Premier Rock Forum

The BBC Sessions disc is a scorcher. `Lazy Sunday' misses but the rest is crazy heavy mod soul. Enjoy.

PWP wrote:The BBC Sessions disc is a scorcher. `Lazy Sunday' misses but the rest is crazy heavy mod soul. Enjoy.

This seems like sound advice to me. I didn't even know about this one.

My honest to goodness tip (on top of this one) would be to get a cheap and nasty singles comp on cd - you see them around for a fiver, or even less. If you're lucky you'll get the mono stuff and you can rock.

I don't mean to be too down on Ogden's... - it's really a decent album, and does have Rollin' Over on it, one of their finest songs. I mean, I think they only have about four albums, and they're pretty much all good. They're a difficult band to go far wrong with.

If the Small Faces had carried on the way they were heading, Led Zeppelin would have had serious competition.

Fucking brilliant.

And thus not crap.

the small faces are my favorite singles band. from 64 to 69 (roughly) there were what, 14 singles, every single one great. every song great, from the straight up mod rock to some fairly bizarre stuff at the end. the closest for me might be the buzzcocks and they had half that.

Man, I just picked up their first record -- a kick ass CD reissue that I'm really fucking enjoying right now. So cool!

Chapter Two wrote:If the Small Faces had carried on the way they were heading, Led Zeppelin would have had serious competition.

I think that Humble Pie, at their best, did give Zeppelin a run for their money.

But that's neither here nor there. In my mind's eye--and my head's ears--the Small Faces are not crap.

An excellent band, far from Crap. They are totally Not Crap.

Afterglow is one of the best British soul songs I've ever heard.

A great band, but they had their problems. Inconsistent songwriting, mostly. They were hardly ever bad, but frequently they weren't more than all right: which should be enough, but considering the fact that their peaks (most of the first album, the mid-60's singles like "Tin Soldier" and "Itchycoo Park," the first half of Ogden's Nut Gone Flake) are huge, it really made me wonder why they couldn't concentrate more on tightening up their music. (The Small Faces documentary answered those questions for me: they were too busy dealing with a ludicrous, greedhead shark of a manager at first, and then trying to keep Andrew Oldham's mismanaged Immediate label afloat pretty much all by themselves after that, while Steve Marriott kept getting more and more pissed off that they weren't being taken seriously - talk about pressure...)

They had tons of energy, though, and unquestionably they were the defining Mod band. (The Who had started moving away from the Mod image by the second album. I don't think the Small Faces did.)

Steve Marriott was one of the best vocalists the '60's ever produced. The guy could sing. Marriott's guitar playing, while nowhere near as good from a technical level as, say, Townshend, was nevertheless really exciting, jagged, and loud at its' best - qualities you could also attribute to Kenney Jones' fantastic drum bashing. Ronnie Lane and Ian McLagan really were secret weapons - Lane was, off and on, a great songwriter, and how many other bands could say they had their own R & B piano player and psychedelic organist in one guy? Not that many, if you think about it.

They also made a graceful and fascinating transition to psychedelic music - I doubt Parklife and Modern Life is Rubbish would have existed without them.

They're definitely Not Crap, but they're somewhat dated now in ways that, say, the Beatles aren't, and I do think they didn't have it as together as they could have, but still, that wasn't really their fault.