Mama Weer All Crazee Now
Co-written by the band’s Noddy Holder and Jim Lea, and recorded with as-live spontaneity by Hendrix producer Chas Chandler, Holder believes it’s up there among Slade’s defining moments.
Any poll to decide Slade’s second-most famous song must include Mama Weer All Crazee Now, the band’s third UK No.1 hit, in 1972. Unlike with the Midlanders’ previous chart-toppers Coz I Luv You and Take Me Bak ’Ome, Slade had released Mama three months before its parent album, Slayed?, hoping for it to enter the singles chart in pole position – a feat previously accomplished only by The Beatles with Get Back, three years earlier
Slade’s record label, Polydor, had considered the feat impossible. But when Mama Weer All Crazee Now debuted at No.2 before leapfrogging Rod Stewart’s You Wear It Well, the stops were pulled out to try to make the next single, the non-album track Cum On Feel The Noize, an instant chart topper. Such was the measure of Slade’s popularity in 1972, it worked.
Mama Weer All Crazee Now was the first Slade single to be based on a melody written by Jim Lea alone, after the bassist and violinist observed the audience reaction at a concert by Chuck Berry that same year. “Everybody [in the audience] was singing [along to] his tunes. It wasn’t just a few people, it was everyone,” Lea explained years later. “I thought that was amazing – why not write the crowd into [our own] songs?”
The lyrics were written by singer and guitarist Noddy Holder following an equally raucous appearance by Slade at the NME Poll Winner’s Concert at the Empire Pool (now the Arena) in Wembley at which many seats were smashed. Surveying the aftermath, Holder thought: “Christ, everyone must have been crazy tonight.”
“There was a mountain of broken chairs in the middle of the hall,” Holder says, looking back now. “It might have happened at Empire Pool or it might have been in Liverpool, but it was somewhere massive. This was our first real concert tour [as headliners], with Quo as support, and it gave a real taste of how big the band was becoming
