How Dave came to feel the noize

Monday 9th October 2006, 8:58PM BST.

Dave Hill was a teenage office boy working in Wolverhampton when his boss warned him there was no future in his dreams of pop stardom, and that he should concentrate on his day job.

That was in the late 1960s, and the extrovert Slade guitarist who still pulls in the crowds wherever he performs, recalls his employer’s advice with some amusement.

“I worked at Tarmac as an office boy for three years,” he says.

“I started to grow my hair, The Beatles were in the charts, and I was playing in the group in the evenings.

“My department head called me into his his office, and said ‘we notice your hair is growing long. We understand you’re in a group, and I think you need to choose – is it the office work or the group?’

“He said there were more prospects with the office work than the group. He said it was a passing phase, that it wouldn’t last.”

Dave went home to consider his future, and asked his father for advice.

Flamboyant

“He said: ‘Well you aren’t very good at the office work are you? You’re good at the group.’ I was lucky I had the support of my old man to take a chance with it.”

Even in these early days the young Dave was developing a taste for his outrageous costumes, getting changed in the toilets at work before leaving for a gig. “It was great until somebody spotted me, then it became a bit of a problem,” he says.

In Slade’s heyday, Dave was probably the band’s most flamboyant member, his outrageous costumes even outshining those of frontman Noddy Holder, with his flowing locks, silver suits and bizarre hats.

After 30 years, there is still no mistaking him as he strolls into the reception area of Wolverhampton’s Novotel, clutching Slade’s new four-CD anthology of all the band’s recordings from 1969 to 1991.

The Rolls-Royce with the YOB 1 number plate may have made way for a more discreet Audi, and the hair may be a little less wild, but you are still in no doubt who he is. The Midlands accent is as pronounced as ever, too, although he was born in Devon.

“Mum and Dad were Potteries people, from the Stoke area, but they moved to Kingswood, Devon,” he says.

“I was born in Fleet Castle. It was just after the war, and they turned part of the castle into a hospital because the maternity hospital had been bombed,” he says.

When Dave was two, his parents moved to Wolverhampton, and lived at a few addresses while they waited for a council house.

“My dad was a mechanic, and he worked at a garage. We lived in the Dunstall Park area. I remember living in Jones Road, and we later went to live on the Warstones estate in Penn.” Dave has fond memories of Wolverhampton’s council estates, saying they were great places to grow up.

“The council estates brought people together, there was a great community in those days.

“When I’d come back after a gig, I could leave whatever fancy car I had at the time outside. I never had to worry about anybody taking a key to it.”

Trained

Dave was 14 when he started playing the guitar, trying to emulate skiffle stars such as Lonnie Donegan and Tommy Steele.

“We used to go to the Gaumont, where we would play on a Saturday morning – we used a square box with a hole in it as a bass.”

Surprisingly for such a showman, Dave says he lacked confidence at school, where he struggled to fit in.

“I wasn’t good at school, and I didn’t play football or anything like that. Some kids are good at sports, others do other things, but I was neither. If you were a clown at school, which I was a bit, nobody wants to bother with you.”

But it was his love of music which allowed his self-esteem to grow. He believes music is in his blood, his grandfather David Bibby having been a classically trained pianist.

“They say the genes sometimes skip a generation, and I think that might be possible. My father was a mechanic, and my son is, so I may have inherited the music gene.”

Not that the piano was ever his favourite instrument. When My Friend Stan, featuring Jim Lea on the piano, only got to No 2, Dave was heard muttering in the dressing room: “Piano equals failure.”

Slade went on to become the biggest selling UK act of the 70s.

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