Slade drummer Don Powell has shared insight on his life-changing car accident.
It was the early morning of July 4, 1973 when the rocker was severely injured in a crash near his home in Wolverhampton, England. At the time, Slade was the biggest band in Britain, having scored five No. 1 singles on the U.K. chart. Powell and his fiance were both ejected from the vehicle in the accident. She died instantly, but the drummer miraculously survived.
“I’ve still got no idea what happened,” Powell confessed during a recent appearance on the Rockonteurs podcast. “We were both, myself and my girlfriend, were thrown out of the car, and my girlfriend had already died, and I was about to die, just as two nurses happened to be coming by on duty. It was about one o’clock in the morning, and my head was split open, and the nurse had to push my head back together.”
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The second nurse rushed to a nearby home and used their phone to call for an ambulance. Once at the hospital, surgeons had to drill into Powell’s skull to release pressure.
“Apparently I died twice,” the rocker remarked. “But they brought me back.”
After six days in a coma, Powell awoke. Though he lost all sense of smell and taste, he managed to regain function of all of his extremities. Relearning how to drum wasn’t easy, especially given Powell’s memory loss.
“It was hard, because like, I couldn’t remember anything,” he admitted, recalling how he couldn’t remember how to play Slade’s holiday hit “Merry Xmas Everybody.” “We got on stage to try to do an encore. We’ll go on and do ‘Merry Christmas.’ I said, ‘How does it go? How does it go? Sing it to me, how does it go?’ I couldn’t remember anything.”
Don Powell Reconnected With the Nurse That Saved His Life
For years, Powell tried in vain to find the nurses who saved his life, “just to say thank you.” Eventually, a news reporter was able to link him with one of them.
“I managed to speak to her on the phone,” the drummer recalled. “I said, I believe there was two of you there. She said, ‘Yes, there was my friend. She got married and moved out of the area, so we haven’t seen each other for many years.’ I said, but what I wanted to say… was just to say thank you.”
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Gallery Credit: Corey Irwin