From the Small Faces to some VERY posh places

LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL by Kenney Jones (Blink £20) BRIAN VINER

THE remarkable life story of Kenney Jones reads rather like the work of a bad novelist. He had a poor-but-happy Fifties childhood in London’s East End, living in a terraced house with no indoor toilet, the only son of a lorry driver who was a cousin of the Kray twins.

And now? He lives with his second wife Jayne, a former model, in country house splendour and owns Hurtwood Park Polo Club in Surrey. There’s a photograph in the book of him playing polo with Prince Harry.

It was a drum kit that changed his life. It cost £64 13s 6d and he pinched a tenner from his mother’s purse to make the downpayment. He was 13.

Less than four years later, on his 17th birthday, Jones made his debut on Top Of The Pops, with the band he had co-founded. They’d hit on a name, when a ‘posh bird’ they knew called Annabelle suddenly said: ‘You all have little faces, you’re all small . . . you should call yourselves the Small Faces.’

Jones (pictured in 2012) was the baby of the group, whose hits included the wonderful Itchycoo Park. In 1969, after lead singer Steve Marriott left, the Small Faces recruited a lead guitarist called Ronnie Wood, who brought with him a shy friend named Rod Stewart.

In due course, they became Rod Stewart And The Faces — and with fame and fortune came a licence to behave badly. At the end of every gig, Stewart would announce: ‘Party back at our hotel!’

The subsequent hooleys were riotous. Soon, the Faces were banned from the entire U.S. Holiday Inn chain but, at a 1972 festival in Puerto Rico, they found a way round that by pretending to be another band, who were due to arrive later.

It worked and, thereafter, they would regularly pose as Fleetwood Mac — ironic, as Mick Fleetwood, at 6 ft 6 in, was a good foot taller than the diminutive Jones.

In 1975, Stewart left to go solo, which was the cue for the third phase of Jones’s career, succeeding his friend Keith Moon as drummer of The Who.

Jones might have known how to behave badly, but he was a novice next to Moon. Once, Moon gave Jones a lift in his chauffeurdriven purple Rolls-Royce, in which he’d had a speaker fitted connected to a microphone. He also hung a pair of inflatable legs out of the window and shrieked in a woman’s voice that he was being attacked.

The Rolls was stopped by the police, who demanded to know what had happened to the woman who’d been abducted.

In September 1978, Moon died from an overdose and Jones joined The Who, ostensibly as an equal member, until lead singer Roger Daltrey decided that he shouldn’t receive an equal cut of recording contracts.

But he stayed with them through much of the Eighties and, in 2014, having suffered from prostate cancer, reunited with the band’s surviving members, Pete Townshend and his old antagonist Daltrey, for a concert at his polo club, to raise funds for Prostate Cancer UK. As he approaches his 70th birthday, Jones clearly has no plans to f-f-f-fade away.