A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 159: “Itchycoo Park”, by the Small Faces

Episode Date: December 7, 2022

Episode 159 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Itchycoo Park” by the Small Faces, and their transition from Mod to psychedelia. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode available, on “The First Cut is the Deepest” by P.P. Arnold. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

A history of rock music in 500 songs by Andrew Hic. Episode 159, Itchiku Park, by the Small Faces. For once, there is little to warn about in this episode, but it does contain some mild discussions of organized crime, arson and mental illness, and a quoted joke about capital punishment in questionable taste, which may upset. some. One name that came up time and again when we looked at the very early years of British rock and roll was Lionel Bart. If you don't remember the name, he was a left-wing Bohemian songwriter, who lived in a communal house share, which at various times was also inhabited by people like

Shirley Eaton, the woman who has painted gold at the beginning of Goldfinger, Mike Pratt, the star of Randall and Hopkirk deceased, and Davy Graham, the most influential and innovative British guitarist of the 50s and early 60s. Barton Pratt had co-written most of the hits of Britain's first real rock and roll star, Tommy Steele. Your time cave, while I lived in a cave, is what he did when he wanted to rave. Took a stick and he drew on the wall. Man out of heard I had himself for rock with a caveman, with a caveman, and a tight style of might, I hold your baby very tight, his way with women was rather neat.

And then Bart had gone solo as a writer, and written hits like Living Doll, for Britain's biggest rock and roll star Cliff Richard. But Bart's biggest contribution to rock music turned out not to be the songs he wrote for rock and roll stars and not even his talent spotting. It was Bart who got steel signed by Larry Parns and he also pointed Parns in the direction of another of his biggest stars, Marty Wilde. But the opportunity he gave to a lot of child stars in a very non-rock context. Bart's musical Oliver, inspired by the novel Oliver Twist,

was the biggest sensation on the West End stage in the early 1960s, breaking records for the longest-running musical, and also transferred to Broadway, and later became an extremely successful film. As it happened, while Oliver was extraordinarily lucrative, Bart didn't see much of the money from it. He sold the rights to it, and his other musicals, to the comedian Max Bygraves in the mid-60s for a tiny sum,

in order to finance a couple of other musicals, which then flopped horribly and bankrupted him. But by that time, Oliver had already been the first big break for three people who went on to major careers in music, all of them playing the same role. Because many of the major roles in Oliver were for young boys, the cast had to change frequently. Child labour laws meant that multiple kids

had to play the same role in different performances, and people quickly grew out of the roles as teenagerhood here. We've already heard about the career of one of the people who played the Artful Dodger in the original West End production, Davy Jones, who transferred in the role to Broadway in 1963, and who will be seeing again in a few episodes time, and it's very likely that another of the people who played the Artful Dodger in that production, a young lad called Philip Collins, will be coming into the story in a few years' time. But the first of the artists to use the Arvill Dodger as a springboard to a music career was the one who appeared in the role on the original cast album of 1960,

though there's very little in that recording to suggest the sound of his later records. Steve Marriott is the second little Stevie we've looked at in recent episodes to have been born prematurely. In his case, he was born a month premature and jaundiced and had to spend the first month of his life in hospital. the first few days of which were spent unsure if he was going to survive. Thankfully he did, but he was a bit of a sickly child as a result, and remained stick-thin and short into adulthood.

He never grew to be taller than five-foot-five. Young Steve loved music, and especially the music of Buddy Holly. He also loved Skiffle, and managed to find out where Lonnie Donegan lived. He went round and knocked on Donegan's door, but was very disappointed to discover that his idol was just a normal man, with his hair unconed and a shirt stained with egg yolk. He started playing the ukulele when he was 10, and graduated to guitar when he was 12, forming a band which performed under a variety of different names. When on stage with them, he would go by the stage name Buddy Marriott and would wear a pair of

horn-rimmed glasses to look more like Buddy Holly. When he was 12, his mother took him to an audition for Oliver. The show had been running for three months at the time, and would be a lot of the time, and was likely to run longer, and child labour laws meant that they had to have replacements for some of the cast. Every three months, any performing child had to have at least ten days off. At his audition, Steve played his guitar and sang, Who's Sorry Now? The recent Connie Francis hit. And then, ignoring the rule that performers could only do one song, immediately launched into Buddy Holly's Oh Boy.

His musical ability and He was given him For me Stars appear And the shadows of all in His musical ability And attitude impressed the show's producers

And he was given a job Which suited him perfectly Rather than being cast in a single role He would be swapped around Playing different small parts in the chorus And occasionally taking the larger role Of the artful Dodger Steve Marriottet

was never able to do the same thing over and over and got bored very quickly. But because he was moving between roles, he was able to keep interested in his performances for almost a year, and he was good enough that it was him chosen to sing the Dodgers role on the cast album when that was recorded. And he enjoyed performance enough that his parents pushed him to become an actor, though there were other reasons for that too.

He was never the best-behaved child in the world, nor the most attentive student, and things came to a head when, shortly after leaving the Oliver cast, he got so bored of his art classes he devised a plan to get out of them forever. Every art class for several weeks, he'd sit in a different desk at the back of the classroom and stuff torn up bits of paper under

the floorboards. After a couple of months of this, he then dropped a lit matching which set fire to the paper and ended up burning down half the school. His school friend Ken Hawes talked about it many decades later saying, I suppose in a way I was impressed about how he had meticulously planned the whole thing months in advance.

the sheer dogged determination to see it through. He could quite easily have been caught and would have had to face the consequences. There was no danger in anybody getting hurt because we were at the back of the room. We had to be at the back, otherwise somebody would have noticed what he was doing. There was no malice against other pupils.

He just wanted to burn the damn school down. Nobody could prove it was him who had done it, though his parents at least had a pretty good idea who it was. But it was clear that even when the school was rebuilt, it wasn't a good idea to send him back there, so they sent him to the Italia Conti Drama School, the same school that Anthony Newley and Petula Clark, among many others, had attended.

Marriott's parents couldn't afford the school's fees, but Marriott was so talented that the school waived the fees. They said they'd get him work and take a cut of his wages in lieu of the fees, and over the next few years they did get him a lot of work. Much of that work was for TV shows, which like almost all TV of the time no longer exist. He was in an episode of the Sid James sitcom Citizen James, an episode of Mr Pastry's Progress,

an episode of the police drama Dixon of Doc Green, and an episode of a series based on the Just William books, none of which survive. He also did a voiceover for a carpet cleaner ad, appeared on the radio soap opera Mrs Dale's diary, playing a pop star, and had a regular spot reading listeners' letters out for the Agony and Marge Proops on her radio show,

Almost all of this early acting work was utterly ephemeral, but there are a handful of his performances that do survive, mostly in films. He has a small role in the comedy film Heavens Above, a mistaken identity comedy in which a radical left-wing priest played by Peter Sellers is given a parish intended for a more conservative priest of the same name, and upsets the well-off people of the parish by taking in a large family of travellers and appointing a black man as his churchwarden. The film has some dated attitudes in the way that things that were trying to be progressive and anti-racist 60 years ago invariably do,

but has a sparkling cast with Sellers Eric Sykes, William Hartnell, Brock Peters, Roycaneer, Irene Handel, and many more extremely recognisable faces from the period. Matthew, you're marking him into good Christians, are you? I don't know, Reverend. Am I? Yes! Good, well, we'll see then. What is the outward and visible sign of baptism? Water!

Well done, very good. Now, the three and one, in whose name? You're late, Jack. I had to do something for me dead. I see. Well, we were just having a few questions. Can you tell me what we mean by the three in one? Trenquilax, mister.

No, Jack, that is not the answer. Sit down, boy. Does anybody else know? Yes, Percy? Father, son, an only ghost. on an hourly ghost. Good, now we're getting somewhere. Marriott apparently enjoyed working on the film immensely,

as he was a fan of The Goon Show, which Sellers had starred in, and which Sykes had co-written several episodes of. There are reports of Marriott and Sellers jamming together on banjos during breaks in filming, though these are probably slightly inaccurate. Sellers played the banjolalee, a banjo-style instrument which has played like a ukulele,

as Marriott had started on ukulele before switching to guitar, it was probably these they were playing, rather than banjos. He also appeared in a more substantial role in a film called Live It Up, a pop exploitation film starring David Hemmings, in which he appears as a member of a pop group. Oddly, Marriott plays a drummer, even though he wasn't a drummer, while two people who would find famous drummers, Mitch Mitchell and Dave Clark, appear in smaller non-drumming roles.

He doesn't perform on the soundtrack, which is produced by Joe Meek and features Sounds Incorporated, The Outlaws and Gene Vincent. But he does mind playing behind Heinz Burt, the former bass player of the Tornadoes, who was then trying for solo stardom at Meek's instigation. Show me the way To win your heart And love to That film was successful enough That film was successful enough That two years later

In 1965 Marriott came back for a sequel Be My Guest With the Night Shades, The Nashville Teens and Jerry Lee Lewis this time with music produced by Shell Talmy, rather than meek. But that was something of a one-off. After making Live It Up, Mariet had largely retired from acting,

because he was trying to become a pop star. The break finally came when he got an audition at the National Theatre, for a job touring with Lawrence Olivier for a year. He came home and told his parents he hadn't got the job, but then a week later they were bemused by a phone call, asking why Steve hadn't turned up for rehearsals. He had got the job, but he didn't. decided he couldn't face a year of doing the same thing over and over, and had pretend that he

hadn't. By this time he'd already released his first record. The work on Oliver had got him a contract with Decker Records, and he'd recorded a buddy Holly knockoff, give her my regards, written for him by Kenny Lynch, the actor, pop star, and all-round entertainer. Tell her she's still on my mind Everywhere I go I was a bad one lift for my own fun Never gave a thought to me That record wasn't a hit

But Mariette wasn't put off He formed a band who were at first called The Moonlights And then the Frantics And they got a management deal with Tony Calder Andrew Oldham's junior partner in his management company Calder got former Shadow Tony Mien to produce a demo for the group, a version of Cliff Richards hit Move It, which was shopped around the record labels with no success,

and which sadly appears no longer to survive. The group also did some recordings with Joe Meek, which also don't circulate, but which may exist in the famous T-Chess tapes, which are slowly being prepared for archival releases. The group changed their name to the moment, and added in the guitarist John Weeder, who was one of those people who seemed to have been in every band ever,

either just before or just after they became famous. At various times he was in Johnny Kit and the Pirates, John Mayol's Blues Breakers, family, Eric Burden and the Animals, and the band that became Craby Appleton, but never in their most successful lineups. They continued recording unsuccessful demos, of which a small number have turned up.

One of their demo sessions was produced by Andrew Oldham, and while that session didn't need to a release, it did lead to Oldham booking Marriott as a session harmonica player for one of his Andrew Oldham Orchestra sessions to play on a track titled 365 Rolling Stones, one for every day of the year. Oldham also produced a session for what was meant to be Marriott's second solo single on Decker, a cover version of the Rolling Stones as Tell Me,

which was actually scheduled for release but pulled at the last minute. Like many of Marriott's recordings from this period, if it exists, it doesn't seem to circulate publicly. But despite their lack of recording success, the moments did manage to have a surprising level of success on the live circuit. Because they were signed to Calder and Oldham's management company, they got a contract with the Arthur Howe's booking agency, which got them support slots on package tours with Billy J. Kramer,

Freddy and the Dreamers, The Kinks, and other major acts. and the band members were earning about £30 a week each, a very, very good living for the time. They even had a fanzine devoted to them, written by a fan named Stuart Took. But as they weren't making records, the band's line-up started changing, with members coming and going.

They did manage to get one record released, a sound-like version of the kinks' You Really Got Me, recorded for a budget label who rushed it out, hoping to get it picked up in the US and for it to be the hit version there. But the month after that was released, you're really got me now,

you got me so I can't sleep at night. But the month after that was released, Marriott was sacked from the band, apparently in part because the band was starting to get billed as Steve Marriott in the moment, rather than just the moments, and the rest of them didn't want to be anyone's backing band. He got a job at a music shop

while looking around for other bands to perform with. At one point around this time, he was going to form a duo with a friend of his, Davy Jones, not the one who had also appeared in Oliver, but another singer of the same name. This one sang with a blues band called the Manish Boys, and both men were well known on the mod scene in London. Marriott's idea was that they called themselves David and Goliath, with Jones being David, and Marriott being Goliath because he was only five foot five. That could have been a great band, but it never got past the idea stage. Marriott had become friendly

with another part-time musician and shop worker called Ronnie Lane, who was in a band called The Outcasts, who played the same circuit as the moment. just take a look at yourself Yeah, how far you accuse me Take a look at yourself You ain't so good baby Just take a look at yourself

Lane worked in a sound equipment shop And Marriott in a musical instrument shop And both were customers of the other As well as friends At least until Marriott came into the shop Where Lane worked and tried to persuade him to let Marriott have a free PA system. Lane pretended to go along with it as a joke and got sacked.

Lane had then gone to the shop where Marriott worked in the hope that Marriott would give him a good deal on a guitar because he'd been sacked because of Marriott. Instead, Marriott persuaded him that he should switch to bass, on the grounds that everyone was playing guitar since the Beatles had come along, but a bass player would always be able to find work. Lane bought the bass. Shortly after that, Marriott came to an outcast's gig in a pub and was asked to sit in.

He enjoyed playing with Lane and the group's drummer, Kenny Jones, but got so drunk he smashed up the pub's piano while playing a Jerry Lee Lewis song. The resulting fallout led to the group being barred from the pub and splitting up, so Marriott, Lane and Jones decided to form their own group. They got in another guitarist Marriott knew, a man named Jimmy Winston, who was a couple of years older than them, and who had two advantages. He was a known face on the mod scene,

with a higher status than any of the other three, and his brother owned a van and would drive the group in their equipment for 10% of their earnings. There was a slight problem in that Winston was also as good on guitar as Marriott and looked like he might want to be the star, but Marriott neutralised that threat.

He moved Winston over to keyboards. The fact that Winston couldn't play keyboards didn't matter, he could be taught a couple of riffs and licks, and he was sure to pick up the rest, and this way the group had the same line-up as one of Marriott's current favourites, Buccottie and the MGs. While he was still a Buddy Holly fan,

he was now, like the rest of the mods, an R&B obsessive. Marriott wasn't entirely sure that this new group would be the one that would make him a star, though, and was still looking for other alternatives in case it didn't play out. He auditioned for another band,

the lower third, which countered Stuart Tuck, the writer of the moment's fanzine, among its members, but he was unsuccessful in the audition. Instead, his friend Davy Jones, the one who he'd been thinking of forming a duo with, got the job. A few months after that, Davy Jones at the lower third

changed their name to David Bowie in the lower third, and we'll be picking up that story in a little over a year from now. Marriott, Lane, Jones and Winston kept rehearsing and pulled together a five-song set, which was just about long enough to play a few shows. if they extended the songs with long jamming instrumental sections. The opening song for these early sets was one which, when they recorded it, would be credited to Marriott and Lane.

The two had struck up a writing partnership and agreed to a Lennon McCarty-style credit split, though in these early days Marriott was doing far more of the writing than Lane was. But You Need Loving was heavily inspired by You Need Love, a song Willie Dixon had written for Muddy Waters. I got yawning and I got bunny. Baby you look so sweet and cunning. Baby way down inside.

Woman, you need love. Woman, you need love. You got to have some love. I'm going to give you some love. I know you need love. You just got to have love. It's not precisely the same song, but you can definitely hear the influence in the Marriott Lane song.

They did make some changes, though, notably to the end of the song. You will be unsurprised to learn that Robert Plant was a fan of Steve Marriott. The new group were initially without a name, until after one of their first gigs, Winston's girlfriend, who hadn't met the other three before, said, You've all got such small faces. The name stuck because it had. a double meaning. As we've seen in the episode on My Generation, Face was mod slang for someone

who was cool and respected on the mod scene, but also, with the exception of Winston, who was average size, the other three members of the group were very short. The tallest of the three was Ronnie Lane, who was five foot six. One thing I should note about the group's name, by the way, on all the labels of their records in the UK while they were together, they were credited as small faces, with no the in front. But all the band members refer to the group in interviews as the small faces, and they've been credited that way on summary issues and foreign market records. The group's official website is thesmallfaces.com, but all the posts on the website refer to them as small faces with no the. The use of the word the or not at the start of a group's

name at this time was something of a shibboleth. For example, both the Buffalo Springfield and the Pink Floyd dropped theirs after their early records, and its status in this case is a strange one. I'll be referring to the group throughout as the small faces, rather than small faces, because the former is easier to say, but both seem accurate. After a few pub gigs in London, they got some bookings in the north of England, where they got a mixed reception. They went down well at Peter Stringfellow's Mojo Club in Sheffield, where Joe Cocker was a regular performer, less well at a working man's club and reports differ about their performance

at the twisted wheel in Manchester though one thing everyone is agreed on is that while they were performing some Mancunians borrowed their van and used it to rob a clothing warehouse and gave the band members some very nice leather coats as a reward for their loan of the van. It was only on the group's return to London

that they rarely started to gel as a unit. In particular, Kenny Jones had up to that point been a very stiff, precise drummer but he suddenly loosened up and, in Steve Marriott's tasteless phrase, every number swung like Hanratty. James Hanratti was one of the last people in Britain to be executed by hanging. Shortly after that, Don Arden's secretary, whose name I haven't been able to find in any of the sources I've used for this episode, sadly, came into the club where they were rehearsing the Starlight Rooms to pass a message from Arden to an associate of his who owned a club. The secretary had seen Marriott perform before.

He would occasionally get up on stage at the Starlight Rooms to duet with Elkie Brooks, who was a regular performer there, and she'd seen him do that, but was newly impressed by his group, and passed word onto her boss that this was a group he should investigate. Arden is someone who will be looking at a lot in future episodes, but the important thing to note right now is that he was a failed entertainer who had moved into management and promotion, first with American acts like Gene Vincent

and then with British acts like the Nashville Teens who had had hits with tracks like Tobacco Road Arden was also something of a gangster as many people in the music industry were at the time but he was worse than most of his contemporaries and delighted in his nickname the Al Capone of Pop The group had a few managers looking to sign them, but Arden convinced them with his offer. They would get a percentage of their earnings, though they never actually received that percentage,

£20 a week in wages, and, the most tempting part of it all, they would get expense accounts at all the Carnaby Street boutiques and could go there whenever they wanted and get whatever they wanted. They signed with Arden, which all of them except Marriott would later regret, because Arden's financial exploitation meant that it would be decades before they saw any money from their hits, and indeed both Marriott and Lane would be dead before they started getting royalties from their old records. Marriott, on the other hand, had enough experience of the industry to credit Arden with the group getting anywhere at all, and said later, look, you go into it with your eyes open, and as far as I was concerned, it was better than living on brown-source rolls.

At least we had 20 quid a week guaranteed. Arden got the group signed to Decker, with Dick Rowe signing them to the same kind of production deal that Andrew Oldham would pioneered with the stones, so that Arden would own the rights to their recordings. At this point, the group still only knew a handful of songs, but Roe was signing almost everyone with a guitar at this point, putting out a record or two and letting them sink or swim. He had already been firmly labelled as the man who turned down the Beatles, and was now of the opinion that it was better to give everyone a chance than to make that kind of expensive mistake. again. By this point, Marriott and Lane were starting to write songs together, though at this point it was still mostly Marriott writing, and people would ask him why he was giving Lane half the credit, and he'd reply, Without Ronnie's help keeping me awake and being there, I wouldn't do half of it, he keeps me going. But for their first single, Arden was unsure that they were up to the task of writing

a hit. The group had been performing a version of Solomon Burke's Everybody Needs Somebody to Love, a song which Burke always claimed to have written alone, but which is credited to him, Jerry Wexler, and Bert Burns, and has Burns' fingerprints, at least, on it to my ears. Arden got some professional writers to write new lyrics and vocal melody to their arrangement of the song. The people he hired were Brian Potter, who would later go on to co-write Rhinestone Cowboy,

and Ian Samwell, the former member of Cliff Richards' drifters who had written many of Richard's early hits, including Move It, and was now working for Arden. The group went into the studio and recorded the song, titled What You're Gonna Do About It? That version, though, was deemed too raucus, and they had to go back into the studio to cut a new version, which came out as their first single. At first, the single didn't do much on the chart,

but then Arden got to work with teams of people buying copies from chart return shops, bribing DJs on pirate radio stations to play it, and bribing the person who compiled the chart. for the NME. Eventually it made number 14, at which point it became a genuinely popular hit. But with that popularity came problems. In particular, Steve Marriott was starting to get seriously annoyed by Jimmy Winston. As the group started to get TV appearances, Winston started to act like he should be the centre of attention. Every time Marriott took a solo in front of TV cameras, Winston would start making stupid gestures, pulling faces, anything to make sure the cameras

focused on him rather than on Marriott, which wouldn't have been too bad, had Winston been a great musician. But he was still not very good on the keyboards, and unlike the others didn't seem particularly interested in trying. He seemed to want to be a star rather than a musician. The group's next planned single was a Marriott and Lane song, I've Got Mine. To promote it, the group mimed to it in a film, Dateline Diamonds, a combination pop film and Crime Caper, not a million miles away from the ones that Marriott had appeared in a few years earlier. They also contributed three other songs to the film's soundtrack. Unfortunately, the film's release was delayed, and the film had been the big promotional push that Arden

had planned for the single, and without that it didn't chart at all. By the time the single came out, though, Winston was no longer in the group. There are many, many different stories as to why he was kicked out. Depending on who you ask, it was because he was trying to take the spotlight away from Marriott, because he wasn't a good enough keyboard player, because he was taller than the others and looked out of place, or because he asked Don Arden where the money was. It was probably a combination of all of these,

but fundamentally what it came to was that Winston just didn't fit into the group. Winston would, in later years, say that him confronting Arden was the only reason for his dismissal, saying that Arden had manipulated the others to get him out of the way, but that seems unlikely on the face of it. When Arden sacked him, he kept Winston on as a client and built another band around him, Jimmy Winston and The Reflections, and got them signed to Decker too, releasing a Kenny Lynch song, Sorry She's Mine, to no success.

Another version of that song would later be included on the first Small Faces album. Winston would then form another band, Winston's Fums, who would also release one single, before he went into acting instead. His most notable credit was as a rebel in the 1972 Doctor Who story Day of the Daleks, and he later retired from show business to run a business renting out sound equipment and died in 2020.

The group hired his replacement without ever having met him or heard in play. Ian McClaghan had started out as the rhythm guitarist in a Shadow's Soundaright band called The Cherokees, but the group had become R&B fans and renamed themselves the mule skis. and then, after hearing green onions, McClaghan had switched to playing Hammond organ.

The Meal Skinners had played the same R&B circuit as dozens of other bands we've looked at, and had similar experiences, including backing visiting blues stars like Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, and Howling Wolf. Their one single had been a cover version of Back Door Man, a song Willie Dixon had written for Wolf. The Meal Skinners had split up, as most of the group had day jobs, and McClagan had gone on to join a group called Boz and the Boz People, who were becoming popular on the live circuit,

and who also toured back in Kenny Lynch while McCleggen was in the band. Boss and the Boz People would release several singles in 1966, like their version of the theme for the film Carry On Screaming, released just as by Buzz. The clock's churned flutters by,

everybody's getting goose pimples, cold icy fingers that run up your spine, Oh, whoa, whoa, come closer, come closer Those fingers that you're feeling are mine So carry on screaming, carry on screaming Because when you're screaming, I know that you're dreaming of me By that time, McCleggen had left the group Bos Burrell later went on to join King Crimson and Bad Company

McClaghan left the boss people in something of a strop and was complaining to a friend the night he left the group that he didn't have any work lined up. The friend joked that he should join the small faces because he looked like them, and McClagan got annoyed that his friend wasn't taking him seriously. He'd love to be in the small faces, but they had a keyboard player.

The next day he got a phone call from Don Arden, asking him to come to his office. He was being hired to join a hit pop group who needed a new keyboard player. McLaghan at first wasn't allowed to tell anyone what band he was joining, in part because Arden's secretary was dating Winston, and Winston hadn't yet been informed he was fired, and Arden didn't want word leaking out until it had been sorted,

but he'd been chosen purely on the basis of an article in a music magazine which had phrased his playing with the boss people, and without the band knowing him or his playing. As soon as they met, though, he immediately fit in in a way Winston never had. He looked the part, right down to his band, height. He said later, Ronnie Lane and I were the giants in the band at five foot six inches, and Kenny Jones and Steve Marriott were the really teeny tiny chaps at five-foot-five and a half inches, and he was a great player and shared a sense of humour with them. McClaghan had told Arden

he'd been earning £20 a week with the Boz people, he'd actually been on five, and so Arden agreed to give him £30 a week during his probationary month, which was more than the 20 the rest of the band were getting. As soon as his probationary period was over, McClagan insisted on getting a pay cut, so he'd be on the same wages as the rest of the group. Soon, Marriott, Lane and McClagon were all living in a house rented for them by Arden, Jones decided to stay living with his parents, and were in the studio recording their next single. Arden was convinced that the mistake with I've Got Mine had been allowing the group to record an original, and again called in a team of professional songwriters. Arden was convinced that the mistake of the songwriters. Arden was convinced that the mistake.

brought in Mort Schumann, who had recently ended his writing partnership with Doc Pommas and struck out on his own, after co-writing songs like Save the Last Dance for Me, Sweets for My Sweet, and Viva Las Vegas together, and Kenny Lynch. And the two of them wrote, Shalalalooly, and Lynch added backing vocals to the record. None of the group were happy with the record, but it became a big hit, reaching number three in the charts. Suddenly, the group had a huge fan base of screaming teenage girls, which embarrassed them terribly, as they thought of themselves as serious heavy R&B musicians, and the rest of their career would largely be spent vacillating between trying to appeal to their teeny bopper fan base and trying to escape from it

to fit their own self-image. They followed Shalalallai Lee with Hey Girl, a Marriott Lane song, but one written to order. They were under strict instructions from Arden that if they wanted to have the A side of a single, they had to write something as commercial as Shalalalala Lee had been, and they managed to come up with a second top ten hit. Two hit singles in a row was enough to make an album viable, and the group went into the studio and quickly cut an album which had their first two hits on it. Hey Girl wasn't included, and nor was the flop I've got mine, plus a bunch of semi-originals like You Need Loving, a couple of Kenny Lynch songs, and a cover version of Sam Cuck's Shake. The album went to number three on the album chart, with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the number one and two spots.

And it was at this point that Arden's rivals really started taking interest. But that interest was quelled for the moment when, after Robert Stigwood inquired about managing the band, Arden went round to Stigwood's office with four goons and held him upside down over a balcony, threatening to drop him off if he ever messed with any of Arden's acts again. But the group were still being influenced by other managers. In particular, Brian Epstein came round to the group's shared house with Graham Edge of the Moody Blues and brought them some slices of orange,

which they discovered, after eating them, had been dosed with LSD. By all accounts, Marriott's first trip was a bad one, but the group soon became regular consumers of the drug, and it influenced the heavier direction they took on their next single, All or Nothing. All or Nothing was inspired both by Marriott's breakup with his girlfriend of the time and his delight at the fact that Jenny Rylance,

a woman he was attracted to, had split up with her then-boyfriend of Rod Stewart. Rylands and Stuart later reconciled, but would break up again, and Rylance would become Marriott's first wife in 1968. All or Nothing became the group's first and only number one record, and according to the version of the charts used on top of the pops, it was a joint number one with the Beatles' double A side of yellow submarine and Eleanor Rigby,

both selling exactly as well as each other. But this success caused the group's parents to start to wonder why are their kids, none of whom were yet 21, the legal age of majority at the time, were not rich. While the group were on tour, their parents came as a group to visit Arden and ask him where the money was, and why their kids were only getting paid £20 a week, when their group was getting £1,000 a night. Arden tried to convince the parents that he had been paying the group properly, but that they had spent their money on heroin, which was very far from the truth.

The band were only using soft drugs at the time. This put a huge strain on the group's relationship with Arden, and it wasn't the only thing that Arden did that upset them. They had been spending a lot of time in the studio working on new material, and Arden was convinced that they were spending too much time recording, and that they were just faffing around and not producing anything of substance. They dropped off a tape to show him that they had been working, and the next thing they knew Arden had put out one of the tracks from that tape,

My Mind's Eye, which had only been intended as a demo, as a single. That it went to number four on the charts didn't make up for the fact that the first the band heard of the record coming out at all was when they heard it on the radio. They needed rid of Arden. Luckily for them, Arden wasn't keen on continuing to work with them either. They were unreliable and flaky, and he also needed cash quick to fund his other ventures,

and he agreed to sell on their management and recording contracts. Depending on which version of the story you believe, he may have sold them onto an agent called Harold Davison, who then sold them on to Andrew Oldham and Tony Calder. But according to Oldham what happened is that in December 1966, Arden demanded the highest advance in British history, £25,000, directly from Oldham, in cash, in a brown paper bag. The reason Oldham and Calder were interested

was that in July 1965 they'd started up their own record label, immediate records, which had been announced by Oldham in his column in Disc and Music Echo, in which he'd said, On many occasions I have run down the large record companies over issues such as pirate stations, their promotion and their tastes, and many readers have written in and said that if I was so disturbed by the state of the existing record companies, why didn't I do something about it? I have.

On the 20th of this month, the first of three records released by my own company, Immediate Records, is to be launched. That first batch of three records contained one big hit, hang on Sloopy by the McCoys, which immediate licence from Burt Burns' new record label Bang in the US. The two other initial singles featured the talents of Immediate's new in-house producer, a session player who had previously been known as Little Jimmy to distinguish him from Big Jim Sullivan. the other most in-demand session guitarist, but who is now just known as Jimmy Page. The first was a version of Pete Seeger's The Bells of Rimney,

which Page produced and played guitar on for a group called The Fifth Avenue. And the second was a Gordon Lightfoot song performed by a girlfriend of Brian Jones's, Nico. The details as to who was involved in the track have varied. At different times, the production has been credited to Jones, Paige, and Oldham.

But it seems to be the case that both Jones and Page play on the track, as did session bass player John Paul Jones. While Hang-on Sloopy was a big hit, the other two singles were flops, and the Fifth Avenue split up, while Nico used the publicity she'd got as an entree into Andy Warhol's factory,

and we'll be hearing more about how that went in a future episode. Oldham and Calder were trying to follow the model of the Brill building of Phil Spector and of US independence like Motown and Stacks. They wanted to be a one-stop shop where they were, They produced the records, manage the artists, and own the publishing. And they also licensed the publishing for the Beach Boys' songs for a couple of years, and started publicising their records over here in a big way, to exploit the publishing royalties. And that was a major factor in turning the Beach Boys from minor novelties to major stars in the UK.

Most of Immediate's records were produced by Jimmy Page, but other people got to have a go as well. Giorgio Gimelski and Shell Talmi both produced tracks for the last. label, as did a teenage singer then known as Paul Raven, who would later become notorious under his later stage name Gary Glitter. But while many of these records were excellent, and immediate deserves to be talked about in the same terms as Motown or Stax when it comes to the quality of the singles it released, though not in terms of commercial success, the only ones to do well on the chart in the first few months of the label's existence were Hang-on-Sloopy and an EP by Chris Farlow.

It was Farlow who provided immediate records with its first homegrown number one, a version of the Rolling Stones as Out of Time produced by Mick Jagger, though according to Arthur Greenslade, the arranger on that and many other immediate tracks, Jagger had given up on getting a decent performance out of Farlow,

and Oldham ended up producing the vocals. Greenslade later said, Andrew must have worked hard in there, Chris Farlow couldn't sing his way out of a paper bag. I'm sure Andrew must have done it where you get an artist singing and you can do a sentence at a time stitching it all together, he must have done it in pieces. But however hard it was to make, out of time was a success. Or at least, it was a success in the UK. It did also make the top 40 in the US for a week,

but then it hit a snag. It had chartered without having been released in the US at all, or even being sent as a promo to DJs. Olam's new business manager Alan Klein had been to work his magic on the US charts, but the people he bribed to hype the record into the chart had got the release date wrong and done it too early. When the record did come out over there, no radio station would play it in case it looked like they were complicit in the scam.

But still, a UK number one wasn't too shabby, and so immediate records was back on track, and Alden wanted to shore things up by bringing in some more proven hitmakers. immediate signed the small faces and even started paying them royalties, though that wouldn't last long as immediate went bankrupt in 1970, and its successes in interests stopped paying out. The first work the group did for the label was actually for a Chris Farlow single. Lane and Marriott gave him their song My Way of Giving, and played on the session along with Farlow's backing band The Thunderbirds. Mick Jagger is the credited producer, but by all accounts Marriott and Lane did most of the same.

of the work. Sadly, that didn't make the top 40. After working on that, they started on their first single recorded at immediate, but because of contractual entanglement, I Can't Make It was recorded at immediate, but released by Decker. Because the band weren't particularly keen on promoting something on their old label, and the record was briefly banned by the BBC for being too sexual, it only made number 26 on the charts. Around this time, Marriott had become friendly with another band, who had named themselves the little people in homage to the small faces, and particularly with their drummer Jerry Shirley. Marriott got them signed to immediate, and produced and played on their first single, a version of his song, Tell Me, Have You Ever Seen

Me? When they signed to immediate, the little people had to change their name, and Marriott suggested they call themselves the nice, a phrase he liked. Oldham thought that was a stupid name, and gave the group the much more sensible name, the apostolic intervention. And then a few weeks later, he signed another group and changed their name to the Nice. The Nice was also a phrase

used in the Small Face's first single for immediate proper. Here Come the Nice was inspired by a routine by the hipster comedian Lord Buckley, the Naz, which also gave a name to Todd Rungren's band and inspired a line in David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust. So the Naz,

look at this little little. cat with a bent frame and he say, what's the matter to you baby? And the little cat with a bent frame, he say, well, my frame is bent nass. It's been bent for me in front. So the nars look at the little cat with the bent frame and he put the golden eyes of love on this, her little kitty, and he looked right down into the windows of his soul. And he said to the little cat, he said, straight. Captain up straight in a now and everybody jumping up and down say,

Look what the Nass put on that boy. You dug him before, dig him now. Here Come the NICE was very blatantly about a drug dealer and somehow managed to reach number 12 despite that. It also had another obstacle that stopped it doing as well as it might. A week before it came out, Decker released a single, Patterns, from material they had in the vault, and in June 1967, two Small Faces albums came out.

One of them was a collection from Decker of outtakes and demos, plus their non-album hit singles, titled From the Beginning, while the other was their first album on Immediate, which was titled Small Faces, just like their first Decker album had been. To make matters worse, from the beginning contained the group's demos of My Way of Giving

and Tell Me Have You Ever Seen Me, while the group's first immediate album contained a new recording of Tell me Have You Ever Seen Me and a version of My Way of Giving with the same backing track but a different vocal take from the one on the Decker collection.

From this point on, the group's catalogue would be a complete mess, with an endless stream of compilations coming out, both from Deca and, after the group split, from immediate, mixing tracks intended for release with demos and jam sessions with no regard for either their artistic

intent or for what fans might want. Both albums charted, with small faces reaching number 12 and from the beginning reaching number 16, neither doing as well as their first album had, despite the immediate album, especially being a much better record. This was partly because the Marriott Lane partnership was becoming far more equal. Kenny Jones later said, during the Decker period, most of the self-penned stuff was 99% Steve. It wasn't until immediate that Ronnie became more involved. The first immediate album is made up of 50% Steve's songs and 50% of Ronnie's. They didn't collaborate as much as people thought. In fact, when they did, they often ended up arguing and fighting. It's hard to know who did what on each song credited to the pair,

but if we assume that each song's principal writer also sang lead, we know that's not always the case, but it's a reasonable working assumption, then Jones's 50-50 estimate seems about right. Of the 14 songs on the album, McCleggen sings what? which is also his own composition, up the wooden hills to Bedfordshire. There's one instrumental, six with Marriott on solo lead vocals, four with Lane on solo lead vocals, and two duets, one with Lane as the main vocalist and one with Marriott. The fact that there was now a second songwriter taking an equal role in the band

meant that they could now do an entire album of originals. It also meant that their next Marriott Lane single was most the Elaine song. Itchiku Park started with the verse lyric from Lane, over a bridge of size, to rest my eyes in shades of green, under Dreaming Spires to Ichikoo Park, that's where I've been. The inspiration apparently came from Lane reading about the dreaming spires of Oxford, and contrasting it with the places he used to play as a child, full of stinging nettles. For a verse melody, they repeated a trick they'd used before. The melody of my mind's eye had been borrowed in part from the Christmas Carol Gloria in Excelsis' day. and here they took inspiration from the old hymn, God be in my head. As Marriott told the story, we were in Ireland and speeding our brains out writing this song.

Ronnie had the first verse already written down, but he had no melody line. So what we did was stick the verse to the melody line of God be in my head, with a few chord variations. We were going towards Dublin Airport, and I thought of the middle eight. We wrote the second verse collectively, and the chorus speaks for itself. My eyes in shades of green. Marriott took the lead vocal, even though it was mostly Lane's song. But Marriott did contribute to the writing, coming up with the middle eight. Lane didn't seem hugely impressed with Mariet's contribution, and later said,

It wasn't me that came up with, I feel inclined to blow my mind, get hung up, feed the ducks with a bun. They all come out to groove about, be nice and have fun in the sun. That wasn't me, but the more poetic stuff was. But that part became the most memorable part of the record. not so much because of the writing or performance, but because of the production. It was one of the first singles released using a phasing effect, developed by George Chiquantz, and I apologise if I'm pronouncing that name wrong, who was the assistant engineer for Glyn Johns on the album. I say it was one of the first, because at the time there was not a clear distinction between the

techniques now known as phasing, flanging, and artificial double-trecking, all of which have now diverged, but all of which initially came from the idea of shifting two copies of a recording slightly out of sync with each other. The phasing on Ichikou Park though was far more extreme and used to far different effect than that on say revolver. It was effective enough that Jimmy Hendrix, who was at the time working on Axis Bald as Love, requested that Chkianz come in and show his engineer how to get the same effect,

which was then used on huge chunks of Hendrix's album. The BBC banned the record because even the organisation which had missed that the Nice, who is always there when I need some speed, was a drug dealer, was a little suspicious about whether we'll get high and will touch the sky

might be drug references. The band claimed to be horrified at the thought and explained that they were talking about swings. It's a song about a park, so if you play on the swings, you go high. What else could it mean? No drug references there, I'm sure you'll agree.

The song made number three, but the group ran into more difficulties with the BBC after an appearance on top of the pops. Marriott disliked the show's producer and the way that he would go up to every act and pretend to think they'd done a very good job, no matter what he actually thought, which Marriott thought of as hypocrisy, rather than as politeness and professionalism. Marriott discovered that the producer was leaving the show, and so in the bar afterwards told him exactly what he thought of him, calling him a two-faced, and then a four-letter word beginning with C, which is generally considered the most offensive swear word there is. Unfortunately for Marriott, he'd been misinformed. The producer wasn't leaving the show,

and the group were barred from it for a while. Itchiku Park also made the top 20 in the US, thanks to a new distribution deal immediate had, and plans were made for the group to tour America. But those plans had to be scrapped when Ian McCleggen was arrested for possession of hashish and instead the group toured France with support from a group called the Hurd. Marriott became very friendly with the Hurd's guitarist Peter Frampton and sympathised with Frampton's predicament when in the next year he was voted Face of 68 and developed a similar teenage following to the one the small faces had. The group's last single of 1967 was one of their best. Tin Soldier was inspired by the Hans Anderson story, The Steadfast Tin Soldier,

and was originally written for the singer P.P. Arnold, who Marriott was briefly dating around this time, but Arnold was so impressed with the song that Marriott decided to keep it for his own group, and Arnold was left just doing backing vocals on the track. It's hard to show the appeal of Tin Soldier in a short clip like those I use on this show, because so much of it is based on the use of dynamics and the way the track rises and falls, but it's an extremely powerful track and made the top ten. But it was after that that the band started falling apart,

and also after that that they made the work generally considered their greatest album. As Ichikou Park had made number one in Australia, the group was sent over there on tour to promote it, as Support Act for the Who, but the group hadn't been playing live much recently and found it difficult to replicate their records on stage, as they were now so reliant on studio effects like phasing. The Australian audiences were uniformly hostile,

and the contrast with the Who, who were at their peak as a live act at this point, couldn't have been greater. Marriott decided he had a solution. The band needed to get better live, so why not get Peter Frampton in as a fifth member? He was great on guitar and had stage presence. obviously that would fix their problems, but the other band members absolutely refused to get Frampton in.

Marriott's confidence as a stage performer took a knock from which it never really recovered, and increasingly the band became a studio-only one. But the tour also put strain on the most important partnership in the band. Marriott and Lane had been the closest to friends and collaborators, but on the tour both found a very different member of the Who to pal around with. Marriott became close to Keith Moon, and the two would get drunk and trash hotel rooms together.

Lane, meanwhile, became very friendly with Pete Townsend, who introduced him to the work of the guru Mayor Barber, who Townsend followed. Lane too became a follower, and the two would talk about religion and spirituality while the bandmates were destroying things. An attempt was made to heal the growing rifts, though. Marriott, Lane and MacLaghan all moved in together again like old times,

but this time in a cottage. something that became so common for bands around this time that the phrase, getting our heads together in the country, became a cliche in the music press. They started working on material for their new album. One of the tracks that they were working on was written by Marriott, and was inspired by how,

before moving into the country cottage, his neighbours had constantly complained about the volume of his music. He'd been particularly annoyed that the pop singer Silla Black, who lived in the same building, and who he'd assumed would understand the pop-star lifestyle, had complained well than anyone. It had started as a fairly serious blues song, but then Marriott had been confronted by the members of the group The Hollies,

who wanted to know why Marriott always sang in a pseudo-American accent. Wasn't his own accent good enough? Was there something wrong with being from the east end of London? Well, no, Marriott decided there wasn't. And so he decided to sing it in a cockney accent, and so the song started to change, going from being an R&B song, to being the kind of thing Cockneys could sing around a piano in a pub.

Marriott intended the song just as an album track for the album they were working on, but Andrew Oldham insisted on releasing it as a single, much to the bands discussed. And it went to number two on the chart, and along with Ichiku Park meant that the group were now typecast as making playful, light-hearted music. The album they were working on, Ogden's Nut-Gone Flake, was eventually as known for its marketing as its music. In the Small Faces long tradition

of twisted religious references like their songs based on hymns and their song Here Come the Nice which had taken inspiration from a routine about Jesus and made it about a drug dealer The print ads for the album read Small Faces which were in the studios Hallowed be thy name

Thy music come, thy songs be sung on this album as they came from your heads We give you this day our daily bread Give us thy album in a round cover as we give the 37 shillings and 9pence. Lead us into the record stores and deliver us Ogden's Nut-Gone Flake for nice is the music, the sleeve and the story

forever and ever, immediate. The reason the ad mentioned a round cover is that the original pressings of the album were released in a circular cover, made to look like a tobacco tin, with the name of the brand of tobacco changed from Ogden's Nut Brown Flake to Ogden's Nut Gone Flake.

A reference to how, after smoking enough dope, your nut or a head would be gone. This made more sense to British listeners than to Americans, because not only was the slang on the label British, and not only was it a reference to a British tobacco brand, but American and British dope smoking habits are very different. In America, a joint is generally made by taking the dried leaves and flowers of the cannabis plant, or weed, and rolling them in a cigarette paper and smoking them. In the UK and much of Europe, though, the preferred form of cannabis is the resin, hashish, which is crumbled onto tobacco in a cigarette paper and smoked that way. So having rolling or pipe tobacco was a necessity for dope

smokers in the UK, in a way it wasn't in the US. Side one of Ogden's was made up of normal songs, but the second side mixed songs and narrative. Originally, the group wanted to get Spike Milligan to do the narration, but when Milligan backed out, they chose Professor Stan the Unwin, a comedian who was known for speaking in his own almost English language on when he is. It comprised the vowel sound and threp,

so please don't confuse or stretch the pigeonholes of your mind to encompass what these sounds really are. They do in fact go back to Ethorebus, unready, King Alfis and burnt capers where, you know, the toast fell in. And of course the dear lady did get a very cross-knit

and smote him across the eardrow, Excalibol, the great... ...sword, The great sword which Riesie Haff and Merlin for evermore was the beginning of the great constitution of the great English-speaking people odors of these Iloan. They gave one winner's script, telling the story that linked side two of the album,

in which Happiness Stan is shocked to discover that half the moon has disappeared and goes on a quest to find the missing half, aided by a giant fly who lets him sit on his back after Stan shares his shepherd's pie with the hungry fly. After a long quest, they end up at the cave of Mad John the Hermit, who points out to them that nobody had stolen half the moon at all. They've been travelling so long that it was a full moon again, and everything was okay.

Unwin took that script, and reworked it into Unwin's E's, and also added in a lot of the slang he heard the group use, like Cool It and What's Been Your Hang Up? Mad John, in fine, fine, foldy silken robes, all whitely hair, scintillating beard and dangle. Well, the beard must be three to four years old, to growing and great, all night load, what? And he was glowing with a friendly light,

oh dear, joy, and a voice full of a cockney, cockney, cockney, all joy of life and live it emanate from the cockload of his heartstrings. Cool to say you, man. What's been your hang-up, man? I'm waiting seven whole days for you. Not still worried about this since late moon and dangly,

huh? Stan, yes, that's why I'm sorting you out here. The album went to number one, and the group were justifiably proud. but it only exacerbated the problems with their live show. Other than an appearance on the TV show Colour Me Pop, where they were joined by Stan the Unwin to perform the whole of Side 2 of the album with live vocals,

but miming to instrumental backing tracks. They only performed two songs from the album live, rolling over and song of a baker, otherwise sticking to the same live show Marriott was already embarrassed by. Marriott later said, we had spent an entire year in the studios, which was why our stage presentation had done, not been improved since the previous year.

Meanwhile, our recording experience had developed in leaps and bounds. We were all keenly interested in the technical possibilities, in the art of recording. We let down a lot of people who wanted to hear our out-duns played live. We were still sort of rough and ready, and in the end the audience became uninterested as far as our stage show was concerned. It was our own fault, because we would have sussed it all out if we had only used our brains. We could have taken Stan the Unwin on tour with us, maybe a string section as we were well, and it would have been okay. But we didn't do it, we stuck to the concept that had been

successful for a long time, which is always the kiss of death. The group's next single would be the last released while they were together. Marriott regarded the Universal as possibly the best thing he'd written, and recorded it quickly when inspiration struck. The finished single is actually a home recording of Marriott in his garden, including the sounds of a dog barking and his wife coming home with the shopping, onto which the band later overdue percussion, horns and electric guitars. Incidentally, it seems that the dog barking on that track may also be the dog barking on Shameless by Pink Floyd. The Universal confused listeners, and only made number 16 on the charts, crushing Marriott, who thought it was the best thing he'd done, but the band was starting to splinter.

McClaghan isn't on the Universal, having quit the band before it was recorded after a falling out with Marriott. He rejoined, but discovered that in the meantime Marriott had brought in session player Nicky Hopkins to work on some tracks, which devastated him. Marriott became increasingly unconfident in his own writing, and the writing dried up. The group did start work on some new material, some of which, like the Autumn Stone, is genuinely lovely. But by the time that was released, the group had already split up. The last recording they did together was as a backing group for Jeanne Allie Day, the French rock star.

A year earlier, Allie Day had recorded a version of My Way of Giving under the title, Je ne'Jamaeimonde. I do you have to rest what I ame, why would you that I change today? My heart is too,

I've said, I've always been a cheque Now he got in my Let's him Jolmphiresses And the small faces flew to France, as did Peter Frampton who Marriott was still pushing to get into the band.

They recorded three tracks for the album with Frampton on extra guitar. These tracks left Marriott more certain than ever that Frampton should be in the band, and the other three members even more certain that he shouldn't. Frampton joined the band on stage at a few shows on the next few gigs, but he was putting together his own band with Jerry Shirley from Apostolic Intervention. On New Year's Eve, 1968, Marriette finally had enough.

He stormed off stage mid-set and quit the group. He phoned up Peter Frampton, who was hanging out with Glyn Johns listening to an album John's had just produced by some of the session players who'd worked for immediate. Side 1 had just finished when Marriott phoned.

Could he join Frampton's new band? Frampton said, of course he could. Then put the phone down and listened to Side 2 of Led Zeppelin's first record. The band Marriott and Frampton formed was called Humble Pie, and they were soon releasing stuff on immediate. According to Oldham,

Tony Calder said to me one day, pick a straw. Then he explained we had a choice. We could either go with the three faces, Kenny, Ronnie and Mac, wherever they were going to go with their lives, or we could follow Stevie. I didn't regard it as a choice. Neither did Tony. Marriott was our man. Marriott certainly seemed to agree that he was the real talent in the group. He and Lane had fairly recently bought some property together, two houses on the same piece of land, and with the group splitting up, Lane moved away and wanted to sell his share in the property to Marriott. Marriott wrote to him saying, You'll get nothing. This was bought with money from hits that I wrote, not that we wrote,

and in closing a PRS statement showing how much each Marriott Lane song had earned, with the ones Marriott had written most of circled in red. Lane wrote back, a five-page letter just consisting of the words, blah, blah, blah, waffle, waffle, repeated over and over, and ending with, Steve, forget it. That's what you're best at. Humble Pie's first single, Natural Born Boogie, reached number four in the charts. The album that came from is also widely noted as being one of the first to be referred to in a music magazine as heavy metal. Though less often noted is that it was in the context of the review of their first three albums in Rolling Stone,

which said they were, boring in lots of different ways, called their third album more of the same 27th-rate heavy-metal crap, and ended, If Humble Pie had to listen to themselves, they would probably vomit. For God's sake and your own, don't subject yourself to the same torture. Stay away from this album by all means.

That was, largely, the critical consensus about Humble Pie, but they had a great deal of success, especially in the US, where they had three albums going to the top 30, one of them going top ten, and where several of their tracks remain staples of 70s rock radio.

But after Humbull, humble pie split up in 1975, Marriott's career went south, and so did his mental and physical health. The stories of his behaviour in the last 15 years or so of his life are appalling, though they can be partly explained, though not excused, by his alcohol and substance dependence, and by various mental illnesses. He spent most of the last decade or so of his life playing pubs and clubs with various pickup bands, mostly playing blues standards, and only throwing in one or two of his old hits, but he couldn't stand playing anymore. He died in 1991, aged only 44, after falling asleep, drunk in bed with a lit cigarette in his mouth, and setting fire to his

house. His bandmates carried on without him. Released from their immediate records contract, they started putting together a new band, and they did always regard it as a new band. not a continuation of the small faces. On guitar they brought in Ronnie Wood, who had been playing around the scene for years. Wood had been in the birds, the British group spelled with an eye, not the American group with a Y.

And he had also briefly been in a late line-up of the mod group, The Creation. Wood had also played bass in the Jeff Beck Group, who will be hearing more about in future episodes. and had recently quit them. He signed up with the three remaining faces and started rehearsing, but this line-up of the group nearly ended before it had begun.

After only a week, there was a call at the rehearsal studio. It was Keith Richards. The Rolling Stones were thinking of sacking Brian Jones, and wanted to know if Ronnie Wood would replace him. But it was Ronnie Lane, not Wood, who took the call. And he told Richards, No, thanks, I think he's quite happy where he is. Wood didn't find out he'd had the offer until the mid-70s.

The new group gelled quickly, but still needed a singer. They got him Wood's brother Art, who had formerly been the singer in the aptly named the Art Woods, and did a few gigs with him under the name Quiet Melon. Sometimes Long John Bulgy would sing a few numbers as well, as would the old singer from the Jeff Beck group. And for a couple of gigs, another old bandmate of Woods, Kim Gardner of the Creation, subbed Verlaine on bass.

Quiet Mellon went into the studio to record a handful of tracks, though those would remain unreleased for the time. They decided that Art Wood wasn't quite what they were looking for. McClaghan and the two Ronnie's between them could handle the backing vocals fairly well, but that still left them in need of a singer, ideally one with a similar sort of gravelly voice to the one that Marriott had. The answer was staring them in the face.

They should ask Wood's old bandmate from the Jeff Beck group, the one who had been hanging around at rehearsals and who had joined them on stage for a couple of songs and done backing vocals on their recent demo session. So on the 18th of September, 1969, they met up with him and asked him to officially join the group, which they were now calling the Faces. And the new singer for the Faces was,

Oh, is that the time? Sorry, I have to go. I'm sure we'll pick up on this story at some point, though. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the Generosity. of my backers on Patreon. Each week, Patreon backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast.

This week's is on The First Cut Is the Deepest by P.P. Arnold. Visit patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey to sign up for as little as a dollar a month. A book based on the first 50 episodes of the podcast, from Savoy Swingers to Clock Rockers, is now available.

Search Andrew Hickey 500 Songs on your favourite online bookstore or visit the links in the show notes. This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey, and produced by me and Tilt Ariser. Visit 500Songs.com. That's 5000-0-the-numbersongs.com. to read transcripts and liner notes and get links to hear the full versions of songs excerpted here.

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