Theatre in the round
Summer ’68 echoed to the sound of a tin full of Cockney-psych, a moon-themed fairy tale and a singing baker. Jim Irvin remembers.
LO, THE 50TH anniversary of the Small Faces’ Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake. (Immediate/BMG/Charly) ★★★★★. This record has a lot to answer for: the first rock album I ever desired, requested for my ninth birthday, partly on the strength of the circular sleeve, but also because of my regard for Tin Soldier – the most exciting 45 ever made, obviously. Once past the beautiful packaging, I was stunned by its sound, humour, energy and depth, finding it more enjoyable perhaps than Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (my dad bought all of The Beatles’ albums), less lofty, more mischievous. That was it, I was hooked on vinyl. And Ogdens’ was a veritable education. It taught me, roughly, how to bake bread and about the outcome of dockside prostitution, plus whatever happened to the moon and dangly. And it provided a valuable lesson in rock musicianship: Steve Marriott’s ability to switch vocally, in seconds, from deep-soul shredding to wistful tenderness to Cockney knees-up, all with plausible authenticity, (and his guitar-playing is brutal in places); Ronnie Lane’s gut-rumbling bass, often treated as a lead instrument, contrasts with his strange quavery voice on atypical songs about bakers and flies and afterglow; Ian McLagan’s rollicking keyboards are both playful and mature, and Kenney Jones perfects runaway-steam-engine drumming. It’s all delivered with a punky intensity no other pop group was employing at the time. Even The Who wouldn’t get close to such sonic excitement until they hired the guy who engineered Ogdens’, the miraculous Glyn Johns, whose ‘everything louder than everything else’ mix on the mono version is impossible but works, and remains unfeasibly exciting. OK, maybe the whole Happiness Stan side is silly – except that it isn’t, it’s charming, wistful, conjures all kind of pictures and, of course, includes Stanley Unwin’s tongue-twisted narration, which remains delightful. What would today’s nine-year-olds make of it, I wonder? I’d like to think they’d be intrigued enough to find out where this piece of folk-art came from. Because that’s what Ogdens’ has grown into, a broadcast from the melting pot that generation was steeped in: music-hall, marijuana, soul, blues, sing-alongs, pubs and fields of wheat, guitars and khazis and bowls of AllBran, roll-ups, fairy tales and stokers from the coast of Kuala Lumpur. It’s all here, crammed into a tobacco tin. What, though, could they possibly have done to make it worth buying Ogdens’ for the umpteenth time? Two deluxe editions, three LPs and five CD/DVDs, bring together everything associated with the album: mono and stereo versions, outtakes, single mixes, US alternatives, and, on DVD, the group’s appearance on BBC2’s Colour Me Pop. The original stereo and mono mixes were discrete; the stereo slightly brighter, more trebly, sometimes because the tracks had been slightly sped up; Rollin’ Over is 20 seconds shorter in stereo and Happydaystoytown shaves seven seconds. Rene in stereo, on the other hand, gets an extra half-minute of the long party vamp section at the end. As the original production masters were mislaid, the main task for this anniversary re-rub was piecing together suitable production masters to cut from, drawn from foreign duplicate copies and other sources – they reckon around 14 in all – that had to be cleaned, EQ’d and compiled into harmonious new production copies before actual remastering (half-speed on vinyl) could begin. The results are impressive, sound excellent next to original vinyl copies, and seem fuller, less brittle than earlier CD reissues. Add an excellent, exhaustive booklet and coloured vinyl, and I’m afraid you may have to splash out one more time. That’s defiantly it for me, however, until the edition where the band play holographically in your living room.
“A punky intensity no pop group had at the time.”