Listen to mother. ‘They looked lovely didn’t they?’
It is the first time in Kay Marriott’s lengthy interview that the Small Faces are mentioned and immediately her mind flashes up their collective beauty, present and correct in a million photographs.
The Small Faces wore the Sixties. Mohair, cotton, leather, PVC, Prince of Wales check, striped shirts, silk shirts, tab-collar shirts, bright neckerchiefs, Madras jackets, suede jackets with large buttons, suede jackets with small buttons, wide belts, striped jumpers of all colours, straight leg trousers with sharp creases, and then there are the shoes.
Good dressing begins with the shoes and the Small Faces might well have invented that rule. Their shoes were always on the button: crocodile skin, basket weave, suede, two-tone, loafers, brogues, always patterned, always striking. Marriott even wore white plimsolls to one photo session. He put them with brown mohair trousers and a green striped jumper, turned to the camera with his shades on and his hair centre parted and posed immaculately.
Clothes play a huge part in this group’s legacy. Clothes made the Small Faces look and act like a tight gang; like brothers in Mod bonded by colour and style.
Consider the footage of Steve, Ronnie and Mac, shot in 1966, coming out of their Pimlico abode, jumping onto a jeep and riding through Victoria.
The camera catches them disembarking from the vehicle, standing outside a clothes shop admiring the goods.
They start mimicking the ’60s comedian Harry Worth’s one and only trick by fooling around with shop window reflections, then, as one, they turn and strut down the street in their Mohair suits and in that one magical moment they look for all the world like the princes of London town.
‘From 1965 to 1967,’ says John Hellier who was there at the time, ‘Steve Marriott was a style icon. You waited to see what he would wear and then you’d go off and try and get it before anyone else.’
‘Steve Marriott turned heads,’ one magazine would later proclaim, ‘when he walked down Carnaby Street wearing a blue silk shirt and white trousers.’
Yet clothes were also the band’s Achilles’ heel. When they signed to Don Arden’s Contemporary Music he put them on twenty quid a week and softened the blow by opening up accounts for them in clothes shops up and down Carnaby Street. On that rare occasion when they weren’t playing or recording or shopping or smoking spliff and taking pills, and they asked how much money they had, they were shown figures, which shocked them. When they complained they heard the same old story – ‘What do you expect? You have spent it all on clothes.’
Indeed, a teen idol magazine reported that in one year alone ‘the Small Faces spent £12,000 on clothes,’ a small fortune.
Don Arden their first manager said it. Tony Calder and Andrew Loog Oldham who took over in 1967 said it too.
‘Ronnie Lane,’ Calder says, ‘would walk into a shoe shop, see a pair of shoes he liked and buy every pair in his size and in every colour. He would wipe the shop out and then he would tell them, send the bill to my record company and the shoes to my house (Small Face Ian ‘Mac’ McLagan disputes this, says Lane was not a big shopper).’
Not that Marriott was too fussed about his bank balance. Throughout his whole life, the anarchist in him kept the same attitude towards money.
‘Steve wasn’t too bothered,’ stated Jenny Rylance his first wife, ‘he just wanted to play and write music, the money or lack of it was totally irrelevant to him. As long as he had enough money to pay the rent he was happy.’
‘He said to me once,’ says Steve’s mother, ‘that as long as I can just keep playing and making music I am the happiest bloke alive.’
From such attitudes do others grow rich.
Like so many musicians of the ’60s, the Small Faces lived in wonderland. They had girls and drugs on tap, clothes shops they could raid without paying, their faces in the papers, classy accommodation, a chauffeur-driven limo, celebrities popping around to see them, TV companies asking them to perform, the radio blaring out their records – why bother with money when you’re so young and everything you want is yours for the taking anyway?
Thus the band and hundreds of their contemporaries paid in full for their time in the magical garden. When it was time to leave, many did so without a penny to their name. Yet other legacies remain.
The Small Faces story reflects the changes in music, clothes and drugs that took place in Britain in the last half of that decade of magic, the Sixties.
At first, the band dressed smart, adored amphetamines and played furious R&B with attitude. So did many others.
Two years later they discovered LSD, applied their Mod sensibility to the prevailing hippie fashions and began adding psychedelia to their music. So did many others.
During their time, the band made three albums. One of them was a near classic, one is regarded as one of the greatest records of the era. Time has not harmed their music. In fact, time has enhanced it. Will we ever hear a record as unique and as powerful as ‘Tin Soldier’ or ‘Afterglow (Of Your Love)’ or ‘Green Circles’ or ‘Get Yourself Together’ or ‘Rollin’ Over’ or ‘I’m Only Dreaming’ from a group barely out of their teens? Doubtful. The odds are long and getting longer by the year.
By the time each member of this band was in their very early twenties, they had notched up over ten top ten hits, spent months in the album charts. It was not bad going for a group whose main struggle was to be taken seriously. And when they failed in that task the Sixties ended and so did they.
***
It began in the J60 music shop, second day of January 1965, halfway through the decade of magic. Jimmy Winston, like most working class kids of the Sixties, was a Mod. He was tall, moody, had a penchant for the girls and a taste for rumbles.
He was older than Marriott by four years and it showed. After all, the gap between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one is so much bigger than the one between thirty-eight and forty-two. He also hated his surname – changed it around a lot.
Marriott smiled at his pretentions. ‘He actually used to call himself James Moody before he started using Winston which was probably in honour of Winston Churchill,’ Marriott would tell John Hellier in 1984. ‘James Moody gives you a picture of the guy; collar up, coat on, shades. But we were too busy being lunatics to take things as seriously as he was.’
At first, Steve looked up to Jimmy who was worldly, dressed well, had respect. On the street these factors matter. But within a band situation different dynamics apply. Leader comes first or he dies. Marriott would quickly rise to Jimmy’s level and then he would topple him. He would topple him because Jimmy Winston threatened to move into his spotlight and as Kay his sister will tell you, that’s the one move you do not make against Steve Marriott, not without expecting a fight.
Originally, Winston wanted to be an actor. He had spent a couple of years at drama school without achieving anything of note. In the week he left, he decided to turn his attention to music.
His family ran the Ruskin Arms pub in Manor Park and Jimmy began compering musical evenings which featured him singing with the resident band. Jimmy was also handy with a guitar – played it well in fact – which is why he was in the J60. He was on guitar business.
Marriott noticed him straight away.
‘I suppose I found Jimmy Winston,’ Marriott told John Hellier. ‘He used to come to the J60 the same way as Ronnie but he was more of a regular. I didn’t know him except from there... the Ruskin Arms was a great pub. I went round the pub once and he was mucking around on guitar. He was proficient on guitar, more so than me at the time. His family were much more well off than mine so he had some decent equipment.’
Music brings the like minded together. Steve and Jimmy talked, shot the breeze.
‘Then, one night, while I was singing in the pub,’ Winston continues, ‘in walked Steve and Ronnie.’
Steve and Ronnie. Marriott and Lane: the heart and soul of the Small Faces; the Yin and the Yang; the one and the two which makes three – the magic number. As local musicians, their paths had crossed many times and they had now drawn close. Both were young musicians, Mods and in love with R&B.
Where Steve was garrulous, a thousand words a minute, Ronnie was laidback, quieter, more reflective. Where Steve was action, Ronnie was thought. Where Steve rushed in, Ronnie strolled. He was a dreamer, a searcher and he adored the little bundle of pure energy known as Steve Marriott.
Consider their TV performances. Every time Steve pulls a funny face or yelps out in sheer joy, Ronnie’s face automatically breaks open and it is a lovely smile, a smile of love.
The other members of the band sometimes grin at Marriott’s behaviour, sometimes grimace. But Ronnie always smiles. Understanding.
‘Ronnie was a lot less aggressive,’ says their later engineer and producer Glyn Johns, ‘he was a milder individual although he wasn’t all bells and whistles. He had an unpleasant side too.’
Ronald Frederick Lane was born on April, 1st, 1946, son of Stanley and Elsie Lane. He went to school in Plaistow, East London, an area thought by many to be upmarket. ‘Don’t believe all that guff about Terence Stamp being a cockney. He was brought up in Plaistow...’
That was Sixties photographer Terence Donovan mocking Stamp, revealing the pecking order within the East End.
At five years old, Lane could strum a ukulele. At sixteen he enrolled in the Lister Technical College in Plaistow. Afterwards, he briefly worked on a fairground in Battersea, South London, and the nomadic lifestyle he was exposed to there would never lose its grip on him.
By the time Ronnie had started visiting the J60 music shop, he and Marriott had already been in some scrapes. Lane worked for Selmer, the music equipment people. One day, Marriott had shown up at his workplace unannounced, looking to blag some free equipment. Lane was amused by his friend’s chutzpah. He picked up a microphone and started announcing to his colleagues, ‘Free PA for Marriott, Free PA for Marriott.’
Lane’s boss was not amused and handed the young Mod his P45. Lane wasn’t that bothered. He had high hopes for the Outcasts, the group he was playing in.
Lane’s closest friend in the band was drummer Kenney Jones. Kenney was a little bit like Ronnie. East End boy, quiet as well, not one to crave the limelight. There was an essential goodness that shone out of Kenney. Still does to this day. He was born a year after Marriott, 16th September, 1948, started playing drums at an early age. He had been introduced to Ronnie via Lane’s brother Stan. They discovered that they had both served in the territorial army. Now Kenney Jones was a little drummer boy.
After his dismissal from Selmer, Ronnie Lane figured that his friend Marriott owed him big time. He and Jones went to visit him one Saturday morning, Lane hoping that Marriott would help make amends for his role in Lane’s sacking by selling him a guitar at a good price.
His plan failed.
The first thing Marriott did was to tell Lane to forget guitar playing. Since the Beatles had crash-landed in the UK from who knew where and turned the world upside down, everyone wanted to be a guitarist. It was a far sharper move to play bass. That way you were never out of work. He then showed Lane a Harmony bass, offered it to him at a really cheap price.
Ronnie said that his father would have to return and sign the HP forms. Marriott said cool and suggested Lane try out the instrument first. Lane plugged in, Jones went behind the drum kit and Marriott pulled out a guitar. The trio played for a bit and Lane agreed to buy the bass.
Soon after this meeting, Lane got back in touch with Marriott. His group the Outcasts had a residency at a pub called the Earl of Derby in Bermondsey, South London. Why didn’t Steve pop down and have a play, a blast? Can’t hurt, can it? Of course not.
‘We got paralytic,’ Marriott recalled. ‘I don’t know if it was nerves or friendship or both but we got paralytic and went onstage. I can’t remember much of it but I think I smashed the piano up or something. I was banging the shit out of it, jumping on top of it.’
After the gig, Ronnie and Kenny and Steve sat outside the Earl of Derby. All were drunk, exhilarated.
The Outcasts were finished. The landlord had sacked them. Marriott’s drunken behaviour was the reason.
For the second time running, Marriott had cost Lane a job.
‘So we said let’s form a band of our own,’ Marriott recalled. Lane happily agreed. So did Jones when he was asked.
‘I know someone else we can get in,’ Marriott told them. He was thinking of Jimmy Winston.
The next day, January 24th, a Sunday, Lane went to Marriott’s family house in Daines Close and Steve Marriott played him Ray Charles and Bobby Bland records.
The boys sat there, captured by the music they were hearing. The thrill of the new ran through both of them, made them shiver with delicious delight.
Now, it was Steve’s turn for a dismissal. After selling Ronnie the Harmony guitar at such a low price, Marriott was given the sack from the J60. Both boys were square now.
Marriott started using his days to travel up West and hang out in the Giaconda cafe on Denmark Street, where all the major music publishers had offices.
‘I’d hang out there because it was like Tin Pan Alley,’ Marriott explained. ‘If people wanted demos made they’d come in and say, “Can anyone play drums?” and someone would say, “Yes, I can.” At least it was a few quid in your pocket. I’d do anything; drums, vocals, harmonicas, backing vocals, guitar, bass, anything. I’d play anything. I don’t really remember any of the things that I worked on, most of it was foul.
‘There were some good writers around like Clive Westlake and another one called Barry Norman who became a producer. They favoured me for singing on their demos so whenever they made them I’d be there. I think these were publisher’s demos, not recordings as such. At the time it didn’t enter my head.’
Marriott was also readying himself for the release of his second Decca single, ‘Tell Me’ c/w ‘Maybe’. It was February 1965, but the disc never appeared and Marriott never mentioned it again. In truth it was a knock-back, a swift kick to the kidneys.
It meant that any dreams he had of making it alone were now over. Still, there was always the band. Or was there?
After a few rehearsals, Marriott began to have conflicting feelings about the other band members’ abilities. Put baldly, Ronnie and Kenney were not up to scratch. They were too young, too inexperienced. Jimmy Winston though was ideal. He not only had good guitar technique but he also brought valuable things to the table. He owned an organ, his parents ran a pub whose upstairs landing they could rehearse in, plus Jimmy’s brother Derek had put his black Mariah van at the band’s disposal.
Yet Marriott had other ideas for the elder man. One day, he suggested that Winston switch to the organ whilst Marriott stayed on guitar.
Winston agreed and Marriott smiled to himself. He had achieved his first ambition. He now played in a group with the exact same line up as the band he so revered, Booker T and the MG’s, writers of classics such as ‘Green Onions’.
‘There was no conflict at all at that early stage,’ Winston recalls. ‘What I liked about that time was that we would get together and just sit around and play acoustically. We didn’t have to set up with 2,000 watts of power. Within just a couple of weeks we were doing a very raw set. There were only about five songs in the set. Apart from our own song. ‘E Too D’, there was stuff like ‘You Need Love’, or ‘Baby, Don’t You Do It’. They all had a certain kind of feel about them.’
That feel Winston refers to is the product of the band’s full-on immersion into rhythm and blues. ‘You Need Love’ was a Willie Dixon composition performed by the blues legend, Muddy Waters. It would later inspire Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’.
‘It was fantastic, I loved it,’ Marriott said of the song. ‘Muddy Waters recorded it but I couldn’t sing like Muddy Waters so it wasn’t that much of a nick. I was a high range and Muddy was a low range so I had to figure out how to sing it. So I did and that was our opening number for all the years we were together. Every time we were on stage that was our opening number, unless we had a short set. That’s where Jimmy Page and Robert Plant heard it. Robert Plant used to follow us around. He was like a fan.’
Meanwhile ‘Baby, Don’t You Do It’ was a Tamla Motown classic written by Holland, Dozier and Holland and recorded by Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, the creme de la creme of Tamla. ‘Shake’ was a classic Sam Cooke song, written and performed by the R&B pioneer who would later be murdered in a motel.
Rhythm and Blues. All over Britain groups were using R&B as the bedrock for their music. The Stones, Them, the Animals, the desire to sing like an R&B man and play fiery music was irresistible.
In March, Marriott was still not convinced of the band’s worth. He secretly auditioned for a group named The Lower Third. His indecision was hardly surprising.
‘What you have got to remember,’ Winston states, ‘is that when we first met we had no pre-history. Steve and Ronnie had not known each other for too long. It’s not as if you’ve known somebody from school, it was all absolutely fresh. My energy was with Steve because he was very similar to me in a way. He had a lot of drive, a lot of attitude and there were a lot of things he wanted to do. With great respect to Ronnie and Kenney they were slower and just coming out of their shell. Me and Steve had both been at it for a few years to find something that would carve into a career. Our energies were definitely higher so in a way we fascinated each other.’
The Lower Third were unable to see Marriott’s potential. They gave the spot to a young singer-songwriter called Davey Jones who would later became David Bowie and, just for good measure, he too would plunder ‘You Need Loving’ by the Small Faces, nicking the distinctive rhythm for his huge 1972 hit single, ‘Jean Genie’. On a recent VH1 documentary called Storytellers David Bowie tells the tale about himself and his good friend Steve Marriott’s plans to form an R&B group in 1964 to be called ‘David and Goliath’. Bowie was presumably David leaving Steve as Goliath!
***
One grey weekday Ronnie Lane popped into the Giaconda cafe on London’s Denmark Street to see Steve Marriott. Lane was now running errands for the Home Office and that day carried with him a brown tube. Naturally, Marriott had to see what was inside it.
‘We opened the tube and it was stuff like intricate diagrams of a nuclear submarine,’ he revealed, ‘Polaris submarine bases is what it was. Of course, it had brown sauce all over it by the time we had rolled it back up.’
Later both musicians briefly shared the same day job at a Lyons Corner House cafe in Baker Street, central London.
‘I was only there a couple of days,’ Marriott said, ‘four I think. I got pissed off with it. My hands went all brown and the skin started falling off them because of the bleach they used to wash up with.
‘I used to have to wash the plates and Ronnie would rack them and push them through a shower. It was a nightmare – a conveyor of eggs and bacon. I think we got eight quid a week. Ronnie stayed on to get his week’s wages but I pissed off. I couldn’t handle it. There was this mad Scotsman who used to go round with a knife all the time and this other mad woman who used to turn on all the gas taps and just giggle. The Scotsman would pick up a carving knife and yell, “I’ll fucking kill the bitch” and go after the one who turned on the taps. It was fucking mad.’
Despite his acute resistance to mindless work, Marriott needed money. He had again left home and was now living in a flat in Loughton, Essex, with friends including one Mick O’Sullivan. He was also seeing a girl named Annabella who Winston had first introduced to him.
Despite the age gap, Jimmy and Steve maintained a friendly relationship. The pair would often visit Winston’s girlfriend Annie at her flat in Kensington. She shared it with a girl named Wanda and the boys would spend the night smoking dope, listening to music or spoken comics. It was here that Marriott first heard the work of the comedian Lord Buckley whose comical stories were filled with hip druggy references. One of his pieces was called ‘Here Comes Da Nazz’. In later life, that phrase would be plundered for a record entitled ‘Here Come The Nice’. Annie proved useful in other areas.
‘I don’t know if she had the readies or not,’ Marriott said of her, ‘but she signed the HP agreement for me, God bless her, which allowed me to get a Marshall amp – the old ones with the big cooker knobs on it. It was massive for those days. We were notoriously loud – if you can’t play, play loud.’
It was Annie, too, who gave the band their name after watching their very first show at the Kensington Youth Centre in East Ham on Thursday, May 6th, 1965.
‘You’ve all got such small faces,’ Annabella said to the band after the gig. She had been in the front row watching them and that was her strongest impression of the band. Small Faces. The phrase had a contemporary resonance. ‘Faces’ was a term applied to the Mod elite, those who rigorously kept themselves above the rest in terms of attitude and fashion. The small part of the title provided a nice humorous angle.
Small Faces? All agreed? All agreed.
The band’s debut show had been arranged by Marriott. He had experienced little problem in persuading the hall’s owner to let them perform there – mostly because youth nights were run by fan and former Moments fanzine editor, Stuart Tuck.
After watching their debut gig, not only did Tuck invite the group to play the next night at the venue but he also asked them to perform at his wedding reception.
‘Basically,’ Marriott recalled, ‘we formed for Bar Mitzvahs and weddings. Any chance to play. Not trying to make it, just to have a laugh.’
It’s an important quote. Twenty-five years later he would be using it to rigorously defend his position as the leader of a pub band.
As the band’s equipment was stored at the flat in Loughton, and the van wasn’t available that day, the band persuaded Tuck to move his reception to their flat in Loughton. The resulting reception was a rowdy drunken affair. The band played like demons and at some point in the night the bride managed to throw herself over the first floor balcony. She escaped serious injury.
It was that kind of night.
Before departing on honeymoon, Tuck again phoned his friend Maurice King at his Starlight Rooms club in Paddington. On Tuck’s strong recommendation, King agreed to book the Small Faces for two afternoon shows on Sunday, May 16th, 1965.
The group spent the preceding week rehearsing at both the Kensington Youth Centre and the Ruskin Arms. On Tuesday and Thursday night they performed for the Ruskin Arms regulars as a warm up before travelling to Paddington on the Sunday to play the Starlight Rooms, nerves running through them, excitement crawling up the spine.