Tag: Cuz I Luv you

Long before Prince started to mess with titles to songs…Slade was doing it in the early seventies. When I think of glam rock…I don’t think of this band but they were indeed considered glam rock.

Slade was very successful in the UK with 6 number ones, 16 top ten, and 24 top 40 singles. They could not duplicate their success in America where they only had two top forty singles…Run, Runaway, and My, Oh My both in the 80s. Quiet Riot covered Slade’s songs Cum On Feel The Noize and Mama, Weer All Crazee Now, and had hits in the 1980s.

This 1971 song was Slade’s first number-one single and solidified their status as one of glam rock’s biggest bands in the UK. Chas Chandler (formerly Jimi Hendrix’s manager and Animals bassist) encouraged them to write their own songs and they ended up writing a lot of hits.

The song was written by lead singer Noddy Holder and bassist Jim Lea. They wrote it during a rehearsal they used to tune Lea’s violin. The song grew from there.

Slade was not like The Small Faces who never toured the US. They toured extensively with bands like Humble Pie, ZZ Top, J Geils Band, Black Sabbath, Santana, and Aerosmith opened for them in a few places until Toys in the Attic hit…and then they reversed it.

They even did a movie called  Slade In Flame that came out in 1975. It was what went on behind the scenes in rock at the time. It wasn’t a spoof because Holder fought against that.

Noddy Holder: “We thought ‘Because I Love You’ was a wet title for a song and so we used the spelling that would be on toilet walls in the Midlands and that made it more hard-hitting.”

Noddy Holder: “We didn’t like how the title would look on vinyl: ‘Because I Love You.’ It didn’t fit Slade’s image. In the studio, I had the lyric sheet written out phonetically in Black Country dialect which is how we used to write on bog walls. Chas Chandler, our manager, saw the lyric sheet, and said, ‘Why don’t we use that?’ It caught on and had such an impact.”

“Of course, you got Prince doing it in the ’80s, then all the hip-hop artists later on, so we started something. The education authorities got onto us for influencing the youth for bad spelling.”

Noddy Holder: “He (Chas Chandler) told us to write a hit song, just like that, and that’s not very easy to do. Jimmy and me wrote ‘Coz I Luv You’ in 20 minutes and Chaz was raving about it. We felt that it wasn’t rocky enough for Slade so we added all the handclapping and boot-stomping, which made it much more commercial and became our trademark.”

Jim Lea: “Our first hit, Get Down And Get With It,’ was a cover. Chas kept ringing up saying we needed a follow up, fast. We’d started trying to write in pairs – Don [Powell] and I, Noddy and Dave [Hill] , but the other two weren’t coming up with anything. Bolan was big at the time and all his songs were slinky and sexy. That seemed to be what it took to get a hit, so I had an idea to do something softer. At the time Nod and I used to jam along to [’30s French jazz violinist] Stéphane Grappelli and [Belgian jazz guitarist] Django Reinhardt, so I went over to his folks’ house to work something up with him. I’d already got the structure and 20 minutes later we had ‘Coz I Luv You.’ It romped to #1. I had to turn round to Don and say, ‘Look, we’re going to have to keep this going.'”

Cuz I Love You

I won’t laugh at you when you boo-hoo-hoo
Coz I luv you
I can turn my back on the things you lack
Coz I luv you

(Chorus):
I just like the things you do mm
Don’t you change the things you do mm

You get me in a spot and smile the smile you got
And I luv you
You make me out a clown then you put me down
I still luv you

(Chorus)

I just like the things you do mm
Don’t you change the things you do mm

Yeah

When you bite your lip you’re gonna flip your flip
But I luv you
When we’re miles apart you still reach my heart
How I love you

(Chorus)

I just like the things you do mm
Don’t you change the things you do mm

Only time can tell if we get on well
Coz I luv you
All that’s passed us by we can only sigh hi-hi
Coz I luv you

(Chorus)

I just like the things you do mm
Don’t you change the things you do mm

No, no, no.

(Repeat to fade)
la la laa la la laa, laa, laa..