The surprising '90s band Slade influenced: "I never would have imagined it"

10 June 2026, 11:31 | Updated: 10 June 2026, 11:34

By Mayer Nissim

We all know Slade influenced the likes of Kiss and Oasis, but Kurt Cobain was also a massive fan.

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Slade weren't just one of the biggest bands of the 1970s, they were also one of the most influential.

Their immediate impact on groups like Kiss, Cheap Trick and Quiet Riot was obvious, while Noel Gallagher famously once said: ""No Slade = No Oasis".

But the band's influence also extended to some places you might not have guessed.

While the 1990s grunge movement was decidedly American and had a near-punk Year Zero sensibility at times, it turns out that Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain was a proper fan of the Brit glam rockers.

"Slade! A band that would never bend over," Kurt is reported to have said of Noddy Holder's group (we're not sure where the comment came from but the earliest we've found it is on a Vive Le Rock biography from 2009).

Asked about that quote, Noddy Holder told Classic Rock in 2014: "I know what he meant. We wouldn't bend in America.

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"If we'd've bent we probably would've been bigger than we were. But we wouldn't toe the corporate American line."

Noddy later told the NME in 2022: "I never would have imagined we’d influenced Kurt Cobain and we only found about that years later.

"As a kid, he'd seen us at a Seattle show. We were a bona fide loud, brash, over-the-top, anthem-slinging act and at that age, he'd probably never saw anything like us in America and got off on it."

While Kurt's love of Slade isn't up for debate, it's not clear when exactly Kurt would have seen Slade.

A glance at the archives shows that the band played the Paramount Theatre there in 1973, when Kurt would have just been six, and again at the Gold Creek Dome in Woodenville in 1976, when he would have been nine.

It's not impossible that an underage Kurt went to the second show, but it doesn't feel completely likely.

And it's generally accepted that Kurt's first live show was seeing a pre-Van Halen Sammy Hagar supported by Quarterflash at the Seattle Center Coliseum in March 1983, when he would have been 16.

"I remember this one time I went to see Sammy Hagar when I was in seventh grade," Kurt told Melody Maker in 1993, which suggests that he was 13, further confusing the timeline.

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"Everyone was passing around pot, and I got really high and I lit myself on fire.

"I had a Bic lighter in my sweatshirt pocket and I was watching Sammy, swinging upside-down from the rafters, mocking everyone else who was holding their lighters above their heads. I looked down, and petrol had spilt out everywhere, and my shirt was on fire."

But even if he never saw them live, you can hear those glam rock dynamics in the Slade sound.

And it's been widely claimed that both Kurt Cobain and Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan were influenced by the hard rocking Whatever Happened To Slade album, which was released to pretty negative reviews in 1977.