A
JANUARY 1968 TOUR of Australia with The Who sowed the seeds of the Small Faces
demise, reveal members of the group and their label management in the latest
issue of MOJO magazine, on sale in the UK on Tuesday.
Road-rusty
after a year in and out of the studio, the Small Faces’ poor performances
created tension and resentment in the group, specifically between fiery
singer-guitarist Steve Marriott and the more spiritually-inclined bassist-singer
Ronnie Lane. In Australia Marriott cornered record exec Tony Calder.
“He
said, ‘I’m not gonna give any more of my f***ing songwriting to Ronnie Lane,’”
Calder tells MOJO’s Mark Paytress. “I’d never realised there was a problem
until then, or that Steve had been writing most of the [hit] songs.”
The
tragedy was that in the studio the group were at the top of their game, with
their first album on Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate Records – their third in
total – yielding the astonishing (Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me and Show Me
The Way, and the ardently loved Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake in the pipeline. Yet the
Australia trip had broken something in the band, and it preyed on Marriott’s
mind when a potentially make-or-break US tour was mooted.
“He wouldn’t
go because he couldn’t face failure,” says Marriott’s mum Kay. “If they went
there and weren’t accepted, it would have been dreadful for him. He was a
coward in that way, bless him.”
Calder
says it was also during the Australian tour that Marriott first came up with
the idea of introducing Peter Frampton, the rising ‘Face Of ’68’ and
guitarist/singer with The Herd, into a five-piece Small Faces. “Stevie said,
‘Go back to London and call him. I want him out of his contract.’ But it took
time, maybe a year or more.”
“I love
Pete,” says Small Faces organ maestro Ian McLagan, “but it wasn’t the right
move for us. Maybe we should’ve got a trumpeter, not another guitarist!”
While
Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake was to reveal the copious creative life that remained in
the group, MOJO’s cover story reveals surprising disharmony over its mix of
psychedelic whimsy, searing soul-rock and daft cockney gurning. When managers
Calder and Andrew Loog Oldham (still in recovery after his 1967 nervous
breakdown) released the ebullient but polarizing Lazy Sunday as Ogden’s…’ first
single in April 1968, another nail was knocked into the group’s coffin.
“We were
all pissed off with that, because it messed things up for us,” McLagan tells
MOJO. “Just like Sha-La-La-La-Lee had done.”
On New
Year’s Eve 1968, Steve Marriott walked off stage mid-gig and broke up the Small
Faces early the following year. Marriott and Frampton formed heavy rockers
Humble Pie, while the rump of the band found another path to success,
recruiting Ron Wood and Rod Stewart to constitute The Faces. But a quality that
belonged to the Small Faces exclusively was lost.
“I wish
we could have stayed together,” Faces/Small Faces drummer Kenney Jones sadly
concludes, “but Steve was gung ho.”
A box
set of the Small Faces’ Immediate output, entitled Here Come The Nice: The
Immediate Years 1967-1969 is out on Monday, January 24. For info on this, in
all its incarnations, visit www.thesmallfaces.com
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