1960s
LONGAGOSANDWORLDSAPART JOHN HARRIS marvels at the (almost) complete works of one of the greatest bands of all-time. Straight up
THE SMALL FACES Small Faces From The Beginning Small Faces All Universal 2-CDs Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake Universal 3-CD
executed with a care and knowledge lacking from most of the Small Faces stuff that used to litter the stores. The self-titled debut album is
their next move being spoiled by entirely predictable music business chicanery. Two weeks before Immediate released a second album with the same eponymous title as
prove what some people have known for aeons – that as far as this era was concerned, mono was always better than stereo, as proved by unimpeachably great mixes of
Over 40 years after their split, the question demands to be asked again: what was the legacy of The Small Faces? Whisper it, but it’s true: in a lot of the stuff collected here, you can hear the first stirrings of ’70s hard rock and heavy metal, a point underlined by the music Steve Marriott went on to make with Humble Pie. The best example lurks on his first band’s debut album: ‘You Need Loving’ is a retooled update of Muddy Waters’ ‘You Need Love’, in turn pilfered by Led Zeppelin for ‘Whole Lotta Love’, with The Small Faces’ treatment clearly in mind – to say that Robert Plant was influenced by what Steve Marriott did to the vocal would be a ridiculous understatement. The tragedy of that link – from
mods to rockers! – is that Zep and their ilk had none of The Small Faces’ lightness of touch, humour, punk-ish energy, beautifully-judged psychedelia, or any number of other qualities. In that sense, they remain a kind of locked example of one-off wonderment, whose underlying essence – rock ’n’ soul, let’s call it – was never bettered in any other hands. At its best, in fact, this is music so perfect that it almost defies belief. Which brings us to these four
“deluxe edition” albums, newly remastered, overseen by Ian ‘Mac’ McLagan and Kenney Jones, full of both mono and stereo versions, and accompanied by a slew of exhumed rare mixes, backing tracks and alternate versions. Many of us are still holding out for a definitive box set, but that’s no reason to complain about what’s here: these are beautifully-done reissues,
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like a lot of self-titled debut albums: wet-behind-the-ears, pretty obviously flawed, home to at least some filler, and not exactly a work of great art. But to zero in on the merits of particular tracks would be to miss the point: what’s most fascinating is the way that they tangle up their standard-issue R&B influences with elements that point to where rock was headed. In other words, in early ’66, The Small Faces were already much more than straight-ahead mods, in thrall to what they had presumably heard at The Scene and The Flamingo. On ‘E
their first, Decca put out From The Beginning, an odds-and-sods collection built around ‘My Mind’s Eye’ and ‘All Or Nothing’. Parts of it are eminently dispensable, though there also such overlooked triumphs as their pulsating version of the soul standard ‘Baby, Don’t You Do It’, brimming with groove and menace. Grafting bonus tracks on to such a cobbled-together album was never going to be too enlightening, and so it proves: there’s a nice “session version” of the ’67 single ‘I Can’t Make It’, but nothing much more head-turning.
“Thisismusicsoperfect thatitalmostdefies belief”
Too D’, there are shades of what we know as Syd Barrett-esque guitar playing, ‘Come On Children’ threatens to out-energise The Who circa My Generation and ‘I’ve Got Mine’ points ahead to the drone- laden title track of Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake. A CD of extra tracks fills in a few gaps but doesn’t deliver any truly jaw dropping moments until the end – when an alternate take of ‘’ (previously released as “the French EP version”) begins with the same long moans of Hendrix-ish feedback you hear during the middle of the official cut, once again proving that The Small Faces were much more cutting-edge than a lot of people thought. In early ’67, they split with both
their infamous manager Don Arden and the Decca label, which led to
The first Immediate album is
where everything begins to cohere. “They’d had their ‘Sha-La-la Lee’/’What’Cha Gonna Do About It’ Don Arden phase,” label boss Andrew Loog Oldham later told me, “and I was lucky to able to catch them at the beginning of getting it right”. ‘Become Like You’ attests to the fact that the acid was kicking in, Kings Road Edwardiana surfaces on ‘All Our Yesterdays’, and Ian McLagan provides a harpsichord on ‘Show Me The Way’ – though if all that suggests their talents getting lost in some Austin Powers fantasia, ‘Get Yourself Together’ alone proves that their talent for writing blue- eyed pop songs was actually growing greater. There’s an embarrassment of delights among the extra tracks, a lot of which
‘Tin Soldier’ and ‘Itchycoo Park’, all vitality and punch. And then came the big one: the
half-conceptual Ogdens Nut Gone Flake, spread here across three CDs. Loog Oldham again: “I was able to say to The Small Faces, ‘Alright – you asked for your fucking opportunity. You asked for a house for six weeks, you asked for the recording equipment, you asked for Glyn Johns, you asked for enough hash to put soles on the feet of India… you’ve got it. You better come back with genius.’ And they did.” Give or take a slight overdoing of whimsy on the themed songs about Happiness Stan, he was right, though the fact that such brilliance demanded to be treated carefully is highlighted by US mixes of the material on CD two: there was surely no need to cake slap-back echo on ‘Afterglow (Of Your Love)’ or swamp ‘Lazy Sunday’ with Ronnie Lane’s bass part. Among the more pleasing extra tracks is an unreleased instrumental called – arf, arf – ‘Kamikhazi’, a nimble, soul-infused thing that sounds like something from a lost film soundtrack. Note also a “phased version” of the title track: nothing more or less than the whole thing run backwards, which was doubtless a herbally- assisted giggle at the time. All the fun ends with an
extended version of ‘Happydaystoytown’ and an aphorism that could only have come from them: “Life is just a bowl of All Bran/You wake up in the morning, and it’s there”. Once again, the truth hits home: The Small Faces had a magic that was theirs, and theirs alone.
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