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All Or Nothing:
The Authorised Story Of Steve Marriott
Simon Spence OMNIBUS
Warts-and-all biography of the Small Faces and Humble Pie frontman.
“No one denied the fact he was a great vocalist… but they didn’t particularly like him,” Small Faces drummer Kenney Jones recalls in this hair-raising biography of arguably British rock’s most gifted singer.
While there is never any question about the epic scale of Marriott’s talents, the diminutive frontman’s music tells only half of his story.
Amassed from 125 interviews, this fascinating new oral history fills in the gaps. So we learn of the irrepressible Marriott’s path from child star to mod icon with the Small Faces to stadiumslaying rock god with Humble Pie, before a self-destructive tsunami of drug addiction and chronic alcoholism combined to destroy his career, finances, talent and personal life.
While it’s a gold mine of trivia for fans – who knew, for example, that the young Marriott and David Bowie hatched plans to form a band called David And Goliath? – its greatest value is in its unflinching portrait of Marriott as a man who, as Humble Pie drummer Jerry Shirley points out in the foreword, was “hard-wired to be confrontational”.
This self-destructive streak helped Marriott blow countless opportunities to achieve the stardom his talent deserved. An audition to join the Rolling Stones goes wrong when he upstages Mick Jagger. A lucrative world tour supporting AC/DC, who idolised him, is nixed when they overhear Marriott describing them as “ungrateful midgets”. A chance to join Bad Company following the departure of Paul Rodgers is squandered when he turns up at drummer Simon Kirke’s house late and coked-up. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s offer of the role of Che Guevara in Evita is drunkenly turned down with the words: “I’m not a puppet.” The list goes on.