Song #13: "Run Runaway" by Slade

 

Song #13: Slade — “Run Runaway”

Today’s Song

Song: “Run Runaway”
Artist: Slade
Year: 1984
Era bucket: 1980–1989
Random draw: Song #13
Remaining eligible population after today: 9,061

This is our first song from the 1980s.

Chart performance

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #20
Date of peak: June 16, 1984
Weeks on Hot 100: 17
Weeks in Top 40: 8
Weeks in Top 20: 1
Weeks in Top 10: 0
Weeks at peak: 1
1984 year-end rank: #138

Hot 100 run: 67-56-50-44-39-34-32-27-25-23-20-27-43-65-80-84-98

It also reached #1 on Billboard’s Rock Top Tracks chart.

Slade at this point

Charting record: 5th of 7 U.S. Hot 100 hits
Top-20 hit: 1st of 1
Top-10 hit: 0 of 0
#1 hit: 0 of 0

Previous Top-20 hit: None
Next Top-20 hit: None

“Run Runaway” would be Slade’s only American Top-20 hit. Its follow-up, “My Oh My,” reached #37, giving Slade two U.S. Top-40 hits.

As we’ll see, that American chart record gives an almost comically incomplete picture of Slade.

Retrospective standing

Billboard GOAT rank: #7,141
GOAT points: 104,704
Among Slade Hot 100 songs: #1 of 7
Among Slade Top-20 hits: #1 of 1

Record details

Written by: Noddy Holder and Jim Lea
Produced by: John Punter
Original UK album: The Amazing Kamikaze Syndrome
U.S. album: Keep Your Hands Off My Power Supply
U.S. label/catalog: CBS Associated 4-04398
U.S. B-side: “Don’t Tame a Hurricane”
U.S. single length: 3:42
Recorded: 1983
Genre: Rock / Celtic rock

Slade:
Noddy Holder — lead vocals, rhythm guitar
Jim Lea — bass, electric violin, backing vocals
Dave Hill — lead guitar, backing vocals
Don Powell — drums

That electric violin matters. The Celtic fiddle sound in “Run Runaway” is not a guitar effect. Lea is actually playing violin on the record.

Listen / watch / read

Canonical version: The original 1984 single edit, approximately 3:42. The five-minute version on The Amazing Kamikaze Syndrome is the album version; the roughly 3:46 version currently found on Crackers (The Christmas Party Album) closely corresponds to the single edit.

Official music video: Yes. The original video was filmed at Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire and received substantial MTV exposure in the United States.

Video: Slade — “Run Runaway” official video
Official audio: Slade — “Run Runaway”
Lyrics: Shazam

Versions / title history

“Run Runaway” first appeared on Slade’s 1983 UK album The Amazing Kamikaze Syndrome. For the American market, CBS Associated repackaged much of that album in 1984 as Keep Your Hands Off My Power Supply, with a different running order and some track changes. “Run Runaway” became the lead U.S. single.

The UK 7-inch runs about 3:43, essentially the same edit as the 3:42 U.S. single. A five-minute album version and a longer 12-inch version also exist.

No unrelated same-title Top-20 hit appears in our project pool.

Streaming note

The version matters today. The five-minute Amazing Kamikaze Syndrome recording is not the single edit that made the American chart. For purposes of this project, I listened to the shorter version corresponding to the 1984 single.

My rating: 84/100

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I absolutely knew Slade’s “Run Runaway” before today. In fact, it was already in my Favorites playlist.

When the song came out in 1984, though, I knew virtually nothing about Slade. They were simply the band that made this song I really liked. Over the years I learned more about them — certainly enough to know that they had been wildly popular in Britain long before “Run Runaway” became their lone American Top-20 hit — but I had never really dug deeply into their career.

I was 12 years old when “Run Runaway” became a hit. That was right around the point when music was becoming more than just something I listened to. I was already listening to American Top 40 religiously, writing the weekly chart down on notebook paper and keeping the results in a binder. But around this age I was starting to develop a real sense of what I liked.

For a very long time, I have considered 1984 one of the greatest years in pop music — probably the greatest. Decades later, when chart historian Chris Molanphy did a podcast episode making the case for 1984 as the greatest year in pop-chart history, I felt strangely vindicated. It was almost like he had been reading my mind.

The obvious case for 1984 is easy to make from the gigantic records.

But I think “Run Runaway” makes a different case.

This was the #138 song of 1984. It reached #20 for exactly one week.

And 42 years later, I still love it.

That is depth.

It just moves

The first thing that struck me during my deliberate listen today was the same thing that must have grabbed me when I was 12.

Before Noddy Holder sings anything, the drums and guitars are already moving. They gallop. The record feels as if it has started running and you have to catch up with it.

Then the first human sound arrives — something like “Ho now!” — and even that functions almost like another percussion instrument. It doesn’t stop the music so the singer can begin. Holder just jumps aboard something that is already moving.

This is almost a perfect running song. I was literally tapping my toes while listening today. Sitting completely still seems contrary to what the record is asking you to do.

Holder’s voice helps enormously. There’s a raspy AC/DC-like quality to his delivery that I certainly would have recognized in 1984. “Run Runaway” contains some sounds that would have been unfamiliar to 12-year-old me, but the foundation was immediately understandable: pounding drums, loud guitars, a huge chorus and a hard-rock singer roaring over everything.

Then there is the call and response.

Holder throws out a phrase and the other voices answer him. It makes the verses accessible almost immediately. You don’t need to understand the song. You barely need to know it. Before long, you know where you're supposed to shout.

That communal quality turns out to be very Slade.

The American charts have some explaining to do

Here is what the Billboard Hot 100 tells us about Slade:

Seven charting records.

One Top-20 hit.

“Run Runaway.”

Peak position: #20.

If that were all you knew, you could reasonably conclude that Slade were a minor British rock band who briefly wandered onto American radio in 1984.

That is spectacularly wrong.

In Britain, Slade had six #1 singles, 16 Top-10 hits and 24 Top-40 hits. They spent a combined 20 weeks at #1. They also had three #1 albums.

Their breakthrough came in 1971. “Get Down and Get With It” reached #16, followed by “Coz I Luv You” at #1. Then came a remarkable run that included “Take Me Bak ’Ome,” “Mama Weer All Crazee Now,” “Gudbuy T’Jane,” “Cum On Feel the Noize,” “Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me” and “Merry Xmas Everybody.”

Slade’s peak wasn't 1984.

It was more than a decade earlier.

This is one of the strangest distortions we've encountered so far in a project built around the American charts.

Slade were not a band that needed America to make them stars.

They were already stars. America was the anomaly.

If I were choosing a song through which to tell the Slade story, I certainly wouldn’t begin with “Run Runaway.” I’d start in Britain around 1971.

But this project doesn’t get to choose its doorway.

“Run Runaway” is Slade’s only American Top-20 hit, which means this is the only time this project will give us Slade. The American chart has introduced us to them in almost exactly the wrong place in their career.

Maybe they were in the wrong country at the wrong time

The obvious question is why.

My mental picture of early-1970s American pop is filled with things like Philadelphia soul and soft rock. British glam — Slade, T. Rex, Sweet and others — feels like it belongs to another universe.

America was also still living in the shadow of Vietnam and the enormous cultural upheavals of the late 1960s. I don't want to make too much of that here; there will be better songs through which to discuss it. But British glam's flamboyant, aggressively unserious sense of fun may simply have been a poor fit for the American mood. Later in the 1970s, America would embrace escapism much more openly, but by then Slade's original moment had largely passed.

Listening to Slade now, though, some of what they were doing sounds remarkably compatible with the American pop-metal boom that would arrive much later: loud guitars, enormous melodic choruses, gang vocals, flamboyant clothes and, especially, a sense that hard rock was allowed to be fun.

There's something in their presentation that reminds me of what bands like Aerosmith would be doing in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The music can be loud while the band makes it obvious that they understand some of the whole rock-star enterprise is inherently ridiculous. Bon Jovi had some of that quality too.

Slade had apparently figured that out years earlier.

In other words, a lot of Slade's musical DNA might have fit beautifully in America around 1987.

The problem is that Slade themselves might not have.

When “Run Runaway” reached America, Noddy Holder was 37. The other members were in roughly the same age range. They look like grown men in the video because they were grown men.

That matters once MTV becomes part of the equation. The American hard-rock bands about to flourish on MTV weren't merely selling loud guitars and catchy choruses. They were also selling youth and, frequently, sex appeal. The power ballad would become partly a vehicle for showing the audience that the long-haired guy in the leather pants also had a sensitive side.

Slade didn't look like that.

They looked like Slade.

Maybe their problem wasn't that they were simply ahead of their time. That's too easy.

They were perfectly of their time in Britain.

Their timing problem may have been geographical.

Then America changed

By 1984, the environment was different.

Quiet Riot’s 1983 version of Slade’s “Cum On Feel the Noize” had reached #5 in America, providing rather convincing evidence that an old Slade song could connect with the new American hard-rock audience. That success helped reopen the American door for Slade.

And Slade walked back through it at an unusually favorable moment.

America was in the middle of the Second British Invasion. In one week in July 1983, 20 of the American Top 40 singles were by British acts, breaking a record that had stood since the original British Invasion. By the following spring, British acts accounted for 40 of the Hot 100.

“Run Runaway” entered the Hot 100 on April 7, 1984.

The timing is almost too perfect.

A decade earlier, Slade's exaggerated Britishness may have made them harder to export to America. In 1984, Britishness itself had become commercially attractive.

And “Run Runaway” certainly wasn't trying to hide where it came from.

A rocky Scottish jig

Listening today, I immediately noticed something I probably couldn't have identified when I was 12.

This thing sounds Celtic.

There's a reason.

Jim Lea is actually playing electric violin on the record. Slade takes something resembling a Scottish fiddle tune and bolts it onto a pounding hard-rock rhythm.

At 12, I wouldn't have thought, Interesting use of Celtic musical vocabulary.

I would have thought:

This sounds cool.

Maybe that's exactly why it works. “Run Runaway” is quirky enough to be distinctive without being difficult. The Celtic element gives it an unusual flavor, while the guitars, drums, call-and-response vocals and Holder's raspy delivery make the basic proposition immediately accessible.

Then I watched the video for the first time today.

Good Lord, do they commit to the bit.

There are kilts.

There are bagpipes.

There is a Scottish marching band.

There are children in kilts doing the response vocals.

There is a castle.

And there is a man using a caber as an air guitar.

The best part is that none of this is presented as solemn Celtic heritage. The marching band shows up at the castle and everybody dances. The entire thing feels like a party.

The video understands the song perfectly.

This is supposed to be fun.

It also reinforces the age issue. Slade look like guys in their late 30s having a blast making a ridiculous rock video. I actually find that enormously appealing.

I'm less sure how useful it was for selling them to American teenagers in the emerging MTV hard-rock marketplace.

MTV without MTV

Drummer Don Powell has said he thought MTV helped make “Run Runaway” successful in America, and the video received substantial exposure there.

That's particularly interesting to me because MTV had nothing to do with how I discovered the song.

I didn't have cable in 1984. I lived far enough out in the sticks that we wouldn't get it until several years later. I desperately wanted to see music videos and would watch MTV wherever I could find it — including spending ridiculous amounts of time staring at it in a bowling alley near my high school.

But I don't remember this video at all.

I knew “Run Runaway” from the radio.

There’s an interesting chart-mechanics distinction here, too. MTV itself did not count toward the Hot 100 in 1984. A song couldn't earn Billboard points simply because people watched its video.

MTV created exposure.

That exposure then had to become the things Billboard actually measured: radio airplay and record sales.

So MTV could show “Run Runaway” to an American teenager. That teenager could buy the single, request it on the radio, or simply become part of the audience convincing radio programmers that the song was connecting.

MTV could help create the demand.

The demand still had to show up somewhere else before Billboard counted it.

Chameleons and other things that don't need to make sense

Then there are the lyrics.

For more than 40 years, one of the things I have remembered from this song is the image of a chameleon lying in the sun and the phrase “all things to everyone.”

Why?

For one thing, chameleon is a really weird word to hear in a pop song.

I don't think I ever particularly cared what any of it meant.

The lyrics seem much more important functionally than narratively. Holder says something. Somebody answers. A strange little image flies past. The rhythm never breaks.

After reaching that conclusion, I found an interview with Jim Lea in which he explained how he and Holder wrote “Run Runaway.” Lea said he deliberately wanted the lyrics to be abstract and not really about anything in particular. The listener could decide what they meant.

Well, good.

Forty-two years later, I have decided they don't need to mean very much to me.

The words work.

“Chameleon” sticks in my head.

Everybody shouts.

The song keeps moving.

A second act that didn't become an American third act

“Run Runaway” wasn't merely a freak one-week American accident.

It reached #1 on Billboard's rock chart. Keep Your Hands Off My Power Supply reached #33 on the Billboard 200.

There was a legitimate opening here.

The follow-up was “My Oh My,” a slow-building arena-rock power ballad that had reached #2 in Britain. In America it reached #37.

That sequence caught my attention because it resembles a hard-rock release strategy that would become almost formulaic a few years later:

Lead with the rocker. Follow it with the power ballad.

By the late 1980s, bands like Warrant could use exactly that progression to widen their audience.

Slade was doing something remarkably similar in 1984.

It just didn't explode for them.

Maybe there doesn't have to be a complicated explanation.

Maybe the subsequent songs simply weren't as good for the American market.

“My Oh My” got a fair hearing and reached the Top 40. Later singles barely registered. “Run Runaway” may simply have hit a perfect intersection of song and moment that Slade couldn't reproduce.

A planned American tour supporting Ozzy Osbourne was canceled after Jim Lea became seriously ill. That surely didn't help Slade establish a larger American rock audience, although I don't want to pretend that touring with Ozzy would automatically have produced more pop hits. Ozzy himself was hardly a Hot 100 singles machine.

The opportunity was real.

It just didn't turn into a sustained American career.

Historically interesting is not historically important

After everything I've learned today, I still don't think “Run Runaway” is an important song in the history of rock.

Remove it from 1984 and the history of popular music proceeds essentially unchanged. Nobody needs to include it in a documentary explaining how rock developed.

But it is historically interesting.

Through this seemingly minor #20 hit, we can see the Second British Invasion, MTV changing the way American hits were created, the enormous U.S./UK divide over glam rock, the growing American pop audience for hard rock and some of the ingredients that would soon flourish in American pop-metal.

Most of all, we can see how misleading a national chart can be.

If all we had were Billboard, Slade would be a footnote.

If all we had were the British charts, wondering whether Slade mattered would be an absurd question.

Both charts accurately describe what happened in their respective countries.

Neither one, by itself, tells the whole history.

But none of that is why I love this song

This is the part I don't want to lose underneath everything else I learned today.

I loved “Run Runaway” before I knew virtually any of this.

I loved it when I was 12.

And listening to it today, I remembered immediately why.

It's fun.

That's not faint praise.

I think sometimes we treat fun as though it's a lesser musical accomplishment than sadness, profundity or emotional complexity. We'll certainly encounter songs in this project that I love because they're sad, beautiful or emotionally devastating in a way that works for me.

“Run Runaway” isn't one of those songs.

This is closer to what rock music is supposed to be, at least some of the time.

Something to enjoy.

Something that makes you move.

Something that makes your day a little brighter.

Something that makes you smile when it comes on.

More than four decades later, “Run Runaway” still does all of those things for me.

And it occupies one of my favorite places in pop culture: popular enough to have found me, but not popular enough to have followed me around for the rest of my life.

It never became an American standard. It isn't one of those '80s songs that appears endlessly in movies, commercials, sporting events and nostalgia playlists. I'm guessing a lot of people have forgotten it.

I haven't.

Hearing it has a little of the pleasure of discovering an unknown band, which is especially funny considering that in Britain Slade were about as far from an unknown band as you could get.

Maybe that's another reason 1984 remains my favorite year for pop music.

The case for a great year isn't just the masterpieces at the top of the chart.

It's what happens when you start digging down.

“Run Runaway” peaked at #20 for one week.

It finished #138 for the year.

And 42 years later, I put it on and started tapping my toes.

That's a pretty good #138 song.

84/100.

Critically, is it the best record we've encountered in this project?

Probably not.

Personally?

So far, absolutely.