The Tragic Story of the Small Faces
One of the greatest British rock bands of the ’60s never received the recognition or rewards they deserved
I rediscovered the Small Faces in 1973, five years after they disbanded. I’d not realised that my then favourite band the Faces, with Rod Stewart on vocals and Ronnie Wood on lead guitar, was 3/5 of the Small Faces.
I remembered their fantastic pop songs very well as a young child since in 1960s Britain, The Small Faces were serious rivals to The Rolling Stones, The Who, and The Kinks although The Beatles were in their own league, of course.
Unable to get enough of The Faces and having bought everything they’d ever recorded to that point, I went back into the Small Face’s back catalogue. There was an independent record store near my college in North London, not too far from where Rod Stewart came from. Remember, this was the days before Amazon and online specialist record stores.
The North London store stayed open late so after the end of the college day around 5pm, I’d to the store to hunt for Small Faces records. They bought and sold secondhand records so the stock changed a fair bit. They also sold import discs so I bought the US import of Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake there for some reason.
This wasn’t a great idea since the UK album sleeve was in the form of a round tobacco tin whereas the US version was the standard square cover.
I had a lot of discs to collect from the store because the Small Faces had fourteen hit singles and five hit albums in the UK plus commercial success across mainland Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.
They were, however, the only major British rock band to have little success in the USA during the ‘British Invasion’ of the ‘60s.
We are the Mods
The Small Faces were Ronnie Lane, Kenney Jones, Ian McLagen and former child actor, Steve Marriott. Along with the Who and the Kinks, the Small Faces represented the British Mod youth subculture of the era.
The Mods wore sharp Italian suits and short hair and rode Italian motorscooters.
The Mods’ scooters were ornately decorated with lights, pennants, and British symbols, especially the Union flag and British Royal Airforce roundels. Music formed an important element of the Mod culture.
The term ‘Face’, meant a well-dressed, good-looking Mod. The group added Small to their name since the four members were all under five foot five inches tall. The Mod culture came from London as did the Small Faces, three of them from my homeland of East London.
Lead singer Steve Marriot was sometimes photographed in the football shirt of my team, East London’s West Ham United. It’s no wonder the Small Faces became one of my favourite rock bands even after they’d split up.
The conflicts
Management conflicts
Now I had a new passion, I explored their history. I found that the Small Faces had signed a management contract with Don Arden in 1965; Arden was Sharon Osbourne’s father and he had a reputation for being a hard man.
Despite the band’s enormous UK commercial success, it’s reported that Arden paid them just £20 a week (around $50 at that time) plus a clothing allowance.
Their attempts to find out their true royalty earnings were repulsed by Arden and it took the band three years to break away from him. They only received their due royalties following a series of lengthy court battles, by which time two of the band were dead.
Musical conflicts
There were also continuous tensions over their musical direction within the band, especially over songwriting credits and what the other members called Marriott’s Lead Singer Syndrome — acting as if he were the most important person in the band.
The Small Faces often released catchy rock-pop singles but their preferred music taste was for a harder US-style R&B.
Problems came to a head when their record company released a song without their agreement. They’d written and recorded Lazy Sunday Afternoon as a joke during a light-hearted studio session.
Marriot had sung Lazy Sunday in a strong East London Cockney accent and used London slang throughout the song. It was a great song and a major UK hit but the jokey singing style and lyrics damaged their attempts to be taken more seriously.
Marriott quit the band during a live gig in 1968, announcing to the audience he’d had enough before walking off. He went on to form Humble Pie with Peter Frampton and experienced similar royalty problems.
Steve Marriot was the lead guitarist and lead singer and he was eventually replaced by Rod Stewart on vocals and Ronnie Wood on guitar. They dropped the ‘Small’ as Stewart and Wood were tall and became just The Faces.
They Faces were to break up yet again in 1975 when Rod Stewart also succumbed to Lead Singer Syndrome after tasting far more success with his solo albums. He left to go solo and Ronnie Wood joined the Rolling Stones, a band he was already playing for before before the official split.
The Small Faces reformed in 1978, without Lane, and released two albums without commercial success. They split up for the final time.
American failure
The Small Faces never broke the US. One problem was that pianist Ian McLagen had a minor drug conviction in England and couldn’t get a visa for the US.
It’s unlikely that their inability to tour the US was the only reason behind their failure there. Despite their many classic rock-pop songs, the Small Faces were idiosyncratic, quintessential Cockney working-class boys. Apart from Lazy Sunday, they recorded several amusing English music hall-style songs in Cockney accents, such as Rene The Dockers’ Delight, Happy Days Toytown and Donkey Rides a Penny a Glass (?).
The US import album I bought in that North London Record store called Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake was a psychedelic rock concept album narrated between tracks by a popular British comedian called Stanley Unwin. Unwin was popular in the UK for using a deliberately corrupted form of English that was, nonetheless, strangely intelligible to British audiences.
His narration was largely unintelligible elsewhere which didn’t help record sales outside the UK.
The Small Faces strong British musical style and humour were especially not a good fit for the US market.
Itchycoo Park was their only US hit, a catchy pop tune that reached number 16 in 1967. This was also a psychedelic rock song but was about a park they used to hang out in near their homes in East London. It was the nickname they used for the park since it was full of stinging nettles that irritated the skin if you touched them.
True to their sometimes argumentative way, writers Steve Marriot and Ronnie Lane disagreed on which park in East London the song was about when interviewed later.
The end
Steve Marriott
Steve Marriott’s vocal and musical influences were mainly US R&B singers such as Otis Redding, Booker T, and Ray Charles. His vocal style influenced many later British singers, such as Robert Plant and Paul Weller. He’s considered one of the UK’s greatest blues-style singers.
He was also a good guitarist who had a trial with the Rolling Stones after the departure of Mick Taylor. Apparently, Mick Jagger rejected him after Marriott also wanted to sing. Two artists with lead singer syndrome was never going to work.
Marriott eventually became disillusioned with the music industry and retired to playing small clubs and bars in his local area around Essex and East London. He died in 1991 in a fire at his home after falling asleep with a cigarette in his hand. An autopsy found alcohol, valium and cocaine in his blood.
Ronnie Lane
Ronnie Lane left the Faces before they split up to form Slim Chance, a touring folk-rock-country band. The band had several UK hits, such as How Come and The Poacher, but suffered from financial difficulties due to the complicated format of the tours. Lane decided he wanted to go to towns around the UK that had no concert venues so he went on tour with a large circus-style tent. It never worked.
He also recorded critically acclaimed albums with Pete Townsend and Eric Clapton.
Lane was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1977. With little money due to the Small Faces royalty issues and the Slim Chance failures, his medical care was funded by his musical friends, Rod Stewart, Ronnie Wood, and Jimmy Page. His health deteriorated and he died in 1997.
Ian McLagen
Ian McLagen was a highly respected keyboard player who, following the demise of the Faces, continued to record and work as a session musician until his death from a stroke in 2014 aged 69.
McLagen worked with the Rolling Stones, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, Lucinda Williams, Jackson Browne and many others.
He moved to Austin Texas with his wife Kim Kerrigan who had left Who drummer Keith Moon for him. Kerrigan was killed in a road accident in Austin in 2006.
Kenney Jones
The only surviving member of the Small Faces at the time of writing. Jones joined The Who as their drummer in 1978 and played with them for ten years. He has also played on many recordings for other artists such as The Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, Chuck Berry, Joan Armatrading and Paul McCartney.
The Small Faces Legacy
The Small Faces back catalogue consists of some of the greatest British pop music of the 1960s and has a pride of place in my vinyl record collection alongside The Beatles and The Stones.
Their music continues to influence rock and pop music in the UK, including the mid-’90s Brit Pop phenomenon and bands such as Blur, Oasis and Pulp.
Paul Weller, Led Zeppelin, The Sex Pistols, The Smiths, Aerosmith and the Raspberries have also all cited the Small Faces as a major influence on their music.
Now see what the Small Faces could do with one of their greatest songs, Tin Soldier with PP Arnold on backup vocals.