Slade-drummer Don Powell writes children’s book

The Adventures of Bibble Brick is the title of Don Powell’s children’s book that is now available from Amazon in both an e-book and a hardcover edition.

The 76 years old drummer who rose to fame with the seventies’ British glam rock band Slade, wrote the original manuscript in the sixties, but apart from the chapters being printed as a serial in the Slade fan magazine in the seventies, it has never been published. Not until now, where Don and I have teamed up. We have been friends for 17 years and the last time we worked together was on the 2018 updated version of Don’s official biography “Look Wot I Dun”, which I wrote back in 2013.

In the biography Don revealed that he was twenty-two when he wrote The Adventures of Bibble Brick. “I’d always had the idea, even when I was a teenager, to do something that appealed to both children and adults,” he explained. “Because when I was a young child, I used to sit with my father, watching cartoons, and I couldn’t understand why he was laughing at different things than the ones that I was laughing at. I was laughing at the obvious things, but Dad was laughing at something else, and I didn’t get it until I started to get older. Then I could see the humour, things that appealed to him, and that was really what inspired me to write it.”

Together Don and I have rewritten the story from the sixties to make it more up to date without it losing its original charm, humour, and quirkiness. It is beautifully illustrated by Mark Millicent, a US-based British illustrator. He was hand-picked for the job by Don and me in a competition held in 2021.

The Adventures of Bibble Brick tells the story of the pebble Bibble who leaves the beach to see for himself how it is to live on shore. Here he ends up in the entourage of a prize fighter, where he makes new friends and fights against the bad guys.

The story is still wonderfully inappropriate for younger children with its boxing theme, drunken night club scenes and a very sexy spider. It is not your ordinary bedtime story, but both young and old Slade fans are sure to love it, especially as the observant reader will be able to spot some points of similarity between the main characters and the members of the original Slade.