Three songs, three number ones: the breakthrough British band who dominated 1973
What imagery does the year 1973 trigger in your brain when considering the UK pop landscape?
It can only be glam. Around the world, other musical moments were having their purple patch, prog was wielding its conceptual bluster, soul was finally entering the album era, and garage rock was paving the way for punk. Yet, for any Brit, there’s something about the 1970s’ fourth year that just beams starburst lights, bluescreen optical effects, and Top of the Pops’ shimmering flair during its golden age.
It was the perfect sugar rush surge of glitter escape as BBC 1 made its jump to colour in late 1969. The earlier psychedelia was blunted by TV’s unfortunate black and white shutters, but glam was colour broadcast’s first real stars, a new crop of pop superheroes who embraced everything the double-denim Woodstock residue had been earnestly eschewing for years: gleeful artifice, theatrical zing, unabashed commercialism, and a deathly aversion to extended jams in favour of taut, radio-friendly pop at its most urgent.
It was the new music for a new generation of kids bored with their elder siblings’ old hippy records, offering a transportive whisk away from the day’s biting social malaise, and whetting the appetite for punk’s insurgent bulldoze only a few short years away. In this gleaming burst of pop-rock cheer entered one of the era’s most iconic acts, who not only helped define glam’s aesthetic identity, but made their mark on the UK musical record books.
So, which band shot to number one three times?
Much of the glam cohort had been doggedly chasing fame for years before raiding the dressing-up box. Marc Bolan had been playing the starry-eyed folkie in the psychedelic-leaning Tyrannosaurus Rex, and David Bowie had jumped between everything from novelty jingles to vocal harmony trios before affixing his red, Martian mullet.
Slade was no different. Formed as The Vendors in Wolverhampton as early as 1963, the future glam stalwarts went through all the day’s rock trends, from early beat style to later skinhead toughs, while failing to make a dent in the charts.
However, a solid live reputation and a cover of ‘Get Down and Get With It’ in 1971 began to turn commercial tides in their favour, building their sorely-needed momentum across the following year with their mammoth ‘Take Me Bak ‘Ome’ and ‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’ chart stompers plus the Slayed? LP shooting to number one. Coupled with frontman Noddy Holder’s chequered top-hat dungaree combo and guitarist Dave Hill’s spaceman clobber, Top of the Pops land was ready for their glam rock conquering.
Amid this dizzying explosion of success, Slade would count themselves as the first band ever to release three singles shooting straight to number one. Across 1973’s glam peak, ‘Cum On Feel the Noize’ would land in February, followed by ‘Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me’ as the summer hit of June, then, to their festive immortality, December would see ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ dominate the season’s chart with five weeks at the top spot.
While the likes of Ziggy Stardust and Roxy Music may well have endured in the critical opinion of glam’s hallowed heights, Slade stood as the ‘people’s glitter band’, doing away with arty pretences and postmodern playings and gunning straight for hard rockin’, pop appeal that showered them with ungodly sales during their 1970s heyday.
