Chris Slade has called time on his drumming career, saying in a video posted over the weekend to his Facebook page for the Chris Slade Timeline that he is retiring. “Hello everybody. It’s with a heavy heart that I’m announcing my retirement from drumming,” he said, adding later, “it’s bye for now.”
The announcement lands now because Slade, one of the best-known veteran drummers to come through AC/DC, framed it as a decision forced by age and health rather than by choice. He said he is “near enough 80 years old” and has been drumming professionally since he was 16, when he played with Tom Jones. He also pointed to a small stroke he said happened about seven years ago, telling fans that it had got worse and “screwed me up.”
For Slade, the retirement closes a long run that included joining AC/DC in 1989, playing on The Razor’s Edge and leaving in 1994 when Phil Rudd returned. He came back in 2015 when legal issues forced Rudd to take an extended leave of absence, and he was still active with the Chris Slade Timeline, which he told Rolling Stone in 2020 played for about two hours at shows. The latest video makes clear that he was still trying to keep performing after that.
That is what gives the decision its bite. Slade said he was “really jealous” of the Stones and Paul McCartney for carrying on into their eighties and that he wanted to do the same, but he no longer believes he can. Last month he had already told fans on Facebook that the band had to bow out of Brudstock Festival after he fell over and hurt his ribs badly, a setback that now reads less like a one-off accident and more like part of a wider physical toll.
He did not say the retirement is permanent in every sense, only that the drumming chapter is over for now. The Facebook page will continue to post now and again, but the performance career that carried him from Tom Jones to AC/DC has reached its last clear stop, and Slade left the door open only as far as the words he chose: “bye for now.”
