tension into a hard-edged melody wrapped in resignation. The lyrics — stripped of the youthful rebellion that powered their earlier hits — echo the ache of growing older, of realizing that triumph and loss often walk hand in hand. It’s as if the band were speaking not only to their audience but to themselves, acknowledging that the road ahead would demand something deeper than sequins and amplifiers.
Musically, the track bridges two Slades: the brash hitmakers and the weathered storytellers. The arrangement carries the theatrical flair of Jim Lea’s orchestral sensibility, mingled with the punch of classic rock instrumentation that had always been their lifeblood. There’s a cinematic sadness to the way the chords linger, as though the song were watching the curtain fall on its own golden era. This tone aligns seamlessly with Slade in Flame — a film often described as one of rock’s most realistic depictions of fame’s underbelly. Within that context, “OK Yesterday Was Yesterday” stands as both an elegy and a survival song: the quiet acceptance that to move forward, one must bury the ghosts of what once was.
In the end, this track’s enduring power lies not in its commercial success but in its truthfulness. It is Slade without disguise — the glitz worn thin, the heart exposed, the laughter tinged with melancholy. “OK Yesterday Was Yesterday” is less about forgetting the past than forgiving it — an anthem not for the stage, but for the soul’s backstage, where every musician, and every listener, eventually finds themselves standing alone beneath the fading lights, whispering that yesterday, after all, is gone.