OGDENS NUT GONE FLAKE FULL

“It’s got that hard-hitting R&B they were already known for, but with a punch that hadn’t existed previously. “It’s the perfect Small Faces album, isn’t it?” Paul Weller asked, when we discussed the album in 2015. Witness the unapologetic Englishness of “Lazy Sunday,” the ballsy soul of “Afterglow” and the near template for 70s rock in “Song of a Baker,” and it’s obvious that, in Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake, the Small Faces had constructed the blueprints to most of what was to come over the next fifty years, from the Faces and Humble Pie, which grew from the band’s ashes, to Bowie, Blur and Oasis, to name just a few.

OGDENS NUT GONE FLAKE FULL

Full of Marriott’s theatricality, not to mention his barn-burner R&B belting, and Lane’s lazy, hazy Cockney charm, it’s the sort of creative tension that made The Beatles so unique and compelling. Housed in a round sleeve, based on a tin of tobacco, it was a psychedelic statement writ large.īut Side One of Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake, oft overlooked as a result of the legend that’s built up around the concept piece of Side Two, is just as remarkable. Taking up only one side of the album (half of the tracks had already been recorded when the band stumbled on the idea during a joint boating excursion), it’s still structurally adventurous and sonically stunning.įull of great songs and lots of laughs, in the form of the gobbledygook narration by Stanley Unwin, whom the band enlisted, after British comedy giant Spike Milligan turned down the gig, to help hold the piece together, it represented the moment in the 1960s when pop and rock ceased existing together easily. Jones recalls the birth of Ogdens’ in loving detail in his forthcoming memoir Let the Good Times Roll, out this autumn.īorn from the wild, fertile mind of bassist Ronnie Lane - about the fictitious Happiness Stan and his search for the half of the moon unseen from earth, and who ultimately discovers that life is nothing but a bowl of All Bran cereal – it’s a half-baked concept, for sure. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Who’s The Who Sell Out and The Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society, it changed the course of rock and roll forever. charts for six weeks and, like The Beatles’ Sgt.

But we all conquered America anyway – Steve with Humble Pie and us with The Faces – but I think that if we had gone I think we’d be up there with The Who.”įifty years ago, the Small Faces released the quasi-conceptual masterpiece Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake. “Our manager Don Arden didn’t trust anybody to look after us in America, anyway, because he was afraid he’d lose control of us. “We should have gone to America, and we wanted to go to America, but we’d had a drug bust, so we couldn’t go,” the Small Faces’ drummer Kenney Jones told me in 2012 of why he thinks his former band, although Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, never broke in America.

Ogdens nut gone flake