Return To Base - Recording

Recording

In the November–December 1979 Slade News magazine, Hill stated "the album took six weeks, on and off, to record."

The album saw the band produce together for the first time which Hill was asked if any one member of Slade did the bulk of production work. Hill stated "No, we each took it in turn to produce certain parts ourselves - which makes it the first album we have solely produced ourselves."

In response to how the album's title was decided, Hill said "We had a whole list of suggestions for the title, and "Return To Base" is from one of the lines in the song "Sign of the Times".

In the November–December 1979 fan club magazine, it was stated that the album's title also described the band's actions of the time. Both Lea and Hill lived in Wolverhampton whilst Holder and Powell lived in London. By the album's release, all members were living in Wolverhampton.

Upon asking if the album's artwork had been designed, Hill replied "It's still being done, but I understand that it is going to have a photo of a ticker-tape message on the front saying "Return To Base", in computer-like lettering. But it should be a very basic cover - so that it ties in with the "basic" reference in the title."

Hill spoke of how he felt on the final album overall "I'm very satisfied with it. It's got a mixture of different types of songs on it, all of which adds up to it being a good album!" Hill also stated his favourite songs on the album, "My favourites are the rock 'n' roll one "I'm a Rocker" and the instrumental one "Lemme Love Into Ya" - probably because of the way that they come over on stage more than anything else."

In a 1980 fan club interview, Noddy Holder spoke of the album. "Over the last couple of years me and Jim have been writing a lot of songs, but we haven't known which way to approach them really. With "Return to Base" we were really pleased with the album, we thought that it turned out really well - but it didn't sell. Everyone around the band was saying to us that we weren't coming up with as good songs as we used to. But me and Jim knew that we were, we knew that we were coming up with strong songs. Some of the songs on "Return to Base" we thought were some of the best songs that we'd ever written. There only seemed to be me and Jim that had confidence in the songs; people like Chas, Dave and Don said that they didn't think our songs were as strong, some of them they did but some of them they didn't. But we ourselves thought that they were. Thus it was a case of getting the album down; and in our minds it turned out to be a great album."

During the recording of "Return to Base", Slade were persuaded by Slade's engineer Andy Miller to record a song that was written by himself and Bernie Frost, both whom worked with Status Quo. The song titled "Another Win" was recorded by Slade and despite the song turning out fine, the song was never released and is still unreleased to this day. The song was later recorded by Status Quo, ending up appearing on a bootleg album only. In August 2011, the full track was unofficially made available via Slade In England.