FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
Small Faces - Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake
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I have not done a Vinyl Corner…
IN THIS PHOTO: Small Faces in 1968/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz
for a while now, so I thought it was time to return! One of the best albums of the 1960s, Small Faces’ Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake is a Psychedelic classic. Released on 24th May, 1968, it is one of the defining albums of that era. Not that The Beatles dominated the 1960s, but I often look at albums released around the time of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (May 1967) as the most influential Psychedelic album of the period. Small Faces, like The Beatles, were an English band. I do think there was a difference in style and scope between English and American bands when it came to Pop and Psychedelia in the 1960s. Led by the late great Steve Marriott, Small Faces’ third studio album is often seen as their very best. Consisting of two distinct sides, the first is a selection of songs of different styles. The second is called Happiness Stan, and it is a concept suite. The boy in the concept is Happiness Stan, and there are six songs interlinked with narration provided by comic monologuist and performer Stanley Unwin in his unique, nonsensical private language of ‘Unwinese’. I am going to come to a review for the magnificent Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake. The song the album is best known for is Lazy Sunday. One of the finest songs ever, that is not the only pearl to be found! Go and own this album on vinyl, as it is a remarkable thing to listen to! Before coming to a review, Louder Sound told the story of Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake in a great and insightful feature from last year. I love how Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake is distinctly English. With more groove and attitude than American brands, this was Mod and Psychedelia blended together:
“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”.
I am going to wrap up with a review for Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake. I am aware that many people might not have heard the album or know about Small Faces. This is what AllMusic noted about the 1968 album in their review:
“There was no shortage of good psychedelic albums emerging from England in 1967-1968, but Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake is special even within their ranks. The Small Faces had already shown a surprising adaptability to psychedelia with the single "Itchycoo Park" and much of their other 1967 output, but Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake pretty much ripped the envelope. British bands had an unusual approach to psychedelia from the get-go, often preferring to assume different musical "personae" on their albums, either feigning actual "roles" in the context of a variety show (as on the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album), or simply as storytellers in the manner of the Pretty Things on S.F. Sorrow, or actor/performers as on the Who's Tommy. The Small Faces tried a little bit of all of these approaches on Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake, but they never softened their sound. Side one's material, in particular, would not have been out of place on any other Small Faces release -- "Afterglow (Of Your Love)" and "Rene" both have a pounding beat from Kenny Jones, and Ian McLagan's surging organ drives the former while his economical piano accompaniment embellishes the latter; and Steve Marriott's crunching guitar highlights "Song of a Baker."
Marriott singing has him assuming two distinct "roles," neither unfamiliar -- the Cockney upstart on "Rene" and "Lazy Sunday," and the diminutive soul shouter on "Afterglow (Of Your Love)" and "Song of a Baker." Some of side two's production is more elaborate, with overdubbed harps and light orchestration here and there, and an array of more ambitious songs, all linked by a narration by comic dialect expert Stanley Unwin, about a character called "Happiness Stan." The core of the sound, however, is found in the pounding "Rollin' Over," which became a highlight of the group's stage act during its final days -- the song seems lean and mean with a mix in which Ronnie Lane's bass is louder than the overdubbed horns. Even "Mad John," which derives from folk influences, has a refreshingly muscular sound on its acoustic instruments. Overall, this was the ballsiest-sounding piece of full-length psychedelia to come out of England, and it rode the number one spot on the U.K. charts for six weeks in 1968, though not without some controversy surrounding advertisements by Immediate Records that parodied the Lord's Prayer. Still, Ogdens' was the group's crowning achievement -- it had even been Marriott's hope to do a stage presentation of Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake, though a television special might've been more in order”.
Although it did not do too well in the U.S., Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake did get to number one on the UK Record Retailer LPs Chart. Still a unique and extraordinary album to this day, I would advise anyone to go and get this on vinyl. As I always say, if you cannot afford to, then stream the album and enjoy it that way. I wanted to show my appreciation and fondness for an album that…
TURNS fifty-five next year.