The 50th birthday issue of Shindig! is now in the shops and, if you
excuse me whilst I play a quick little flourish on this here trumpet, includes
my article on The Faces and interview with Kenney Jones as the cover story. Toot-toot-ta-toot.
I’d love to say Shindig!
editor Jon Mills and I rocked up at Kenney’s country mansion in Surrey for
beers on the lawn (which was a possibility at one stage) but the interview
eventually took place, five weeks ago, at the offices of Universal Music in
Kensington. We sat in one of their swish meeting rooms drinking coffee out of
china cups and dunking biscuits whilst chatting for over 90 minutes. We decided
beforehand to concentrate on the early days of The Faces with the focus being
their first album and stuck to that quite firmly although obviously there was overlap
with the Small Faces and later success. Wasn’t entirely sure how much there was
to say but ended up with over 4000 words and the mag devoted over ten pages to
the band (with some cracking photos). It did mean though I didn’t get to ask about
Kenney’s time with The Who and drumming on “You Better You Bet”. One day.
One unexpected bonus was Kenney happening to mention The
Action in glowing terms. Stick me within ten yards of anyone who was around the
60s music scene and it’s evitable I’ll ask them about my favourite band but
Kenney’s tribute – “They should have been the biggest thing since sliced bread”
- was completely unprompted, which made it sound all the more welcome and genuine.
There’s a new five-LP/CD set of the Faces’ four studio
albums and a disc of rarities out now entitled You Can Make Me Dance, Sing or Anything. For a two week period I
don’t think I listened to anything other than The Faces (with a side helping of
early Rod).
And finally, to help Shindig!
celebrate their 50th issue, they’re holding a knees-up at Rough
Trade East down in Bethnal Green with The Pretty Things playing a live
set on Thursday 8th October. Free entry, can’t be bad.
I shall be buying that as I absolutely love The Faces and early 70s Rod The Mod. They had 'it': the cocksure swagger, the gang mentality and, above all, the music, be it out and out rockers with self depreciating (and often witty) lyrics or wistful country inflected tunes generally and great covers of soul records. At the expense of sounding like a modernist iconoclast I'd probably rate them above The Small Faces.
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ReplyDeleteI can't really compare - always think of them as totally different groups - but am far more likely, these days, to pull out a Faces record than a Small Faces one.
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