I grew up living in the next street to Dave Hill from Slade. It was a pleasure to chat to one of the most glam rockers of all time about his new book, Slade’s pending tour, starring in the greatest rock film of all time, and why ’without Slade, there would’ve been no Oasis’.

At one point Slade were the biggest group in the country. How did you keep your feet on the ground?

Well I think it was more than this country. It was generally the world, except for America. We were as big in all these places I’ve been to like Australia and Russia.

You can’t comprehend what it was like in the rest of the world. Obviously you can comprehend in England because the people you run into and the reaction of people you know, and newspapers and Top of the Pops.

I grew up on a council estate and the roots of the band were very much ’blokes around the corner’.

My life story comes out next month (November), so I’m in the midst of preparing for that. Nod, our singer, has done the foreward; Noel Gallagher has done the afterward.

I met him (Gallagher) once at the airport and I kept in contact. And he said something quite interesting. He said “If there was no Slade there’d be no Oasis”.

Also he said something that I thought was really poignant. “I saw them (Slade) as people that lived in a council house down the road from where I was”.

The root of it is we had the background of stability. We had good families, and when we made it… nobody can prepare you for what fame does to you. Becoming famous I don’t think we ever realised the roster of number ones we would’ve had.

But our manager Chas Chandler, who was Jimi Hendrix’ manager, believed in us immensely. He saw us as the follow on from the Beatles. He said in his mind we were that kind of group. You know, ’working class people who made it’. We got writers; we got abilities; and we got an image, which was a lot to do with our success.

I wouldn’t say anyone can cope totally with fame. Fame isn’t natural. Suddenly you’ve gone from being a boy from school; you play guitar, you’re in a band… I was a bit of a duffer at school. I wasn’t like a popular kid. And suddenly I’ve gone to extreme fame and found my reason to be so to speak; Top of the Pops. And suddenly you can’t go to the places that used to go to. You’re either going to get mobbed or annoyed, so we had to become a little bit isolated from being too exposed walking down the road.

I was still living at my dad’s house when I had two number ones. I moved and my dad was still signing the autographs. I thought that was really great (laughs).

To be continued