#The Small Faces

[heroinsight]

Chrissie Shrimpton and Steve Marriott, 25th January 1967 by Robert Young for The Daily Mirror 

[flamememeago]

Various lazy faces, both small and large

[reluctant-martyrs]

@balladofeasyrider requested the Small Faces

Send me some musicians to draw from memory

[nostalgia-eh52]

1965 The Small Faces

[cannedbluesblog]

The Small Faces

[kaiserkeller]

my favourite little piece of lore i learned recently is that the small faces were banned from top of the pops in 1966 because steve marriott told the producer to fuck off as they were being made to be the opening act too often

[burnandshiverconsulting]

[lil-melody-moon]

Things go yeet, aka Keith Moon throws the entire room out the window

New Zealand offered some respite, partly because both the concert schedule and the atmosphere were less oppressive. On January 30, the occasion of Steve Marriott's twenty-first birthday, the bands took a plane ride from Auckland to Wellington in the morning and, ensconced in their high-rise hotel in the latter city, gathered in Marriott's room for a party. The Small Faces' record company EMI had kindly bought Marriott a portable record player, and singles to go with. With the night off and the booze in, it looked like being a good party. But when one of the records skipped, an excited and inebriated Steve Marriott smashed the player with his fist, unwittingly breaking it in the process. Realising the error, the former Artful Dodger decided to make a proper job of his destruction, and in the madness of the moment, he picked his broken birthday present up and threw it out of the window. Everyone rushed to the balcony and watched the player turning as it fell, the fans who were gathered on the forecourt several floors below parting like the Red Sea before Moses as it landed in their midst. "It looked so good when it went down," recalls John Wolff, "and the smash it made was fantastic, it was music to our ears, that we shouted, 'Leave those bits there!' I rushed downstairs in my dressing gown, gathered it all up and brought it back upstairs so we could throw it out again!" But as Steve Marriott recalled in The Small Faces biography The Young Mods' Forgotten Story, that "was the wrong thing to do in front of Keith Moon, because the next thing that went out was the telly, armchairs, the lot went out of the window, the whole room… It was just mad." Marriott was stunned. Even though he had started it, he didn't realise anyone went in for that kind of behaviour, and he was right; for all that Moon had been building up to something like this, his actions represented a new high - or low - in on-tour vandalism, an over-the-top reaction to Marriott and Wolff's already crazed actions in a moment of collective, chaotic high spirits. As best as conflicting recollections of what happened next can be correlated, with his furniture now on the hotel forecourt Marriott invented a stupendous lie about unknown intruders breaking into his room and destroying it. Apparently (and amazingly), the hotel took him at his words, the room was redecorated, and the next day EMI supplied Marriott with a new, even better record player. The bands played their two shows each at the town hall and came back for an end of tour party, again in Marriott's room. Keith walked in, complimented the hotel on their redecorating job, admired Marriott's new record player - and promptly threw it straight out the window. "Me and Wiggy looked at each other in amazement," recalled Steve Marriott, "and we screamed "No! No! No!' And Keith was going 'Yes! Yes! Yes!', bunging things out and smashing things. The whole room gets duffed up again. Fucking wrecked."

Tony Fletcher: Dear Boy: The Life of Keith Moon, pages 214-215

[mariannefaithful]

[jonesbrianshining]

Steve Marriott

[callemodista]

The Small Faces

[heroinsight]

art by Audrey Herbertson

[flamememeago]

Small man issues.

[undergroundrockpress]

The Small Faces, 1967.

[thespliffbunker]

[cannedbluesblog]

Ronnie Lane