single in early ’69. The song had originally been written for PP Arnold, as she explains. “They wrote ‘Afterglow’ for me and I really loved it. I liked it so much that they took it back! So then they wrote ‘If You Think You’re Groovy’ for me. It was kind of compensation.”
The reflective mood continues with Ian McLagan’s beautifully understated ‘Long Agos And Worlds Apart’. Play it alongside the previous album’s ‘Up The Wooden Hills To Bedfordshire’ and you realise that Mac was developing his own distinctive take on the English pop song. Next up is ‘Rene’, spotlighting Marriott in exaggerated Cockney mode. Just like ‘Lazy Sunday’, it’s laugh-out-loud funny and features Carry On-style double- entendres in abundance. Rene is the “dockers’ delight” at The Crown & Anchor (“Ask for Rene and you’ll be well in”) and was based on a real life Rene
“It made us laugh,” Marriott opined in Paolo Hewitt’s The Young Mods’ Forgotten Story. “Anything that made us laugh, we liked. God knows how it worked but it did and I’m very proud of it.” In his autobiography, All The Rage, Ian McLagan recalls, “When the work was all done, Stanley gave each of us a copy of his book, Rock-A-Bye Babel & Two Fairly Tales, which I treasure to this day.”
Side two is a six song, inter-linked fairytale about Happiness Stan. Looking up into the sky, and noticing that there’s only half a moon, Stan decides there and then to go on a journey to find the missing half. Along the way he meets a hungry fly. Stan agrees to share his shepherd’s pie with him. Grateful for this kindness, the fly says that he knows someone who can help him. So Stan uses his magic powers to turn the fly into a giant, and the fly is then able to
I’ve got nowhere here.’ But in the back of my mind I’ve always seen it like that. That’s what I’m doing at the moment – putting it together as a comedy animation film. I’ve been working on it for years. So I’ve got to finish it and get it out of my system.”
The Victorian child-like charm to be derived from the story and Stanley Unwin’s Edward Lear-like narration is complemented by a let’s-throw-in-the- kitchen-sink production and a variety of song styles ranging from psych-folk (‘Mad John’), UFO Club-style wig-out (‘The Journey’ – although it still manages to clock in at well under five minutes), proto-heavy rock (‘Rollin’ Over’, complete with added brass, bar- room piano and a drum break to die for) to pure English music hall with a sing- along coda (‘Happy Days Toy Town’). The tune on this last song almost
How exotic it must have all seemed to foreign listeners trying to make sense of Mrs Jones and her Bert’s lumbago, and sitting in the khazi, sussing out the moon
that Marriott had known while growing up in Manor Park, East London. ‘Song Of A Baker’ is one of Ronnie Lane’s best songs, notable for its marriage of a heavy, post-psych rock sound to contemplative lyric and some muscular performances, including one of Marriott’s best recorded guitar solos. The aforementioned ‘Lazy Sunday’ rounds off side one on a whimsical note.
Turn the record over and you’re greeted with a gently plucked harp and the gobbledegook narration of Stanley Unwin (see sidebar). Kenney Jones tells explains how he wasn’t actually the first choice for narrator of the Happiness Stan fairytale. “Spike Milligan was busy and he couldn’t do it. That’s when we found Stanley Unwin. I’m a great believer in fate. It couldn’t have been better. I can also see Spike doing it, but Stanley was made for the part. We told him what the story was all about. The lyrics tell the story; each song tells its own story. [Unwin] spent a few days with each of us and then said, ‘I want to get to know you all individually’; and so we did. He’d pick up on our mannerisms – like ‘blow your cool, man’. We’d say things like, ‘He’s blew his cool.’ Lots of little slang things we had, he put them all into that. There was a lot of the character of ourselves in the way Stanley portrayed it.”
68
sounds like it could have been lifted from a Gracie Fields keep-your-pecker- up wartime musical. Liberal use of harp, harpsichord, strings, flute and curious electronic textures ensure that the whole suite remains a headphones favourite to this day.
transport him to the cave of Mad John. He turns out not to be so mad after all, as he’s able to explain to Stan that the disappearance of the moon is only temporary. As Stan has been on his journey for so long, if he now looks up into the sky he’ll see
The fatigue sets in: Denmark, late ’68 (top); the posthumous ‘Afterglow (Of Your Love)’ single, too good to remain an album track
that the moon is full again. Then, for good measure, Mad John explains the meaning of life – “Life is just a bowl of All Bran.” Perhaps Eccentric John would be a less cruel epithet!
Kenney Jones thought Happiness Stan could be turned into a cartoon. “I went up to everybody in the band afterwards. Because in those days cartoons were popular, I said this would make a great cartoon. And they just looked at me and said, ‘No thanks.’ I thought, ‘Oh yeah,
Members of the Immediate “family” contributed to the recording of the album but weren’t credited. “It was Steve who acknowledged my involvement on the album,” explains Billy Nicholls. “There were no credits on the album, but he said [that] the backing vocals were all PP and Billy, which was nice.” Arnold says she didn’t sing on the album. “I was doing my own thing. I wasn’t with them every day. We came together and collaborated but I wasn’t with The Small Faces all the time. I was out there doing PP Arnold!”
Ogdens’ sailed up the charts, reaching #1 on June 29th and staying there for six weeks. Even a controversy-courting press campaign in which The Lord’s Prayer was bastardised (“Give us thy album in a round cover, and we give you 37/9d” etc), and used without the band’s knowledge, couldn’t halt its progress. It also won numerous industry awards. “We cleaned up,” remembered Marriott in Terry Rawlings’ All Our Yesterdays. “Andrew collected them and we caught
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