A newly restored trailer for Slade's classic Slade In Flame movie has been released. The 1975 movie, which saw the Brummie rockers play Flame, a fictitious late 1960s group, is showing in UK cinemas from May 2, with a two-disc DVD/Blu-ray following on May 19. Screening details are available on the BFI website.
"We didn’t go in and make a knockabout comedy movie, which everybody thought we would," Slade frontman Noddy Holder told Classic Rock in 2005. "We came out with a solid, credible rock film about what went on behind the scenes in the rock business. There were some laughs in it, but a lot of people came out of the cinema shocked.
“When I was a kid, I just thought it was brilliant,” film critic Mark Kermode, who provides an audiocommentary on the DVD, told The Irish News last year. "But, you know, you can see movies when you’re a kid, you think they’re brilliant, and then you go back to them later on and you go, ‘Oh, no, they’re not brilliant - it’s just that I was a kid’."
Kermode remained a fan, however, and his enthusiasm helped prompt a DVD release in 2007, bringing the film a whole new audience.
“Slade are actually really good in it, and the performance footage of them playing is excellent," says Kermode. "And, of course, the soundtrack album is just brilliant.
"I’d be saying, ‘Look, I know everybody thinks it’s a joke. And I know I’m saying it’s the Citizen Kane of British pop movies, but I’m serious: It’s absolutely brilliant."
Playback of the trailer on other websites has been disabled by the British Film Institute, but it can be viewed on their YouTube page.
