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WHO'S CRAZY NOW by Noddy Holder (Ebury Press, 16.99) LAST NIGHT A DJ SAVED MY LIFE by Bill Brewster amd Frank Broughton (Headline, 14.99)
THE YEAR is 1972, and glam kings Slade are stomping up the charts with Mama Weer All Crazee Now. And it's a tossup which is louder - Noddy Holder's bruising Black Country vocals or the band's eye- searing stage wear.
Silver-suited Dave Hill is the worst offender. Looking like a Baco- foiled turkey, he teeters about the stage on the biggest platforms north of Clapham Junction.
And yet it's lead singer Noddy Holder who has gobsmacked the shuffling teenagers on the studio floor. It's not his stovepipe hat bedizened with mirrors, nor yet his frock coat and mutton-chop sideboards.
It's his sheer pop-eyed, fanatical presence which is positively defying the world not to Get Down and Get With It. Slade are the biggest thing since The Beatles.
Police vans spirit them from concert halls while decoy limousines distract hordes of shrieking fans. 'We knew nothing of the outside world,' Holder recalls. 'We saw the inside of dressing rooms, hotels, tour buses, planes, TV and radio shows, recording studios and concert halls.' At the height of Slade's enormous fame, with Britain at their feet and America beckoning, Noddy Holder fulfilled his life's ambition - he bought a posh house in Sutton Coldfield.
Holder's autobiography charts his progress from the working-class Walsall neighbourhood where he grew...