The Small
Faces were at the forefront of British psychedelia in the late 60s with their
career-peaking album Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake, and all it took was one trip.
In 1966 The
Small Faces were the ultimate embodiment of the metropolitan mod ideal. Four
diminutive Jack-the-lads perpetually decked out in razor-sharp threads fresh
from Carnaby Street. Rail-thin, hyperactive, mischievous; it was blatantly
obvious to every ticket on the street that you didn’t get cheekbones like that
from early nights and All-Bran.
Mum-friendly
pop stars or not, The Small Faces were clearly quaffing large on whatever
chemical indulgences Swinging London swung their way. To alleviate the boredom
of a heavy provincial touring schedule, The Small Faces invariably took to the
road with as many stimulants as were necessary to render rain-lashed Manchester
club dates bearable: at first a little grass or hash; on occasion something a
little speedier.
Then, shortly
after Steve Marriott (guitar/vocals), Ronnie Lane (bass/vocals) and Ian McLagan
(keyboards/vocals) moved into a shared Westminster apartment, a new drug
entered their orbit that expanded their artistic remit almost beyond all
recognition: LSD.
“We took our
first trip in Westmoreland Terrace in early ’66,” remembers Ian McLagan. “And
almost immediately started experimenting, using Chinese instruments and all
sorts of sounds, to try and recreate a trip.”
By the
following year the band’s singles output painted them as full-blown, unashamed
drug evangelists. Though interestingly, July ’67’s lyrically blatant Here Comes
The Nice concerned scoring speed rather than acid; yet another weapon in the
Faces’ extensive pharmaceutical armoury.
“It was weird
that they allowed Here Comes The Nice to come out at all,” smiles McLagan. “We
were dabbling in all kinds of chemicals and Methedrine was one of them. We were
wrong to have written about a speed dealer. They weren’t the nicest people. The
guy you bought your hash from was usually just a head, but a speed dealer –
like a coke or heroin dealer – was only interested in getting your money. It
was quite different. They weren’t your friends.”
Just two
months down the line from Here Comes The Nice, The Small Faces delivered one of
the Summer Of Love’s defining statements, a psychedelically-inclined slice of
quintessentially English whimsicality, characterised by a phasing effect
courtesy of Olympic Studios engineer George Chkiantz. With a melody Marriott
lifted straight from the hymn God Be In My Head, it concerned a nettle-swathed,
rail-side bombsite in Ilford called Itchycoo Park.
Having
delivered the East End Good Vibrations, The Small Faces prepared to record the
Cockney Sgt. Pepper. But first there was the small matter of an Australian package
tour (alongside The Who and Paul Jones) to take care of.
“[The
Australian press] gave me hell from the very beginning, because I’d just been
busted,” Mac continues, “I was on my way to Athens for a holiday but never got
further than Heathrow. As I was showing my passport they smelt the hash on me,
searched and busted me. As soon as we landed in Australia we had a press
conference, so we’re all lined up in front of the television cameras and the
first guy goes: ‘Steve Marriott, Ronnie Lane, Kenney Jones, Ian McLagan… you’re
the drug addict right?’”
Controversy
continued to plague the tour to its conclusion. “On our way to New Zealand we
had to stop off in Sydney. You couldn’t drink on internal flights back then,
but one of Paul Jones’ Australian backing band passed a bottle around and the
police were called. We weren’t even drinking but they arrested and held us in
the first-class lounge where a waitress came straight up to us and said: ‘What
would you like to drink?’
"So we
drank. The police arrested us as soon as we arrived in New Zealand, but we
ended up having a great time. Steve had his 21st birthday party; Keith [Moon]
wrecked his room; it was business as usual.”
Some of the
material eventually included on their seminal Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake was
already in the can by this point, but not enough for an entire album. So in the
spring of ’68 The Small Faces hired cabin cruisers and took to the River Thames
to write some more.
“We found a
camaraderie we hadn’t had before; I was even allowed to be involved in the
writing. Long Agos And Worlds Apart was only my second song. It was all about
being high. My first song was Up The Wooden Hills To Bedfordshire and that was
all about… being high. I think I only had two modes at the time, one was being
high and being awake, and the other was being high and being asleep.”
So what,
other than the very liberal usage of a cocktail of psychoactive substances, was
driving this period of unprecedented creativity? According to McLagan, not the
influence of the then blossoming American West Coast psych scene, that’s for
sure.
“Most of the
music that came out of San Francisco at that time gave me a bad trip,” asserts
McLagan. “I thought it was wet; hopeless frankly. It seemed like they’d
forgotten the groove, the soul. It was totally boring; we had nothing in common
with those guys apart from the drugs.”
There’s no
escaping the fact that Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake defines a uniquely Small Faces
brand of psychedelia. Above all, it’s very mod, and very English. The cover (a
round tobacco tin mock-up), lyrical imagery and subject matter are all
symptomatic of the Edwardian nostalgia so prevalent in London as mod went
psychedelic. While iconic boutique Granny Takes A Trip dressed the era,
Ogdens’… provided its soundtrack: a seamless collage of hallucinogenic blues
shouting, pop-art ingenuity, agrarian folk whimsy and music hall chirpiness.
“Coming from
the East End the other three had more of a link to the music hall than me,”
admits Hounslow-born McLagan, “I’d seen Max Miller, The Crazy Gang when I was a
kid, but Steve was a throwback. Apart from being a great blues and soul singer,
he was a natural music-hall entertainer and that side was always bursting out
of him. It’s a particularly English thing: The Kinks had it, The Who had it.
Steve couldn’t help himself, he always had that sense of humour, while we
thought we were all blues men, we were Max Miller wearing denim.”
The influence
of the music hall on Marriott’s work was never more obvious than on Ogdens’…
most celebrated track, Lazy Sunday: “Lyrically, that was all about Steve’s
problems with his landladies, landlords and neighbours, which were ongoing,”
Mac reveals, “He really was the worst neighbour, with dog shit everywhere and
music all hours of the night at full volume.
"And
musically, well, while we were on the Australian tour Bob Pridden, The Who’s
sound guy – who was a very funny and humorous chap – had this little dance he’d
do when we were hanging out that he’d accompany with this little
‘rootdedootdedoo’ tune, which ended up being part of Lazy Sunday.”
Making a
feature of one’s cockney accent simply wasn’t done in ’68. Every vocalist in
the UK seemed to have been in denial of their natural burr since the initial
importation of rock’n’roll from America in the mid-50s, with a mid-Atlantic
twang uniformly adopted by all. But Marriott (formerly the 13-year old Artful
Dodger in the West End production of Lionel Bart’s Oliver!) not only reclaimed
his linguistic heritage on Lazy Sunday.
His
rollicking performance on Rene – the bawdy tale of a dockside prostitute – was
so strident as to be almost mockney. Here’s the song and performance Damon
Albarn plundered for Blur’s career-reanimating Sunday Sunday single. How ironic
is it that 1995’s Britpop crown was contested so fiercely by a pair of
apparently diametrically opposed bands who were so clearly basing their careers
on two different incarnations of the same core band: Blur as The Small Faces
and Oasis as the band that would later grow out of them: The Faces.
“I like the
fact that people have listened to us and taken something from us,” says Mac,
“I’ve heard some of Blur’s stuff and really like it, and I like Oasis, but our
biggest champion is Paul Weller. Our biggest champions back then were probably
Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood. They told us that Ogdens’… kept them going on
their American tours with Jeff Beck. Rod and Woody’s sense of humour is just as
mad and rooted in vaudeville as ours."
Further
compounding Ogdens’… matters was the other half of the Marriott/Lane songwriting
partnership: “Ronnie, on the other hand, was more of a folkie,” McLagan
continues, “Song Of A Baker, The Hungry Intruder, Mad John; they all came from
him more than Steve. He was already floating in the direction of the folkie he
eventually proved to be.”
While
Ogdens’… first side was only distinctive for the excellence of its material,
the album’s entire second side was given over to a six-part song cycle, mostly
written on the Thames, which told the tale of Happiness Stan’s search for the
other half of the moon. Hardly grand opera, but in formative concept album
terms, this missing link between The Who’s A Quick One While He’s Away and
Tommy predated The Pretty Things’ S.F. Sorrow by six months.
“It was
Ronnie’s basic idea,” says Mac. ”The story was very thin but we soon made the
songs fit. A Quick One was the light: Pete [Townshend’s] little rock opera
convinced us that it could be done, so we did one of our own and Pete loved
it.”
While the
deeply psychedelicised story of Happiness Stan (who lived inside a rainbow in a
small Victorian charabanc, by all accounts) was obviously pretty
straightforward. After all, what could possibly be confusing about a saga made
up of brief musical vignettes concerning grateful flies that band together to
form makeshift aircraft, mad tramps, and that concludes with the philosophical
assertion that: ‘Life is just a bowl of All-Bran, you wake up every morning and
it’s there’?
It was felt
that – for the benefit of the slightly less medicated – the services of a
clarifying narrator should be engaged. With Marriott’s first choice for the
role, ex-Goon Spike Milligan, unavailable ‘Professor’ Stanley Unwin, an
unlikely television star of the day (famously fluent in his own particular
brand of gibberish known as Unwinese) got the job.
He turned out
to be an inspired choice. “I don’t know who suggested Stanley, but boy, what a
brilliant stroke,” says Mac. “He came down the studio and we were thrilled to
meet him. He’d just hang around while we were going about our business, recording
and chatting, and make notes. He picked up on the way we spoke – ‘Cool, man’
and all that – and although it was like a whole new language to him, he totally
got it.
"We
pointed out what we needed in the way of links and after a while he came back and
tried a few things. [producer] Glyn Johns must have trimmed it down a bit
because he couldn’t half rabbit on, but he was brilliant.”
A side from
the often dizzying mix of musical styles and sound effects etched into its
grooves, Ogdens’… was housed in a perfectly circular sleeve based on a vintage
’baccy tin, that was just right for clamping between your knees and rolling a
recreational doobie on. The title, meanwhile, came as a by-product of
researching the artwork.
“Ogdens’
tobacco very kindly sent over all these scrapbooks with original labels pasted
in,” remembers Mac, “We browsed through them and as soon as Steve saw this
rectangular label for Ogdens’ Nut Brown Flake he went: ‘There it is: Nut Gone
Flake, perfect.’ Someone copied and adjusted it into a round tin by hand and my
pals from art school – Nick Tweddell and Pete Brown – painted the wonderful
psychedelic collages inside with all the butterflies.”
Ogdens’ Nut
Gone Flake topped the UK charts for six weeks in the summer of ’68, with Lazy
Sunday stalled at No.2 in the singles charts behind Louis Armstrong’s Wonderful
World.
Yet despite
outward appearances, all wasn’t wonderful in the world of The Small Faces.
Firstly, the band weren’t pleased that Immediate had released Lazy Sunday as a
single without their consent. Marriott considered it little more than a novelty
song, and certainly not representative of Ogdens’… as a whole. Secondly, while
there was pressure on the band to play live, much of Ogdens’… and their more
recent singles (Itchycoo Park, Tin Soldier) were almost impossible to replicate
outside of the studio.
In February
’69, just a month after The Small Faces’ live US debut, Steve Marriott quit the
band.
“We were
recording for the next record and things were falling apart bit by bit. Then he
left,” says Mac. “It’s a shame because I think we could have made a better
album than Ogdens’… We were well on the way to doing it. He and Ronnie were
writing beautifully, but we’ll never know.”
So was the
Happiness Stan concept a flash in the pan, a passing flirtation with the rock
opera format, or perhaps the ex-Artful Dodger had ambitions to branch into
musical theatre?
“If The Small
Faces had stayed together I think that we probably would have done a whole
concept album,” opines Mac. “I don’t think it’s ever been done properly. Tommy
is a bit (snores)… long. I know (ex-Small Faces drummer) Kenney (Jones) is keen
to animate Ogdens’…, but it needs to be developed and it would be great if
someone could write some more songs. I’d be keen to look at developing the
second side of the Ogdens’… album into a proper show; a West End or Broadway
thing, or maybe a movie.”
Ultimately,
though generally accepted to be a high watermark of the English end of the
genre, is Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake actually psychedelic?
“No,” Mac
states matter-of-factly. “We were over that; we weren’t taking acid when we
were making it; you couldn’t get decent acid at that point. The age of acid was
very short-lived. It was like the mod thing: mod was two years, max. The
clothes weren’t there after a while because the fashion industry caught on and
killed it with cheap, crappy imitations.
“Psychedelia
was here and gone. For me personally it was that one big night we had in
Westmoreland Terrace where I spent five hours or so drawing self portraits on
the carpet and having the most wonderful trip. I was thinking: ‘Great, my whole
life has changed.’ Then I went to sleep, woke up the next morning, felt a bit
odd and then just went back to being ordinary again.”
So while much
of Ogdens’… creation was informed by the band’s experiences of LSD, it was very
much forged in the afterglow of The Small Faces’ acid experimentation. In fact,
at this point the whole notion of a cohesive psychedelic rock scene was little
more than a journalistic contrivance to link all the bands together. It was a
convenient, generic pigeonhole in which ingenious, progressive music of a
certain vintage can be placed.
“The
psychedelic scene was about as united as the punk scene,” says Mac. “Punk
wasn’t just about one thing and neither was psychedelia. I was always into the
blues, rock’n’roll, soul and r’n’b, acid didn’t change that, it was more like
an excursion; a left turn before going back on track, and once we’d got over
the initial rosy glow of acid it was back to soul music for us, because that’s
what we did.”
So, in
retrospect, did acid’s influence enable The Small Faces’ to create their
defining moment in Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake?
“Ogdens’… was
pretty good, it was adventurous, but we could have done a lot better.” Mac concludes,
“Acid did change my life temporarily, but as far as the music went, acid was
the worst thing that could have happened; because everyone was trying to
recreate a trip, which is like trying to catch a cloud."
This feature
originally appeared in a Classic Rock Psychedelic Special in 2008. Ian McLagan
died in 2014.
