Richard Loncraine (1975)
An unexpected reunion and a revelation …
I first saw this film on its original release, when I was nineteen and watched practically everything that came to York’s Odeon or ABC. It was plain Flame in those days – the story of a Midlands rock band of that name, their breakthrough and break-up. The band’s four members are played by the four members of Slade – Dave Hill, Don Powell, Jim Lea and Noddy Holder, the last two of whom composed the songs that Flame perform. I recall only a couple of things about that first viewing. First, Tom Conti, who plays the smartest of the film’s collection of music-industry suits; I’d not seen him before and was taken with his acting. Second, my scornful, snooty feelings about the picture overall. Renewing its acquaintance half a century later, I find I’ve changed my mind on both counts. Tom Conti has had a very successful career but I’ve not much liked him in anything else I’ve seen. Whereas Slade in Flame is now, as well as very entertaining, much more interesting than I remembered or expected. Who’d have guessed the film would survive in this way, remastered by and screened at BFI to mark the fiftieth anniversary of its first appearance in British cinemas?
Probably not the producers of Slade in Flame, who were Gavrik Losey (Joseph’s son) and the late Chas Chandler, Slade’s manager. Even A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965) were made in such close proximity that you wonder if the people behind them were nervous that Beatlemania wouldn’t last. Seizing the day must have been a factor in putting Slade on screen, too; the band had had their first UK number one (‘Coz I Luv You’) in 1971, and five more by the end of 1973. A major difference between Richard Loncraine’s film and Richard Lester’s Beatles films is that here-today-gone-tomorrow is a main premise of Flame’s storyline – even if a brief shot in the film of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, at the front of a row of albums, could be construed as a ray of hope for more enduring success. Maybe not, though: the real surprise of Flame revisited, for me, is its almost bracing cynicism.
The band’s managers are socially miles apart – they switch from down-market, dodgy Ron Harding (Johnny Shannon) to public-school smoothie Robert Seymour (Tom Conti) – but cashing in quickly is crucial to both men. In their different ways, Harding and Seymour are equally nasty pieces of work. Neither fools their current hot property, though. When the group takes off commercially, Paul (Jim Lea), who has a milk round, and his partner Julie (Nina Thomas) are uneasy about their world changing suddenly; unattached Stoker (Noddy Holder) derides Paul’s lack of ambition. It’s Paul who eventually quits the band and heads home to his former life; by this stage, though, there’s little evidence of dissent from Stoker or the two other band members, Barry (Dave Hill) and Charlie (Don Powell). The public don’t get sick of Flame. It’s the band, soon sick of being exploited by the music industry, that walks away.
At the start of the story, guitarist Barry and bassist Paul are in a band fronted by Jack Daniels (Alan Lake), a comically mediocre club singer; when the outfit auditions for a new drummer, Charlie comes on board. Stoker, who runs a market stall, belongs, however, to the rival Undertakers, whose act evokes 1960s freakbeat performers from the Joe Meek stable. Stoker, in ghoulish make-up, gets locked in his stage coffin, thanks to Jack Daniels. This triggers a fight between the bands and a night in the police cells, where Paul and Stoker get talking. Soon after, Stoker ousts Daniels as vocalist and Flame is born, with Paul’s friend Russell (Anthony Allen) their roadie and Barry’s girlfriend Ange (Sara Clee) in tow. While it’s no surprise that none of the Slade quartet did much acting post-Flame, they all do well enough here – playing sort-of-themselves, they’re relaxed on camera. And while Lea and Holder’s numbers for the film aren’t the best of Slade, they’re pretty good.
For this viewer, part of Flame’s charm, fifty years on, comes from some of the bit players, familiar to me mostly from 1960s and 1970s television: Jimmy Gardner and Sheila Raynor as Charlie’s parents; Bill Dean, in a splendid cameo as a saturnine club owner. Johnny Shannon, in a larger role than usual, is excellent, too. Tom Conti wasn’t the only cast member to fare seriously well in the years ahead (he would star in Frederic Raphael’s The Glittering Prizes a matter of months after Flame‘s original release); there’s also Kenneth Colley, as Seymour’s sidekick. The mixture of non-actors in the cast includes Emperor Rosko, Tommy Vance and the ITN newsreader Reginald Bosanquet. Whereas Rosko appears as himself (ditto Bosanquet), Tommy Vance is a pirate radio DJ called Ricky Storm. The director Richard Loncraine has kept up a steady output in cinema and TV in the decades since Flame, his debut feature, but the most interesting name in the non-cast credits is on the screenplay: Andrew Birkin went on to write, among other things, the fine BBC drama series The Lost Boys (1978), along with the book J M Barrie and the Lost Boys (first published the following year).
Although nostalgia plays a part in enjoying Flame now, the story’s consistently grungy locations, shot by Peter Hannan, keep that in check. The film was released in 1975 as Slade in Flame in a few places outside the UK – presumably in the expectation that it would attract more attention with an internationally successful band’s name attached. (The opening titles actually allow for this: ‘SLADE IN’ appears in one shot, ‘FLAME’ in the next.) It would have been almost unthinkable not to put the three words together for this re-release. ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’, part of the British Christmas soundtrack since it first topped the charts in December 1973, is still going strong and quite right, too: the brilliant fusion of memory and anticipation in both Noddy Holder’s lyrics and Jim Lea’s melody is elating. That song’s longevity confounds this film’s assumption that the success of bands like Flame – and, by implication, Slade – is bound to be short-lived. Which makes watching it all the more pleasurable.
8 May 2025
