It was a dove-grey Mohair suit with nipped waist and covered buttons. There was an inverted pleat placed at the back of the jacket and the draped trousers had slanted pockets as well as a paisley lining. It was a thing of rare and true beauty and it belonged to a precocious teenager called Andrew Loog Oldham. He had awoken one day and decided to wear this suit instead of his school uniform. Predictably, he ran into trouble.
‘I don’t know why you bother, you only wore it for a day,’ his teacher scolded him as he changed back into his uniform.
And the Mohair boy looked at his teacher and he said to himself with a smile, ‘Yeah, but what a day.’
And that, in essence, was Mod.
***
In 1965, the British recording industry did not understand pop music. For those that ran the show, pop music was a bright tricky little creature whose ways remained a mystery. It was only the young who understood and thus it was only the young who could make it work.
Andrew Loog Oldham was young, also brazen and fearless and very sharp. He was, in author Johnny Rogan’s words, Britain’s ‘first teenage tycoon’.
One of Oldham’s favourite films was The Sweet Smell Of Success, starring Burt Lancaster as a powerful newspaper columnist and Tony Curtis as a conniving PR man. In both their characters, Oldham saw himself.
By the time he was eighteen he had already lived double the life of his peers. He had worked with two of the decade’s greatest lights – Mary Quant and Pete Meaden – and handled press for another, the Beatles.
He wanted to be a pop star, but had had enough self-awareness to realise he would never attain his musical ambitions. Nondescript guys in glasses rarely make it into teenage beds or bedroom walls.
Instead, Oldham blazed his own trail, became the star behind the stars. He found a group, the Rolling Stones, took them over, persuaded John and Paul to write them a hit, then insisted that Mick and Keith now write their own music.
He indulged his Phil Spector fantasies by producing the resulting music and then used the media brilliantly to sell the group as the dark alternative to the sweet Beatles, the guys who had given them a hit in the first place.
‘Anything that has some form of image,’ he told the TV cameras and therefore the nation, ‘I get involved in. I’m a terrible user and a thief.’ Andrew Loog Oldham understood the potential of the media. He dreamt up the headline ‘Would You Let Your Daughter Marry A Rolling Stone?’ and would place ads in the music weeklies extolling the virtues of songs he adored but had no business connection to. The Mamas and the Papas and the Righteous Brothers were just two groups that gained from his enthusiastic benevolence.
In August 1965, again following his hero Spector’s example, he launched his own record company, Britain’s first major independent label. He called it Immediate, a very ’60s word.
The company operated on the classic good-cop-bad-cop principle. Oldham was the good cop, the man with the ideas, the creative soul who could mingle and sympathise with disgruntled musicians.
The bad cop was none other than Tony Calder, the man who had asked to manage Steve Marriott in 1963 and did so with the Moments in 1964. Calder, who had learnt his trade at Decca and so knew the enemy well, was assigned to look after the finances.
Both men wanted the same thing, to establish a company that rivalled the success of the American music publishers, Neven and Kirshner, who operated out of the now legendary Brill Building in New York.
‘They had Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Mann and Weill, Phil Spector and Neil Sedaka,’ Calder says. ‘They would say to the writers, write a song that is between that song and that song. It was absolutely on the button pop music and that was what we wanted. We wanted a music room where people could come and sit down and write with each other.’
In all their offices, a room containing a piano and a Revox amp was always maintained. Many would write there, including Steve Marriott.
Oldham and Calder’s initial business strategy was simple. The company licensed American hits for the UK. At first, the policy worked well. Their first release, the McCoys’ ‘Hang On Sloopy’, went to number one in August.
The next two singles came from the group Fifth Avenue and an intriguing vocalist named Nico. Neither charted, however.
Oldham now developed a separate strategy, persuading Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to write and produce songs for his artists. The duo dutifully began work with new signing, Chris Farlowe, who had a hit with their ‘Out of Time’. It would take a year for the idea to really pay off when the band Twice As Nice took the Jagger-Richards song ‘Sittin’ On A Fence’ into the charts, but a year is a long time to wait. By the end of 1966, the company was not in great shape. Great ideas, little chart action. It was at this time that in his office at 63-69 New Oxford Street, Tony Calder took a call from the agent Tito Burns. The company had moved from their original Ivor Court offices some months previously.
Burns came straight to the point. Did Calder want to buy the Small Faces? Arden wanted them off his hands. They were going cheap. Calder said No, they’re going off the boil. Plus, I don’t want to work with Don Arden. Not that Calder didn’t admire Arden’s methods. He just didn’t want to find himself subject to them.
Burns persisted. With Arden no longer their manager, Immediate could even fulfil that role. Would he at least see Arden? Calder agreed to meet and within ten minutes, Don Arden was sitting in his office. To his surprise, Calder claims, he discovered that the band were not actually signed to Decca but to Arden’s company, Contemporary Records. That made life a whole lot easier. Calder told Arden he would ring Oldham, who was recuperating from his excesses in a nursing home in the country.
‘I said to Andrew, “I don’t want to say anything but they have no direct contract with Decca.” He said, “That means we can put them on Immediate.” I said, “Yeah and the price is twenty-five thousand.”’
Calder goes back to Arden. He needs the band’s signed agreement to the sale. ‘Not a problem,’ Arden replied laughing, ‘That lot will sign anything to get away from me.’
Arden then added an extra proviso; he wanted the money in cash and in a brown paper bag.
‘I remember sending the contracts girl to the house in Pimlico to sign the paper,’ Calder recalled, ‘and she came back and said, “There’s your piece of paper and never ask me to deal with that band again.” I said, “Why not?” She said, “I went to the house and there was marijuana smoke everywhere. I go to the upstairs bedroom, knock on the door and the first thing that Steve Marriott says to me is, “Do you fancy a shag?”’
Phase two of the band’s career had just kicked off.
***
Tony Calder says that Immediate gave the band the best deal of their career to date. For the UK, they were given ten per cent of monies earnt from record sales, five per cent for those sold abroad. Andrew Loog Oldham assumed all managerial duties, although he was in no way the band’s first choice.
‘Me and Ronnie did a bit of teamwork on the shopping for a new manager,’ Marriott revealed to Hellier. ‘We flitted around to a few different things. We were with Robert Wace but that didn’t work out because a band like us needed a lot of attention and they couldn’t give it to us. We also saw Chris Blackwell at Island, but he pointed out that he wouldn’t have the time to give us. Andrew said he could and did.’
It was a fortuitous time for all concerned parties. Here was a band desperate to compete with their contemporaries, to win respect for their creativity. Here was a company amenable to realising that vision.
To do so required a huge scaling down of their concert commitments and much more time spent in the studio. For Loog Oldham and Calder, that scenario was perfect.
‘See,’ Marriott explained, ‘since Oldham had a record company, he didn’t have to work hard as a manager because we were in the studio, we were on his label and under his management. So it suited his purposes much better to have us turning out records he just had to market rather than manage us on the road and have to worry about all that kind of shit.
‘As for us, we loved the opportunity to use all the facilities of the studio.’
Last word goes to the ex-journalist turned PR man, Keith Altham. ‘Andrew did care,’ he states, ‘and he was an enthusiast. See, Don Arden was just like a puppet master. He pulled the strings and the artists danced to his tune. If he got it wrong, he got it totally wrong.’
‘Basically, he was a strong-arm man and he used that reputation, sometimes to good effect and sometimes to extremely bad effect. His artists were just a means to make money for him. He certainly didn’t care about them at all. Andrew could relate to what his artists were doing and, for a while, the Small Faces loved the freedom he gave them in the studio. Unfortunately, after a while Andrew just lost the plot, probably one too many substances and Immediate just went down the pan. It is of my opinion that Andrew did care and meant well. After all, he was a very good manager for the Stones but by the time he took on the Small Faces he was a truly fucked up guy.’
***
The year 1967 begins with the group entering the Olympic recording studios in Barnes for four straight days. On the 6th there is a kind of homecoming gig at the Upper Cut in Forest Gate and then it’s back again into the studio on the 7th until the gig at Purley on the 11th. The band make a hectic dash home to catch new guitar sensation Jimi Hendrix perform at the Bag O’Nails club.
Hendrix remained a fan of the band, could see the cleverness and liked the unexpected touches within their music. More recording follows, then gigs at Chelmsford, High Wycombe, Stevenage, Hull and Stockport.
Meanwhile, the first fruit of the liaison between band and record company is made apparent when Immediate issue singer Chris Farlowe’s version of the Marriott-Lane song ‘My Way Of Giving’ on January 27th (Rod Stewart would later cover the song). The record was produced by Mick Jagger and featured Steve and Ronnie on vocals and guitars. Marriott was a huge fan of Farlowe’s strong voice.
P.P. Arnold, a fellow Immediate artist Marriott had befriended, recalls that, ‘Steve loved his American soul roots but I remember vividly the day he first heard Chris Farlowe. He completely flipped and thought he was the greatest thing England had ever produced. There were even plans afoot [for Steve and Chris] to do an album together. During 1967, Chris Farlowe was Steve’s favourite singer in the whole wide world.’
Marriott was also a great fan of Arnold’s voice as well as her other attributes. In 1967, they would start a relationship which would enable him to write one of his greatest ever love songs.
With the popularity of LSD, the switch of focus to the hippie lifestyle of San Francisco and the birth of the well heeled Chelsea set who now said they too wanted to come out and play, the working class Mod look of ’66 gave way to the hippie look of ’67. The brilliance of Steve Marriott was to take these two opposing fashions and blend them together.
Yes, his hair grew long but never in a scruffy or unruly manner. Yes, he wore flares but velvet crushed ones with frilly shirts and waistcoats. He also wrapped colourful scarves around three button down Grandad vests.
No other band of the time looked like his group. The Beatles had opted for an Edwardian hippie style – round glasses and uniform jackets, moustaches – the Stones had gone for a wasted image that would eventually define the term ‘outlaw chic,’ the Who remained the same, as did the Kinks.
The Small Faces, however, pioneered and developed a new Mod look, still strong today, and one in parallel with their musical ideals. The shape those ambitions took were hinted at when Melody Maker’s Nick Jones attended a December Small Faces recording session.
In the article, Jones meets the band at their Pimlico house. Outside, the occasional screams of young girls huddled by the front door can be heard. In the kitchen, Jones noted, ‘tape recorders, miles of tape all over the place, guitars, speakers and the old piano in a corner. Onto a tape recorder whirled a rough backing track – just drums, bass, piano and guitar.’ The song in question was ‘Green Circles’, a mini psychedelic masterpiece written by Marriott and destined to become one of the jewels in the Small Faces canon.
At eleven, the team depart for the studios, carrying bottles of Napoleon Brandy, ‘guitar cases and other oddments of mystery and imagination’. As they walk into the studios, Jones quotes Marriott as saying, ‘I love this place.’ The band commence recording. When they take a break, Marriott sits next to Jones and tells him ‘Our outlook is one of happiness and well being and this must come through with our music. We are living and we want our music to live as well.’
***
With Arden gone, so too the Pimlico abode.
‘When they moved out of Westmoreland Terrace they left everything there,’ Stan Lane recalls. ‘I’ve never seen so many shoes in my life.’
Steve would now find trouble settling anywhere in London. His habit of listening to music at extremely high levels any time, day or night, would see him ejected from flats all over town.
His rowdy reputation soon spread amongst letting agents. In the end he was forced to use an alias, Fred Smith, when applying for property.
His inability to please his neighbours was picked up by the Daily Sketch. They reported that the pop star had been asked to move house three times within a month. ‘Some people apparently had complained to the agents about noise late at night,’ he told the Sketch reporter, ‘but nobody said anything to me about it.’
Maybe that was because he couldn’t hear them.
***
In late January, a reminder of the risks involved. On Saturday the 28th the band played two shows at the Gilderdrome in Boston, Lincolnshire. Nearing the end of the set, Marriott broke a guitar string. He bent down to fix it and a host of objects thrown from the crowd sailed above him.
One was a heavy glass ashtray which hit Kenney Jones full on the head. The drummer fell to the ground: blood everywhere. Marriott shouted, ‘That was a fucking nice thing to do,’ and the band walked off stage. Jones received six stitches. ‘There were a dozen boys who started jeering when Steve broke his string,’ Jones told the press, ‘they must have been jealous of us.’ Actually, they were hard mods, displeased by what they perceived as the band’s lame R&B renditions.
In February, more gigs, then recording at Olympic followed by a welcome mid-month holiday. Despite Jones’s injury, the band had much to look forward to, a feeling bolstered by their healthy standing in the recent music press polls. In Disc and Music Echo they scooped Best Single for ‘All Or Nothing’, came fifth in the best album category whilst Marriott himself was voted eighth top singer, third best dressed boy, third Mr Valentine and sixth top boy singer.
In the NME a similar pattern was repeated, whilst on the 24th of January they were made winners of Radio Luxembourg’s ‘Battle of the Bands’ competition. Record wise, however, the band remained in a state of limbo. Such were their contractual obligations with Decca, Immediate had agreed to produce and then licence the records back to them until everything was resolved. The first offering would be their seventh single, ‘I Can’t Make It’ c/w ‘Just Passing’.
It came out two weeks after Marriott and his girlfriend, Chrissie Shrimpton, were arrested and taken to the Gerald Road police station in Belgravia. The taxi they were travelling in was stopped by plain clothes policemen. While they were detained in custody, their flats were raided by other police officers. Marriott’s abode yielded nothing, Shrimpton’s some pills prescribed by her doctor. Shrimpton’s take on the matter was probably nearest the truth. The police had recognised Steve and thinking that he was probably carrying, pounced on him.
Marriott, meanwhile, quickly put out a press statement. Part of it read, ‘I have never taken drugs in my life. There is nothing to this at all. My conscience is clear.’
No further comment.
***
On Thursday, March 9th, Decca Records issued ‘I Can’t Make It’ c/w ‘Just Passing’.
The band refused to promote the single but were stunned when the BBC banned the song from their airwaves. The title was ‘too suggestive’, they announced.
Today, their action seems absolutely archaic, but, in 1967, there was a real fight taking place between the forces of conservatism who worried loudly about the onset of the permissive society and those who wanted to see British society freed from all constraints. Caught in the middle of this battle, the BBC sometimes acted very inappropriately.
‘I know how you’re feeling,’ sings Marriott on ‘I Can’t Make It’, a great example of pop/soul, ‘I felt that way too / But don’t get hung up because it’s healing / And I’m going to help you through it all I can make it if you can.’
The subject was left up to the listener. You decide. What is not in doubt is that ‘I Can’t Make It’ yielded from Marriott one of his most sensual vocal performances to date (check his little yeahs! halfway through) and that was what the man from the BBC was running scared from, not the words but the sound of the words. By the time of the ban, the band were on tour, undertaking another lengthy package tour, co-headlining with the American singer-songwriter, Roy Orbison, supported by Paul and Barry Ryan, Sonny Childe and the T.N.T., the Robb Storme Group, Candyman and the Settlers and guitarist Jeff Beck, although Beck left the tour after the first show citing sabotage as a reason. He might have had a point. The NME review stated that the guitarist ‘looked unhappy and sounded diabolical’.
Marriott hated the tour, hated it. A cock-up from start to finish, he complained. Every night, the band looked out at the audience, Mods, on one side, the middle aged Orbison fans (‘the beehived barnet brigade’) on the other. However well the band played, the gigs never really took off. To liven things up, at one show the band secretly tuned Roy Orbison’s guitar to a much higher key.
When showtime came, Orbison walked onstage, picked up the instrument, strummed it once, realised what had happened and without missing a beat, sang the opening song perfectly.
‘Didn’t miss a note,’ Marriott admiringly recalled. ‘Then he looked at us all standing in the wings waiting for the fuck up and he called us “cunts”.’
‘Untrue,’ Mac says. ‘It was his backing band who tuned his guitar up a tone, and it happened on the last night. Roy said something like “You bastards,” not “cunt”.’
On the day ‘I Can’t Make It’ entered the charts, where it would reach number twenty-six, the band pulled away from the tour to play a gig in Hull’s Skyline Ballroom with the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Naturally, Marriott adored Hendrix.
He told reporter, Pat Saville, ‘In this business you often wonder if anything new and exciting will happen and then, from nowhere, someone like Jimi appears. He’s fantastic and when I saw him I stood and cheered.’
Five days later, the band rise early to meet film director Peter Whitehead at Cumberland Terrace, near London’s Regents Park, to film a promo for their new hit single’s B-side, ‘Just Passing’ (for what reason remains a mystery. The song is barely a minute long and is but the B-side. Later on, their song ‘Get Yourself Together’ would be dubbed onto this footage).
The film featured Marriott being chased down the street by the band who are dressed as policemen. The band catch up with Marriott and there is a mock fight, some of it filmed in slow motion.
In light of his recent scrape with the law, the press quickly picked up on the reference points, but Marriott angrily refuted their suggestions of the group attacking the police. ‘Even though I came out of it clear (the arrest with Chrissie Shrimpton who he had now stopped seeing) other people painted me black,’ he lied. ‘It was a drag. But then we had an idea to do something to make people laugh at the whole thing for what it really was. So we shot this tele-film. We wouldn’t want to make the police look stupid...’
Three days later Steve Marriott went down with gastroenteritis. The arm of the law is indeed long.
‘Just Passing’ was very short, full of whimsical words, the odd laugh, careful little chord changes and as a nod to its inspiration, a car horn nicked from the Beach Boys’ ‘You Still Believe In Me’, issued on their groundbreaking concept album Pet Sounds, a timeless work which, along with Revolver by the Beatles and Blonde on Blonde by Dylan, had provided the soundtrack for 1966.
The song was a snatch of the dream to come. The band were changing fast. Their growing confidence as songwriters, their desire to experiment, and their new found studio freedom, had taken the band away from the dense sound of their R&B roots and into a new pastoral period. Apart from the Beach Boys, black music had acted as a springboard for all of the above to explore their own creativity. Dylan sang the blues, the Beatles sang Motown.
The Small Faces’s ability to replicate the sound of the R&B records they loved so much had been enough to satisfy them. Not anymore.
Pop music in the mid-60s was at its most fertile, regularly throwing up new sounds, new styles, new techniques which would then be the talk of the town until the next little explosion came along. The word ‘progressive’ was heard a lot. Every song, every single had to be a progression from the last.
Move forward. Progress. Your ability to do so defined your talent, your standing amongst your peers. For the Small Faces to be accepted into this world, they would have to find the same levels of ingenuity and inspiration as their contemporaries. It was as simple as that.
Otherwise, they really would be just passing.
***
Steve Marriott was living in Baker Street now, beneath the flat of Cilla Black, of all people. The woman that Brian Epstein believed he could turn into the ‘Edith Piaf of pop’, but who would end up presenting Blind Date instead, had quickly made known her distaste for her new neighbour. ‘You’d think she would understand,’ Marriott stated to a journalist, ‘but she has been complaining the most. I’m sorry I make so much noise but I am only having fun. The guy who owns the place came to see me and said, “No noise after midnight,” and I’m paying £40 a week. It’s a joke.’
Marriott was speaking on a day he had been persuaded to hold a press conference at his flat. One of the writers present, the Melody Maker man, noted a stereo in the hallways blasting out a ‘spirited bossa nova’. Later, Marriott jigged around to Steve Cropper and some Bar Kays music.
In his interview, Marriott explained that the last single had not done so well because of the BBC ban. It didn’t help either that, at the time, the band had been managerless and there had been no one to promote the record on the radio. As for the idea that the title had been ‘too sexy for consumption’, he stated, ‘You’ve got to have a disgusting mind to think like that.’
On his brush with the law, Marriott was unequivocal in his summing up. ‘They busted me just because I’m a name. As far as I’m concerned there should be a distinction between hash and pot and hard drugs. If you read any dictionary they are not even classified as drugs. Pills are a bad scene and so are hard drugs. The only thing against hash and pot is that people can say they are a stepping stone to hard drugs, but that’s only because the public are under the impression it’s all the same thing. Why don’t the newspapers wake up and give the people the facts?’
With the Beatles and their manager having admitted to taking LSD, with the ongoing saga in the press concerning the private habits of the Stones, Marriott’s public defence of marijuana use was the first sign of his attempt to join ranks with his contemporaries. Yet such was the huge media fuss generated by the Beatles and the Stones, his voice got lost in the commotion.
He retaliated by writing and issuing two singles that year which would be laden with drug references. Both of them would be hits and one of them you can still hear on TV thirty-two years later, a song that is regularly called upon by advertisers when selling the Sixties back to us.
***
The name of the band caught their attention – the Little People. It was a deliberate nod to the Small Faces and came from the band’s drummer, Jerry Shirley. He had first seen the Small Faces on Ready Steady Go! playing ‘Whatcha Gonna Do About It’, and Kenney Jones’s playing in particular had gripped him.
‘I became a pseudo-Kenney,’ Shirley would later tell Hellier. ‘I did just about everything I could to be like him.’
Shirley travelled to a lot of their gigs and made contact with his heroes. He was eventually rewarded with a support slot for his band at a Small Faces show at the Wolsey Hall in Cheshunt.
‘After the gig,’ Shirley recalls, ‘Steve actually asked me if I would be their stand in drummer for Kenney in the event of Kenney being sick or unavailable. It was probably just friendly chat on Steve’s behalf but of course it made me feel ten feet tall.’
The pair became good friends. Shirley would often visit Marriott at his new flat in William Mews, Knightsbridge, and Marriott reciprocated by offering his band a new song he and Ronnie had written called ‘Tell Me Have You Ever Seen Me’.
For Shirley it was a dream come true, Marriott and Lane taking his band into the studio to produce the song, along with a vibrant instrumental entitled ‘Madame Garcia’.
At the session, according to Shirley, Marriott was far keener on the job at hand than his co-writer.
‘Ronnie was always a bit distant,’ Shirley recalled, ‘I think he had some resentment about us coming in and recording one of their songs. Ronnie was at the recording session but he left halfway through.’
Immediate Records agreed to release ‘Tell Me’ as a single but they wanted the Little People to change their name. Marriott suggested the Nice – the band’s phrase for good gear. Loog Oldham turned the name down immediately, said it was rubbish and instead christened the band the Apostolic Intervention.
Three days later he announced that he had signed P.P. Arnold’s backing band and given them a name. He called them the Nice.
Despite being a fine 45, ‘Tell Me Have You Ever Seen Me’ c/w ‘Madame Garcia’ did not propel the Apostolic Intervention into chartland but it did solidify Marriott’s relationship with Shirley, creating a friendship that would last for many years.