Slade Drummer To Reveal All About Girlfriend’s Death
It caused him to descend into a desperate sea of alcoholism and serial womanising.
But Slade drummer Don Powell is facing his demons to produce a warts‘n’all biography in which he reveals his real thoughts about the devastating car crash which left his girlfriend Angela Morris dead.
Thursday marks the 40th anniversary of the carnage in Compton Road, Wolverhampton which left the Bilston-born sticksman in a coma for six days.
After he woke in hospital, chart-topper Don, who had a fractured skull and whose heart stopped beating twice, suffered severe memory loss, which continues to this day.
He is still not even sure who was behind the wheel of his Bentley as it veered off the road and ploughed into a wall – killing Angela, aged 20.
On January 4, 1974 an inquest jury in Wolverhampton returned an open verdict on her death.
Don has enlisted the help of his close pal, Danish writer Lise Lyng Falkenberg, to pen his life story.
Don told the Sunday Mercury: “The whole point, when Lise agreed to do this, is I said I don’t want to hide anything. People should know about the problems I was going through – the amnesia and all these things.
“It was a strange life I was leading.”
Chris Charlesworth, managing editor of publisher Omnibus Press, said Don and Lise’s work will pull no punches.
“It has touched on the whole of the Slade story, including the terrible car accident he was in and how that affected him,” said Chris.
“He talks at length about his alcoholism – how he became a perpetual drunkard, more or less, and then cleaned his act up.
“It also mentions how he has had quite a lot of relationships with women – he talks quite candidly about that.
“He doesn’t hold back about the less attractive things that have happened to him. They all stem back to the accident.”
Don was treated in Wolverhampton’s Royal Hospital after two off-duty nurses helped to save his life at the side of the road.
The drummer, who still plays in a version of Slade with guitarist Dave Hill, found some closure after the turn of the millennium when he managed to track down one of the nurses.
While band mates Noddy Holder and Jim Lea wrote the group’s stunning string of raucous rock anthems in the 70s and 80s, six of which made number one, Don, who has quit the booze and lives in Denmark with partner Hanne, was left less financially secure by the success.