Two sets, two shows. Once more, the band impresses and once more the baton is passed on. Maurice King now picks up the phone and calls a friend of his in Sheffield. The name of the friend is Peter Stringfellow. His club is called the Mojo. It is Mod central in that city.
King insists to Stringfellow that he should book this new act he’s just worked with. They would be perfect for his club.
A date is arranged, Saturday, May 22nd. As the band is travelling north, a couple of other dates are also put on, one in Manchester, one in Sheffield.
Their first ever tour.
The band rehearse all week. On Thursday they pack the van with guitars, amps, bags of clothes and bags of nerves, then they travel to Manchester. With them is roadie Terry Lucas, known as ‘Terry the Egg’.
‘I don’t know where Terry the Egg came from,’ Marriott said. ‘He must have been an acquaintance of mine but he wasn’t a friend.’
The band’s first date is at Manchester’s Twisted Wheel. It is a landmark club.
The Twisted Wheel started life in the early ’60s, mainly playing beat music. In 1964 it booked one Roger Eagle to DJ and he turned the club on its head. Eagle was an apostle and a missionary for the R&B music that was revolutionising Britain and changing young people’s mindsets forever. On his first night at the club Eagle played tunes such as ‘Help Me’ by Sonny Boy Williamson, ‘Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting’ by Charlie Mingus, ‘Tell The Truth’ by Ray Charles and ‘Road Runner’ by Bo Diddley.
Within six months, soul-crazy kids were travelling from all corners of the Isle to hear him play. Most of these kids were Mods. They dressed smart, dropped pills, chewed hard and danced like dreams. Black music was their religion. It articulated their thoughts and it swayed their groins. Sometimes it achieved both feats simultaneously. That was R&B at its very best and the Twisted Wheel was the Small Faces kind of club. Souled up and Modded out.
So how devastating was it for them to be turned down and turned away by this Mecca of northern Modernism? Because that’s exactly what happened, according to Philip Adabi, one of the club’s owners.
He told Keith Rylatt and Phil Scott, authors of the book Central 1179 that the Small Faces were ‘the worst band we had ever seen at the Wheel.’
Adabi added that he walked out after hearing just two songs at a Friday afternoon audition. He remembered he gave them a pound for petrol and then packed them off to Sheffield.
Marriott remembered things somewhat differently. He told John Hellier, ‘In Manchester, we played the Twisted Wheel – that was the first gig on the trip. Some bastard lent our black Mariah van for an hour and came back with a load of fucking leather coats in the back – done a job. Me and Ronnie and Kenney all got leather coats out of it. Done a job like when we were playing and we really enjoyed playing there.
‘I think it was Terry who suggested that these people use our van. I think he was driving it, said he wouldn’t be gone long, probably got paid a bit of whack. Anyway, we finished the set and the van still wasn’t back and we were out there waiting for it when it screeches around the corner and someone yells, “Get in, get in!” So we piled in the back and it’s up to here in leather coats. We screamed around to some bird’s house and they were getting the coats out and bundling them up. They said. “Take a coat, anything you want.” It was a great coat, had a belt and buttons.’
Kay, his sister, would remember the garment years later.
‘I remember [Steve] bringing it home and stuffing it under the bed and laying on it to crumple it up ’cuz [he] said it looked like plastic, it was so new and thick.’
The band travelled to Sheffield. The venue was a small working man’s club, the gig a disaster. The crowd were the elderly bingo brigade and, for some reason, not particularly fussed by the idea of four groundbreaking young London Mods fusing together raw R&B with a powerful attitude. There were exceptions, though.
Steve Marriott: ‘While we were playing, all these old members were shouting out at us. But I do remember this one old girl. I said, ‘I’d like to do a number by James Brown,’ and this old woman – to me she seemed old, she must have been about forty – started screaming. She loved it. She was hip so we kind of played to her, the only one in the audience who knew what we were doing. And the manager just slung us off after three numbers, paid us off and told us to piss off. That was Sheffield.’
No, it wasn’t. That was the first night in Sheffield. The second day the band were told by the Mojo club that their date had been put forward a night but extra accommodation would be paid for. The band hung around town all day and then, as early evening arrived, went down to the Esquire Club, asked if they could perform there.
‘The Esquire was a very sort of trendy blues club,’ Marriott states. ‘It was where American blues acts would play when they came through. The audience was sort of ex-beatnik, still had the shades and the plastic macs.’
The band did themselves a kind of justice in front of this more demanding crowd and the next day went on to play the Mojo, a gig which would put all bad memories behind them.
‘It was a great club, ‘Marriott says of the Mojo. ‘Really was. It was like Ready Steady Go! or something, a very appreciative crowd. I think we only played the one gig until we had a hit record. It wasn’t very long after that we hit. Suddenly, we were their band. It was like they discovered us so they went crazy when we went back there. It was a special place for us because of the crowd. They gave us an even break which no one else was willing to do. Fond memories of Sheffield.’
He’s not the only one.
‘They went down an absolute storm,’ says Stringfellow, ‘One of my first memories of Stevie was that I used to live above the Mojo club and after their gig we went upstairs to my apartment as it was called in those days, and we played to them music that had been written by Mark Townsend from one of the local groups, the Cadillacs. Anyway, after that night I put in three bookings on them at pretty low prices. The second time they came they had a record at near number one and they packed the place solid. Steve was very much a people’s guy. He would talk to the audience which is what they wanted. He wasn’t just going, here’s the next number but he would talk to them in his Cockney accent which they loved and therefore they took to him and the rest of the boys. He had a phenomenal voice. Out of that little frame came this huge voice. He was unique. Then as they became massive they kept this friendliness about them which is why everyone loved them.’
The Wheel fiasco now forgotten, Marriott and his boys returned to London in a positive frame of mind. They rehearsed all week long and then, on the Saturday, Marriott travelled across town to appear at the New Musical Express stand at the Battersea Park Festival Gardens where he signed a few autographs.
Then, later that day, as arranged, he and Terry The Egg met up in the West End and went to see the manager of the Cavern In The Town Club in Leicester Square, (now the Notre Dame Hall).
Their mission was to convince the manager to book them, a tricky task given that he had never heard them play before. The turning point in the discussion came when Marriott was asked how many songs they performed in their act. Five came the reply.
Not really enough, the manager opined. We would need at least two more songs. No problem, came his eager, lying reply, we actually have a few numbers as back up.
Good, said the manager, you can play tonight. Marriott rushed back home, returned with the three other Small Faces. It was Saturday, May 29th, 1965.
Maurice King came down that night to see the band play. He was not there for kicks. He was there to ascertain the band’s management status.
When he came backstage after their performance and asked if they had a manager, Marriott played him beautifully.
‘Yeah, we’re still kind of sussing it out,’ the up and coming songwriter replied. ‘Here, any chance of using your rooms for rehearsing this week?’
Put on the spot like that, King could hardly refuse. It would prove to be a significant rehearsal. During it, the Small Faces shot up to a whole new level and it was drummer, Kenney Jones who took them there
‘I never thought Kenney was that good up to that point,’ Marriott revealed. ‘He was okay but I didn’t realise that it was the material that he was playing. He set his drums up and he went berserk. For about half an hour he made me and Ronnie kill ourselves laughing. We were giving him the encouragement, “Go on my son,” and he really opened up. It was like a different drummer. It really was an eye opener and after that there was no looking back. Every song we did swung like Hanratty. It was like a revelation. We just couldn’t believe it.’
Marriott and Jones maintained an easy-going relationship for most of their time together. Jones was a quiet man, the most reserved member of the band, and in some senses easy pickings for Marriott’s brand of send-up humour.
In truth, Marriott felt an affinity with the drummer, had done so since the day they met and Jones took one look at him and told him that they had already met in a dream of his. In it, Jones explained, Marriott and Lane performed on the TV show Thank Your Lucky Stars.
‘It sounds ridiculous,’ Marriott pondered, ‘but Kenney’s too sort of straight to make anything up like that. The Small Faces were a fated group.’
They were a fated group but not always in the benevolent way that Marriott refers to here. Senseless deaths, unpaid royalties, the history books tampered with, all this and more would play a large part in the band’s history.
In the early days, however, luck came to stand by their side for just as Kenney Jones was shedding all inhibitions and taking the band up a gear with his powerful assaults on the drums, into the Starlight Rooms walked a young woman, there to see Maurice King. The woman worked as a secretary to a manager called Don Arden.
‘A chick from Arden’s office spotted us, his secretary. She just happened to be around,’ Marriott said. ‘I’d seen her before at the Starlight Rooms. King might have been managing Elkie Brooks ’coz she used to be there a lot. I used to get up and sing with her sometimes and that chick had seen me down there too.’
As the girl waited for King, her attention was increasingly diverted towards the four good-looking boys rehearsing. On returning to Arden’s office at 55 Carnaby Street, she went straight to his office to alert him of a new talent in town. Don Arden listened with his usual interest and then followed his usual pattern. He sent his henchmen, Ron King and Pat Meehan to check it all out.
***
Where there’s gold, there’s rogues.
Rolling Stone guitarist Keith Richards once said of the music business, ‘I’d rather deal with the mafia.’ You can see where he is going. With the Bada Bing boys, at least you know what the deal is. At least, you know where you stand. It is the pretence of the music biz to be a business of fair and scrupulous practice that is the most painful for those who work in it.
For the musicians, the best-ever record company was Frank Sinatra’s Reprise label. Artists were signed for one album whose copyright they owned, not the record company. The royalty rate Sinatra set was laughed at by the music business but was in fact fair and proper. Plus, the costs were evenly divided.
Apart from Reprise and a couple of other labels, the music business remains unparalleled in its constant ability to crack open human lives and leave the blood on the doorstep, dripping outside their black windowed buildings for all to see.
The suited and booted sharks first moved in with the arrival of rock’n’roll in the mid-50s. They called themselves managers but acted like minor gangsters. They would take talent and exploit and exploit and exploit and then they would steal and lie and cajole. They would realise for so many young working class people the dreams they never thought would be theirs, but they would make sure to take their slice of the action before anyone else. And what a slice it was.
In their abject gratitude, singers allowed the shysters to take massive advantage. Soon the pattern was set. You did things their way or you simply didn’t do anything: your choice.
For Steve Marriott, Don Arden was inevitable really. Marriott recognised his game from the start but he didn’t really give a fuck. He told the New Musical Express in 1984, ‘Look, you go into it with your eyes open and as far as I was concerned it was better than living on brown sauce rolls. At least we had twenty quid a week guaranteed. In those days it was great, you could hold your head up with your mum and dad.’
Arden certainly knew the ropes, knew them back to front in fact. By the time he had been alerted to the Small Faces, he had cut his own records, worked as a comedian/compere, tried to save Gene Vincent’s career from alcoholic abuse (he failed) and taken the Nashville Teens into the charts. His acts didn’t sign to record companies, they signed to him. His company then did the deal with any interested record company.
Arden was a first in pop management. Before, managers had merely been slimy, pretended to love their act. Arden was never that. He was a brusque, no nonsense guy who told his acts he would exploit them for all they were worth. Literally. He could do so for he knew the value of angles. That’s why he sold himself to the world as the ‘Al Capone of Pop’.
Under that very title, he told the News Of The World in 1966, ‘I’m a success because I found out that a clenched fist can settle an argument faster than wrangling in court. And I’ve even had my men waving guns about to scare the daylights out of a business rival and produce quick results. That’s how I came to be known as the Al Capone of pop. Let’s get it straight right from the start. I am damned proud of my sumptuous Mayfair office and my Georgian mansions. In an industry riddled with drug addicts, homosexuals and hangers-on, I’m one of the few real men left.’
After receiving rave reports from Meehan and King, Arden came to the Cavern Club to see for himself if his boys were on the case.
The night before he arrived at the Cavern Club, the Small Faces rehearsed at the Ruskin Arms. Afterwards, to save money, Steve and Ronnie decided to walk from East Ham to Loughton.
‘We got on a bus for the last mile or two as we were a bit exhausted and it was freezing cold,’ Marriott recalled, ‘We were standing on the platform at the back of the bus and there’s this guy standing next to us – we don’t know him from Adam – and he’s telling someone who’s following him to fuck off. He gets off the bus and runs away and we get off the bus carrying on talking and this van follows us with six or seven chaps in it who must have been twenty years old or something – which was old to us.
‘They were like the skinheads. There was us, the Mods, and then as they got older they became these car-driving skinheads with bovver boots. They jumped out of this van and beat the shit out of me with this bottle. They did Ronnie with a piece of wood with a nail in it so he had a hole in his forehead. I’ve still got a scar from the bottle, which I use as a parting. I got into using it as a parting in the front when I had bangs.
‘We were covered in blood, really badly beaten, kicked to bits. Eyes out to here, lips, ears, everything. We found out later that it was some boys from Loughton who had gone down to Tottenham and smashed up a few cafes so this was a return visit. We didn’t know, we had no idea.’
As the boys were being beaten, a concerned couple pulled up in their Volkswagen car. The man wound down his window and shouted at the mob to stop. They turned, took one look and then rushed over to the car and began jumping all over it. The couple drove off in sheer panic and the mob returned to finish off Marriott and Lane.
‘Ronnie by this time had disappeared up the road while they were jumping on this Volkswagen,’ recalled Marriott. ‘So they only had me to beat up. They left me for dead.
‘I remember Ronnie coming back to see if I was alright. I was floored, on the ground and he’s got this hole in his head, blood spouting out everywhere and in the shock, we couldn’t stop laughing about it to each other. The shock of being that badly beaten, nothing but blood and we were blowing bubbles and laughing about it. This Volkswagen came back and they took us off to the Woodford hospital.
‘We were covered in blood and we were still laughing from shock and this nurse came out and I’ll never forget the line, she said, “Be quiet, this is a hospital,” which hurt us that much more because we couldn’t stop laughing again.
‘They were saying it was a maternity hospital and we didn’t have any right to be there. That was really bad. If anyone’s that badly beaten they need a bit of attention. the least they can do is clean me up for fuck’s sake. So this man and woman – I’ll never forget them either – took us to their own doctor.
‘We used to wear these little polo necks under our shirts. We used to call them bring me downs ’cos if you stripped off in front of a chick they were a right bring me down and I remember me and Ronnie wringing our bring me downs under the tap and they were full of claret.
‘And the next day we were playing the Cavern Club and Don Arden was going to be there. It was fucking hilarious. Every time Ronnie hit a high note, his stitches would open and the blood would be running down. My face looked like a gargoyle – two black eyes, very fat lips, stitched up head. [Pause] They liked us apparently.’
In fact, Arden thought the boys’ wounds were part of their stage act.
The Small Bloodied Faces, what a great idea.
I’ll sign this bloody lot.
***
The Cavern Club gigs marked the turning point in the band’s career. They played the club five Saturdays running and in doing so established the group’s name and earned themselves a much-valued recording contract.
‘We had that place packed after the first time,’ Marriott explained, ‘It was like there was a new band in town. Kit Lambert came down to see us and got a lot of flak from the Who because he was going to take us on at one point. I think every organisation must have come down at some point.’
After their debut at the club, Ronnie Lane had drawn a picture of a Mod on a scooter with the band’s name behind him on a small blackboard and placed it outside the gig. The club was soon packed with Mods. Marriott meanwhile was busy creating his own bit of mayhem.
‘I can’t remember if I hit the traffic warden or not,’ he told John Hellier, ‘or if I had just words with him. I think I hit him or shoved him. We were trying to load up the van,’ he explained, ‘and he was telling us to piss off and eventually we had to push his ass out. See, by the time you had walked up all those stairs carrying a Marshall cabinet you didn’t feel like arguing about anything.
‘The Cavern was a nice place,’ Marriott continued. ‘Curtains, nice high stage, the whole fucking gear. It was one of the nicest places we played. I don’t think it had a bar in those days. I remember when we were down there we thought we had invented words like “spliff”, because we had heard it off the guys we got our stuff off, Nigerians or Jamaicans or whatever. We had a number called “Pass The Spliff”, and all these guys in the audience would crack up. We thought it was our word, our “in” word.’
Yet not everyone was enamoured with the band’s performances. Lloyd Johnson, a man who would later make his name significant in the rag trade, was a Mod who worked at Cecil Gee’s large shop on Charing Cross Road. The branch was just up the road from Covent Garden and the hip shoe shop Annello and Davide.
‘All the bands used to go there and get their boots,’ Johnson recalls, ‘and then get a lot of their gear either from Cecil Gee’s or a place called David’s on Shaftesbury Avenue. The bands always used to give us tickets because we were the same age as them and that’s what happened with the Small Faces. I can’t remember who came in but they said, “We are playing the Cavern club, do you want to come?”
‘I remember going there and they looked absolutely brilliant but I left the gig early. I was with a mate of mine, a Dutch guy I was working with, and the band had a Hammond organ and the sound was just hitting the absolutely shambolic so we just went home.’
***
Stuart Tuck, Maurice King, they had all put themselves forward in their own little way as prospective managers. But Marriott knew the business and knew it better than most seventeen-year-olds, including his band.
Don Arden was their man. He knew how to blow life into dreams, turn that which only existed in the mind into reality. For Steve Marriott, there was no contest. Arden was their man. Matter closed.
‘He was an excellent manager,’ Marriott told Hellier in 1984, ‘excellent.’
‘He was a friendly sort of rogue in his own way,’ Jimmy Winston recalled to John Hellier. ‘We were very young and gullible and he kinda looked like what we were looking for.’
Arden, in turn, would grow to like his new proteges.
‘And just to prove that the Al Capone of the pop world has a soft spot,’ he boasted in the News of the World sometime later, ‘let me tell you I felt these kids should have at least one year of enjoying the very best in life. After all, they had been hungry in their time.’
One year of the very best in living. At eighteen years of age, to be given a year of the very best was amazing,
As Marriott himself would say, Nice, extremely nice.
Or so it seemed.
***
1965, it was a very good year.
The writer Richard Williams states simply, ‘In 1965, things changed fast.’
Author Simon Wells fully agrees with him.
‘What takes a year to change now took a day in the Sixties,’ he says. Even the Times writer, Bernard Levin, couldn’t ignore how life had speeded up to almost unimaginable levels.
He wrote of this epochal decade, ‘Fashions changed, changed again, changed faster and still faster: fashions in politics, in political style, in causes, in music, in popular culture, in myths, in education, in beauty, in heroes and idols, in attitudes, in responses, in work, in love and friendship, in food, in newspapers, in entertainment, in fashion.’
Music led the way. The Beatles, Dylan, the Stones, all of the top boys were making audacious moves, taking on risks, all of them hell-bent on seeing where their art would lead them to.
A different sensibility dominated Sixties music. Where today an innovation is relentlessly copied, back then an innovation was the spur for the others to take similar leaps of faith and imagination. They used a sitar on their latest record? Shit. I know, we’ll go for feedback.
Thus pop progressed in so many new and exciting ways.
Yet pop is also a hard taskmaster. It does not always reward the talented, the risk takers. It establishes a hierarchy, creates a history that many abide by. There is a line that can be taken with the Sixties, a line which takes you through the usual names and careers of those who have become synonymous with the decade of magic.
John, Paul, Mick, Keef, Bob, Quant, Bailey, Stamp.
But there are deeper seas to trawl, others of equal importance to meet and greet.
Just for starters, Lindsay Anderson, Berry Gordy, James Brown, Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle, Hayes and Porter, Freddie Scott, the writer Joan Didion, the film Bronco Bullfrog, the clothes man John Simons, the actor and writer Patrick McGoohan.
These men and women of creation were just as important, just as vital to the spirit of the time as anyone else, but like the Small Faces they would find their work hidden, their stories misrepresented.
Mod was no different to this process. Mod finished in 1963. The originals saw Ready Steady Go! and decided too many seven and sixers knew the game. Time to mourn the Mohair. Yet to this day mention Mod and people’s mind instantly flash to 1965 and fights with rockers on Brighton beach.
In his book The Sixties, the academic Arthur Marwick pinpoints 1954 as the year the Sixties started, 1974 as the year it died. In The Neophiliacs, Christopher Booker goes further; he states that during this period Britons actually experienced a mass hallucination. This was the only explanation for the eruptions that took place almost daily as the country was turned on and then turned on its head.
For the first time, the young were allowed to take the spotlight. There was talk of a meritocracy, the Lords mingling with the loud as all of them got high, got laid.
The Prime Minister (Number Two) gave the Beatles (Number One) medals. Bailey the working class boy started working at Vogue. Caine and Stamp made their names at the cinema. Gritty working class dramas became all the rage. The illusion that all the barriers were down was created. Everything was up for grabs and anybody could make it...
That’s what Harold Wilson, the PM said. Funnily enough, it’s still being said today.
In the ’60s everyone was talented but not everyone was lucky.
And luck, said Steve Marriott, was exactly what was shining on the Small Faces the day Don Arden got involved in their affairs.