Fame is ‘not for the faint-hearted’, but it certainly helped set up a nice pension plan for Noddy Holder. The former Slade frontman talks family, royalties and reunions with Hannah Stephenson.

His trademark mirrored top hat is now locked in a bank vault, his annual royalty cheque from bestselling festive hit Merry Xmas Everybody provides a lucrative pension, and former Slade frontman Noddy Holder has his feet firmly on the ground.

“I don’t think a day goes by when someone doesn’t shout, ‘It’s Christmas’, at me. Merry Xmas Everybody is 41 years old. It’s a pension plan we never realised would happen,” says the 68-year-old godfather of glam rock.

Today, he lives comfortably in Manchester, still enjoys a good party and remains as much fun to talk to as his hits were to sing along to, from Cum On Feel The Noize to Mama Weer All Crazee Now.

“We were a very happy-go-lucky band and we remained that way for most of our career. But towards the end, we’d spent 25 years together, the same four guys, as a band, and after that amount of time you’re going to start having differences with one another, because you’ve grown up in different ways and gone in different directions in your personal life. For me, the fun had gone.”

He took time off in the mid-Eighties, when he split from his first wife, Leandra, with whom he has daughters Jessica and Charisse.

“My personal life was in turmoil. I was going through a divorce and had two kids who had to cope with the divorce, and my dad was very ill. All those things came all at the same time.”

Personality clashes, egos and ‘musical differences’ put the final nail in Slade’s coffin in the early Nineties.

After leaving, Holder forged a radio and TV career, with radio shows and voice-over work. He also appeared in ITV’s The Grimleys and had a cameo in an episode of Coronation Street.

Holder was awarded the MBE in 2000 for his services to showbusiness. Today, he is happily married to TV producer Suzan Price, 20 years his junior, with whom he has a son, Django.

“In my first marriage, I was away touring and my daughters didn’t know any different from that. It had been like that since they were born. I don’t think I was a bad dad first time around, it was just circumstances that took me away from the family a lot more.

“I should have set aside more time with them when they were young, I did miss out on a load of stuff, and you can’t get that time back.

“With my second marriage, I had a child and I wasn’t going to do the same thing again. I wasn’t going to go away from home when he was growing up for more than two weeks at a time.”

Many of his thoughts are charted in The World According To Noddy, in which he shares accounts of his days on the road, celebrity gossip and general musings about fame, friendship and fatherhood, his dislike of social media, how he manages the ups and downs of modern life and the tough realities of ageing.

The book is peppered with stories about Slade, the band from the Black Country, who partied hard with drink rather than drugs.

“We didn’t change much internally when we became famous. We had that working-class ethic that we worked hard and we played hard. We were big party animals, but we knew when to stop.”

They didn’t trash hotel rooms – because they were too worried about footing the bill.

“We were never a cool band, we were a successful band. We wanted to be a commercial band and to sell our music around the world. We wanted number one singles and albums, from the day we formed in 1966. We weren’t bothered about what the critics said about us.”

But while other bands put their off-stage spats to one side for reunion tours, it’s not something Holder can ever see happening with Slade. The band has never seemed able to make up.

He doesn’t keep in touch, although two of the original line-up – Dave Hill and Don Powell – are still touring as Slade. The original bass player Jim Lea was unhappy about that, but Holder says life’s too short to bear grudges.

“We had 25 years as a band and I didn’t want to get into a ruckus with them. I don’t want hassle. We never get together. We’ve been in the same room about twice in the last 20 years.

“I would much rather we were close friends and that we could go out for a meal together and have a laugh about the old days, but some of them have chips on their shoulders which are 30 years old.”

He still misses the music, although he went on tour last year with his pal, Radio 6 DJ Mark Radcliffe to do An Audience With Noddy Holder.

Now semi-retired, he splits his time between the UK and Portugal, where he has a house, but would like to carry on writing and feels he has a solo album still in him.

  • The World According To Noddy by Nodder Holder (Constable, £8.99).