Almost everything about the Small Faces' 1968 album, "Ogden's Nut Gone Flake"
is brilliant. East London mods that have absorbed soul, R&B, Brit pop, and the emerging harder-edged rock meet LSD and with Ian McLagen turning his hand to piano, electric piano, harpsichord, organ and mellotron and the Steve Marriott/Ronnie Lane writing team delivering superb songs and becoming real
contenders in that dept, they turned in one of the first real concept albums {the side long story of Happiness Stan} and though arguably a year late, one of the great British psychedelic albums. It was out long before the Pretty Things' "SF Sorrow" or the Who's "Tommy" and never gets the credit for having beaten those two to the punch.
It has the right balance of variety of styles, electric and acoustic instruments and great singing, and also one of the best balances of actual songs and jamming, with neither outstaying their welcome. The musical influences all come together in a quite startling way and could only really have been made by the Small Faces. The Kinks from North London, the Who from West London, the Pretty Things and the Stones from that South London/ Kent enclave ~ none of them could have authentically put this together. And the parody cover of a tin of tobacco is so psychedelically subversive, wicked !
I love this album.
So what's wrong with it ?
Stanley Unwin !
On the "Happiness Stan" side, they get this comedian, Stanley Unwin, to do voiceovers and narration. He was famous for speaking English in a sort of nonsensical way and he links a lot of the tracks.
He absolutely drives me nuts. He is so annoying.
Conceptually, I love the idea of having him on the album. Executionally, I'm not a fan. The band originally wanted Spike Milligan to narrate but I'm not sure that would have worked either.
Thanks to Audacity, I've managed to edit him out of most of it, limiting him to a word here or a syllable there, except on one of my favourite songs, "HappyDaysToyTown" in which he has a significant monologue as the band are jamming the song out and I have to include him because it would have butchered the song too much to take his bit out. So I'm doomed
to hear Stan's "Unwinese" as long as I'm alive to listen to the album.
I also can't stand Whitney Houston's "I will always love you." I'm generally quite open to songs. If I like them, then I like them, I don't care what their standing is in the hip stakes. But I just can't get behind that song. I even played it on stage once, back in '97, as a singer I was playing with wanted to cover it. We practiced it over and over but it just never did anything for me. It went down really well but I just wanted everyone to forget they ever saw me playing it.
"Three times a lady" is another one in that vein. I had a mate back in the late 70s that played that song incessantly. Every time I was at his house, he played it over and over. All the other songs he played a lot, I grew to quite like. But not that one. Years later, I was talking with a different friend and he pegged the song as "too classic to be a classic." I knew what he meant. It's almost as though it was written to be a classic great. But it never makes it.
Don't buy it for me for my birthday !
I really love that cover, it is a brilliant, yet so simple, piece of art. I also think the title is utterly fantastic.
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