Chris Slade retires | AC/DC drummer calls time

If you have ever played along to “Thunderstruck”, you have played along to Chris Slade.

The Welsh drummer has announced his retirement, at 79, after a stroke he had roughly seven years ago slowly got worse. He put it plainly, which is very much his way.

Sixty-three years behind a kit, and he signed off with a cricketing metaphor. Here is what he said, and why the career it closes is a bigger one than most people realise.

What Chris Slade said

The announcement came in a video posted to the Facebook page of his own band, The Chris Slade Timeline.

It’s with a heavy heart that I’m announcing my retirement from drumming. I’m near enough 80 years old. I’ve been drumming professionally since I was 16 with Tom Jones. I’ve had a good innings.

The reason is health, and he was specific about it — which is rarer than it should be, and more useful.

A small stroke, but it’s got worse. And I’m afraid that has screwed me up.

That stroke was around seven years ago. It was minor at the time. It has been progressive since, and it has now taken the one thing a drummer cannot work around: the hands and the timing doing exactly what the brain asks of them, every night, for two hours.

He signed off with “bye for now”. Given there is a book on the way, that is probably literal.

Sixty-three years, and most of them famous

Here is the thing about Slade. Ask a rock fan who he is and you will get “the AC/DC guy”. Ask a drummer and you should get a much longer answer.

He joined Tom Jones’s band as a teenager in the early sixties and stayed for around a decade — through the hits, the television series and the Vegas years. That is a serious apprenticeship in playing to a click that doesn’t exist, night after night, for an audience that came to hear the singer.

Then:

• Manfred Mann’s Earth Band in the seventies, including the era of “Blinded by the Light” — a much twitchier, more progressive gig than the AC/DC job people know him for.
• Uriah Heep at the turn of the eighties.
• The Firm, the mid-eighties band with Jimmy Page and Paul Rodgers. Two albums, and a rhythm chair that involved holding down a stage with a Led Zeppelin guitarist on one side and a Free singer on the other.
• David Gilmour’s solo band.
• Asia, across two spells, the second of them running six years to 2005.

That is Tom Jones to Jimmy Page to Angus Young without ever sounding out of place. Not many drummers have a CV that moves that far and still makes sense.

The AC/DC years

Slade joined AC/DC in 1989 and played on The Razor’s Edge, released in 1990.

It matters more than a single album credit suggests. The Razor’s Edge was the record that pulled AC/DC back to the top of the world after a wobbly eighties, and it produced “Thunderstruck” and “Moneytalks” — two songs that have never left rock radio, or a drum shop demo room, since.

His playing on it is a masterclass in the least fashionable skill in drumming: not overplaying. “Thunderstruck” is a groove that a beginner can approximate in an afternoon and that almost nobody plays as well as he did, because the whole thing lives in the feel of the hi-hat and the patience of the snare.

He left in 1994 when Phil Rudd returned, then came back in 2015 when Rudd’s legal problems ruled him out — playing the Rock or Bust touring cycle, including the stadiums, at an age when most players have long since stopped hauling a bass drum anywhere.

You can still tell a Slade AC/DC show from a Rudd one, incidentally. He is a slightly harder hitter, and he sits a fraction on top of the beat where Rudd sits behind it.

What he was doing right up to the end

This is not a musician who faded out quietly a decade ago and formalised it this week.

Slade had been touring Europe with The Chris Slade Timeline, the band he formed to play the music from across his own career. They released their debut album, Timescape, in 2024 — a double, with a disc of originals and a disc of covers.

He also has an autobiography in progress, which he has joked will need to be more than one volume. On the evidence of the CV, he is not wrong.

Final thoughts

There is something very grounded about “I’ve had a good innings” as an exit line. No farewell tour, no cryptic statement about “stepping back to focus on other projects” — just a 79-year-old man explaining that a stroke has taken his hands, thanking everyone, and closing the door himself.

We have written before about how brutally specific drumming is as a job — Phil Collins is the clearest example, and the same thing applies here. A guitarist can adapt. A singer can drop a key. A drummer either has the limbs or does not, and there is no polite way around it.

So: sixty-three years, four decades of hits, and a fill on “Thunderstruck” that will outlive all of us. Good innings indeed.

Read our full Chris Slade feature, or see Chris Slade’s kit era by era in the Rig Vault — the Pearl rig with two bass drums at head height is worth the trip on its own.

If you want more from the AC/DC orbit, Foo Fighters open for them in St. Louis this month with Ilan Rubin on the kit. And for another drummer chair that finally settled down this summer, Zak Starkey is back in The Who.