‘Cancer certainly changed me as a performer’

Noddy Holder hopes to go on the road again in the new year, but the former Slade frontman has said his cancer has changed him as a performer.

Holder contracted oesophageal cancer in 2018 and was given six months to live – but new chemotherapy treatments helped him fight back. In November, his wife said he was cancer free.

Speaking to BBC WM he said performing was still important so he thought “I’d better go out and show my face again.”

He had planned to tour in October and November with Tom Seals’ boogie woogie band, but they put it back until 2025 because they could not get the theater dates they wanted, he said.

Holder said he was “sort of semi-retired now” but was able to do some two-hour shows with Seals last year. The shows were a mixture of songs and anecdotes.

While he joked that most of the band were under 30 and “haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about half the time”, he said he believed he had a lot of stories to tell.

“They’re not just Slade stories, most of the songs I do in the show are stuff that’s happened to me since Slade, but the public seems to like that insight into what your life’s about, your real life’s about,” he said.

Holder, 78, said he was on a “level playing field” after responding well to experimental chemotherapy.

But he said “you’re never cured” and it had given him a “different perspective on life”.

“It’s certainly changed me as a performer, my breathing is not as solid as it used to be back in the day, because of the type of cancer that I had.”

Now the singer, known for fronting hits like Merry Xmas Everybody and Cum On Feel The Noize, said he was trying to “take it easy” and was taking the time to meet up with friends.

That included visits to curry restaurants in his home town, Walsall, and get togethers with former Slade guitarist Dave Hill at one of their favorite Italian restaurants – Fiume in Wolverhampton.

They had their differences over the years, he said, but both had accepted they were “too old to carry on having daft feuds about absolutely nothing at all”.

Hill was as “mad as a box of frogs as he always was” but he was “one of the guys in Slade that I have built bridges with over the years,” he said.