D
Happy boys happy. One of The Small Faces’ many TV performances, summer ’67
on Arden may never have dangled a Small Face by the ankles from a fifth floor balcony, but the relationship between the notorious manager and his charges had certainly soured by the time he took what they considered to be a
demo and handed it to Decca Records as the group’s sixth single release in November 1966. ‘My Mind’s Eye’ went to #4 in the UK charts, making it The Small Faces’ third Top 10 smash. But the group members were far from happy. For months they had been trying desperately to shake off the perception of the band as a superficial pop outfit.
“All of us at every single moment were trying to get away from this
teenybopper image,” remembers drummer Kenney Jones. “If anything we should have been likened to someone like The Yardbirds, or Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton. All those guys had got these rougher, rock ’n’ roll type images and that’s what we honestly were. When we played together [privately] we would be really heavy and wild, off the wall – it was great. But when we did shows it was literally doing the hits. When we were promoting ourselves, we were doing ourselves no good by continuing to promote our teenybopper image and it wouldn’t leave us. We’d go up on stage and play this rinky-dink shit and that’s probably why Don Arden released that fucking record and he put us right back into our pop stuff.”
In May ’66, The Small Faces had set up base in a house together at 22 Westmoreland Terrace, Pimlico, where their collective friendship, already tight, deepened further. “It was kind of like our own little office,” Jones recalls, “our own world. We would invite people there that were in the industry, other musicians. Paul McCartney would be sitting there one day, Mick Jagger the other day, or all of them together. I had my own room, but I very rarely stayed there because you couldn’t get any sleep!” The Small Faces’ reputation as a hit-making band had been established through the success of their first five singles, four of which had landed in the UK Top 20. Now, in the super-dynamic London music scene of mid-late ’66,
“When we played together privately we would be really heavy and wild, off the wall, it was great. But when we did shows it was literally doing the hits”
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