THE SMALL FACES Never Went Away

“The Small Faces are BACK!” screamed Steve Marriott. “Albatross!” screamed back a wag in the crowd.

I understood his point. A couple of weeks before, Fleetwood Mac had been back too. A fraught gig, I read in the paper later. Birmingham was Christine McVie’s home town; she and John had got married there. But the nerves weren’t just gossip column blues. The memories that jangled were of the old love affair with the audience. Once upon a time Fleetwood Mac had the most devoted fans in Britain, played the bluest whites, had two witty guitar heroes. But that relationship finished long ago and now Fleetwood Mac were flaunting their affair with a new audience, with the hip easy-listeners of modern day America. In Britain we felt like dowdy rejects as the hype built up—this was a fuckin’ California pop group!

British blues fans don’t forgive easy but the Mac performed alright. Mick Fleetwood was still the best drummer you could hope to be awed by, John McVie was ace, and if Lindsey Buckingham was a shy shadow of Peter Green, if Stevie Nicks hopped round the stage like a cricket with wet pants, there was always Christine McVie to look at, a confident rockin’ woman, which is not something we see on the English stage every day. The Christine Perfect story has it that she was a star before she met up with John McVie, was winner of the Melody Maker poll and all that. But that’s twaddle. She was nothing. In English rock all women are nothing which is why anyone can and does win the Melody Maker poll. Christine McVie needed to go to California to escape the fate—oblivion—of her Sixties sisters, Carol Grimes, Elkie Brooks, Sandy Denny, Maggie Bell, Julie Driscoll.

I would never have put money on Christine for superstar, that’s for sure, but then I got a lot of potential wrong in the 1960s. Who’d’ve thought that Graham Nash would rise from the Hollies rather than Allan Clark? Jeff Lynne from the Move rather than Roy Wood? Peter Frampton from Hurtible Pie rather than Steve Marriott? Who’d’ve thought that Rod Stewart would become the Great British Rock Singer rather than Eric Burdon or Stevie Winwood or Joe Cocker? Who’d’ve thought that a few weeks after Fleetwood Mac (who left as a rock band) came back to Britain as a pop group, the Small Faces (who left as a pop group) would come back as a rock band?

THE SMALL FACES Never Went Away

by

Simon Frith

The pop/rock distinction may not mean much to you, but in Britain it’s always been important. Pop-singles and screaming girls; rock-LPs and idiot dancing boys. The Small Faces were one of the finest British pop groups ever, but when they split it was because they wanted to be rock stars and however “progressive” their' music, their record company kept on issuing singles, the girls kept screaming. By their end the group was in a terrible muddle.

They still are. “The Small Faces are BACK!” screamed Steve Marriott, but it wasn’t that Small Faces they wanted to be again. The old hits they did do—“Itchycoo Park,” “All Or Nothing”—they did as fast as they could and without heart; the old hit they didn’t do was “Sha La Lee,” white trash, great punk pop—they wanted us to forget it. As people shouted out their requests Steve Marriott got shirty: the Small Faces were back but they weren’t that far back. This was a new band with new songs; they had some rock jamming of their own to do. And the audience didn’t know what they wanted anyway, because the other problem of this comeback was that the Small Faces hadn’t been the peak of their career—they all had become rock stars: Steve Marriott with Humble Pie, the others with the Faces, and, if those days were over, the Small Faces revival was as much a necessity as a pleasure. At least, that’s how Ronnie Lane had heard it. His comedays only. With his own band, Slim Chance, his own music, his own show, he didn’t need the old days. Rick Wills, late of Frampton’s Camel and Roxy Music, was drafted to play bass.

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It took some time and a lot of Cockney cussin’ but eventually we got the message: this was a dynamic new upto-the-minute 1970s rock band; the name was, uh, a promotional device? But then a new difficulty emerged. If these boys weren’t the Small Faces, what musicial ideas did bind them together? The most obvious answer was self-indulgence, but the self-indulgences involved were of rather different kinds. With the Faces, Kenny Jones and Ian MacLaglan achieved the impossible—a boozy British rhythm section that was sloppy, spontaneous and perfect all at once. They enabled Rod Stewart to transform the detached circumstances of a modern rock concert into a communal party. The results weren’t so gripping on record, but live, Rod achieved emotional heights that no amount of professional organization will ever help him reach again. With Humble Pie, meanwhile, Steve Marriott discovered all the excesses available to English stars on the American concert circuit—the vacantly flash guitar, the pseudo soul shout, the mechanical ballin’—on-the-road songs. Put the Small Faces back together and you get? A slbppy band led by a noisy lout?

Not exactly, though I did find Steve Marriott hard to take. He’s balding now, with a salesman’s mustache. He came out with an old coat to his shins and tumed-up jeans. The word was seedy and Jones and MacLaglan looked embarrassed as they huddled behind their machines.

The contractual hassles involved in the Small Faces’ return have meant an oppressing delay in a recording contract and this tour wasn’t promoting anything—it was necessary for some immediate cash and because (and this was what in the end bound the band together) if the Small Faces weren’t working they might as well not be.

But the album (titled Playmates) won’t resolve all my doubts. On the tapes I’ve heard there’s still a tension between MacLaglan’s and Jones’ sound pop/soul instincts and Marriott’s tendencies to Midwestern rock flash. He’s got as tight a performance from them as I’ve heard, but they haven’t managed to curb his equation of volume with emotion, of effort with sincerity. On stage his guitar work was uninteresting and although P.P. Arnold (another name from the Sixties— she had the original British hit of “First Cut Is The Deepest”) sung as backup singer throughout, Marriott treated his own voice, one of the best in the business, with scant respect.

By the end of the evening I was depressed at the waste of all these resources, and the audience remained restrained. The Small Faces were back but they weren’t distinguished. They’ve chosen a place in the mainstream hard rock hinterland that lies between the pop subtleties of Fleetwood Mac and the punk crudities of the new wave and there are a million groups occupying these plains already. The new Small Faces are in danger of disappearing as just another dot on the landscape. I was supposed to talk to them after, at the post-gig hotel thrash. But I didn’t. This comeback meant too much to the Small Faces and to me it had meant nothing at all.