Slade – Old New Borrowed and Blue

The first reason that this album is being featured in the re-reviews section is that is was the first album I ever bought. The second reason is that is still stands up as a really (and surprisingly) good album.

I’d become a Slade fan at the time of Slade Alive but it wasn’t until I’d spent a couple of years gazing at that album, Sladest (a somewhat premature “Best Of’)  and Slayed? In the record racks at Brashs that I was able to collect enough coins to purchase their new 1973 album.

I must have played this album about a thousand times in the first year I owned it. It hasn’t been on such high rotation since but miraculously it has somehow survived two countries, many moves of house and any number of record collection cullings to make it to the turntable this afternoon.

For reasons best lost in history the album opens with the only song on the album not written by Noddy Holder and Jimmy Lea, a blues based growler called Just Want A Little Bit. Strangely this first song is probably the albums least memorable.

From there things start looking up immediately. When The Lights Are Out is a glorious melodic pop song which surely should have been a single even though it was sung by Jimmy Lea rather than the more distinctive voice of Noddy Holder. It’s the sort of song that Cheap Trick must have surely find influential.

From there the album is just a series of great rock songs – consisting of sawing guitars, huge catchy choruses and earthy working class lyrics – punctuated by surprising moments when the band offer something outside this formula.

Of the rockers songs like My Town, Miles Out To Sea, Do We Still Do It, We’re Really Gonna Raise The Roof and Good Time Girls are all cracking good songs while How It Can Be probably has the most perfect pop rock chorus ever committed to vinyl.

For some strange reason they offer a honky tonk piano based song Find Yourself A Rainbow in the middle of Side One – which is a welcome little oddity.

But the hidden classic on here is Everyday – a beautiful ballad that was surely the template used for the Kiss anthem Beth. It’s a song that will still get played at British midlands weddings for another 30 years.

While Old New Borrowed And Blue doesn’t contain any of the best known (and worst spelt) Slade hits like Mama Weer All Crazee Now, Coz I Love You, Gudbuy T’Jane or Come On Feel The Noize, I think it is an album that showed that Slade had a whole lot more to offer than what they are generally remembered for.

I’ll probably still be playing this album in another thirty-six years.