Cum on Wear the Noize: Dave Hill & Superyob Style

Dave Hill was born in a castle in Devon, the son of a mechanic, and moved back with his parents to Wolverhampton when he was a year old. He bought his first guitar from a mail order catalogue and received a few lessons from a local teacher before teaching himself to play. Although he is left-handed, he has always played right-handed. He worked in an office for Tarmac Limited for over two years before becoming a full-time professional musician.

He originally played with drummer Don Powell in a band called The Vendors, which became the The N'Betweens. When Jim Lea and singer Noddy Holder later joined, the band renamed itself first Ambrose Slade then Slade.

In the 1970s, Slade were the biggest band in the UK, and went on to have 23 Top 20 hits and six number one singles. Three of these singles entered the chart at number one (an achievement that even eluded the Beatles). Released in 1973, Merry Xmas Everybody went on to sell a million copies and has charted every year since. Slade's film Flame is still cited to this day as one of the all-time great music films. Dave's outlandish costumes, hair styles, shoes and make up also made Slade one of the visually defining groups of the Glam era.

Dave went on to reform Slade after the original line-up broke up and thirty years later they are still regularly touring the world, playing to hundreds of thousands of fans.

Dave married his wife Jan in 1973, and they have three children and four grandchildren. They still live in Wolverhampton. In 2021 Dave will turn 75.  

NJ Stevenson is a fashion curator, author and lecturer in cultural and historical studies at London College of Fashion. Since 2009 she has presented annual fashion and culture events at Port Eliot Arts Festival and was appointed Fashion Director in 2018.

She is the author of The Chronology of Fashion, published by Bloomsbury in 2011, which has been translated into fourteen languages, including a Chinese edition published in 2018. She has contributed to and consulted on several fashion publications including most recently Biographic Dior and Biographic Chanel, published by Ammonite Press. She has also contributed a chapter on costume and fashion to Ken Russell: Perspectives, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2020, and several academic journals including Fashion Theory and Film, Fashion and Consumption, and presented at academic conferences.

Having worked for over fifteen years as a London-based fashion journalist and stylist for multiple publications, including the Guardian and Elle, Stevenson now works with the Fashion and Textile Museum and the London College of Fashion as an independent curator.

A member of the Centre for Fashion Curation at London College of Fashion, Stevenson is completing her doctorate on the relationship between period film costume and twentieth century fashion. This informs her next curation project, a major exhibition opening at the Fashion and Textile Museum in 2022.

Stevenson also lectures publicly in fashion history and popular culture, most recently a series on British designers at the V&A in 2019 including Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano and Alexander McQueen.