also testifies to the special atmosphere fostered by Oldham. “It was very, very cool. We were just having a ball. We were all really, really young and really, really talented. We all liked each other. I was from the States so I knew all about the Motown kind of thing. With Immediate we were trying to create a similar kind of situation to that, where all the artists worked together [and] everybody wrote for each other. There were some really great in-house writers, Twice As Much were writing for Andrew, they wrote stuff for me. They wrote the tunes, we went into the studio and recorded. The Small Faces would play; they would sort of be like the rhythm section. There was a lot of Phil Spector sounds, big productions, but all the funky stuff was with The Small Faces.” Jerry Shirley, who was the drummer for another Immediate act, The Apostolic Intervention, remembers his time there with similar fondness, though perhaps not solely for musical reasons: “It was a truly wonderful place to be, very creative, each artist ready to help out the other one. Plus the receptionist had the longest legs that Mother Nature had the good sense to create. It was worth going to the offices just to be able to sit there and dream on about her legs.
“To go into the studio and to be given as much time as you like to be creative was heaven. Our freedom was electrifying”
Bless her heart.”
Other associates of The Small Faces at Immediate included precociously talented wunderkind Billy Nicholls, proto-proggers The Nice and gritty blue- eyed soul man Chris Farlowe. Interaction between artists was indeed fluid – they would guest on each other’s sessions, share songs and tour Europe as a collective.
The Small Faces were also given unlimited recording time at Olympic Studios in Barnes. “To go into the studio and to be given as much time as you like to be creative was heaven,” says Kenney Jones. “And that’s where most of the good songs, the good sounds started. It all joined up in a sense, all of what we’d learned over the years. Our freedom was electrifying.” Andrew Loog Oldham announced The Small Faces’ arrival at Immediate with the release of ‘Here Comes The Nice’ in June, the most blatant ode to a drug dealer to ever grace the UK Top 20. That was swiftly followed by the group’s first LP for the
60
Foreign picture covers for ‘Here Come The Nice’ and ‘Itchycoo Park’; the first Immediate album and Decca’s spoiler set, From The Beginning; explanatory press ad for the latter
label, somewhat confusingly titled Small Faces, the same as their Decca debut. Its 14 tracks clearly showed the band stepping away from the muscular R&B that characterised that eponymous debut. Produced by Steve Marriott and
Ronnie Lane, with the invaluable assistance of engineer Glyn Johns, the record’s use of horn stabs of brass, flourishes of harpsichord and deft deployment of strings amply demonstrated the wider sonic spectrum
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