1965-1969

SMALL FACES

LIVE. RARE. UNRELEASED.

MOJO

OCTOBER 1965. WHATCHA GONNA DO ABOUT IT, THE DEBUT Small Faces single, is making its way up the UK charts. The four original members, only together for a few months, are learning how to be a band, and how to talk to the music press. “We admire The Who,” Ronnie Lane tells the NME’s Norrie Drummond, “but we have never tried to copy them in any way. We are Mods and appeal to Mods, but that’s about all we have in common with them.”

Then Lane’s bandmate, Kenney Jones, emphasises the point. “At the moment,” he says, “we are trying to get a sound of our own.” Over the next three and a half short, chaotic, inspired years, the Small Faces would make good on Jones’s promise. There would be street urchin R&B; a very English take on psychedelia; earthshaking portents of the next decade’s heaviest sounds. All of which, and more, are represented on this very special MOJO CD. Twelve tracks. All killer. No filler. Wham bam and, as they say, thank you, Mam!

1 WHATCHA GONNA DO ABOUT IT

(Live at The Twenty Club, Belgium, 1966)

The first Small Faces 45 was released in August 1965, an R&B vamp modelled on Solomon Burke’s Everybody Needs Somebody To Love. This take is from a January 1966 date in Mouscron, Belgium, with Ian McLagan having replaced Jimmy Winston on Hammond.