I still can't remember tragic crash, says Slade drummer Don Powell

Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me had just put the glam rockers on top of the charts for a fifth time. At the age of 26, he had just taken delivery of a gleaming white Bentley.

There was even talk of wedding bells as he looked forward to the future with his beauty-queen girlfriend Angela Morris.

Then, minutes after the young couple left a birthday party at a Wolverhampton nightclub, those dreams would be shattered forever.

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the tragic car crash which left Don with permanent memory loss, and cost Angela her life.

Don spent the following six days in a coma, and his heart stopped beating twice. Doctors had to drill into his skull to relieve pressure on his brain as they battled to save his life, and he also suffered from a broken arms, legs and ribs.

Now, for the first time since the crash, the 66-year-old drummer lifts the lid on the anguish that followed the accident. Ahead of a revealing new authorised biography, he talks frankly about how he hit the bottle as he struggled to come to terms with the tragedy.

"Even today I have no memory of the crash," he says.

Very little is known about the cause of the crash, and Don has long given up any hope of finding out any more.

The couple had arrived at Dix nightclub in Temple Street, Wolverhampton, where Angela worked as a secretary, at around 11 o'clock the night before, and spent a couple of hours there before leaving in Don's Bentley. As they passed along Compton Road at about 1am, on the way to Don's, the car collided with a hedge, before smashing into a wall.

The couple were thrown from the car, leaving Angela lying in the middle of the road and Don in the gutter. The subsequent inquest failed to establish what caused the crash, or who was driving.

"I remember a girl's birthday party, and opening a bottle of champagne," Don said at the time. "I can't remember anything leading up to the accident."

Today Don says he still has no idea what happened. "After the crash, when we were touring in America, I saw a brain specialist called Albert Goodgold who told me what I was going through was quite normal, it was like the brain switched itself off before the crash, and switched itself back on afterwards.

"Strangely, I felt quite good when he told me that. I had become a nervous wreck trying to remember what happened, and he told me not to bother, because I wouldn't be able to," he added.

At the time of the inquest, Don's solicitor issued a statement saying two witnesses had come forward saying Angela was driving, but the drummer says he still has no idea whether or not that was the case.

A month before the accident, Don was taken to hospital after collapsing on stage during a show at Birmingham Town Hall.

Could he have suffered a similar blackout on the night of the crash? "I don't think so," he says "I think that was just heat exhaustion. I don't know, but I don't think that would have been the cause."

He says it was on his doctor's advice that he returned to work the following month, having to be lifted on to his drum-kit for the recording of the hit single My Friend Stan. "At the time, I thought it was the last thing I wanted to do, but looking back I could see he was right."

The accident left him with no sense of taste or smell, and little short-term memory – problems he continues to suffer with today – and he had to learn all Slade's songs again from scratch.

In 1975 he left Wolverhampton and moved to London, and it was then that his life went off the rails, sinking into a haze of alcohol and womanising.

"I was drinking two bottles of vodka a day – and without any effect. That was the frightening thing. My drinking partner at the time was Ozzy Osborne, which tells you everything you need to know.

"The strange thing was, when we were doing Slade concerts I didn't drink before I went on stage, but as soon as I went off, I would hit the bottle.

"I think looking back I might have been trying to blot it out, but there is no excuse.

"It got to the point when I was on the drink 24 hours a day, and I began to realise there was a problem. The only time I wasn't drinking was when I was asleep."

Don, who says he has not touched alcohol since 1985, has lived in Denmark with his second wife Hanne for the last nine years, but still regularly returns to the West Midlands when he tours with his old bandmate Dave Hill in the reformed Slade line-up.

He says it was Hanne who convinced him the time was right to reveal the full story in a book. "She said if I didn't do it now, I never would," he says.

The book has been written on behalf of Don by Danish author Lise Lyng Falkenberg, who is a close friend.