#57 The Small Faces- Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake
- agalvin19
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
A psychedelic game of two halves…
(Immediate)
Released: 24th May 1968
Producer: Ronnie Lane, Steve Marriott
Topped the chart:
23rd June 1968 (for 6 weeks)
6 weeks total
Considering how influential psychedelia has been on music, fashion and culture, it’s remarkable just how quickly the movement fizzled out. Save for revivals, the timeline of the sound basically starts with The Beatles’ Revolver in 1966, gets dark around the end of 67, before the Altamont tragedy and the Manson murders brought the first phase of alternative rock and the 1960s to an horrific end.
Us Brits fought a strong vanguard against this narrative though, as British psych took things in a decidedly more twee direction. Whether it’s the Beatles pretending to be a brass band, the Stones wearing silly wizard hats or the Kinks The Village Green Preservation Society, there was a degree of imagination and whimsy missing in the dark nights of the soul provided by The Doors, 13th Floor Elevators and The Grateful Dead.
At the heart of this movement sits The Small Faces, embracing psychedelia after moving away from the mod sounds of early hits like Sha-La-La-La-Lee, All or Nothing and Itchycoo Park. Their final album before changing moniker and replacing their singer with a randy Scottish bloke called Rod, Ogdens’ But Gone Flake is perhaps the purest strain of British psychedelia, for better and worse.
Bringing together music hall, soul, cockney knees-ups and (dread it, run from it) a “concept”, Ogdens’ (taking its name and cover from a 19th century brand of tobacco), succinctly captures the sound and ambition of British music in 1968. Which probably explains how it was able to sit atop the album chars for six uninterrupted weeks.
Pre-figuring Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love by nearly two decades, the record is a game of two halves: the first side collecting a diverse range of songs which all sound like singles, while the second is a loose narrative fairytale narrated by comedian Stanley Unwin. One side has dated better than the other.
The individual songs on side A are terrific. Featuring a Hammond organ fed through a wah pedal, the instrumental title track sets the scene beautifully, before morphing into soul stomper Afterglow. The song demonstrates just what a talent the band had in vocalist Steve Marriott before he jumped ship to Humble Pie a year later. His blue-eyed soul holler ranks with the very best of them, building to a full-throated roar as organ and guitar duke it out underneath. One can imagine a Tina Turner cover in the style of Whole Lotta Love, but the version we get here will do just nicely, thank you very much.
This soul sound is the sole leftover from their mod era, and while it’s a shame it isn’t revisit, there’s a lot more here to enjoy. Aside from ludicrous Mockney accents which belong in a low-rent Guy Ritchie joint, both Rene and Lazy Sunday make valiant attempts at a pub knees-up; the former eventually exploding into a full-on psych freakout, while the latter is a tighter beast held together beautifully by drummer Kenney Jones. Meanwhile, Song of a Baker is another highlight, a heavy rocker that pre-figures the riffing of Led Zeppelin into the 1970s. It sounds a lot more like Led Zep than the Yardbirds did at this point.
As with most concept albums, your mileage and patience for the narrative second-half will vary. The music itself is still pretty darn good –Rollin’ Over is Purple Haze after one too many jellied eels; Mad John takes inspiration from the folk of Fairport Convention—but the issue lies with Unwin’s narration. Presented in his own whimsical “Unwinese,” he adds extra syllables and changes vowels at random ("Are you all sitting comftybold two square on your botty?” it starts), these days it leans dangerously close to Russell Brand and his “bookywook”-isms. And no one needs that in 2026.
As with the majority of “concept” albums, there’s not much flowing narrative to speak of, more a litany of “stuff” that happens from one song to the next. This ranges from our main character looking for lunch (The Hungry Intruder) to jumping on the back of a giant fly (The Journey). The attempt at a new-age fairy tale falls flat, and this combined with the narration buries the thing that we’re all really here for: the music.
Despite that, there can be no doubting the band’s ambition on Ogdens’, and an artist should always be praised for at least attempting something different. There’s plenty here to recommend, and it would have been interesting to see where The Small Faces went next. The incoming Rod Steward and Ronnie Wood had other plans, as it turned out…
Score: 7/10
Tracklisting:
SIDE A
1. Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake
2. Afterglow
3. Long Agos and Worlds Apart
4. Rene
5. Song of a Baker
6. Lazy Sunday
SIDE B
7. Happiness Stan
8. Rollin’ Over
9. The Hungry Intruder
10. The Journey
11. Mad John
12. HappyDaysToyTown
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