ANDY MORTEN investigates what almost happened next 1862 AND ALL THAT
Autumn Stone, the double album released by Immediate in November 1969 to capitalise on The Small Faces’ split (and presumably to generate some cash in lieu of the comparative failure of Humble Pie’s debut in August), is a grab-bag affair at best. The majority of their hit singles nestle awkwardly amongst five live tracks recorded at Newcastle City Hall in late ’68 for a mooted live album, and a slew of unreleased odds and ends spanning their time with the label. Of these, the delicate, pastoral title track, psych-blues waltz ‘Call It Something Nice’ and a meandering run through Tim Hardin’s ‘Red Balloon’ appear to be finished masters; ‘Collibosher’ and ‘Wide Eyed Girl On The Wall’ are plainly unfinished instrumental backing tracks. Despite their workaday origins, these recordings have turned up on countless Small Faces comps since – occasionally as bonus tracks on reissues of Small Faces or Ogdens’, but usually presented out of context and without annotation as filler alongside the Immediate hits.
him on the stairs, his arms full of bits of plastic. Best artwork, best design, best album. We said, ‘Where the fuck did you get all those?’”
Immediate label mate Jerry Shirley, who was just 17 when he was picked to play drums in Marriott’s post-Small Faces band Humble Pie, is amongst the album’s most public fans. “My favourite Small Faces moment was having Steve give us an advance acetate copy of the Stanley Unwin side of Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake,” reminisces Jerry today. “I was playing in a band in Cambridge called Wages Of Sin and we listened to it over and over and over again. I just couldn’t get enough of it. Pound for pound it’s still my favourite album for the time – it beats them all.”
The album went on to influence future generations of musicians, who realised they could present English-centric lyrics on parochial subjects with wit, panache and “Cor Blimey” swagger. Too many groups to mention here have used Ogdens’ as their template and inspiration.
The next logical step would have been for The Small Faces to perform the album live. Kenney Jones expresses genuine emotion over what could have been. “My biggest regret is that we never ever did play Ogdens’ live in its entirety. We should have done. We broke up at
They were soon joined in the “rarities” stakes by ‘Don’t Burst My Bubble’ and ‘Me, You And Us Too’ (an early stab at ‘Wham Bam Thank You Mam’) and later, on the 1999 double CD, The Darlings Of Wapping Wharf Launderette, further instrumental off- cuts ‘War Of The Worlds’, ‘The Pig’s Trotters’, ‘Picaninny’ and ‘Take My Time’.
It wasn’t long before all of these orphan recordings were being lumped together under a catch-all “summer of ’68” umbrella to form the bones of a Small Faces album in-progress, despite it being abundantly clear to most fans that ‘Bubble’, ‘Nice’ and ‘Take My Time’ sound more like the late ’67 Faces of ‘Tin Soldier’, while ‘Picanniny’ undoubtedly dates from the Decca era.
Thankfully, the new 2012 deluxe editions of the four albums confirm these suspicions, verifying recording dates (seemingly for the first time ever) and placing ‘Bubble’, ‘Picanniny’ et al with their correct albums.
All of this begs the question, what were
the time because one of the things was how are we going to follow that. But if we had stayed together, we would have worked it the same way The Who did with Tommy.”
There was at least Colour Me Pop, an innovative, short-lived music show on the recently launched, arts-based BBC2. As its title suggests, it was made in colour – at the time a novelty for the UK, which was years behind America in its take-up of new technology – and it gave groups the opportunity to perform a selection of tracks “live” in the studio. (“In those days we would take a backing track and we’d do all the vocals live,” says Jones). The Happiness Stan fairytale concept captured the producers’ imaginations and so, in June ’68, The Small Faces were invited to perform some tracks from Ogdens’ on the show. Stanley Unwin was there to narrate.
Kenney Jones remembers the whole experience fondly, including the high- kicking finale. “That was all mine, that was. That’s the one where I was wearing my mum’s green blouse or shirt. Stanley Unwin is wearing a crown. What he should have had was a Merlin-type wizard’s hat – pointy – but they didn’t have any in props. The crown was all they had. It blew the real thing really. The funniest thing on that is our
introduction and the guy at the end. He says some word like ‘idiosyncrasy’ and I thought, ‘What’s that?’ ”
I end my conversation with Kenney Jones by asking him which songs are his favourites. “I’m proud of them all. ‘If You Think You’re Groovy’, I like that. We never put it out, although we did record it; but I played on that for PP Arnold. So I’m kind of proud of that one, and most of the stuff on Ogdens’ and everything we did on Immediate really, because I was always experimenting and still learning. I still am.”
Happiness Stan is a fairytale and, as we all know, a fairytale always has a happy ending. So let us leave The Small Faces, in ebullient mood and at the top of their game, larking away to ‘Happy Days Toy Town’ on Colour Me Pop on the beeb.
A world of possibility awaits...
With thanks to Kenney Jones, PP Arnold, Billy Nicholls, Mick Houghton, Phil Smee and Rob Caiger. Additional interview material taken from All Our Yesterdays (Terry Rawlings, Riot Stories, 1982), The Young Mods’ Forgotten Story (Paolo Hewitt, Acid Jazz, 1995) and All The Rage (Ian McLagan, Pan, 1998). The deluxe editions of Small Faces, From The Beginning, Small Faces and Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake are released on May 7th by Universal
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The Small Faces up to during that creatively bleak period after the perceived failure of ‘The Universal’ in July and their separation in December?
Well, there was talk of another album. It was even given a title, 1862, after the date on Beehive Cottage, Steve and Ronnie’s Essex country abode for much of that year. Relationships within the band during these last six months were strained to say the least. Steve and Ronnie were drifting apart musically – upon hearing Steve play ‘Wham Bam Thank You Mam’ for the first time, Ronnie’s alleged reply was a curt “Fuck off!” – so it’s a minor miracle that anything was recorded at all.
‘Collibosher’, ‘Wide Eyed Girl On The Wall’, ‘War Of The Worlds’ and ‘The Pig’s Trotters’ (soon to be reworked by Marriott as ‘Wrist Job’, the flip of Humble Pie’s first single) date from this time but exist only in instrumental form and are as likely to have been named by the compilers of the various CDs they’ve appeared on as by the band themselves at the time. ‘Autumn Stone’ and ‘Red Balloon’ are in the can and ‘Wham Bam Thank You Mam’ was surely in the running. That doesn’t leave a lot else.
Ongoing research for the Small Faces box set, which hopes to gather all the remaining tracks not accounted for on the four new deluxe editions, has tantalisingly thrown up a number of previously unheard pieces and unidentified tapes but we can’t say for sure, 150 years after the date of its title, whether they’ll go any further towards unravelling the mystery of what The Small Faces’ fourth album proper may have sounded like.
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