“It’s Slade” Documentary (1999) – Part Four: Fame, Fragility, and the Sound of Survival
Part Four of the It’s Slade documentary, broadcast in 1999, is arguably the most revealing chapter in the band’s televised history. Rather than celebrating chart positions or costumes, this segment strips Slade down to the human cost of success, the resilience behind the noise, and the social reality that shaped their music.
The film opens with the shock of sudden fame. Dave Hill describes a level of public obsession so intense that it bordered on confinement. Fans slept in his garden, left notes in trees, and turned his home into a shrine. For a working-class young man barely out of his teens, popularity was exhilarating but also imprisoning. Slade never pretended to dislike success. They openly admit they loved being popular, rejecting the romantic myth that fame must be resented to be authentic. That honesty runs throughout the documentary.
A darker turn follows with Don Powell’s car accident and the resulting amnesia. The band recounts, with remarkable calm, how memory loss became part of their daily working reality. During rehearsals and even on stage, Don would forget songs entirely. Jim Lea describes moments where Powell had to be sung the opening line of a song while the audience waited, just to trigger his memory. Once started, instinct took over. The story is told without sentimentality, but its weight is unmistakable. Slade did not stop. They adapted.
This context makes the creation of “Merry Xmas Everybody” even more powerful. Jim Lea explains how the song’s optimism was a conscious response to Britain’s bleak early-1970s reality: power cuts, three-day work weeks, and a general sense of national exhaustion. The lyric was deliberately working class, rooted in ordinary family rituals and communal warmth. Written in just a few hours, the song became more than a seasonal hit. It became emotional infrastructure for a country that needed relief. Decades later, Lea still notes how strangely fresh it sounds, even as it reappears every Christmas without fail.
The documentary then shifts to Slade’s ambition beyond music, particularly their feature film Slade in Flame. Intended as a serious exploration of the music business’s darker side, the film confused audiences who expected light entertainment. The band reflects on this miscalculation with self-awareness. They exposed uncomfortable truths at a moment when their audience wanted escapism. Artistically brave, commercially costly.
Perhaps the most sobering section concerns America. Despite massive success elsewhere, the United States never fully embraced Slade. The documentary argues this was cultural rather than musical. Post-Watergate and post-Vietnam America was introspective and suspicious of flamboyance. Slade’s joyful excess and unapologetic showmanship felt out of step. They were, quite simply, too much fun at the wrong time.
As punk exploded in the late 1970s, Slade suddenly found themselves labeled relics. The irony, as the film quietly suggests, is that punk’s raw energy owed more to Slade than it cared to admit. Still, money became tight, relevance uncertain, and survival a daily concern.
Part Four ends not with triumph, but with endurance. Slade are remembered for volume and glitter, but this documentary reveals something deeper: adaptability, emotional intelligence, and an unbreakable bond forged under pressure. It’s Slade does not rewrite history. It explains why it mattered.