Ian McLagan - All The Rage: My high life with the Small Faces, the Faces, the Rolling Stones and many more

ISBN: 9781624886690

For Kim, who makes it all possible.

Goodnight Ronnie.

Contents

All photographs not credited come from the authors private collection.

Edited by John Pidgeon, Chris Welch & Ian McLagan.

Thanks to John Pidgeon for aiding and abetting, and then ultimately leaving me to get on with it; and Pete Townshend, Chris Welch, Rob Patterson and Chesley Millikin for encouragement and thought provoking suggestions along the way. Big Love to Ronnie He would if he could, and he often does Wood, in spite of the lack of any useful memory whatsoever; the same goes to Kenney Damn his hands and rot his bones Jones for no memory, but a very good heart all the same; and Rod Stewart for wanting all the filth to be left in; to Jason Cooper, for managing to manage me as well as he did; Tetsu Yamauchi, wherever he is; Pete Buckland, for reliable Faces tour itineraries and for going out with women nearly his own age; Bill German for Stones itineraries; Royden The Chuch Walter Magee III, for being Royden The Chuch Walter Magee III for so many years of my life; Tom Wright, The Faces official photographer; Jody Denberg, Nico Zentgraf & Dave McNarie for considerable research and development, and Albert Lee, Zigaboo Modeliste, John Hellier, Bernie Boyle, Don Archell, Kent Benjamin and Kate Harvey for information no library could provide.

Written over a two and a half year period in Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Brunei, Canada, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Japan, Korea, The Philippines, Romania, Scotland, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and the USA, on planes, trains and buses, in airport terminals, hotel rooms, dressing rooms, bathrooms, toilets and pissholes, on tour, on vacation and at home near Austin, Texas.

by John Peel

Flossie didnt even look up. Someone phoned from Texas while you were out, she muttered. Mac something, she added under ques- tioning. Ian McLagan? I suggested. Could have been, she conceded. Important man, Floss, I chided, but she wasnt listening.

Id love to be telling you wild stories of the early 60s, of Klooks Kleek, Eel Pie Island and the Crawdaddy, but I never knowingly set foot in any one of these places so would have to make them up. The whole truth is that I never even heard the Small Faces until the summer of 1966 and All Or Nothing. Are they from Liverpool? the music director of K/MEN, San Bernardino had asked. A positive answer was still important in that place and at that time. You bet they are, Johnny, I had lied and All Or Nothing had gone on the stations playlist. No American could spot the differences between British regional accents anyway, which went some of the way to explaining all the English DJs on US radio at the time. Many of them were called James Bond and were, in fact, Canadian. Hi, Im James Bond and I was on the phone to my cousin, Ringo, in Liverpool, England yesterday, they would claim and apparently that was enough.

Come the summer of 1967, a return to the UK and by then I knew all about the Small Faces. This was Immediate Records time. Happy to Be Part Of The Industry Of Human Happiness, they asserted or something like it. I first met the Small Faces at a CND concert in East London. Local skins had come over the edge of the park like Zulu in negative, seemingly intent on kicking the hippies and by so doing to demonstrate their support for the pro-nuclear lobby. Unfazed by the mayhem, this lad came up and thanked me for the Radio 1 sessions. Pleasure, I countered. Then, my natural curiosity getting the better of me: Who are you? He laughed. The Small Faces, of course. Further questioning revealed the surprising fact that he wasnt just one of the Small Faces, he was all of them. Not only that, but the buttons on his shirt were microphones and he was recording our conversation. He hoped I didnt mind. Naturally, I didnt. He was wrong about the sessions though. It was session, singular. In April 1968: If I Were a Carpenter / Lazy Sunday / Get Ready / Every Little Bit Hurts, with Steve, Ian, Kenney and Ronnie augmented by P. P. Arnold. Id like to pretend I was there for that one. Me and the lads and P. P., of course. What a larf. But I wasnt.

Some time later Im bad on dates I was backstage at Newcastle City Hall. The Nice, still a few months from transmogrifying, horribly, into Emerson, Lake & Palmer, were on stage. The Small Faces were in their dressing room. You could hear them. Drink, at the very least, was being taken. I was a very censorious hippy and had rejected the offer of a dressing room for myself, as compe`re. I probably thought dressing rooms were elitist. So I was sitting in a phone box. Well, a phone alcove really. What noisy boys those Small Faces were, to be sure. Then they came laughing and tumbling out of the room and saw me pouting there. Awright, John, they seemed to bellow in unison. Coming for a drink then? I wasnt. I disapproved of drinking probably more than I disapproved of dressing rooms. No, thank you, I murmured and watched as they cascaded into the night. Theres more than drink been taken there, I thought to myself, reflecting on the fact that they seemed to be having a much better time than I was, stuck in a phone alcove listening to the Nice.

That night in Newcastle marked, dare I say it, an epiphany of a sort and quite changed my life. In the same year I met Sheila, now my wife, who drank, and started working with John Walters, who certainly did.

Over the next few months, the Small Faces became the Faces and, as such, came a few years later to Sheilas and my wedding. In the Super 8 film of the event, Ian, wearing a suit run up, it appears, from curtain material, is talking earnestly with Rod Stewart and my Aunt Ailsa. We have often wondered since what they could have been talking about.

Between Newcastle and our wedding, the Faces provided Sheila and me and our friends and families with some of the best nights of our lives. Not only the very best gig ever, in Sunderland, at which, witnesses insist, I ended up dancing on stage, waving a bottle of the ubiquitous Blue Nun, but nights recording In Concert programmes sat in the BBCs Paris Studios in Lower Regent Street, London, sessions which started and ended at the Captains Cabin around the corner. My favourite recording is the one in which the Faces grow weary of my fawning introduction and just start playing. Sometimes we still hear the tapes of those In Concerts, by pretty much common consent the most memorable in the programmes history, and remember why it was we so loved the band. Why, we even flew to Rotterdam with them once, ending the night in what we had been warned was a restaurant very popular with that ports notoriously bad bad lads. The Faces made no concessions, seeming not to notice the glowering faces all around, behaving as noisily as they ever did. Sheila and I were scared but impressed.

Unless Ive missed it, theres no mention of Newcastle, Sunderland, the Paris Studio, Rotterdam or our wedding in Macs book, so you can see how important we were to the Faces. They were incredibly important to us though.

Last weekend, I saw Ian at the Glastonbury Festival. He was playing in Billy Braggs band. He looked like a rock star, no question, but seemed happy to be working and genuinely pleased to see me. I was still grinning to myself five minutes after Billy had dragged him back to the bands tour van. Stand up, Ian, Billy had suggested during the bands set, adding: Oh, he is standing up. The old ones are best, they say. Sometimes theyre wrong, sometimes theyre right. In Ians case, theyre right.

by Dave Marsh