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Famously described as “The Citizen Kane of British pop movies” by BBC film critic Mark Kermode, 1975’s Slade In Flame movie was expected to be another rung on the ladder to international stardom for Slade, but it didn’t quite work out like that. In 2003, Classic Rock spoke with frontman Noddy Holder about one of the greatest, most enduring dramatic rock films of all time.

It’s all too easy to forget just how enormous Slade actually were. Perhaps it’s because it would be inconceivable today for four homely rapscallions from Wolverhampton to gain even the most tentative foothold in a contemporary pop scene almost entirely based on airbrushed skin and washboard six-packs. But in the spring of 1974 Slade – undeniably the least glamorous glam band of them all – appeared utterly invincible.

Despite being fronted by a mutton-chop-whiskered, tartan-suited foghorn in a mirrored top hat who had a voice so caustic it could very probably peel paint, Slade were relaxing in the afterglow of Merry Christmas Everybody, their sixth number one hit single to date, which had sold half a million copies on its first day of release, debuted at the top spot and set up camp there for five weeks. Their third consecutive chart-topping album Old, New, Borrowed And Blue had just hit the racks, and Slade were, officially, the biggest band to hit the UK since The Beatles.

Consequently, band manager Chas Chandler (ex-Animals bass player and formerly manager and producer to Jimi Hendrix) was looking to consolidate Slade’s position with an entirely new challenge and, following Brian Epstein’s exemplary Beatles template, decided that the time was right for Slade to make a film.

“We just saw it as the next step in our career,” remembers Noddy Holder, Slade’s effusive former vocalist today, “We always took our career in stages: when we had our first hit we wanted a Number One; then we wanted another; then we wanted to go in at Number One on the day of release. We always had a goal to aim for, but had never really considered making a film. Chas Chandler saw it as the next inevitable step on our career path. I don’t think he looked on it to widen our market; he just thought it was another step up the career ladder and something we should try.”

Noddy’s protestations notwithstanding, Slade were intent on broadening their market as they set to work on what would become Slade In Flame. Ubiquitous at home and all points east Slade might well have been, yet in spite of dogged touring, the all-important, enormously lucrative American market remained relatively oblivious to the band’s parochial charms. Slade’s all-stomping, boots-and-braces lads’ rock may have entirely entranced Britain’s teens, but the peculiar, quintessentially English spectacle of the band’s perpetually prancing guitarist Dave ‘Superyob’ Hill simply didn’t translate into significant sales across the Atlantic.

The natural progression and maturation of Holder and bassist Jim Lea’s songwriting prowess also saw Slade courting a more adult market at home; the deliberately misspelt rowdiness of Mama Weer All Crazee Now and Skweeze Me Pleeze Me had given way to the reflective balladry of My Friend Stan and Everyday, a pair of singles that, significantly, failed to reach the Number One spot.

“We knew that we couldn’t carry on churning out things like Cum On Feel The Noize over and over again,” Noddy remembers, “We didn’t want to be stuck in a rut doing one type of thing. We knew we were a far broader band musically than that.”

It was at this pivotal juncture that Slade decided to launch themselves onto the big screen. At a time when it was crucial not to further alienate their wavering core audience (already dumbfounded by Everyday for its reinvention of Noddy as a love-sick crooner, and also slightly resentful of the amount of attention that the band were paying to America), the hitherto happy-go-lucky Slade spent an entire year working on an uncharacteristically dark film that absolutely nobody expected.

Most ironically of all, the very qualities that so completely perplexed mid-70s youth on Slade In Flame‘s initial theatrical release ultimately assured the film’s enduring longevity.

“The reason that Flame has stood the test of time so well,” Noddy reckons, “is because it wasn’t what people expected. They expected a slapstick, speeded-up comedy with car chases and not much plot, but we went totally the other way. We made a film that would show the other side of the rock business, not the side that the public generally see, and I think the public, certainly in ’75, were very shocked by it. It wasn’t what they expected from Slade at all, but I think it’s helped it stand the test of time as a good rock film.”

Directed by Richard Loncraine (who later worked with Sting on Brimstone And Treacle), Slade In Flame follows the swift rise and spectacular fall of Flame, a late-60s rock band who sound uncannily like Slade. Stoker (Noddy Holder) fronts a tragic theatrical horror rock band, based loosely on Screamin’ Lord Sutch And The Savages.

He then teams up with Barry (Dave Hill), Paul (Jim Lea) and Charlie (played with brave aplomb by Slade drummer Don Powell, still suffering the short-term memory loss symptomatic of the head injuries he’d received in a July ’73 car crash), who have been enjoying the collective ignominy of backing PJ Proby-style club crooner Jack Daniels (a magnificently convincing performance from Alan Lake).

The four-piece become Flame, and are quickly discovered by high-class wheeler-dealer Robert Seymour (Tom Conti, in his first film role), who casually grooms them for stardom. All is going swimmingly until the band’s former agent, violent underworld shark Ron Harding (menacingly realised by bespectacled Johnny Shannon), turns up with a long-forgotten, watertight contract and comprehensively pisses on the party.

Rather than simply offering a tarted-up time capsule of the brickies-in-blouses glam rock epoch, the gritty, unflinching realism of Slade In Flame harked back to the kitchen-sink dramas of the early 60s, and as a consequence joins A Hard Day’s Night and The Girl Can’t Help It as one of the greatest, most enduring dramatic rock films of all time.

Although it’s a cautionary tale of credibility-stretching exploitation that’s laced with moments of eye-watering violence and highly improbable road-life preposterousness, apparently it’s all based on cold, hard fact, as Noddy recalls: “While working on the soundtrack we went out to America to do some dates, and took the writer (Andrew Birkin, brother of ‘Je T’aime‘ Jane) and director out to America with us to tell them stories of what life was like in a rock’n’roll band-not only from our point of view, but from other bands that we knew. They then came back and finished off the storyline and script while we finished the tour.

“So every scene in the film is actually true, even though some of them do seem far-fetched. Even the story of the gunfire on the pirate radio station [Flame have shots fired at them as they endeavour to conduct an interview with a staggeringly youthful Tommy Vance on an offshore pirate station], that’s a true story that happened at Radio London in the Thames Estuary back in the 60s. And yes, Screamin’ Lord Sutch did get trapped in his stage-prop coffin when someone leaned the lid against a wall – he was rather accident-prone.”

If it was the anecdotal script that provided the realism, it was the supporting cast that provided the grit. Johnny Shannon, fresh from intimidating Mick Jagger in Nicholas Roeg’s Performance, was a genuinely scary individual, a textbook East End wide-boy pitched somewhere between Mike Reid and Ronnie Kray. “When he pulled your hair,” Noddy confides with a wince, “he really pulled your hair”.

Alan Lake had just come out of prison. While enjoying a few libations in a nightclub, renowned hell-raiser Lake had assaulted a fellow boozer who’d had the effrontery to insult his wife, Diana Dors, and was subsequently detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Slade In Flame marked Lake’s return to the screen, and he was expected to be on his best behaviour.

However, on the very first day of filming, he headed for the nearest available hostelry, enjoyed a hearty liquid lunch, returned to the location and took a full-blooded swing at the manager of the club in which they were filming. Lake was clearly a loose cannon, and simply had to go.

Despite Slade’s forthright assertions that Alan Lake was Jack Daniels, the producers gave him his marching orders. The following day, Diana Dors – in all her pneumatic glory – arrived on the set and literally begged for Lake to be reinstated. She gave her personal assurance that he would stay off the sauce and from that day forth be as good as gold. He was given one more chance.

And true to Diana’s word, his subsequent behaviour was exemplary. In the thumb-twiddling downtime between takes, Lake, a seasoned raconteur, would unravel colourful, hair-curling tales of inebriation, fisticuffs and porridge that most certainly kept the band entertained, but by electing to use unpredictable wild cards of Lake and Shannon’s calibre, Slade were hardly making life easy for themselves.

“That’s why we chose them,” Noddy says. “They were menacing characters in their own right, and that’s why we picked them to be in the movie. We wanted to give the movie a menacing look and to have the realism that those old black-and-white movies from the 60s used to have, the gangster-type movies that used to be around. We wanted to give Flame that sort of atmosphere.

“But, on the other hand, we got in Tom Conti, who was a real bona fide trained actor. So Flame had a bit of everything; it had a bit of the dark side of the rock business, it had a bit of comedy in it had all different sorts of acting abilities in there, but it all seemed to mesh together and click.”

Far Far Away, the first single to emerge from the Slade In Flame soundtrack – released an almost unprecedented five months after its predecessor, there, Bangin’ Man (at their most prolific, the gap between Slade’s singles was a truly head-spinning nine weeks) – stalled at No.2. The next one, How Does It Feel? never rose higher than No.15, bringing to an end Slade’s impressive run of 12 straight top five singles.

Still one of Noddy’s favourites, How Does It Feel? certainly wasn’t lacking in quality. And while its relative commercial failure was partially symptomatic of the listening public’s growing disillusionment with the glam rock scene as a whole, it was proof positive that by taking a year out to make a movie, and concentrating all their remaining efforts on breaking America, Slade had ultimately bitten off more than they could chew.

“I’m sure that it did cause us to lose momentum,” Noddy concurs. “I mean, when you’re as hot as we were at the time, you have to be there all the time, plugging away on Top Of The Pops every week. That was the only way of promotion in those days. There wasn’t no MTV or videos to promote you; you had to go out and actually do the legwork and go all around the world promoting yourselves, doing TV, radio and live gigs all the time. You couldn’t just send the video out to the territory and expect it to give you a hit record. That wasn’t the way it worked in those days.

“But I think with the type of movie that Slade In Flame was and by going to America we did lose impetus. We’d been to America in short bursts before, but then we decided to make a concerted effort, and of course when you do that your other territories suffer.”

Of course, since disbanding Slade, Noddy has cultivated quite a reputation as a singularly naturalistic thespian, so how goes his post-Grimleys acting career?

“I don’t really want to go down the path of playing ageing rockers that top themselves,” he says. “But I do get sent quite a few of them.”

This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock 53, published in May 2003. Slade In Flame can be streamed via the BFI Player or Amazon. A remastered 50th Anniversary Blu-ray/DVD was released in 2025.

Nightwish founder, keyboardist and lead songwriter Tuomas Holopainen says that the Finnish symphonic metal titans should be able to carry on without him when the time comes.

Talking exclusively in the new issue of Metal Hammer, the 49-year-old, who started the six-piece in 1996, says that “Nightwish has always been more than the sum of its parts”, to the point that it could carry on without any current member, including himself.

“I honestly think at this point, if any member – including myself – left, the rest of them could continue,” Holopainen says. “Any of us. Because we have evidence enough that this band can work with any combo.”

The musician is alluding to the multiple lineup changes that Nightwish have undergone over the past three decades, which have left him and guitarist Emppu Vuorinen as the sole constant members. They’ve cycled through three different lead singers: Tarja Turunen (1996–2005), Anete Olzen (2007–2012) and the incumbent Floor Jansen, who joined in 2013. Their latest shake-up took place in 2021, when bassist Jukka Koskinen replaced longtime member Marko Hietala.

Holopainen reflects on the particularly tumultuous split with Turunen in the new interview, as well, admitting that the band got blamed for the bust-up “for good reason”. The lineup let their singer go via a scathing public letter which alleged that “business” and “money” had become more important to her than the emotion behind the music. Turunen denied the accusation.

“There was no future for us together,” Holopainen reflects. “We were just operating in survival mode and plagued by these dark thoughts. We got completely butchered in the media – it was like we were these evil neanderthals who’d hurt our wonderful ex-singer. I got some really interesting letters, let’s put it that way.”

The keyboardist now has a cordial but distant relationship with Turunen, and rules out the idea of ever reuniting with the singer. “It was a divorce, and an ugly one at that,” he explains, “so I think we have our own lives now. Someone did say to me if we got Tarja and Marko back in, we could tour just South America for a year straight. That’s not gonna happen.”

Nightwish will celebrate their 30th anniversary with the release of rarities compilation The Greatest 30 Years On Earth on December 11. Their latest album, Yesterwynde, came out in 2024, and they’re currently on hiatus from live shows.

Holopainen has six songs prepared for the band’s impending, 11th studio album. He also suggests to Hammer that 2028 will be the year the band return to the road. “Next year is too early to be going back on tour. The year after, possibly?” he says. “I want to do another album before any live shows, and that’s definitely happening.”

If you can’t wait until then to see a Nightwish member onstage, Floor Jansen has European and South American tour dates with her solo band in place for 2026 and 2027. See the list of dates and get tickets via her website. The singer’s solo album, Hytress, is out on January 15.

Read the full interview with Holopainen, looking back on Nightwish’s career, in the new Hammer. Order now and get it delivered directly to your door.

Few artists in the ’90s inspired such fervent devotion as Nine Inch Nails. With 1989’s Pretty Hate Machine Trent Reznor brought industrial metal to the masses, and with 1994’s altogether more unsettling concept album The Downward Spiral, he became one of the poster boys for Generation-X’s frustration, pain and mental turmoil.

Nine Inch Nails’ music made Reznor a superstar, yet, far from giving him the inner peace he craved, it actually seemed to make him even more unhappy.

Battling various demons, and self-medicating with heroin, cocaine and alcohol, Reznor all but vanished in the second half of the 1990s. But when he returned, he did so with an album that was even more complex, dense, dark and personal than anything he had or would ever put his name to again, Nine Inch Nails’ sprawling masterpiece The Fragile.

Somewhat ironically, for Nine Inch Nails’ creative mastermind, the success of The Downward Spiral would lead to life imitating art. Amid the relentless schedule of the infamously tumultuous Self Destruct Tour, with his fanbase expanding and his profile rising, Reznor began to unravel, and his addictions escalated. Much like his character on the album, he began to loathe himself, and appeared hellbent on systematically tearing his world apart.

“I really just hated myself,” he admitted to Rock Sound magazine in 2005. “I got to a point where whatever shred of liking I had for myself was lost. I was on a fast path to death.”

Upon the conclusion of the tour, Reznor had always intended taking an extended break. But when an offer came in for NIN to support his hero David Bowie on his Dissonance tour through to the end of 1995, Reznor, frazzled and exhausted as he was, simply couldn’t resist.

Amid the chaos, he sought a new sanctuary, transforming a former funeral home in New Orleans into a base and recording facility, Nothing Studios. It was here that he produced Marilyn Manson’s 1995 EP Smells Like Children and his protégée’s 1996 commercial breakthrough, Antichrist Superstar. The sessions for the latter record have gone down in history as some of the most fractured and turbulent of all time, and Reznor would later admit they took a heavy toll on his ever-spiralling mental health.

“That was just like staying on tour, without going anywhere,” he told Rolling Stone in a 1999 profile titled The Fragile World of Trent Reznor. “The Manson camp party every night; there’s something going on all the time. At the time I was in that mind-set already, so that was appealing.”

The subsequent success of Manson’s record saw the relationship between the two two musicians deteriorate completely.

“I don’t want to get into a ‘he said, he said,’” Reznor told Rolling Stone, “but to sum that scene up, I think fame and power distort people’s personalities. He and I are two strong personalities that could coexist for a while, but things changed.”

In addition, Reznor’s grandmother, who had raised him after his parents separated when he was five years old, passed away during this period. The loss hit him hard, though he later admitted to putting off dealing with at the time, as he disappeared from the spotlight.

Something had to change.

In classic Trent Reznor fashion, it was tragedy that ultimately sparked him into life, the murder of a close friend from New Orleans providing a brutal wake up call.

“This guy was hired at the studio and somehow over the years we became friends,” he said to Rock Sound. “His mother called me one day, worried he hadn’t come home. I just happened to be in the studio and the news was on. My friend and his cousin had been shot in the face, found dead in the projects. Somehow that just cut through. I felt like I should have been the one who was killed. Shortly after, I had time to figure out the mess.”

Reznor started his reset by heading to Big Sur in California for a change of scenery, taking with him musical ideas that would become The Fragile’s starting point.

“I thought Big Sur would be a nice break,” he told Rolling Stone. “It was sheer terror. Isolation on the side of a mountain, an hour from the nearest grocery store. I really didn’t want to be by myself. I wasn’t prepared for it.”

Reznor’s return to California was challenging, but by the time he returned to New Orleans, he was clean and sober, and he and his English writing partner/co-producer Alan Moulder had a semblance of ideas as to what the new NIN album would be. Reznor went back to Nothing Studios inspired by records like Bone Machine by Tom Waits, Loveless by My Bloody Valentine and, most tellingly, Pink Floyd’s 1979 masterpiece The Wall. A double album detailing a troubled rock star building a metaphorical wall around him, Pink Floyd’s masterpiece explored themes of alienation, frustration and isolation which The Fragile would also draw upon.

Soon the writer’s block rooted in Reznor’s depression was gone, and hours and hours of new material flowed.

“I established a new lifestyle routine of being in the studio all the time,” he told The Guardian. “This record took two solid years of being in the studio every day. When I started the album, I didn’t feel emotionally ready. I didn’t feel tough enough to take on a project, because I was beat down to almost breakdown stage.”

Much of the record was recorded using old, broken, untuned and weathered instruments, a deliberate choice made by Reznor to help represent the feelings of shattered, exhausted alienation and angst.

“I wanted this album, lyrically and sonically, to sound like there was something inherently flawed in the situation,” he told LA Times arts critic Robert Hilburn, “like someone struggling to put the pieces together. The Downward Spiral was about peeling off layers and arriving at a naked, ugly end. This album starts at the end, then attempts to create order from chaos, but never reaches the goal. It’s probably a bleaker album because it arrives back where it starts – the same emotion.”

It quickly became obvious that Reznor now had too much material for a single album. More alarmingly, he began to feel that he could no longer see where the record should start and end, which songs should stay, and what should be left out. His masterstroke here was enlisting the help of legendary Canadian producer Bob Ezrin, who co-produced The Wall.

“He was brilliant, feverishly recording and mixing in 3 rooms at the same time to complete the project on time for its scheduled release,” Ezrin remembered of Reznor to Echoing the Sound. “What he had realized was that he’d created a work that was much longer than was practical to release and that wasn’t quite hanging together the way he had hoped when he created its individual parts. My job was to take all of this work and reorganise it to more practically and effectively tell the story that originally generated all these bits. Sort of like editing a film.”

When Reznor heard Ezrin’s track sequencing, he knew he had the album he wanted.

“I called him into the room,” he recalled to The Guardian, “tried not to have him read my face, and said, Bob – you did it, man.”

Finally, after five long years, the new Nine Inch Nails album was ready.

Released on September 21, 1999, The Fragile entered the US Billboard 200 album chart at number one. By way of a celebration, Reznor allowed himself a beer.

Reviews at the time made it seem that the album was either a disaster or a work of sublime genius. The Fragile was a “banal syndicated-action hour soundtrack” according to Pitchfork, but “a fearsomely accomplished mix of monster riffing, brooding melodies and patches of minimalist soul-searching” for The Guardian. For such a challenging album, such polarising views seemed apt.

For the most part, the record was seen as an artistic success, if not the commercial triumph expected to follow Pretty Hate Machine and The Downward Spiral. But as time has passed, more and more people are standing up to proclaim The Fragile the finest work of Trent Reznor’s career.

Certainly, the album does not boast the crossover hits delivered on his previous two records. Instead, The Fragile is a journey that needs to be absorbed from beginning to end to truly be appreciated.

From the creeping opening dread-filled riff that kicks everything off on Somewhat Damaged, through the ode to his lost family on the quiet-loud-really fucking loud crescendo of The Day the World Went Away, the lilting piano juxtaposed with free jazz drums of La Mer, the popping, funk bass and bawling anger of Into the Void, to finally ending on the punch drunk, swaying, crawl of the closing Ripe (With Decay), The Fragile is an incredible piece of work.

Filled with unusual and unsettling sounds, a gnawing anger and looming, stalking bleakness, yet still hummable, memorable and chock full of hooks, it perfectly encapsulates why Trent Reznor is held in such high regard as a creative powerhouse.

More than a quarter of a century after its release, it still reveals depths and layers to those who remain committed to understanding its crooked, confused genius. It may not be Nine Inch Nails’ most famous, instant or successful album, but once its twisted, fragmented splendour gets its hooks into you, you’ll have trouble arguing against The Fragile as Reznor’s best work.