developing different styles. I tightened up quite a lot. I think the drumming is quite significantly changed. ‘Green Circles’ is very dramatic. I really enjoyed it. I finally found myself, you know?”
Then of course there were the three Top 10 singles in ’67, all of which display in abundance the creativity referred to by Kenney Jones. ‘Here Come The Nice’ is a thinly disguised paean to a drug dealer. The equally blissed-out ‘Itchycoo Park’, with acoustic guitar and Hammond organ to the fore, includes some of Ronnie Lane’s most poetic lyrics (“Over bridge of sighs to rest my eyes in shades of green / Under dreaming spires to Itchycoo Park that’s where I’ve been”). The slightly over-zealous use of phasing might not be to everybody’s taste but this didn’t prevent it from being a surprise hit again in the mid-70s. Maybe it was the anti-school sentiment (“Why go to learn the word of fools?”). ‘Tin Soldier’ is a more strident performance, notable for a larynx-busting vocal from Marriott. It starts off softly, with Ian McLagan on Wurlitzer piano and Hammond organ and gradually builds to a full-on assault on the senses. The presence of PP Arnold on backing vocals adds to the soulful mix. It’s an early example of the heavier, worked-upon sound that The Small Faces would employ on some of the tracks on their next album. After such a sustained run of well-received records, expectations for The Small Faces in ’68 were high.
By the time ‘Tin Soldier’ was released in December ’67, the band was already in the studio working on what would become their most fondly remembered album, Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake. Putting it together was a long, drawn-out process. “It didn’t take a year to record,” Kenney Jones is keen to clarify. “But it was recorded over a year, because we were constantly on the road. We had to gig at the same time.”
Part of the mythology that has built up around Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake stems from its origins. The band, plus assorted wives and girlfriends, would go on cruises down the Thames, starting at Henley, ostensibly to write songs; ostensibly is the operative word here. “Andrew Oldham set the cruises up. He said
THANK YOU STAN JOHN BLANEY on the geniold of STANLEY UNWIN
“Are you all sitty comftybold two-square on your botty? Then I’ll begin.” Thus spake Professor Stanley Unwin. A slight man with an expressive face and even more expressive turn of phrase, he mangled English beautifully. What he spoke wasn’t gobbledegook or gibberish – it made perfect sense. It was clever, witty and playful and was part of a linguistic tradition stretching back to Edward Lear and beyond.
Marriott (no doubt about to be thrown out of another flat) and Lane, “the heart of the band”.
Unwin began his career with the BBC, working for its War Reporting Unit. Now, you might think that the BBC would have frowned on his crackpot linguistic confection, but while it remained a bastion of received pronunciation, its producers knew talent when they heard it. Unwinese became a hit and its creator joined the radio programme Children’s Hour as Uncle Stan, which is probably where the young Small Faces first heard him.
Sitting somewhere between the Goons-
we needed to relax,” says Jones. “We all went on the boat and were supposed to write songs. Not much got written though; but on the way back we stopped and set up a campfire. One of us – I don’t remember who it was – looked up at the night sky and said there’s only half a moon.” That comment set ideas racing and eventually led to the creation of the album’s fulcrum.
At the heart of the band was the songwriting partnership of Steve Marriott and Ronnie Lane. “Sometimes Steve or Ronnie would have a song more or less done,” Jones explains. “Then one or the other would chip in a bit here and there. Or they’d have half a song each and then they’d kind of throw them together basically. They were a great team together writing songs.”
inspired lunacy and Ivor Cutler’s cold logic, there was something edgy about Unwin’s semantic contortions that
appealed to the beautiful people in entertainmentland. Like them he was an outsider granted insider status because he could entertain, and when the world flipped from monochrome to Technicolor he became hipper than Lord Buckley at a hipsters’ convention.
Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake
wasn’t Unwin’s first appearance on vinyl. He recorded an LP, Rotatey Diskers With Unwin, in 1961 and followed it with The World Of Stanley Unwin in ’67. If these were little more than novelty records his appearance on a rock album, a concept album no less, brought him to the attention of a new serious rock audience. To say that his appearance with The Small Faces transformed his career would be exaggeration, but it’s undoubtedly his best-known work and continues to bring deep joy every time it’s heard.
The first four months of ’68 were an interesting time for British bands. There was much talk of concept albums, journeys/quests/odysseys and the like, and trying to find a post-psychedelic sound to fit the more serious times – The Vietnam War was at its height, there was The Prague Spring, talk of student revolution in Paris and Martin Luther King was assassinated in April. Their Satanic Majesties Request, The Rolling Stones’ belated attempt at psychedelia, was met with indifference when it was released in December ’67 – six months too late and too obviously indebted to Sgt Pepper. The Moody Blues’ Days Of Future Passed came out in January, staking its claim as the first concept album. Its songs described different times of the day and night. (Personally, my vote for the first concept album would go to I Hear A New World by The Blue Men, an album of outer space-inspired instrumentals from ’60 which features some of producer Joe Meek’s wackiest sound effects). The contributions to Days Of Future Passed by The London Festival Orchestra were a worrying early example of classical music pretensions amongst pop musicians. Other notable albums
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WHAM BAM
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