Walking through the supermarket the sound of Slade’s Merry Christmas Everybody filled the aisles.  I read once that Noddy Holder and Dave Hill, the writers of the song, earn about £500,000 in royalties on the song each year.  It is 51 years since it was released, it has been an excellent pension fund!

Slade are memorable for their outrageous glam rock presentation and their unconventional spelling of lyrics. Slade used spellings that might have prompted apoplexy among traditional English teachers fifty years ago.  Song titles included Cum On Feel the Noize, Coz I luv you and Skweeze me, pleeze me. On the other hand, perhaps teachers of the post-war era had become inured to youthful acts of rebellion. Perhaps the music of the 1970s seemed tame compared with the psychedelic productions of the previous decade. Slade were the embodiment of youthful innocence compared with the hallucinogenic-inspired bands of the 1960s.

Some historians may date the emergence of a distinct ‘youth’ culture to Victorian times, some might suggest it emerged in the inter-war period.  Certainly, in England, by the time of the Teddy boys in the 1950s, the growth in affluence allowed there to be a conscious decision by young people to mark themselves out by the way they dressed as belonging to a culture that was strongly distinct from the culture of their elders.

By the time that Slade were topping the charts in 1973 with their songs with idiosyncratic spellings, for a young person not to be different from the older generations would have been considered unconventional. Our school barber was hated because of the single ‘pudding bowl’ style he imposed upon all of the boys. The 1960s had brought the long hair and the loud clothes that characterised glam rock.  Bands like Slade carried the trends to an extreme.

Perhaps what is surprising fifty years on from the days of Slade is is how conventional young people have again become. Given the choice, most of them go for the dull, unexciting fashion of the label companies. Unless a young person is a goth, the loud, the outrageous and the esoteric have become rare things to see on the high street. Even the spelling of words with a ‘Z’ has become the preserve of the dully repetitive rap artists whose music will never fill a supermarket in 50 years’ time.

The Slade era was followed by the punk rock years. Why can there not be a similar cultural upheaval?  It would be welcome change in the dullness of these times.