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A CLASSIC ALBUMS SPECIAL
its 40 year years since The Small Faces' curious Ogden's Nut Gone Flake album captured the spirit of London in 1968.
SMALL FACES Ogden's Nut Gone Flake - Immediate 1968
Produced by Stevie Marriott and Ronnie Lane
Engineers: Various
Studios: Olympic Sound plus various
The Small Faces' frontman Steve Marriott had started out as a theatre brat - he'd been in the stage version of Lionel Bart's 'Oliver' - so when his mod band started to attract more screaming girls than scooter-boys, he ached to move on to something more credible. Manager Don Arden and label Decca weren't interested in the Cockney group going beyond covers in the Motown style so, in 1967, Marriott took his Faces to Immediate, the new label of ex-Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham. Marriott had a soulful raw voice and songs to match and he and co-writer Ronnie 'Leafy' Lane finally got the chance to showcase both as they at last produced exactly what they wanted as the first Summer of Love dawned a year later. It was, of course, a 'concept' album, 'Ogden's Nut Gone Flake', which came complete with a circular cover based on a Victorian tobacco tin. Given months of studio time Marriott and Lane had thrown in everything they could - string sections, crooner impersonations, rubber ducks squeaking, fade-outs that faded back in again, drums that cascaded across the soundstage plus the, then new, effects of heavily distorted and phased guitars. All these pyrotechnics needed an conceptual anchor and they got one in the shape of side two's story of 'Happiness Stan', a post-Tolkien dreamer, and his spaced-out search for the other half of the moon, narrated by gobblegook specialist Professor Stanley Unwin, a one-time Carry On regular. None of which would have added up to much except for the fact that virtually all the album's stoned tracks were stone great. Cuts like the knowing, ravers anthem 'Lazy Sunday' - with it's atmospheric church bells fade-out - and the cheeky happy hooker song 'Rene' created worlds of their own while the hard-rocking 'Rollin' Over' used the kind of rough neo-metal guitars that Led Zeppelin were to make millions with over the next decade. 'Lazy Sunday' reached No.2, helping the 'Odgen's...' set itself reach No.1 only for the group to be told that they still hadn't paid off their advance. The Small Faces grimaced and, disillusioned, spilt before the year's end. But 'Ogdens..' was a fittingly dynamic and influential epitah - with everyone from Paul Weller to Blur to the Arctic Monkeys - as well as being one of the real greats of the Sixties.
Phil Strongman |
