When the British public sent Slade’s “pile of shit” to number one in 1971
Before David Bowie affixed his red, Martian mullet, and Roxy Music unveiled their retro-futurist ensemble to immortality, Slade was pioneering the glitter extravaganza known as glam.
They’d been floating around fringes since 1966 as The N’ Betweens, eventually falling under Chas Chandler’s managerial wing, adopting the Slade name and raiding the dressing-up box toward their eventual glam stardom. It was a recipe for success, and soon enough, they were massive.
While Ziggy Stardust and ‘Virginia Plain’ stand with grander critical stature, Slade’s early run outperformed all their glitter peers commercially, shifting millions more singles and racking up 17 top 20 hits in just five years.
Their first of the number one streak was kicked off by their manager. Slade had finally won a hit with their cover of Booby Marchan’s old R&B single ‘Get Down and Get with It’ in May 1971, but Chandler was eager for the band to start penning their own material. T Rex’s ‘Hot Love’ was doing the rounds on Top of the Pops and both Slade and Chandler knew they needed to get in on the glam game, pronto.
It turned out that principal co-songwriter and bassist Jim Lea had been working out a little instrumental sketch on the violin, a sly reworking of John Dummer’s Famous Music Band’s ‘Nine By Nine’ from the previous year, that caught Chandler’s attention. At his insistence, Lea and frontman Noddy Holder stepped up to the task of adding lyrics in their search for a solid UK hit.
Borrowing a little of Marc Bolan’s cooing romance, Lea and Holder quickly drafted a wry love song in a purported 20-odd minutes, the former instrumental fleshed out to a number about a love object’s unerring sex appeal, scored by their shared love of the jazzy styles of Stéphane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt.
Triggering their penchant for comic misspellings in their titles, ‘Coz I Luv You’ would drop in October 1971 and mark their very first number one. For such a pivotal smash, Slade always harboured misgivings about their debut in the glam world.
“I didn’t even like some of those old ones,” Lea confessed to Sounds in 1980 about their early singles. “’Coz I Luv You’ was namby-pamby to us, a throwaway for an album. It shot to number one in two weeks, and we thought, ‘What a pile of shit!’ It was so wet.”
Slade’s first number one’s gentle pop direction wasn’t lost on the band. In an effort ot toughen up the sound, handclap stomps and stamping percussion were added that would grow as a signature flair of Slade’s, as well as ensuring ’Coz I Luv You’s slang title for a grittier impact, influenced by the many scrawled graffiti spotted in pub toilets across the Midlands.
Chandler and the band got exactly what they wanted. ‘Coz I Luv You’ topped the UK charts for four weeks, heralding the arrival of a glam heavyweight as they were set to break British pop records during their 1973 Top of the Pops heyday.
