Are you all sitting comftybold two-square on your botty?  Then we’ll begin.  Sit back, relax and allow The Small Faces to transport you to the Land Of Greens.  There, you’ll meet Happiness Stan, deep inside his rainbow.  Join him, in his quest to Sus Out The Moon… You guessed it – Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake is back!

THE SMALL FACES’ MASTERPIECE

It was probably about 20 years ago when, during an afternoon lull at work, I turned my mind to deciding – and committing to print – my 100 favourite albums of all time.  In order.  It was that kind of a day.  I’ve still got a copy of the list I produced that day and, there at No.7, nestled in between The Albion Band’s Rise Up Like The Sun (No.6) and The Burritos’ Gilded Palace Of Sin (No.8) sits The Small Faces’ masterpiece, Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake.

Released in May 1968, Ogdens’ was – and remains – an extraordinary album in every respect.  Indeed – curiosity started to peak even before the album was removed from its packaging.  The round cover – a parody of a tobacco tin – saw to that.  Investigating further, the would-be listener would then navigate a way through an image of the opened tin, with a pack of Sus Luxury Cigarette Papers included (and we all knew what for…), before arriving at designer Nick Tweddel’s 5-panel pull-out card, with his eye-catching psychedelic collage at its heart.  As a statement of intent, it was a powerful one.

Although the album spent 6 weeks at the top of the UK album charts, following its release, intact copies of the original album are pretty rare nowadays.  So, the news that Ogdens’ is being reissued, worldwide, in that same packaging – for the first time since 1968 – is welcome indeed.  The (limited edition) vinyl album is cut at half-speed from Nick Robbins’ 2018 master of the original mono mix.  And not just that; Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake is also being made available as a 3CD pack that includes the original album in both mono and stereo formats and a disc of outtakes and rarities.

MUSIC HALL AND A DOSE OF “UNWINESE”

And it’s all being provided courtesy of Nice Records, the new label established by Small Faces’ drummer Kenney Jones and manager Nigel Adams.

But, packaging aside, it’s the music that has made Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake such a durable, enjoyable, listening experience.  It’s an album of two halves, both of them showcasing classic English psychedelia at its very best.  On Side One of the album, The Small Faces run through their extensive repertoire of styles; styles that include mod pop, prototype heavy metal, pure psychedelia and a healthy dose of cockerney knees-up music hall.

But it’s Side Two that leaves the indelible impression.  A suite of six songs, interlinked by the inexplicably understandable ramblings of narrator Stanley Unwin.  Readers of a certain age will, no doubt, recall Unwin’s hilarious talent for speaking in his private ‘Unwinese’ language and, here, it works a treat, especially as his dialogue is peppered with examples of the band’s own contemporary slang phrases.

GROPING WITH A STOKER…

It’s the album’s instrumental title track that gets Ogdens’ underway.  A group composition, it’s particularly notable for organist Ian McLagan’s use of wha-wha effects and the strings, performed by a quartet from the London Philharmonic Orchestra.  Afterglow Of Your Love is classic Small Faces, with a big, big sound and Steve Marriott demonstrating why he is, to this day, considered to be one of the best ever white soul vocalists.

Few bands of the time could outdo The Small Faces when they turned their hands to whimsical English psychedelia, and Long Agos and Worlds Apart is a typical example of that craft.  The faded, distorted vocals and meaty keyboard tones bring the sights, sounds and scents of Swinging London vividly back to life.

The glorious Rene is a Side One highlight; a hilarious, warm cockney knees-up, with a pornographic sub-story.  The titular Rene spends her time hanging around the dockside Crown & Anchor, waiting for “…a stevedore from Tyneside” before being observed “…groping with a stoker from the coast of Kuala Lumpur” and Marriott recounts her story with relish.

HEAVY AMBITIONS

It’s no secret that The Small Faces had been feeling increasingly constrained by the chart-hit aspirations of their management and their record label.  Their 1966 move from Decca to Andrew Loog Oldham’s fledgling Immediate label gave them more creative freedom, but the move towards liberation was slow one.  Many of the band’s contemporaries – The Who and Cream for example – were beginning to come up with heavier sounds and The Small Faces didn’t want to be left behind.  Add a few drops of lysergic acid into that bubbling resentment and the urge to break free was intensified.  Song Of A Baker, a granite-heavy Marriott/Lane composition was a clear indicator of the direction in which The Small faces were starting to move.

Side One is brought to its close with Lazy Sunday, the album’s poppiest and most accessible track by some distance.  Marriott’s lyrics bemoan the suburban attitudes of his neighbors who: “…stop me from groovin’, they bang on me wall,” and he gives it his full cockney cock-sparrow as he delivers them.  Lazy Sunday showed the world that The Small Faces could still come up with a chart hit – it reached the heady heights of #2 in the UK, kept off the #1 spot only by Louis Armstrong’s Wonderful World.

A MAGICAL QUEST

Side Two of Ogden’s plunges the listener immediately into fairyland.  The six songs of the suite tell the story of Happiness Stan and his quest to locate the missing half of the moon.  It might sound like a contrived, flimsy, plot but, believe me, the song, together with Unwin’s gobbledygook dialogue, keep the listener fully engaged from start to finish. 

“Are you all sitting comftybold two-square on your botty?” asks Unwin.  “Then I’ll begin.”  And, so too, does the magic.  The concept for the story was conceived during a boat trip that the band took along the River Thames.  Along the way, they observed that the moon was at half-phase and, in their altered state, the band started to wonder where the other half had got to.  And, from those addled musings, came the story.

The tale’s lead character, Happiness Stan, set out to discover the whereabouts of the moon’s missing half.  To help him on his quest, Stan uses his magical powers to create a single giant fly from all the individual flies in the world: “If all the flies were one fly, what a great enormous fly follolloper that would bold,” as Stanley Unwin put it.  The fly introduces Stan to Mad John the Hermit, who explains the physics of the moon’s transformation to Stan.  And that’s it, really.

AN ALBUM NEVER BETTERED

But the music is wonderful, from the psychedelic introduction to Stan, though the Hendrix infused Rolling Over, to the music hall roustery of Happy Days Toy Town, the album’s closing track.  Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake is, indeed, an album of which it’s impossible to tire.

We didn’t know it at the time, but Ogdens’ soon turned out to be The Small Faces’ swansong.  It quickly dawned on the band’s members that they’d produced something that they could never top.  They were also dubious about their ability to perform it live.  Kenney Jones has expressed the view that, if they had taken the plunge and taken Ogdens’ on the road, that might have saved the band from their untimely demise, but it wasn’t to be.  The band played their final gig on the last day of 1968, after which, Marriott jumped ship to form Humble Pie.  Lane, McLagan and Jones found fame and fortune elsewhere, of course.  But none of them ever produced anything that came close to the glory of Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake.

Enjoy The Small Faces in their pomp: Watch them perform Song Of a Baker – a track from Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake – on a 1968 edition of the BBC Television show, Colour Me Pop, below:

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