#uk mod

[defencestar]

Leonardo S.p.A. Wins £1 Billion UK MoD Contract for 23 New Medium Helicopters

Leonardo’s AW-149 military helicopter. Leonardo Wins £1 Billion UK MoD Contract for 23 AW149 helicopters: Rome / London — March 2, 2026 — The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) has awarded Leonardo a £1 billion contract to supply 23 next-generation medium helicopters under the UK’s New Medium Helicopter (NMH) programme. The aircraft — the latest-generation AW149 — will be built at Leonardo’s Yeovil…

Leonardo S.p.A. Wins £1 Billion UK MoD Contract for 23 New Medium Helicopters

[tezla7]

MOD wastes billions and 'continually fails to learn from mistakes', spending watchdog says

The Public Accounts Committee has published a highly critical report into the Ministry of Defence's "broken" procurement system.

https://www.forces.net/news/mod-wastes-billions-and-continually-fails-learn-mistakes-spending-watchdog-says

[defencetechnologynews]

LATEST DEFENCE TECHNOLOGY CONTRACTS: UK MoD awards Theon with Thermis Imaging Systems

LATEST DEFENCE TECHNOLOGY CONTRACTS: UK MoD awards Theon with Thermis Imaging Systems Posted by DETech PRWire Gibraltar www.DefenceTechnologyNews.com

THEON SENSORS has been awarded with a contract for the supply of THERMIS CS thermal imaging systems following a recent international tender by the United Kingdom MoD for the procurement and support of Sniper In-Line Low Light System (SILLS) - Long Wave InfraRed (LWIR) Thermal Sight “Weapon Sight 2”

[johnkatsmc5]

The Small Faces“Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake”1967 UK Psych Pop Rock,Mod (The 40 Greatest Psychedelic Albums of All Time,The 40 Trippiest Albums Ever, Mojo magazine)

Manor Park’s Small Faces began life as puppets to an industry still riddled by svangali-like figures keen to exploit the production line model for pop music production. Yet following two years of mod-friendly, peerless power pop/soul for Decca and scary manager, Don Arden (father of Sharon Osbourne), Steve Marriott, Ronnie Lane et al finally escaped to a label that at least understood how to nurture a band’s creativity. Cementing their psychedelic credentials in the summer of 1967 with “Itchycoo Park” on Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate label - a prime example of their hallucinogenic cockernee schtick – it was time to show that they could really think in terms of whole albums as opposed to snippets of three-minute glory. The result? Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake. Housed in the world’s first circular album sleeve, it was split into two distinct sides. Ogden’s' first half consists of six tightly buzzing slices of the psychedelic r ‘n’ b that was now their stock in trade. Mainly penned by Marriott and Lane the fare divides itself between punchy blue-eyed soul stompers like ''Afterglow (Of Your Love)'' and more chirpy psych knees ups like ''Lazy Sunday'' (inspired by Marriott’s feuds with his neighbours). The second side contains the story of Happiness Stan and his quest to find the moon, interlinked by forgotten master of gobbledegook, Stanley Unwin. Here the songs are considerably more embellished and varied in texture; from the strange faux-folksy “Mad John” to the more rocking “Rollin’ Over”. The latter featured a brass section while the rest included strings, harps and all the usual trappings expected of bands who wished to signal their serious musical intent. But somehow at the heart of it all was the Small Faces’ muscular approach that makes Ogden’s certainly the least fey of all English psychedelic classics. This was to be the template for both Marriots’ later band Humble Pie and Lane, Ian Maclagan and Kenney Jones’ next career move with Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood in the Faces. Sadly, despite one complete airing on British TV (Colour Me Pop) Ogden’s was never to be performed live due, in part, to its complexity. Dispirited by an inability to build on its success (six weeks at number one in 1968), and annoyance that the one hit from the album was the unauthorised release of “Lazy Sunday” the group finally caved in. In the same way as their contemporaries, the Zombies (with Odessey and Oracle), their masterpiece was their swansong and like that album it remains a pinnacle of British 60s pop....Chris Jones ....BBC..review....~ After listening to hundreds of new releases over the last couple of years, I’ve learned that most of the music today is despicably predictable. I can’t tell you how many times I was able to predict chord changes, instrumentation, vocal effects and builds the first time I heard a song. If you’ve heard one tune by Lana del Rey, you’ve heard them all. The same is true for most of the big names in the business: they’re more like reliable brands than creative endeavors. They may do slow songs, mid-tempo songs and fast songs; they may stick a piano in there instead of a guitar; and they all love to start songs in relative quiet before suddenly but predictably jacking up the power. The lyrics are safe, cliché and primarily consist of slogans that will eventually serve as ads for banks, jewelry and car insurance. It would be virtually impossible today to put “Revolution #9” and “I Will” on the same album. The labels wouldn’t have it and the indies don’t have the resources or equipment to pull off something like “Revolution #9.” In the second half of the sixties, though, new approaches became the norm. Musicians were constantly experimenting, looking everywhere for new sounds and styles, breaking rules and shattering expectations. There are few albums that shatter a listener’s expectations as much as Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake. I promise that if you have never heard it before, your first time through will be accompanied by several “What the fucks?” Most of those who have never heard it will likely be American, for the album did absolutely nothing in the States (except for my weird and obsessive father who spent years searching for the original release in the tobacco tin and finally found one from a seller in Bath only to find the disc was warped). On the other side of the pond, it held on to the #1 spot on the album charts for six weeks. Like The Move, Small Faces never really caught on in the USA. Most Americans only know “Itchycoo Park,” which reached #16 on the Billboard charts (The Move only reached #93 with “Do Ya,” released after they technically ceased to exist and before Jeff Lynne fucking ruined it with strings in the ELO version). So, who’s got it right with Ogdens’, the Brits who embraced it or the Yanks who ignored it? The Brits, of course! Now, as I said, you might not believe me if you listen to it once. You’ll hear a bizarre mix that includes two cockney bashes, a remake of a single that failed to chart and a fairy tale about a guy who’s looking for the other half of the moon and is helped by a fly whom he transforms into a giant fly to carry him to a mad guru, all in a weird, kaleidoscopic mix of soul, psychedelia and musical theatre. Have I got you hooked yet? No? Well, then, do what I do before a review: listen to the album three times before you pass judgment. I guarantee you that after the third spin, the tunes will stick in your head, you’ll smile at the audacity of it all and you’ll find yourself rooting for Happiness Stan to complete his quest. And you’ll love the fucking fly! Guaranteed! Ogdens’ is labeled a concept album, but the concept is pretty much confined to the fairy tale on side two; side one consists of individual tracks that have no apparent thematic connection. Still, there is a definite sense of unity to the whole despite the lack of an identifiable theme and the diversity of the music styles. Whether it’s the unity of a band working hard on a complex recording project in close quarters over a period of several months, or the combination of energy and commitment you hear in all the tracks is a cause-and-effect debate for historians. What I want to emphasize is that the unity is not the accidental result of the era in which Ogdens’ was created. It should not be dismissed as a period relic: there’s much more going on here than psychedelic indulgence. Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake opens with the title track, an instrumental based on “I’ve Got Mine,” their second single release that failed to chart in the UK way back in 1965. That failure had more to do with publicity breakdowns than the quality of the single, because by all rights it should have been a hit, if only for Steve Marriott’s killer lead vocal. On Ogden’s, this R&B number is transformed through phasing, energetic panning and plenty of reverb into a mood piece strengthened by the entry of strings in the second “verse” and Kenney Jones’ free-flow bashing on the drum kit. Ian McLagan does a fabulous job on the piano, maintaining the core beat to allow Kenney to go wild. I’ve described it as a mood piece, and the mood it creates is one of curiosity. It’s not a big “ta-da!” opener like “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” but a subtle understatement that is thoughtfully arranged and does a wonderful job of defying expectations and piquing one’s interest. Like nearly all the tunes on Ogdens’ it sticks in your head for days. Speaking of defying expectations, how about opening the album’s beautiful, soulful love song with a mock version featuring coffee-house acoustic guitar, handclaps, stilted background singers and a cheesy, sleazy lead vocal somewhere between The Beatles’ “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)” and The Bonzos’ “Look at Me, I’m Wonderful?” This bit of self-parody is part of what makes Ogdens’ such a delightful record, but the campiness never interferes with their ability to deliver superb music played with professional excellence. “Afterglow (Of Your Love),” once they arrive at what people know as the single, is an absolute knockout. You can’t go wrong with Steve Marriott singing in his most passionate R&B style, and he has one hell of a band supporting him in this endeavor. Ian McLagan’s work on the keyboards (organ and what sounds like a touch of modified harpsichord) is outstanding and the rhythm section of Ronnie Lane and Kenney Jones provide more than enough drive. The harmonies are first-rate, and the waves and crashes of sound certainly foreshadow the heavier rock Marriott would do with Humble Pie. If there is a link between the songs on side one, it’s probably “never do the same thing twice.” “Afterglow” is followed by the sensuously psychedelic sounds of “Long Ago and Worlds Apart,” an intriguing song combining expected and unexpected chord combinations by Ian McLagan. The song combines the best of melodic rock with the best of hand-clapping bluesy, laid-back rock in an amazingly complex but unified composition. The instrumentation and lead vocal are drenched in the fashionable effects of the time, leaving Ronnie Lane’s bass clear and untouched—a very good thing, because the bass part could have probably been released as a solo track to ravenous applause. The harmonies and playful enthusiasm flow in abundance here, and I remain fucking amazed at how they could have packed so much complex yet coherent music into a little more than two-and-a-half minutes. And Ogdens’ just keeps on getting better! Marriott goes cockney (his natural voice) on “Rene” to tell us the story of a dockside hooker with a firm non-discrimination policy, international influence and group discounts. Described in the Wikipedia article as one of two “psychedelic cockney knees up” songs on the album, “Rene” is a combination of tongue-in-cheek wink-wink intrigue in the verses and pour-another-pint singalong in the choruses. There’s more than a touch of musical theater here, as if Steve Marriott had decided to temporarily reconnect with his Oliver roots. Whatever the genre, style or origins, Marriott and Lane were wonderfully talented songwriters and “Rene” is a hoot. Anyone who can work Kuala Lumpur into a line and make it work is a fucking genius in my book: Wisely shifting gears, “Song of a Baker” has been repeatedly identified as a song that influenced the heavy rock movement that dominated the early and mid-1970’s, largely due to Steve Marriott’s burning lead guitar work, the heavy and energetic drumming from Kenney Jones and the oomph in the harmonized lines. You can definitely imagine how the song would sound with the upgraded recording technology used by bands like Led Zeppelin and Humble Pie. I’m not a fan of the heavy rock era (Robert Plant’s voice is like fingers on a chalkboard to me), but I love this song. The relatively lo-fi sound helps dampen what I usually hear as a tendency towards over-dramatization in the heavy rock era’s vocals and instrumentation, leaving behind a very well-constructed and superbly played number that kicks ass. It was a brilliant decision not to allow Steve Marriott to sing this song, as I think it would have become way too over the top. Marriott delivers the superb harmonic lines and Ronnie Lane gives us a suitably understated vocal that works perfectly in the mix. Steve Marriott got his knickers in a twist when Immediate Records released “Lazy Sunday” as a single, feeling it was a novelty song that didn’t deserve the status that should have been afforded Small Faces’ more serious work. He has a point, but goddamn, this is a fun little number that Marriott sings with cockney enthusiasm and the professionalism of a musical stage trooper. The arrangement is cheerfully kitchen-sink, as the band throws in bells, rolling waves and all manner of sound effects. The mood shifts back and forth between music hall bash and Sunday afternoon stillness, and despite the appeal to the average bloke, the arrangement reflects both complexity and thoughtfulness. It’s a great way to end the incredibly diverse but never discordant side one: If that sounds childish and silly to you, then you’re an uptight loser who has forgotten how to play and pretend. It’s not childish—it’s child-like. Marriott and Lane (credited composers on all the songs; McLagan on three, Jones on one) made a commitment to the genre and stuck with it. As I have repeated ad infinitum in other reviews, commitment is the key to artistic success, and Small Faces are to be applauded for not trying to load “Happiness Stan” with any heavy adult-like meaning. It’s a charming fairy tale, and has more of an impact because it remains a fairy tale. You can read the full lyrics on this page at Robbie Rocks. The music, by the way, is certifiably ab-fab. Interspersed among the six tracks that form “Happiness Stan” is a narrative read by Professor Stanley Unwin, a British comedian famous for his gobbledegook known as “Unwinese,” which he uses with great relish in relating key developments in the story. This was a brilliant decision for several reasons: one, he has a jolly grandfather voice that is very comforting and playful; two, he takes care of a lot of narrative details that would have been boring in song form; and three, the gobbledegook adds to the playfulness of the piece, much like the work of Lewis Carroll and (at times) James Joyce. Adults listening to him may cry out in frustration, “This is nonsense!” Children, on the other hand, will understand his wordplay almost instantly. So, again, if you’re an anal, arrogant prick, you may react with disdain to language like this: If you’re open-minded and playful, you’ll giggle with delight and not only will you understand it, you will become more absorbed in the story. After we’re all seated comfortable, too square on our botties, the music begins with the song, “Happiness Stan.” Living deep inside a rainbow, he interprets the world through colors . . . and when he looks up into the sky one night hoping to see a big fat moon, “black has stolen half the moon away!” The track opens with dreamy harp, which transforms to harpsichord when the quaint, drawing-room main theme begins. The beat shifts to heavier rock in the last passage, where Stan has made his astonishing discovery; Ian McLagan’s organ appropriately sets the mood of mystery. The following video is taken from the only “performance” (mimed) of Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake, from the BBC show Colour Me Pop. It will give you a feel for the piece, the band and Unwinese: After the narration, Small Faces just has to kick some ass, which they do quite well in the joyous rocker, “Rollin’ Over,” where Stan sings about the excitement of starting a noble quest. My absolute favorite piece comes next: “The Hungry Intruder.” Stan has paused his quest to have a bite to eat, and just as he’s about to dig in, he hears a faint voice, which, to his amazement, is coming from a tiny fly. Let me get something straight: I hate fucking flies. One item that made it to the top of my packing list when I moved to France earlier this year was my bug zapper, a sort of tennis-racket with battery power that zaps the crap out of any insect that dares enter my space, and flies and spiders are at the top of my public enemies list. But gosh, the fly in “The Hungry Intruder” is so disarmingly polite that it almost makes me feel ashamed about my role as insect executioner . . . almost. The theatrical dialogue here is superbly performed and rather touching: I’ll never make it to Stan’s level of consciousness, but then again, I’ve never met a fly with manners. After lunch, the fly asks Stan if there’s anything he could do for him. Stan explains his quest, and the fly mentions someone who could help. The fly explains he would gladly take Stan to this person if he wasn’t so dinky, and Stan uses his magic powers to transform the fly into the insect version of a 787. Hey, it’s a fucking fairy tale! The narrative merges into “The Journey,” a suitably psychedelic number that takes the pair to meet the man with the answers, Mad John. The song here has the feel of English folk translated for modern sensibilities as Traffic would do later with “John Barleycorn.” John is described a strange hermit to be avoided by all good children, and the lyrics that close the piece enlighten us with a powerful lesson, as all good fairy tales should: Stan buys in to the fear to some degree, and approaches the cave with trepidation. To his delight, he receives a hearty welcome: Mad John shows Stan that during the time Stan has spent on his quest, the moon has taken its natural course and has phased into the full moon. This “struck him like a smacker o’ blueidy,” setting up the other lesson of the tale in the closing piece, “Happy Days Toy Town.” The music to the finale returns to cockney music hall, clearing away any sense of heaviness that might have appeared had Small Faces decided to imbue the piece with ponderous significance, as many other psychedelic artists of the time attempted to do in their work. Fuck the search for meaning! Let’s have some fun! It’s also the perfect ending to a record that combines deeply satisfying music with the awareness that music, at its heart, is something to be enjoyed. The great works of rock combine great lyrics with great music, and the artists who have created those works realized that music at that level of ambition still has to entertain as well as enlighten. The Beatles certainly understood that in the creation of Sgt. Pepper, The Kinks achieved that balance several times and Small Faces pulled it off in Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake—a playful, lyrical, melodic and rocking tribute to the human imagination.....By altrockchick .....~ Tasty and good for your health ... Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake Where would you be on a Lazy Sunday afternoon in the summer of '68? If not rioting naked in the banner-strewn streets, you'd probably be helping Happiness Stan search for the missing half of the moon before discovering that life was just a bowl of All Bran. Precisely forty years ago, Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake was nearing the end of its six-week stint at number one of the UK album charts. After it hit, rock and pop music were never the same. The album was a groundbreaker but not just because of its circular sleeve or its psychedelic concept - it was more far-out than that: by unleashing such a split-personality array of songs, such as Lazy Sunday, Rollin' Over, Afterglow, Rene and Happydaystoytown, the Small Faces left listeners befuddled and lost at the very crossroads of rock and pop. After leaving everyone stranded, the Small Faces themselves crashed and combusted. Just a few years after overseeing a split within the Mod movement between peacocks and lemonheads, the four diminutive Manor Park sharp-dressers split their vessel asunder. Marriott walked off mid-gig at the Alexandra Palace hours before 1969 began, in search of heavier, soul-scorching rock. The fairytale concept behind Ogdens', conceived by Steve Marriott and co while out raving on boat trips on the Thames and strung together by Stanley Unwin's gobbledegook (Spike Milligan turned down the job), only occupied the second side of the album. And the concept was only half-baked, much sillier and infantile than cosmic or profound - a strong LSD trip (at full pelt during The Journey) followed by a back-to-senses Cockney get-together. "Forget about the moon!" the story concludes. Marriott was enraged when Immediate released the accented Lazy Sunday as a pre-album taster single - "'ello Mrs Jones, 'ow's your Bert's lumbago? Mustn't grumble..." - as he thought the song worthy of merely a throwaway album filler. Instead, it became as much an anthem for successions of alienated youth as My Generation. While The Who's transition from beat pop to psychedelia and squally rock was more pronounced and definite, the Small Faces were pulled in both directions at once, and Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake ended up as schizophrenia in full effect. Marriott, who first took the stage as the Artful Dodger in Oliver! eight years previously was cast as the finest, most authentic British white soul singer, but also with Cockney coster overtones. Ronnie Lane, Kenney Jones and Ian McLagan dug deep into Stax, Atlantic and R&B sounds for soul bass-lines, Hammond charges, and break-beats and contorted them to their design, rather than taking the wam-bam, populist meat-and-potato approach of The Who. Ogdens' took a year to complete, but it still ended up rushed and cobbled together. Due to its complex turns and arrangements, the Small Faces never felt able - or willing - to perform the album live. They only mimed to it for one glorious episode of TV's Colour Me Pop (watch parts 1, 2 and 3). Surviving Small Face, drummer Kenney Jones, opined that if they'd stuck at performing Ogdens' live they might have been able to deal with the great behemoth they'd created and move on. Yet it proved to be their final summit. Instead, theatre company Playbox is staging it for the first time as part of Oxjam, with Unwin's son John and the Small Fakers, described as "a facsimile band". The most adept tribute could never reproduce Marriott's voice, the band's tension and kaleidoscopic inventiveness, so I can't help but think, no matter how much hard work is put into it and how much it raises for charity, it's wrong. Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake caused both delight and confusion with its simultaneous celebration of a Technicolor flanged trip and old-fashioned knees-up, folk balladry and proto-heavy metal. It influenced Paul Weller, Ocean Colour Scene and Blur, spawned prog-rock, hard rock, heavy metal and punk rock. By then, Happiness Stan had been unmasked as a lunatic and his creators were well and truly gone. With all the turbulence and seismic damage it wreaked, shouldn't we just let Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake rest in peace now?...Owen Adams....The Guardian....~ In May 1968, the Small Faces released their final LP, Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake, putting an end to their short but stimulating career. Though the band's legend has grown over the years, between 1965 and 1969, its recorded output was relatively small: a run of great singles, three albums and they were gone. Their catalog holds up, especially Ogdenss Nut Gone Flake, even with its period touches. The LP was issued in a round sleeve made to look like a tobacco tin, which opened up in four folds (at the time, tobacco tins were often used to store other, less legal substances). The distinct packaging reflected the exciting music it contained. The album kicks off with the title song, a blazing and swirling instrumental that sets the mood. This opens the door for "Afterglow of Your Love," a beautifully soulful tracks that packs a triumphant chorus. Then there's "Song of a Baker," written by Steve Marriott and Ronnie Lane, who takes lead vocals. Side one ends with the campy music hall-inspired "Lazy Sunday," featuring Marriott in an exaggerated cockney accent. The song was released as a single before the album came out and made it to No. 2 on the U.K. chart. "We didn't want to release [it] as a single even though we virtually knew it would be a hit," Marriott recalled in The Young Mods' Forgotten Story. "We didn't want those gimmicky things to be a trademark." After the universal impact of the Beatles' landmark Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band the previous year, albums were no longer just a collection of songs. Almost everything headed for conceptual territory, and Marriott and Lane wondered if they could the hold the interest of fans for two sides. So, they reserved side two of Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake for the concept, a fairy tale of sorts about a character named "Happiness Stan" and his search for half of the moon. "Every band at that point were trying to keep up with or go one better than everybody else with new sounds," recalled producer Glyn Johns. "It was a very exploratory period, breaking out from the use of very standard instruments and recording techniques. Marriott and Lane added narration between two songs to move along their story, enlisting eccentric British actor Stanley Unwin for the gig. "It made us laugh," remembered Marriott. "Anything that made us laugh, we liked. We gave him a glossary of hip terms to throw in with the Cockneyisms." From the whimsical "Happiness Stan" to the rollicking "Rollin' Over," the Small Faces attempt to cram in as many styles as they can on the LP's second side. The album proved to be a huge hit in the group's homeland, shooting straight to No. 1 and staying there more than a month. And despite the complex nature of the recordings, drummer Kenney Jones envisioned taking the album to the stage, complete with Unwin to narrate. But Marriott, already plotting his move out of the band, shot down the idea. Within a year, Marriott would split and form Humble Pie, while the others would regroup as the Faces, with Rod Stewart and Ron Wood taking Marriott's place. Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake remains their masterpiece from the period. ....~ There was no shortage of good psychedelic albums emerging from England in 1967-1968, but Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake is special even within their ranks. The Small Faces had already shown a surprising adaptability to psychedelia with the single "Itchycoo Park" and much of their other 1967 output, but Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake pretty much ripped the envelope. British bands had an unusual approach to psychedelia from the get-go, often preferring to assume different musical "personae" on their albums, either feigning actual "roles" in the context of a variety show (as on the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album), or simply as storytellers in the manner of the Pretty Things on S.F. Sorrow, or actor/performers as on the Who's Tommy. The Small Faces tried a little bit of all of these approaches on Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake, but they never softened their sound. Side one's material, in particular, would not have been out of place on any other Small Faces release -- "Afterglow (Of Your Love)" and "Rene" both have a pounding beat from Kenny Jones, and Ian McLagan's surging organ drives the former while his economical piano accompaniment embellishes the latter; and Steve Marriott's crunching guitar highlights "Song of a Baker." Marriott singing has him assuming two distinct "roles," neither unfamiliar -- the Cockney upstart on "Rene" and "Lazy Sunday," and the diminutive soul shouter on "Afterglow (Of Your Love)" and "Song of a Baker." Some of side two's production is more elaborate, with overdubbed harps and light orchestration here and there, and an array of more ambitious songs, all linked by a narration by comic dialect expert Stanley Unwin, about a character called "Happiness Stan." The core of the sound, however, is found in the pounding "Rollin' Over," which became a highlight of the group's stage act during its final days -- the song seems lean and mean with a mix in which Ronnie Lane's bass is louder than the overdubbed horns. Even "Mad John," which derives from folk influences, has a refreshingly muscular sound on its acoustic instruments. Overall, this was the ballsiest-sounding piece of full-length psychedelia to come out of England, and it rode the number one spot on the U.K. charts for six weeks in 1968, though not without some controversy surrounding advertisements by Immediate Records that parodied the Lord's Prayer. Still, Ogdens' was the group's crowning achievement -- it had even been Marriott's hope to do a stage presentation of Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake, though a television special might've been more in order.....by Bruce Eder.....~ Not realizing that Ronnie Lane and Steve Marriot were in this band, and not knowing that they wrote "Itchycoo Park" which honestly wouldn't have swayed me in favor of the purchase, I bought it anyway because of some blurb about classic british blah blah blah etc. I tend to really like music from this era, and this is right in there, except to these American ears wow is it "British"! This has totally grown on me. At first I was a little worried, as "Happiness Stan" is just weird, but "Afterglow", "Lazy Sunday" and especially "Song Of a Baker" got me hooked bad. The stereo mix is all over the place, as I must conclude that is how it originally sounded. To my ears there's a little more sonic focus of the mono version, but now after listening to both of them I really like them both. These guys could rock! I have to say I LOVE the story in the liner notes about how after going on tour with the Who, they said that the Who slaughtered them, and Marriot knew they had to step it up if they were going to leave a mark. Well they certainly did. Great, classic, perfect British Psychedelic record. Almost sorta makes me wish I was there. As far as the packaging goes, it's groovy and all, but not knowing anything about them, I would've been fine with just a regular package. Still I don't regret the purchase. I definitely won't be taking the boxed set on any long road trips. It's too nice for that.....PDX-ish guy.....~ Being born in the mid '60's, I didn't develop my taste for British Rock until the mid '70's. With that said, I quickly accumulated the back catalogues of The Kinks, The Who, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd on vinyl. Although I had heard of Small Faces, I had never heard any of their music and definitely never heard of Ogdens. Also, despite my many hours sifting through record stores, I never came across the album and being a round cover, I would certainly have remembered the experience. Anyway fast forward to 2012 and this oversight has now been corrected. All I can say is, "What a treat Ogdens is, and I am glad I missed it the first time around because I find it to be delightfully entertaining 40 plus years later. The music doesn't sound dated like some of the music from the era and it is as strong an album as compared to contemporary British releases like "Village Green Preservation Society", "Beggars Banquet", and the "White Album". Yes it is that good." As to the box set, for the money, this is a great value and much care went into this package. The mono disc actually sounds better to my ears than the stereo versions. I will say that the "hat-box-like paper tin replica" could have been thicker and a nice embossed cover as opposed to just an applied label would have been nice. To the music, as I already said, it is delightful. I do enjoy both sides, but I do find side 2 to be a little less enjoyable mostly due to the nonsensical narration, but I do give the band a thumbs up for the tale of Happiness Stan as it is cohesive and all the elements work, even the narration as it does have its own charm.... Feldman.....~ Ogden's Nut Gone Flake is a historic album full of musical ingenuity and comical conceptions. Released in 1968 the record and its design hit number one on the UK charts. The music is all good and wonderful to hear on the vinyl format as well as the CD format. This record is the mono limited edition packaging. It comes basically exactly like the original with a few extras. One thing which would have been nice would be for the record itself to have come in a more protective inner-sleeve which would have protected it a bit better during shipping, yet one cannot flaw a company that remasters and recreates the original to the tee. The recording sounds amazing and the packaging is out of this world. This Small Faces album is them at their best. If you like vinyl and can afford to buy it (well worth every dime) I suggest you pick it up....Tyler Smith......~ .This is an outstanding album that of course every real music fan should own! Amongst my thousands of CD's and records Ogden's (along with the Small Faces first Immediate album) I listen to almost daily. I do take note of other Amazon purchasers so was suprised to find an average 2 star rating for this reissue. On reading the reviews I found that, though they made some valid points, the worst reviews were by people who had not actually purchased the item but had some issues with the latest presentation and/or price. I think it is rather sad that such a great album, and a very good reissue, should have a 2 star rating due to these reviews. I purchased the vinyl version (PLEASE NOTE MY PHOTO SHOWS THE BOX FOR THE 2018 VINYL LP BUT THE OTHER ITEMS ARE FROM THE 2012 LIMITED CD RELEASE FOR COMPARISON) and find it excellent and great value! The vinyl LP's are new half speed masters and have excellent sound quality. With half decent hi -fi euipment they sound better than 2012 CD remasters which have excellent sound themselves compared to previous reissues. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the history of the Immediate master tapes will appreciate the work that has been done to get these reissues to the level they are. The vinyl set includes the Mono and Stereo mixes plus a disc of outtakes. Yes the outtakes are available elsewhere, but not in this quality on vinyl. The vinyl are 3 high quality 180-gram vinyl beautifully finished discs in red, white and blue vinyl with facsimile 1968 Immediate labels and quality lined paper inner sleeves. Perhaps the only thing that lets the vinyl set down is the outer sleeves which are very plain with a similar design to the outer box with a photo of the original sleeve surrounded by plain white. Very plain when compared with the original. In this way the set does not quite measure up to the excellent presentation of the 2014 'Here Comes The Nice' box set or the limited edition 2012 CD reissue (pictured) which had excellent detail based on the original circular cover. On a practical level though those 'circular' reissues are harder to look after and maintain in excellent condition and no doubt are more expensive and impractical to manufacture in large numbers. The book that accompanies the CD and LP sets, while not hard cover like the 2014 box set, is on 'glossy' print on all 72 pages and contains many new photo's of the lads, the artwork and period labels. It manages to add a new dimension even to the excellent 'circular' booklet with the 2012 'limited release'. If you are lucky enough to own this 2012 release the new CD release may not seem great value. Whilst the new packaging adds a larger format book you do lose some of the 'round packaging', coasters etc. that come with the 2012 set and get the same remastering and basically the same outtakes with the addition of the odd track from the 2014 remaster. You also get a DVD of the 'Colour Me Pop' appearances which are also available on the 2009 'All Or Nothing' DVD where 20 other essential video's are also included. If you haven't got either of these items then in my opinion this 50th anniversary CD set is essential. If you have got them just get the vinyl for the excellent colored vinyl pressings and the new book. Just a further comment in relation to those other negative reviews, as previously stated I thought that the vinyl was great value when ordered from Amazon UK. However for some strange reason it was much more expensive if you ordered it from Amazon USA (import price??) whereas the CD set was expensive from Amazon UK but better value from the US. The LP set only took 4 days to deliver from dispatching in the UK to arrival in New Zealand. Excellent Service. And a final comment on the 5.1 mixes, Yes they are nice to have and I enjoy the 5.1 mixes of my Tull reissues and others. However given the lack availability of the Small Faces masters I can't see any 5.1 mixes being 'real'. More like a modern version of fake stereo. 5.1 mixes are a great novelty but I would never give a great album reissue a 1or 2 star rating because they are not available. These classics were recorded in the days of Mono and Stereo and that's how they still sound best!... David 'Mars' Howes (NZ)....~ This is truly a classic one-off album, and has been duly recognised as such. Of course, it is of very special interest to those of us who were teenagers or young adults in those days (1968). I think I was just 13 when my folks bought me "Lazy Sunday / Rolling Over" (the single), and though that song is ultra-poppy and commercial, it served as an introduction to Steve Marriott and his crew. With a more "mature" or "seasoned" taste now, I would say that Lazy Sunday (a chart hit) is one of the weaker songs on the album. Afterglow of your Love and Song of a Baker are better songs. However, what makes this album so special is the overall hearing from beginning to end. It works! One song rolls into the other, and on the second (vinyl) side you have that marvellous continuum, a story or "concept" interlaced with Stanley Unwin's narrative which, for you foreigners who can't be expected to know who the hell Stanley Unwin was (quite understandably) needs a little explanation: he was like no-one else on earth, and could entertain you with stories you could understand perfectly well despite his telling them in a language found in no dictionary -which had something to do with the English language but, then again, did not, if you see what I mean. The overall effect is of some curiously appetizing children's entertainment reserved for adults who secretly wish they'd never grown up. Apart from the music, the cover art -representing a tin of ± 1920's Ogden's tobacco- did a lot to sell the album; in fact it figures amongst the most famous. It's a quirky album, true, but it certainly deserves its place in the history of rock music. As for recording quality, I'll leave that to other commentators. My purchase sounds fine to me!..... Samuel Pyke....~ I am a huge Beatles fan, I'll admit it. But I will also admit that due to their popularity, amount of output and following, there were a great many bands who are hugely under appreciated and whom, if the Beatles hadn't existed, would of perhaps become more well known. There are, in my opinion, two bands who were hugely under rated in the mid to late 1960 and whose songwriting was brilliant, one was the Bee Gees (who only really hit the big time in the 1970's) and the other being The Small Faces. I am a huge fan of The Small Faces and stumbled on them in the mid 1990s via their more popular songs such as Itchycoo Park and Lazy Sunday. When I discovered this album I was instantly hooked. There is something really great about their cheeky chappy personality. They are capable (via Steve Marriott, and Ronnie Lane (who is my musical idol) ) of writing a song so emotionally beautiful such as Afterglow of My Love to comedy songs such as Lazy Sunday and Rene, which tells it's own, very clear story, when you listen to it.....Miss L....~ Ogdens’… was the album The Small Faces had been wanting to make ever since the 1960s had turned psychedelic a couple of years earlier. Drummer Kenny (now Kenney) Jones and keyboardist Ian McLagan, along with guitarist and lead singer Steve Marriott and bassist Ronnie Lane, had shot to the forefront of the Swinging London scene, sharp-dressed mods with a sound to match. Their knowledge of soul, Tamla Motown and R&B was unrivalled – and it showed. During 1966 the Small Faces had one speed-fuelled chart smash after another: Sha-La-La-La-Lee, Hey Girl, All Or Nothing (a UK number one) and My Mind’s Eye. The last of those was a demo that their manager, Don Arden, gave to the record company without bothering to consult the band. It was an indication that the band’s best interests were not always at the top of the managerial agenda. ‘We were not progressing in any way because we were constantly gigging and we weren’t spending enough time in the studio,’ said Jones. McLagan concurred: ‘It was all bang, bang, bang in the studio – ‘Guitar solo now… Vocals next… Right, that’s done’ – and then off to the next gig, with maybe a TV show or an interview on the way.” The Small Faces were not big enough to confront Arden, and when their parents went to Arden to voice their concerns they were told that the band had spent all their money, with the added statement that the band were all on drugs. Early in 1967 the Small Faces announced that they were leaving Don Arden and Decca Records and signing with Andrew Loog Oldham, manager of The Rolling Stones, and his newly formed label Immediate Records. In retrospect this was jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire, but that’s not how it felt at the time. ‘Andrew promised us unlimited time in the studio,’ says Jones. ‘It was like a breath of fresh air. That’s when we started to get really creative and we turned a musical corner.’ The Small Faces were given virtually unrestricted access to Olympic Studios in Barnes, south-west London, which had already gained an enviable reputation with albums by Jimi Hendrix and The Who. To start with the Small Faces were like kids let loose in a candy store. Their next, self-titled album (not to be confused with their first self-titled album) crammed 14 songs into just over half an hour. They had no problem switching from the mournful Feeling Lonely to the rowdy Cockney knees-up All Of Our Yesterdays, via the LSD-tinged Green Circles. For casual punters, though, it was a bit more confusing. But the singles – none of which came from the album – were another matter. Here Comes The Nice, Itchycoo Park and Tin Soldier were magnificent creations that summed up the spirit of ’67. Oldham was happy to let the band continue their studio adventures, and McLagan stressed that their manager was never involved in the creative process. ‘He’d come in occasionally and pass a joint around, have a laugh and wander off after an hour or so. He wasn’t anything to do with what we were doing.’ Nevertheless, when the band hit a creative block while they were recording songs for what would become the Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake album, it was Oldham who despatched them off on a boating weekend on the River Thames. ‘He booked us some boats and told us to go away and clear our heads and come up with an idea and some songs to go with it,’ Jones said. It was a bold suggestion, not least because the Small Faces’ nautical inclinations had never progressed beyond the confines of the paddling pool in their local park. But that didn’t stop them from becoming intrepid mariners – in their own heads, anyway. The album’s title and the circular sleeve design are inextricably linked, although nobody seems to remember which came first – which is not surprising given the subject matter. ‘We assumed that marijuana would become legal quite soon, which was perhaps a little naïve,’ stated McLagan. ‘So we thought we’d be ahead of the game. We envisaged that rather than cigarette machines there’d be joint machines, with all the packaging and everything. The people at Immediate got [pipe tobacconists] Ogdens to send over all their old designs and scrapbooks going back to the previous century, and we browsed through them. We were looking at this design on a tin which said ‘Ogdens’ Nut Brown Flake’, and Steve suddenly went: ‘Nut brown – nut gone! That’s the one.’ We got an artist to come in and change the wording, but we kept the original design.’ The band originally wanted to release the album in a tin, but the cost of manufacturing a 12-inch tin proved impractical, not least because of the cost (John Lydon’s Public Image would have better luck a decade later). Instead they opted for a circular something up their sleeve: the original circular Ogdens’… album cover cardboard fold-out sleeve – which was almost as impractical when it came to shop displays. It wasn’t easy to rack, it was flimsy, and the record kept falling out. None of this mattered if you were stoned, but the majority of record retailers were pretty straight. Nevertheless, when it was released at the end of May 1968, after a nine-month gestation period, the album became The Small Faces’ biggest success. It spent six weeks at number one that summer, boosted by unanimous rave reviews and the success of Lazy Sunday which was riding high in the singles chart. The success of Lazy Sunday, though, created its own set of problems. The band were unhappy that it had been released as a single, believing it enhanced their image of lightweight pop stars at a time when they wanted to be regarded as serious musicians. ‘We were in Germany when we picked up a copy of Melody Maker and discovered that we had a hit record with Lazy Sunday, Jones remembers. ‘We’d just done the record for fun, but Andrew took it upon himself to release it as a single without telling us. Looking back on it he was right, of course, but at the time it didn’t do anything for the image we were trying to put across as serious musicians – not when we doing heavier rock songs like Song Of A Baker or Wham Bam Thank You Ma’am. McLagan believed this was ‘the first nail in the coffin. It was fun and it was a part of what we were, but afterwards it was like: ‘How do we get out of this?’ Now we were getting screaming girls at our gigs and we couldn’t hear ourselves play. It was like Beatlemania, and it used to piss us off a lot.’ There was another problem: The Small Faces were increasingly unable to play the songs on Ogdens’… live because the technology wasn’t around to reproduce the sounds they’d recorded in the studio. ‘You couldn’t play an acoustic guitar as the front instrument with a band. You couldn’t hear it. And if you tried to mic it up it would just feedback’ explains McLagan. ‘There were no acoustic guitar pickups. There was no phasing, either. You couldn’t get that effect on stage. Plus there were songs where I was playing three different keyboards.’ The only performance the Small Faces ever gave of Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake was on the BBC’s Colour Me Pop show – and that was barely live; they sang to backing tapes. But they did manage to get Stanley Unwin to reprise his narrator’s role. They put him on a throne and stuck a crown on his head. Looking back, what the Small Faces really needed at this point was a manager who could have given the band creative guidance through this rocky phase in their career and taken them to the next level, much as The Who’s managers Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert did with Tommy. ‘We thought Andrew was managing us but he wasn’t really,’ said Jones. ‘He and his partner Tony Calder were having problems with the label because they were running up bills, and although we didn’t realise it at the time they were going under. We were the biggest act they had so we were keeping them going.’ McLagan put it more succinctly: ‘Andrew’s nut had gone. We should have gone to America but we never did. The excuse was that I’d been busted for dope, but that wasn’t true. They didn’t want to let us go because there would have been other managers and agents sniffing around and they would have told us that we were mad if we weren’t being paid properly; we would have been enlightened.’ As it was, The Small Faces gradually fell apart at the seams over the latter part of 1968. Marriott, in particular, became increasingly disillusioned, particularly after The Universal, a song that he considered one of his finest, stalled at #16 when it came out as a single. The end was nigh when Marriott threw down his guitar and walked off stage at London’s Alexandra Palace on New Year’s Eve 1968. At that point they agreed to disband, although they carried on for a couple of months, playing the gigs they’d been contracted for. McLagan reckoned it was the only time they saw any money as a band. ‘I’d taken over the finances because it was impossible to tell who wasn’t stealing from us at that point.’ By the time they played their final gig, Marriott was already setting up Humble Pie with his mate Peter Frampton. The others would soon be moving on to the next phase of their career in the company of Rod Stewart and Ron Wood. Immediate Records staggered on into 1970 before collapsing in a haze of bankruptcy, but at least its finest hours still survive, and prime amongst them is Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake.....~ Speculation and lore have always surrounded the Small Faces’ most celebrated LP. Some argue that Odgen’s Nut Gone Flake is the first rock ‘n’ roll concept album (side two tells a tale of a boy who befriends a housefly before searching for the moon’s missing half). Others recall the band’s infamous manager Andrew Loog Oldham locking the lads away in a country home with their instruments, a block of hash and the instructions to write something heady. From the get-go this 1968 mod opus had all the good makings of a cult album with its cryptic packaging, immediately likable songs, kooky concept and controversy — Oldham’s ad copy for Odgen’s spoofed The Lord’s Prayer. More importantly, it was with this album that the band injected some muscle into Britain’s psychedelic sound. The soulful “Afterglow (Of Your Love)” proved that love songs could rock hard and heavy, as Steve Marriott delivers one of his top vocal performances, while bass man Ronnie Lane really came into his own with the impassioned epic “Song Of A Baker.” The quirky cockney “Lazy Sunday” birthed the blueprints for ‘90’s Brit-pop having directly influenced Blur’s “Park Life.”....OFRSS....~ What a fine piece of '60s brit pop! I must say on first listen, I thought what is this second rate kinks bullshit! But on repeated listens the songs hooks sinked into my ear drums, and never let go. It's really just a delightful mix of nastalgic british music hall, with a bit of some soulful rock, and smittering of folk and psychedelia. It all sounds a bit primitive, but in a delightful way. I'm reminded of the troggs first album, where i thought wow this is a band with limited abilities, but maximizing those abilities to delightful effect. I feel the small faces are a bit better than the troggs, especially in the songwriting department, but this does sound like the apex of not the tightest band in the world, and it's all the better of it. Highly recommended!.....~ By and large, there are some albums that transcend the era of popular music they were recorded in, and then there are some that remain forever tied to the culture and attitudes of the era. There is a very small group of albums that manage to do be both, or neither. Released in 1968, Small Faces' Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake is both an immortal classic, and a celebrated period piece. Released at the height of the very British take on counter culture, in many ways the album epitomised the very English, tea on the lawn psychedelia, with its side long fantasy tale narrated by Stanley Unwin, flirtations with a sort of prototype heavy rock, and a distinct music hall influence woven throughout. Due to the second side of the original vinyl being dedicated in its entirety to the tale of Happiness Stan’s search for the missing half of the moon, Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake is inevitably an album of two halves. The first, more traditionally song-based side of the original album is a real mixed-bag of material as Small Faces realised that their audience were looking for an album which more closely followed the formulae of the band’s recent hits, “Tin Solider” and “Itchycoo Park”. From instrumental pieces, to soulful hard rock, to music-hall influenced beat-pop, the band does its best to demonstrate its diversity. Where it works, on songs like the title track, and “Afterglow”, the band knock it out of the park, however “Rene” over-eggs the music hall to the point where it becomes a novelty singalong cockney knees-up. The only thing that saves “Lazy Sunday” from the same fate is the band’s inherent ability with a pop song, as it touches, but doesn’t quite go over the line to the point where it becomes a novelty hit. Given Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake's second side’s fantasy narrative concept, it’s striking how it manages to avoid becoming a twee mess, given the fairy-tale imagery, Stanley Unwin’s gobbledygook verse, and the ever-present shadow of music hall influence. The fact that the narrative is kept tight, and that Unwin’s engaging charisma is allowed to take centre stage along with the band, instead of sounding like it has been added as an after thought, saves it from becoming a straight up experiment in novelty songwriting. It works, it’s cohesive, and most importantly, the band, and Unwin, all sound utterly committed to pulling it off. While no one could argue that Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake is an ageless album, it retains a charm of its own. Much of this can be put down to the fact that they were, at their very core, a hell of a band, with Ronnie Lane and Kenney Jones being one of the best beat-combo rhythm sections of the 60s, both Lane and Steve Marriott being ace songwriters, and Marriott being one of the premier vocalists of his generation, and keyboard player Ian Mclagan being the band’s secret weapon. Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake may be the Small Faces’ masterpiece, but it is not flawless, but the fact that the band managed to pull it off in the manner they did, has menat that it remains a much loved period piece and one of those albums that everyone needs to hear at least once.....pq.....~ Take your fill, take nothing less If it weren’t for the stunning quality of the first side plus the bonus tracks on CD, this rating could easily been a star or more lower. Actually, the original LP might not even be that superstrong. The easy solution is to buy the CD re-issue: for once, you get a flawed while already very good album with a huge number of bonus tracks that are partly quintessential, partly forgotten gems. In this case, the enhanced CD is the definitive purchase. Anyway. The first side of the original LP is one of the best sets of songs on one vinyl side ever. They’re all classics except „Long Agos and Worlds Apart“, which in turn improves the sequencing by putting in a just-decent melody for once. It’s psychedelic pop-rock at its best, from the classic instrumental intro (hypnotic) to the rocking singalong anthem of „Lazy Sunday“. These guys could rock as hard as the Stones, play as melodically versatile as the Kinks and had the demanding pressure of the Animals – and were eager disciples of the psychedelic Beatles (listen to the excellent „Rene“ and, say, „Baby, You’re a Rich Man“ in a row). And sometimes they did all these things in one song. Their sound is amazing, a muscular bass, roaring but non-flashy electric and acoustic guitars, great production. It’s a commonplace that Steve Marriott is the 1960s' „hidden frontman“ if there ever was one, having no trouble to sneer, balladeer and roar, and always come of as a character. If you’re at all interested in psychedelic 1960s rock, get this immediately. It may take three or four listens but you’ll find yourself singing out loud to every single song on side one in no time. I don’t know how to explain the weird decision of the second side with its fairytale/shaggy dog narrative and singalong kiddy melodies played to rock music. It’s as if they were sitting in the studio, banging out one superb single after another and deciding that, since everybody else was doing concept albums, the second album side had to consist of „art“. Also, the „art“ should come of as „non-serious“ and playful, because everything else would be just pretentious, now wouldn’t it. Again, this is an example that the Small Faces were a great band with the tendency for tardiness. Everybody else was doing concept albums. So they wanted their’s too and that’s nice. It’s just a stupid move to screw up an alltime great album just for fun. Because this is what it’s about, they’re daring to have fun at the cost of the music critic who wants the consistently brilliant rock album they’re capable of! Well, they do it with open eyes and deliberate purpose, so I can respect that. And, after all this haggling, I need to point out that Side B here is by no means bad. The melodies are good singalong melodies, the narrative is all good fun, the songs between the narrative rock, „Happiness Stan“ shows enough potential to feel like a missed opportunity and hey, the medieval ballad „Mad John“ even has an emotional grip on me. I guess I’m just crying over the fact that the Small Faces straight-facedly flipped the bird to their last chance to commercial success as album musicians......trapecchi .....~ After several weeks of fighting with it, at points being bored by it and confused as hell...I finally have to conclude that Ogdens' is actually damn near brilliant. Really a record of damn fine music, and lots and lots to consider within! It's funny I started with the Small Faces on this cycle just sort of as "oh hey another British band with a THE X name, might as well fill some space, people seem to like them". Little knowing they'd be able to play in the leagues of the best of them, and also unlock a whole other epoch involving Rod Stewart and his solo career in the 70's. Talk about more than I bargained for, but all in good ways yes. I quickly took a liking to them on their earlier two records (namely the second), where I was pleased to see that I had once again stumbled onto a Zombies esque 60's guitar pop treasure box. Which is probably my happiest happy place when I hang out in the 60's. I expected Ogdens' as their often most lauded release to be much like again the Zombies Odyssey and Oracle. This goes to explain why I stumbled bad on entry and took awhile to recover, as Ogdens' simply isn't that simple. It's a record definitively split into two parts, in the truest sense. Side one is a bunch of songs. And Side two is a miniature concept album rock opera. Yep. There's lots unexpected about this. Normally a concept album would put the concept first, and round out side two with "the other stuff". Prog has a bad habit with this for example. Also one would maybe expect that the rock opera would sound more like the oncoming 70's, while the other songs would be more melodic gems like their earlier career but no not really. Side Two is the overtly sixties one, it's concept is no serious Prog thing but a ridiculous fun little fairy tale about a guy looking for where the other half of the moon went, complete with a off kilter children's story type narrator who freely ignores proper grammar and makes up new adjectives left and right. It's all very much in league with the Zombies, Beatles, Kinks, Monkees and all that sort. Most of the easier happier material is there and it wasn't really the challenge at all. You may know I'm a skeptic of rock albums being about stories, but something this silly and lightweight? Please, I'm tickled pink by it. But this brings us to side one, where I had my troubles. Side one...sounds like the band is already gearing up for where they'd be in their reincarnation as Faces in just a couple years' time with Rod and Ron. A sort of rough and tumble rootsy Soul Rock for lack of a better word, yeah there's still some silly 60's fare like Renee and Lazy Sunday aboard, but mostly it gets defined by the one two punch that opens it, especially the soulful power anthem that is Afterglow. Songs like those are already begging to be sung over by Rod Stewart in my opinion. Marriott does well though don't get me wrong. So the result of these two sides is that the overall experience is pretty confusing on a first listen. But given some time I had to think it still really worked, and that they essentially gave strong effort to both developing sides of themselves. Which when you think about is super impressive. I can within the same sit down be drawn into the passionate chuggy anthems, and then enjoy the pretty melodies and goofy atmosphere of side two. The band basically manages to have their feet in two different puddles without it feeling awkward. Maybe because the 60's pop feels slightly informed by the 70's hard soul, and vice versa. Much like Traffic's album of this year this sounds like a triumph of the transitional stage rather than being skewered on the fence of crossings. I agree with band members that think they might have become a super powerful entity had they not fallen slightly apart right after this with lead singer Steve Marriott leaving. They would reform as I mentioned, but by that point their fates had firmly aligned with side One and the tastes of two Jeff Beck Group alumni....Zephos ....~ Now the last time I played “Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake” – and it was an earlier CD version – I said this….”Psychedelia!, R&B!, Top Tunes!, A Massive Hit, Silly Cockney Accents, A very rude song about the Dockers’ Delight, The Meaning Of Life and Professor Stanley Unwin. This is a wonderful record although very much of 1967. Oh, and I suspect large amounts of mind altering substances were involved in its creation.” Actually, I was wrong – “Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake” came out in May 1968. Also, if it is stuck in a time warp of the 1960’s, why does it remain as popular as it undoubtedly is? I have an earlier CD version but this one that has just been reissued by Charly Records really is quite wonderful. It is a two CD set – the first being the original mono album, while the second is sort of, but not quite, a stereo version, taken from various sources (American mixes, early versions and the like) with four previously unreleased songs. Like “Small Faces” and “There Are But Four Small Faces” the album comes with a posh booklet with excellent sleeve notes by Mark Paytress. And the whole reissue was overseen by drummer – Kenney Jones and keyboard player – Ian McLagan. (Ian McLagan died on 3rd December 2014, less than a month after the album was reissued - there is only one Small Face left, sadly.) And the sound of the album is far superior to previous issues. Of course that wouldn’t matter if “Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake” was rubbish – but it isn’t. Remember the second side was a story linked by Professor Stanley Unwin which ought to be really dated in 2015 but it isn’t. For a start things like “The Journey” really rock and the whole thing, which is known, is “Happiness Stan” remains a joy. What was Side One is simply great. “Lazy Sunday” was a Number 2 hit single, “Afterglow” was also a hit – along time after Small Faces had split and for awhile I felt the intro spoilt it, but it doesn’t. “Rene” is profoundly rude, and both “Long Ago & Far Way” sung & written by Ian McLagan and “Song of the Baker” sung by bass player Ronnie Lane who was the main writer with vocalist and guitarist, Steve Marriott are both excellent and the album commences with the title track which is a rather terrific instrumental. Going back to “Happiness Stan”, the closing song “HappyDaysToyTown” starts with the line “Life Is Just A Bowl Of All-Bran” and so it is. The meaning of life, indeed. “Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake” defies its age – and it is very much of 1968 – but it still sounds fresh & inventive in 2015.....CharlyF1954......~ This is often viewed as a hidden gem among the late 60s psychedelic fans, and lets be honest their are millions of these so called hidden gems, USA, SF Sorrow, Music Emporium, Trip Thru Hell, I mean there were millions of obscure 60s psych bands who were one hit wonders or never hit big enough. Small Faces were big, in fact Marriott was in top consideration by Page to lead sing for Zeppelin when they first formed, but outside of England, Small Faces were relatively obscure and didn't have any hits outside of the minor Itchypoo Park failing to reach the top 10. These guys were pretty good, but not great. They were more of a band you play for catchy singles, but their albums sort of lacked. By pure sound and style, this is a pretty solid psych album and has the elements, but it just doesn't have the songwriting or depth that other psych bands like Pink Floyd or Love had. And most of the songs aren't too memorable either, the entire second half of this just doesn't have any real moments. Still, its just a mildy catchy, somewhat obscure late 60s psych pop album and it will scratch that itch for fans of the genre. And the vocals are pretty damn good.....jweber14 .....~ It’s pretty much in my musical DNA to prefer Small Faces when they stuck close to their mod origins and produced taut, sharp numbers with minimum bluster and maximum impact. Still, it was almost inevitable that anyone who was someone would get swept up in the heady atmosphere of the late 60’s and attempt something different. Thus Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake leaves me very much in two minds. Of course it wasn’t really in Small Faces’ DNA to completely succumb to hippiedom either, so once the instrumental title track has swirled past, what we have on side one is pretty much old mods dressed as sonic adventurers. “Afterglow of Your Love” wins by retaining the intensity of, say, “All or Nothing”, while it is of a part with a kind of heavier-than-thou vibe elsewhere. Steve Marriott’s soulful vocals are still in place, though on “Rene” and “Lazy Sunday” he goes in for a bit of cockney – genuinely so, since he was a working class lad from East London. Given that all of the tracks on side 1 (save perhaps for “Lazy Sunday”) might have been embellished beyond all reason by lesser bands, you have to give Small Faces a thumbs up for turning in solid, enjoyable performances, even though it’s hard to resist thinking that less might have been more. Side 2, with its tale of Happiness Stan, is hard to evaluate today. At a personal level, this, like a lot of conceptual pieces of the time, doesn’t really work for me. Frankly, I feel that the music gets in the way of Stanley Unwin’s charming narration, which I could happily listen to for the full 20 minutes, but it’s hard when you weren’t there, to enter into that peculiar late 60’s mindset. Again to Small Faces’ credit, at least they don’t let themselves get carried away by notions of profundity. Nothing speaks louder of the spirit of the enterprise than the knees-up that rounds things off, “Happy Days Toy Town”. There are a lot of bands that might have benefitted from taking the idea that “Life is just a bowl of All Bran” seriously. Ultimately I’m left with the feeling that Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake is an album of two halves, but not necessarily the halves the band themselves envisaged. On the one hand you have the heavy stuff (heavy blue-eyed soul?), where the band align themselves with certain current musical trends; on the other hand you have the irrepressible, cheeky Small Faces, deeply implicated in a very English tradition (Marriott’s vernacular delivery is not unique, but it was far from common). The band do neither badly, and sometimes quite excellently, but the confusion of approaches almost makes me want to shout: “Will the real Small Faces, whoever they are, please stand up?....resist_retreat ....~ Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake is a big improvement from their last album which wasn't anything special. Although I don't consider this album to be a masterpiece the material is still a lot stronger compared to it's predecessor. The only thing I find annoying on this LP are those stupid spoken word parts on the B-side. Spoken word can be good and entertaining if it's done the right way and not like this. Most of the material on the album is enjoyable but there are some parts especially on the side B that feel a bit useless. I'd like to rate this LP with 3,5 stars out of five. It's worth checking out for the psychedelic rock fans even if it's not one of the best albums the genre has to offer. Good work however.....CooperBolan .....~ It's one of the great travesties of modern times that the Small Faces only recently got inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame and even then only on a spliced ticket with their later Ron and Rod-added incarnation as Faces while the likes of the appalling pomp-rock power-balladeers Heart, to name but one, breezed in years ahead of Steve, Ronnie, Mac and Kenney. Anyway, rant over, this is the band's most celebrated work, which topped the UK album charts in the summer of 1968 and is a fine representation of a charismatic, inventive and massively underrated band. Boasting not only one of the best lead vocalists and front-men around in the pocket dynamo that was Stevie Marriott, they had a great song-writing team of Marriott and Ronnie "Plonk" Lane at their heart. Throw in two other fine instrumentalists in livewire drummer Kenney Jones and keyboardist extraordinaire Ian McLagan and you have one of the best little bands that ever was and who if there was any justice would surely have gone on to world domination in the early 70's, only to split acrimoniously and see their space filled by the likes of Led Zeppelin, Free and others. Even if the hippy-trippiness of "Ogden's" is about a year too late after the summer of love and all that, the album, whilst not perfect, more than gets by with its mixture of broad Cockney humour, plenty of grit and no little talent. Side one is the fairly conventional one, even if it does open unusually with a dreamy instrumental title track with some post-"Walrus" type strings swirling around a droning melody with Glyn Johns continuing the flanging studio trickery of earlier singles like "Here Comes The Nice" and "Itchycoo Park". Next up, after a droll spoof pub-vocalist intro is the superb "Afterglow Of Your Love", a dynamic Marriott rock number, which Ronnie Lane matched with the equally rocking "Song Of A Baker" later on. Before that Ian McLagan gets a rare vocal outing on his beguilingly idiosyncratic "Long Agos And Worlds Apart", which is followed by Marriott's slightly hackneyed, okay-the-first-time, rather like the old girl herself, the docker's delight, "Rene". The side finishes with Marriott's brilliant Cockney reverie "Lazy Sunday", a surprise smash hit when lifted as the single. For side two, the band cheekily employ the gobbledygook king Dr Stanley Unwin to relate, if that's the right word, the tale of Happiness Stan's quest for the other half of the moon and while his participation dates the album in the modern-day, it was another example of their irreverence for pop norms of the day. The story's a cute one and well-embellished by the band's soundtrack, especially with the Who-influenced "The Hungry Intruder", Marriott's folk-psychedelic "Mad John" and the larking-about closer "Happy Days Toy Town" which finds the meaning of life in a bowl of all-bran. Ironically, rather like contemporaries the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel, the group broke up after probably their best and most successful album, although unlike them, the band's light was hidden under a bushel for many years after their demise as Marriott heavied it up with Humble Pie and his old mates did likewise with Messrs Wood and Stewart, but really the Small Faces if they could just have held it together and built on the cohesion of "Ogden's" could have easily enjoyed continued critical and commercial success and not have to wait nearly 50 years for Cleveland's miles-too-late recognition of their verve and quality. As it was, tragically neither Marriott or Lane saw out their 40's whilst Jones and McLagan found themselves swindled out of their hard-earned money by rogue management. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it!....Lejink ....~ Side one is superb – Rene is the only average track. The rest is entirely classics or minor classics. Afterglow of Your Love / Long Agos and Worlds Apart has always seemed to me to work really well as one piece and Afterglow has won polls on the Room for Ravers web site as their most popular song. Song of a Baker possibly shows their potential and how they had developed as a heavy progressive band, better than any other track they ever cut. The title track is a superb instrumental with terrific Kenny Jones drumming. Lazy Sunday is their catchiest and most memorable song, very English, very psychedelic, and very funny (Cor Blimey Mrs Jones, How’s your Bert’s lumbago?). Quite brilliant so far. Side two is a catastrophe with four of the worst tracks they ever cut and Stanley Unwin’s gibberish links rendering it unlistenable. This is psychedelia at its embarrassing nadir, a half witted concept piece sketched out on the back of an envelope. However there are still two great tracks – the folk rock Mad John – one of many fine songs about madmen at this time (Fool On The Hill, Madman Running Through the Fields). Then there is the Little Richard meets Hendrix quasar of energy that is Rollin Over, one of the highest energy tracks in the entire history of rock. There is also a classic sleeve design that opens out into 8 sides. Never very lucky with albums, the Small Faces created another very problematic LP that is half genius half disaster. It soared to number one in the UK and stayed there for six weeks. It looked as though the Smalls were set for a career as one of the top 4 or 5 bands in the UK. Inexplicably Marriott decided to break up the group shortly after the release of Ogdens, when their average age was only about 22. 1968 was undoubtedly the best year of their career. How sad that it should also be the last.....apricot18 .....~ Fantastic album! One of the greatest, most powerful and imaginative records ever released. I first heard this over Easter 1983 on a cassette recording my brother made, I must have listened to it dozens of times over those weeks. Got the vinyl soon after and still have it, although I later got the CD to protect the vinyl from overuse. Ok, I'm not saying this album is perfect, and for those perhaps listening to it now for the first time it might sound a bit odd, but the whole thing is a total journey and will never get dull. It's all about context here, think of this album, freshly pressed 39 years ago, and listen to what else was popping up at the time and you'll understand what a breakthrough it really was, one of the few 'concept' albums not taking itself too seriously, with robust and diverse music, whixh at the end of the day is what it is all about. The story of Happiness Stan on side B is a pleasant nonsense story, but it's not nonsense because it's obscure or because it tries to get over a message, other than life being 'just a bowl of All Bran'. The more conventional side A holds the strongest tracks musically, including the gutsy and powerful 'Afterglow', and the wrenching passion of 'Song of a Baker', proving the Ronnie Lane had a characterful singing voice. Naturally it is Steve Marriott's vocals that are the stand out, this was a man at the height of his vocal power (forget Humble Pie where he shared vocals way way too much with lesser voices). The track most people would be familiar with here is 'Lazy Sunday', a big hit as a single, and one often targeted as being a bit jokey. Who said music can't be fun??? Anyway, listen to the long fade out with the church bells, it's pure loveliness. I have read here them being criticised for sounding too English? Of course they sound English, they ARE English, the only time this is a bit exaggerated is on 'Lazy Sunday' and 'HappyDaysToyTown' which are both a bit of a music hall sound. Try singing 'Lazy Sunday' in a straight voice, sounds stupid doesn't it? It's like getting Tom Cruise to do the voice over bits in Blur's 'Parklife', doesn't work anymore. The English accent and vocal style has a place just like anyother, just because American phrasing is more common, doesn't make it the only way. To summarise, lovely album packed through with great vocals, excellent guitarwork from Steve Marriott (one of the most underrated of axe heroes) and beautiful original songs by Marriott/Lane, all with the sense of uncomplicated fun the band were famous for. If you don't have this then get it, and see where Paul Weller nicked all his ideas!....Bagboy.....~ The words 'seminal' and 'masterpiece' are far to often applied to far too many things (music, paintings, food) but in the case of the Small Faces' 1968 offering Ogdens Nut Gone Flake those same words couldn't really be more appropriate. In 1968 the world was still tripping out on bad quality LSD or at least pretending it had; popular beat combo The Beatles had turned a few heads with the release of Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band the year before; Vietnam was prominent in peoples minds (particularly the Vietnamese); students were revolting (nothing new there then) and the Small Faces...well, the Small Faces donned their Granny Takes A Trip finest, took a boat down the River Thames in Olde London Town, smoked a herbal cigarillo or ten and came up with the idea of one 'Happiness Stan', a rather forlorn and pleading figure preoccupied with the search and location of the other half of the moon which, in case you don't already know, dangly in the heavenly bode (naturally enough helped in his search with the enlisted aid of an enormous fly and a strange lad by the name of 'Mad John') - what else!. _Ogdens Nut Gone Flake_ was born and 'Happiness Stan' was let loose on the world, and the world, in return, has been a better place since. Stans story is lavishly illustrated both in music (by the magical Small Faces of course) and verbally (by one 'Professor' Stanley Unwin ~ not to be confused with 'Happiness Stan' ~ confused? ~ Good). The late Stanley Unwin was an English comedic linguist who'd invented 'Unwinese'; a fixating gobledeegook language that anyone could understand without understanding the individual words ~ well, sort of. Listen and learn. 'Professor' Unwin was something of a British institution and his inclusion on Ogdens Nut Gone Flake is totally appropriate and serendipitous (paricularly seeing as the task was originally offered to Spike Milligan who declined). There are two very distinct sides to_Ogdens Nut Gone Flake_ , 'pre' and 'post Unwin'. Pre-Unwin starts with the instrumental title track, something of a layered keyboard soundscape with Ronnie 'Plonk' Lanes booming bass prominent in the mix - this is the only track which I've never been able to make my mind up about, do I like it or don't I like it? Well yes, I suppose I do like it but I always warm as it draws to a close, thereby unleashing the remainder of_Ogdens..._. The next track is "Afterglow of Your Love"; this could (and does) easily rank as many fans favourite Small Faces track. Steve Marriotts vocals are consummate (where they ever anything but? ~ Is it an exaggeration to call this man the greatest white male soul singer England has ever produced? I don't think it is) and combined with Ian 'Mac' McClagens descending keyboard riff go to make this an absolute classic in terms of British rock music. The 'Mac' sung "Long Ago and Worlds Apart" is a pleasing little psychedelic distraction which suddenly turns into a pleasing little surf tune and sort of sets the listener up for the remainder. The 4th track is the inimitable "Rene", the story of a woman of questionable virtue and access thereof. "Rene" is a vaudeville, gin palace, music hall, sing-a-long extravaganza and many is the time I've rolled up a trouser leg, whacked a knotted handkerchief on my head, lit up an 'Ogden' and spun wildly around the room, arms flailing wildly to this most excellent of cockney knees ups '...love is like a hole in the wall, a line-up in a warehouse, no trouble at all, if you can spare the money then you'll have a ball, she'll have yours-ahh...'. Is there anything quite like "Rene" anywhere else in the annals of rock history? Next up, another classic, Ronnie Lanes immortal "Song of a Baker" which he sings with true passion and panache '...there's wheat in the fields and water in the stream, salt in the mines and an aching in me, I can no longer stand and wonder 'cause I'm driven by this hunger...', truly wonderful (and recently covered by Ocean Colour Scene). "Lazy Sunday" is well known track, particularly to collectors of crap 1960's compilations but is, nevertheless, a breezy and stylish gem. It has a certain quintessential Englishness that only the Small Faces, The Kinks and The Beatles ever really captured. The final track on side 1 is "Donkey Rides, A Penny, A Glass", another sing-a-long with typically tongue in cheek lyricism ...'_snow flakes falling like leaves in the summertime, fishcakes, cabbage and mash, oh the world is mine_...'. And on to side 2 (or track 8 on the cd)... We have now entered the strange realm of 'Happiness Stan' and as 'Professor' Unwin asks us '...are you all sitting comftybold two square on your botty?...' we are transported into new and ethereal surroundings; but just in case Stanley Unwin loses us somewhere along the line the Small Faces are there to lead us by our cockney forefingolds in the right direction, albeit a rather odd kaleidoscopic one. The track "Happiness Stan" basically introduces us to the character. The next number is "Rollin' Over", a bright, optimistic doo-waddy-waddy tune (the falsetto singing by one Billy Nichols) with a great bass line and one which plots the genesis of Stans quest to locate the missing half of the moon ...'_goodbye sunshine, I'm on my way, I'll be long time gone by the break of day, tell everyone that I'm gonna find it and there ain't nothing gonna stop me_...'. "The Hungry Intruder" introduces us to Stans consort from here on, an enormous hungry, yet personable, fly - what else!. "The Journey" is next and is again a hybrid of 'Unwinese' and music; this time a bass driven chirpy tune ending in a psychedelic Hammond waltz!. The penultimate track "Mad John" offers the listener (and indeed Stan) a solution to all this 'missing half of the moon' stuff with the installment of Mad John, a local cave dwelling fruitcake cum sage; a lovely acoustic number that terminates in a great royal '_aye-diddley-aye-dye_' - true value for money. The conclusion to Ogdens Nut Gone Flake is another raucous cockney sing-a-long, "HappyDaysToyTown", with its opening line ...'_life is just a bowl of Allbran, you wake up every morning and it's there_...', what else does anyone need to say?. _Ogdens Nut Gone Flake_ may never reap the stellar magnitudes of praise heaped upon the likes of Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band but it should. This here album is unequivocal proof (if any were ever needed) that the songwriting team of Steve Marriott and Ronnie Lane were as strong and as vital in British music as were that of Lennon and McCartney (but dear listener you should have already realised this having listened to the first Small Faces album for the Immediate label, the imaginatively titled Small Faces - a serious contender as their best album). _Ogdens Nut Gone Gone Flake_ is a thing of beauty and of its time, that is true, but it is much, much more than that...it is also timeless; overflowing with great tunes well played; a whacky verbose and instantly lovable lingo in the shape of 'Unwinese'; it is stylish; it has joie de vivre; it has bucketfulls of humour, love and bloomingful good taste. If you take your music seriously and have any interest whatsoever in the sounds coming out of England (London specifically) in the late 60's then you simply have to own this album. _Stay Cool Won't You_....ThePoacher ......~ 

Released in May 1968, Ogden's Nut Gone Flake is the final album by The Small Faces Famous for its inventive cover design and unique packaging resembling a giant tobacco tin, the album peaked at no 1 in the UK chart in June 1969. It has subsequently become widely considered one of the most influential and creative albums of the 60's era, inspiring musicians of future generations. The first side of the record features a blend of rock, R&B and psychedelia through some of the band's best-known and best-loved tracks including Afterglow, Song of a Baker and Lazy Sunday. The second side is a surreal fairy story about a lad called Happiness Stan, narrated by Stanley Unwin and journeying further into psychedelia. Ogden's Nut Gone Flake has been re-released in a number of vinyl and CD editions, greatly improving sound quality, culminating in 2018's splendid 50th anniversary edition......~ By far the best-known Small Faces LP, ‘Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake’ was also their most successful, enjoying a six-week run at the top of the UK charts during June and July 1968. It marked the arrival of the Small Faces as a bona fide ‘album band’, a belated but brilliant achievement. The concept album mixes heavy rock, psychedelia, soul, and sheer cheekiness into a mélange that is truly addictive. Stanley Unwin’s narration, is without question a triumph of boldness, surrealism and musical bravura. The original mono and stereo vinyl LP’s in their award-winning revolutionary round sleeves were incredible. Unfortunately, subsequent editions on vinyl, tape and CD all suffered from varying sound quality, distortion, incorrect edits and fades and poor packaging which was unacceptable for such a historic and important album. For the first time ever, ‘Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake’ on CD has been produced using recently discovered original Immediate master tapes, Olympic Studio session multitracks, Trident Studios and Pye Studios tape reels plus material from Kenney Jones’ Small Faces archive. The remastered sound will be a revelation and simply has to be heard! The 3CD edition on Universal and Charly is made up of the original mono LP, the original stereo LP plus a third CD of previously unreleased material including alternative mixes, early takes and session backing tracks. As befitting its legendary status, ‘Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake’ is released in a variety of formats worldwide.....~ “We should have gone to America, and we wanted to go to America, but we’d had a drug bust, so we couldn’t go,” the Small Faces’ drummer Kenney Jones told me in 2012 of why he thinks his former band, although Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, never broke in America. “Our manager Don Arden didn’t trust anybody to look after us in America, anyway, because he was afraid he’d lose control of us. But we all conquered America anyway – Steve with Humble Pie and us with The Faces – but I think that if we had gone I think we’d be up there with The Who.” Fifty years ago, the Small Faces released the quasi-conceptual masterpiece Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake. It went on to top the U.K. charts for six weeks and, like The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Who’s The Who Sell Out and The Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society, it changed the course of rock and roll forever. Jones recalls the birth of Ogdens’ in loving detail in his forthcoming memoir Let the Good Times Roll, out this autumn. Born from the wild, fertile mind of bassist Ronnie Lane — about the fictitious Happiness Stan and his search for the half of the moon unseen from earth, and who ultimately discovers that life is nothing but a bowl of All Bran cereal – it’s a half-baked concept, for sure. Taking up only one side of the album (half of the tracks had already been recorded when the band stumbled on the idea during a joint boating excursion), it’s still structurally adventurous and sonically stunning. Full of great songs and lots of laughs, in the form of the gobbledygook narration by Stanley Unwin, whom the band enlisted, after British comedy giant Spike Milligan turned down the gig, to help hold the piece together, it represented the moment in the 1960s when pop and rock ceased existing together easily. Housed in a round sleeve, based on a tin of tobacco, it was a psychedelic statement writ large. But Side One of Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake, oft overlooked as a result of the legend that’s built up around the concept piece of Side Two, is just as remarkable. Full of Marriott’s theatricality, not to mention his barn-burner R&B belting, and Lane’s lazy, hazy Cockney charm, it’s the sort of creative tension that made The Beatles so unique and compelling. Witness the unapologetic Englishness of “Lazy Sunday,” the ballsy soul of “Afterglow” and the near template for 70s rock in “Song of a Baker,” and it’s obvious that, in Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake, the Small Faces had constructed the blueprints to most of what was to come over the next fifty years, from the Faces and Humble Pie, which grew from the band’s ashes, to Bowie, Blur and Oasis, to name just a few. “It’s the perfect Small Faces album, isn’t it?” Paul Weller asked, when we discussed the album in 2015. “It’s got that hard-hitting R&B they were already known for, but with a punch that hadn’t existed previously. The Happiness Stan bit is a bit rubbish, sure, but ‘Rene’ and ‘Rollin’ Over’ have got an amazing swagger. The Faces before they even existed. And it’s got ‘Afterglow,’ which is such an amazing tune.” The fourth LP by East London’s favorite sons — guitarist/vocalist Steve Marriott, bassist/vocalist Ronnie Lane, keyboardist Ian McLagan and drummer Jones, who shared a collective average age of just 20 — their ragged, gritty R&B- and soul-infused sound reached its apotheosis on Ogdens’, under the guiding hand of the producer Glyn Johns at London’s famed Olympic Studios. “There were instruments there that were leftover from a film score that had been recorded at Olympic, one was like a theramin, so we just used them,” the band’s keyboardist, the late, great Ian McLagan told me of the recording of “Afterglow” in 2012. “It’s such a great song. Steve and Ronnie would come in with an idea that we would develop, but that one was Steve’s and when he brought it in he knew what he wanted. And Steve’s voice on that is just too good. “All these years later, listening back to it, every song sounds like a hit to me,” Jones recalled of the album. “It’s amazing to me, because we were all so incredibly young!” Released countless times over the years – and at least seven times on CD alone – the album will reportedly get a 50th anniversary spiffing up later this year, complete with the original mono mix that packs the real wallop. “We were following in the footsteps of the Beach Boys and The Beatles and the Stones,” McLagan recalled of the heady days after the band had cut ties with Arden and Decca Records for the artist-friendly environs of Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate Records. “The Beatles were off the road, Brian Wilson was off the road, the Stones had taken a break. We did the same. Plus, at IBC studios, where we cut our early tracks, we only had a 4-track. There really wasn’t much you could do on that. But once we got to Olympic, which had an 8-track, we couldn’t believe it. We felt like we could do anything, and the sound was bigger and better. And Glyn Johns, our producer, was loving it.” “I felt like I was in an orchestra,” agrees Jones of the artistically adventurous sessions. Legendarily recorded over the course of a year, McLagan recalled that the actual time spent recording was in fact probably no more than three weeks in total. “We always did a gig after being in the studio,” McLagan said. “It was all so quick I barely remember it.” “We were always rushing around,” Jones agreed. “But once we left Don Arden and signed up with Andrew Loog Oldham and Immediate, there was no real pressure to keep putting out hit after hit. And we were like a finely tuned machine by that point, anyway, so we really blossomed in the studio, I think.” “We all had our jobs to do,” McLagan said of the band’s line-up. “But now Stevie could play piano while I played Hammond, so that added a whole new dimension. And he and Ronnie were like Lennon and McCartney, because their writing was constantly moving and developing.” For McLagan, joining one of the biggest band’s in the U.K.in 1965 had been a dream come true. Now, barely three years later, his bandmates were like brothers. “When I joined up, I was just floating,” McLagan said of the moment he joined what was then one of his favorite bands. “But by the time of Ogdens’, Steve and Ronnie were real supportive of my writing. And once we got to Ogdens’, and we were developing ideas more and more in the studio, there was no denying that we were all contributing, so that’s how the co-writes came about.” After several years of juggling their tough sound, which drew adoration from young mods, with the screaming girls who came to their shows as a result of the string of hit singles that Marriott and Lane were turning out, the Small Faces were ready to move on. “We were dying to shed our teenybopper image,” Jones told me. “We were an R&B band, not a pop band.” “Ronnie had the idea about Happiness Stan,” McLagan recalled of the loose theme that tied Ogdens’ together. “So as the songs were written, we’d try to steer them in that direction. It wasn’t like later, where you take a month or more to work on it. We were still doing gigs. But now and then we’d get three or four days in the studio at one go and we’d really go to town.” Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake proved the Small Faces were hardly a spent creative force, but when Loog Oldham released the cheery but poppy ‘Lazy Sunday’ as the first single from Ogdens’, the band members, already under intense pressure to head for the U.S. for a make-or-break tour, hit the collective ceiling. “We were all so pissed off,” McLagan remembered. “Just like ‘Sha-La-La-La-Lee’ had been released without the band’s consent and drove everyone mad, having to play it night after night, ‘Lazy Sunday’ was like that, but after years of problems and hassles. It was the beginning of the end.” After a high-pressure and ultimately disastrous tour of Australia with The Who, and the mooted break-out tour of the U.S. on the horizon, Marriott walked off stage in the midst of a New Year’s Eve gig at the end of 1968. The end of the Small Faces was on the horizon, even as Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake had secured the band’s status among the upper ranks of the burgeoning rock firmament, as evidenced even in the half-hearted miming the band did of Side Two of the record for the BBC’s late night music television show Colour Me Pop. “Steve had bought a house in Epping, and there was a church local to him that we were going to use to rehearse and record,” McLagan recalled. “But he wanted Pete Frampton to join the band, and we all said, ‘No way!’ We loved Pete, but that just wasn’t the Small Faces to the rest of us. His playing is beautiful, but it didn’t have the fire that the rest of us had. So it was a sad ending, and lots of unfinished business, because Steve just went, ‘Fuck it. I don’t want to play all the guitar. I want to sing.’ He formed Humble Pie and we, eventually, became the Faces with Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood. But I do think we really had a lot of great work ahead of us, and it’s a shame it had to end when it did.” “For a long time I was fine it was over,” Jones remembered. “I think that Stevie would have been more artistically satisfied if we’d gotten to the U.S. and had been recognized for what we were really about, but that, sadly, wasn’t to be. Now I’m a fan, and the music lives on.”......~

When The Small Faces had to think about their second album for Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate label, they did what all self-respecting British pop bands of the era liked to do: retreat for a while to mull things over. But where the likes of Traffic holed up in their Berkshire cottage, The Small Faces opted for a quintessentially Cockney option, a nice boat trip up the Thames. Under the influence of various mindbending stimulants, their antics had the local floating bourgeoisie spitting feathers, as it became obvious that their vessel was, if not physically, then at least temperamentally rudderless. Somewhere along the way, they cooked up an idea for a concept album. Both The Pretty Things and The Who, their fellow-travellers on the road from R&B to psychedelia, were working on their own concept albums, the over-arching essential for the new popocracy. It was fine if you were an art-school pseudo-intellectual like Lennon or Townshend, but a bit of a tall order if you were a bunch of East End oiks who looked and acted as if you’d ligged your way into the Swinging ‘60s party through the bathroom window. Still, even barrow-boys have dreams, and behind the rough, playful exterior, The Small Faces had actually become quite thoughtful lads, lapping up the new-age mysticism of Carlos Castaneda, and musing upon spiritual concerns like many another rowdy beat group brought to introspection via LSD. Thus they came up with the idea of psychedelic explorer Happiness Stan and his need to find out where the moon went when it waned. OK, so it’s not much of an idea, but it provided enough of a spine to carry one of the more engaging pop albums of the late ’60s. It was a work which bore many of the hallmarks of the heavier “rock” music just starting to appear, but without sacrificing any of the virtues of pop – the bright harmonies, singalong melodies and colourful arrangements. Packaged in an infuriatingly fragile circular fold-out sleeve which pastiched an old Nut Brown tobacco tin, Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake exhibits a kinship not just with fellow hard-rocking music-hall storytellers like The Kinks and The Who, but with the Syd-era Pink Floyd too, occupying much the same territory of slightly sinister childhood whimsy. It would spend six weeks atop the UK album chart, though the success only served to increase the pressures that would see the band break up within a year of its release. This “Deluxe Edition” of the album is actually presented in a proper tin, though its three discs offer little beyond the original, comprising just a mono version, a stereo version, and the “Classic Albums” radio documentary about the album. The title track which opens the album is an instrumental overture with phased drums in “Itchycoo Park” style and a woozy wah-wah keyboard part on which Steve Marriott operated the effects box whilst Ian McLagan played the electric piano. It provides a pleasing link with the band’s early career, being effectively a re-recorded version of “I’ve Got Mine”, the 1965 flop single. Here, it looms portentously, before “Afterglow” serves up the first of the album’s classic moments. It’s a curiously muscular love song, but one whose charming melody punches effortlessly through the sonic barrage. “Another one of those written for one of your girlfriends, some watery tart or another,” says Marriott dismissively in the documentary, but it’s nonetheless one of the finest moments of their entire career. “Rene” is a tribute to another watery tart, in this case the Manor Park prostitute who gave Steve Marriott a hands-on introduction to the facts of life. It starts out as an exaggerated cock-er-nee music-hall knees-up that would bring a blush even to the cheeks of Great Escape-era Blur, but relaxes into a psychedelic blues jam for the extended instrumental coda. “Song Of A Baker” sounds a bit like The Who doing “Wild Thing”, with a heavy guitar break over burring, Leslie’d organ and more of Kenny Jones’ avalanche drums, although Ronnie Lane explains in the documentary how the idea – essentially, “how hard you’ll work if you’re hungry” – came from a Sufi book he had read. In contrast, the opening lines to the ensuing “Lazy Sunday” were written by Steve Marriott on the toilet of his messy Chiswick flat, where his late-night rowdiness aroused the ire of his neighbours. Now regarded as an all-time classic, this was another case where the band themselves were underwhelmed by their own magic. When Andrew Oldham released the track as a single whilst they were away touring Japan, they phoned home, furious, to protest. They didn’t want to be condemned to playing this corny fluff every night; they’d rather be playing things like “Song Of A Baker”, and “Rollin’ Over” from the second side’s “Happiness Stan” suite, heavier grooves which presaged both Marriott’s future direction with Humble Pie, and the others’ progress as The Faces. Linked by Stanley Unwin’s semi-nonsensical narration, the suite is a brilliant summation of contemporary musical tropes, with tracks like “The Hungry Intruder”, “Mad John” and “Happiness Stan” itself draped in Mellotron, woodwind, harpsichord and strings, with “Rollin’ Over” and the MGs-style limber funk groove “The Journey” providing the more forceful moments. Naïvely charming, its fairytale whimsy is spiked with bathos in the concluding “Happy Days Toy Town”, another music-hall cakewalk which finds them opining that “life is just a bowl of All-Bran”. Like The Beatles satirising the Maharishi as “Sexy Sadie”, The Small Faces may have been open to the influence of Eastern mysticism. But they were still, at heart, sharp-witted East End lads with a disinclination to take themselves, or life, too seriously. By andy Gill.....~ By and large, there are some albums that transcend the era of popular music they were recorded in, and then there are some that remain forever tied to the culture and attitudes of the era. There is a very small group of albums that manage to do be both, or neither. Released in 1968, Small Faces’ Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake is both an immortal classic, and a celebrated period piece. Released at the height of the very British take on counter culture, in many ways the album epitomised the very English, tea on the lawn psychedelia, with its side long fantasy tale narrated by Stanley Unwin, flirtations with a sort of prototype heavy rock, and a distinct music hall influence woven throughout. Due to the second side of the original vinyl being dedicated in its entirety to the tale of Happiness Stan’s search for the missing half of the moon, Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake is inevitably an album of two halves. The first, more traditionally song-based side of the original album is a real mixed-bag of material as Small Faces realised that their audience were looking for an album which more closely followed the formulae of the band’s recent hits, “Tin Solider” and “Itchycoo Park”. From instrumental pieces, to soulful hard rock, to music-hall influenced beat-pop, the band does its best to demonstrate its diversity. Where it works, on songs like the title track, and “Afterglow”, the band knock it out of the park, however “Rene” over-eggs the music hall to the point where it becomes a novelty singalong cockney knees-up. The only thing that saves “Lazy Sunday” from the same fate is the band’s inherent ability with a pop song, as it touches, but doesn’t quite go over the line to the point where it becomes a novelty hit. Given Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake’s second side’s fantasy narrative concept, it’s striking how it manages to avoid becoming a twee mess, given the fairy-tale imagery, Stanley Unwin’s gobbledygook verse, and the ever-present shadow of music hall influence. The fact that the narrative is kept tight, and that Unwin’s engaging charisma is allowed to take centre stage along with the band, instead of sounding like it has been added as an after thought, saves it from becoming a straight up experiment in novelty songwriting. It works, it’s cohesive, and most importantly, the band, and Unwin, all sound utterly committed to pulling it off. While no one could argue that Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake is an ageless album, it retains a charm of its own. Much of this can be put down to the fact that they were, at their very core, a hell of a band, with Ronnie Lane and Kenney Jones being one of the best beat-combo rhythm sections of the 60s, both Lane and Steve Marriott being ace songwriters, and Marriott being one of the premier vocalists of his generation, and keyboard player Ian Mclagan being the band’s secret weapon. Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake may be the Small Faces’ masterpiece, but it is not flawless, but the fact that the band managed to pull it off in the manner they did, has menat that it remains a much loved period piece and one of those albums that everyone needs to hear at least once.....JON BRYAN ....~ 2012 was a momentous year in the history of the Small Faces. On April 14th the band were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. The year also saw the results of the first ever complete upgrade of the band's catalogue. With the full co-operation of both surviving members, Kenney Jones and Ian McLagan, the five years before had seen a massive programme of tape recovery and upgrading. Masters had been pulled in from all over the world, including Immediate label multi-tracks from the Kenney Jones and Charly Records archives. Using these, it was possible to represent all of the Small Faces' original albums sounding better than at any time since the sixties and to add a whole host of newly discovered tracks and alternative versions. The new editions also feature original artwork and contemporary photos and publicity material alongside comprehensive new notes by band experts. 'Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake', recorded in late 1967 and early 1968, and released in the summer of that year, is by far and away the Small Faces' best-known and most successful album. Alongside classic tracks like 'Lazy Sunday', 'Afterglow' and 'Rollin' Over', it even added a conceptual twist with the story of 'Happiness Stan' and the narrations of Stanley Unwin. Loved also for its crazy round packaging, the record represents the band's finest hour, though soon after its release the Small Faces were no more, having morphed into the Faces and Humble Pie. This deluxe digibook 2CD edition of the album features the newly re-mastered mono mix of the original album plus a second disc of previously unreleased rarities and alternate versions.....~ Longitudes certainly enjoys 50th anniversary specials. But can you blame me? I was a nipper in the 1960s, so I have fond memories of that time. And in 1968, I lived in Detroit, Michigan, when Motown music ruled the world, and the Detroit Tigers took the World Series. I can claim that I actually knew hitting legend Al Kaline, because his kid got shot up by the same allergist as me. 1968 was a violent year in America, but there are some good things that occurred. However… this latest installment in ‘60s nostalgia boards the QE2 to sail “across the pond.” It profiles a record by a Brit band that pulled the difficult trick of marrying style with substance, which are usually mutually exclusive, and very few rocksters have been able to combine both. Elvis, the Beatles, James Brown, Hendrix, Bowie, Roxy Music, and the Clash come to mind. All made great music but were also visually dazzling. Another is the Small Faces, a limey band that literally “carried the colours,” at least in England, for the mid-’60s British Invasion jump-started by the Beatles and Rolling Stones. Four working-class geezers, three of whom hailed from London’s rough East End, the Small Faces were the prototypical Mod band. “Mod,” short for modern, was an English youth movement that began in 1959, similar to American subcultures like beat or hippie, but smaller, and less threatening to the status quo. Mods wore flashy clothes, drove Vespa scooters, listened to soul music, and took speed drugs. Mod gave an identity to English working-class kids. Pete Townshend documented Mod culture with the 1973 Who album Quadrophenia. The Small Faces were Mod to the core, but could also play instruments. The band members were lead singer/guitarist Steve Marriott, bassist Ronnie (“Plonk”) Lane, drummer Kenney Jones, and organist Ian McLagan (who replaced Jimmy Winston early on). All four stood under 5 feet 5 inches tall. (Eric Clapton, upon meeting them for the first time, said they all looked like little “haw-bits.”) Their short stature, mischievousness, and stylish Carnaby Street threads made them the most eye-catching band in England for a time, especially beloved by screaming young girls (“birds”). For music fans, between 1965 and 1968 the songwriting team of Marriott-Lane churned out a basketful of sophisticated pop hits in the UK, one quasi-hit in the U.S. (“Itchycoo Park,” which reached #16 in ‘67), and one LP masterwork, released in May ‘68. Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake is considered a classic by “those in the know,” but often overlooked when classic rock albums are bandied. I could give several reasons, but I’d rather just rave on. The first evidence that this record is a cut above most is the packaging, as visually arresting as the band’s Mod bob haircuts, tangerine and lime-green blazers, and winklepicker shoes. Ogdens’ was the first record released in a round sleeve, designed to resemble an old tobacco tin, and the name parodies an 1899 brand of tobacco. The sleeve unfolds to four circles with moody black-and-white pics of the band members (photographer Gered Mankowitz). Musically, Ogdens’ is equally mind-blasting. After the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper, Ogdens’ was the first “concept album,” preceding both S.F. Sorrow by the Pretty Things and The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by several months. The second side is a Ronnie Lane-inspired musical fairy tale about “Happiness Stan,” who goes on a quest, assisted by a friendly fly, to find the other half of the “dangly” moon. Linking various musical snips is daft narration by English comic Stanley Unwin, who combined the Small’s cockney slang with his own nonsensical “Unwinese” speak. (Unwin supposedly influenced John Lennon’s absurdist lyrics and poetry.) As “knees-up” as side two of Ogdens’ is, the heavy hitters are on side one. The title song opener is an instrumental that explodes with Lane’s thunderous bass, McLagan’s altered Hammond organ, and sweeping woodwinds that include cello. “Afterglow” showcases ace-Face Marriott’s wailing voice. In a non-racial world, Marriott’s soulfulness would be held in similar regard as Ray Charles and Otis Redding. I know what some of you are thinking: he’s bloody white, mate! But I say: bollocks, mate! Great pipes is great pipes. None other than Keith Richards and Ozzie Osbourne have cited Marriott as one of their favourite singers, and those two blokes know something about singing (amongst other things, wink-wink).small faces 2 “Long Agos and Worlds Apart” is one of only two numbers Ian McLagan wrote with the band. (The other is “Up the Wooden Hills to Bedfordshire.”) Like the Who’s John Entwistle, McLagan wasn’t prolific, but his two songs are highlights of the band catalogue. He has a world-weary voice that contrasts Marriott’s full-frontal assault. This song has a loping instrumental line that I can’t determine is organ or guitar. But it’s an intoxicating arrangement, with a dollop of appropriate psychedelia. “Rene” is an ode to a waterfront prostitute, “groping with the stokers from the coast of Kuala Lampur.” Marriott, as cockney tour guide, leads us into working-class East London. If you think you’ve suddenly ducked inside an English music hall, it’s because, before discovering rock ‘n’ roll, Marriott was a precocious child actor/singer who starred as the Artful Dodger in the London stage musical Oliver! (He was also in several films, one of which starred a pre-Clouseau Peter Sellers.) “Rene” is a rousing singalong tune, the second half a chugging instrumental where our hyper tour guide goes berserk on distorted guitar and blues harp. “Song of a Baker” is a Ronnie Lane special. Though an inner-city lad, Lane had an affinity for rural life, and later moved to an isolated farm in Wales. “Song of a Baker” is a heavy rocker, but its heart is in the country. Some of the album’s best lyrics are “I’m depending on my labour / The texture and the flavour” and “So I’ll jug some water, bake some flour / Store some salt and wait the hour.”small faces 6 Side one closes with one of the band’s best A-sides, the theatrical “Lazy Sunday.” Marriott wrote it after his neighbors had him evicted for noisemaking. He was always trying to distance himself from his acting roots (which fortunately managed to slip through in the music), and didn’t want this song on the album, but Immediate Records had final say. It’s quintessential English, slice-of-life escapism. (Think “Penny Lane,” the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset,” the Hollies’ “Bus Stop,” the Zombies’ “Beechwood Park,” and the Smalls’ own “Itchycoo Park.”) The bouncy melody is broken by cockney-esque poetry like “Cor blimey, ‘ello Mrs. Jones, ow’s your bird’s lumbago?” Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake reached #1 on the UK Albums Chart and stayed there for six weeks. (America had too much on its plate in ‘68, and missed the boat.) Due to the record’s complexity, including orchestration, the group never performed it live. This fact contributed to their demise. They knew they could never top Ogdens’. Also, Marriott wanted to get into guitar-heavy, R&B-styled rock and distance himself from the teen-scream scene (though one of the special things about the Small Faces was their playful irreverence). So, he quit the Smalls seven months after the album’s release. He joined with guitar hotshot Peter Frampton (ex-Herd) to form Humble Pie. The other three were briefly adrift, but eventually hired Ron Wood and blond, sexy Rod Stewart, both much taller and recently exiled from the Jeff Beck Group, to become the Faces.small faces 3 Whilst not as artistically satisfying as the Small Faces, both Humble Pie and the Faces achieved the popular success in North America that had escaped the Smalls. Drummer Kenney Jones is the only Small left. Steve Marriott died tragically in a house fire in 1991; Ronnie Lane succumbed to multiple sclerosis in 1997; and Ian McLagan died of a stroke in 2014. If you fancy rock bios, you’ll be gobsmacked by McLagan’s book All the Rage, which is one of the best fly-on-the-wall rock bios I’ve yet read. As for Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake, it’s been rereleased several times, on CD and vinyl, with music and packaging variations. The original UK vinyl version with the round gatefold cover is the one to get. But you may have to put your home on the market, or place one of your children into indentured servitude to afford it....Uncut.....~ 

  With Small Faces' brief catalogue of albums now remastered and reissued, their growth towards Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake -- famously in a round cover like a tobacco tin and with panels that opened out -- can now be traced to this, their finest moment. Singer/writer/guitarist Stevie Marriott was one the great British r'n'b singers and the band of singers/writers Ronnie Lane and keyboard player Ian McLagan, and drummer Kenney Jones quickly outgrew their Mod roots, became a chart-damaging pop-rock band (All or Nothing, My Mind's Eye, Tin Soldier, Here Comes the Nice etc) and captured the typically whimsical English brand of psychedelia with Itchycoo Park and Lazy Sunday, the latter on Ogdens. Often written up as a concept album, Ogdens is a game of two halfs: the first side is separate songs and the second (the concept) is a tale of Happiness Stan who sees the half moon and goes in search of the other half. ogdenTold in his witty gobbledegook by Stanley Unwin (first choice Spike Milligan declined), the story includes the proto-heavy metal Rollin' Over (which owes a nod to Hendrix's Foxy Lady), slightly scary Mad John and jaunty-Cockney HappyDaysToyTown -- three very separate-sounding pieces and indicative of the musical reach the Small Faces commanded. On the first side are Marriott's soul-searing Afterglow, the heavy Song of a Baker (sung by Lane and driven by Jones' powerful drumming) and -- because they were good lads from the East End music hall tradition -- there is Rene ("the docker's delight") which is in the pub-singalong vein of Lazy Sunday. As Mark Paytress notes in his liner essay to the double CD mono reissue (the second disc of previously unreleased sessions, stereo mixes), "Like the Beatles' White Album issued several months later, it wanted to be both fanciful and down-to-earth". So (aside perhaps for the swirling Journey), Ogden's wasn't really a psychedelic album as many claim, and the Small Faces were more a lagers'n'pot band than tripping-out acid heads (witness the boozy career of their off-shoot the Faces, and Marriott's subsequent band, the hard rocking Humble Pie). Produced by Marriott and Lane, and engineered by Glyn Johns, the album topped the UK charts for six weeks but did absolutely nothing in the US where it has undergone constant "discovery" since, as Kenney Jones says in an interview here. But for the Small Faces, Ogdens was the breaking point and Marriott quit a few months later to form Humble Pie with Peter Frampton. There was the Autumn Stone collection but the Small Faces -- who left a trail of classic singles and this one shining, cohesive but diverse album -- were all but forgotten, except by fans. It wasn't until this year they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as were The Faces. No matter maybe, their reputation was always secure with those who lovingly unfolded that faux-tobacco tin and turned up the volume. These Essential Elsewhere pages deliberately point to albums which you might not have thought of, or have even heard . . . But they might just open a door into a new kind of music, or an artist you didn't know of. Or someone you may have thought was just plain boring. But here is the way into a new/interesting/different music . . . Jump in......~ Albums don’t come much more steeped in British whimsy than this 1968 concept album by the seminal mod quartet. Unfortunately, its unapologetically English bent is probably what kept it from catching on in the U.S., even as it zoomed up the British charts. The second half of the album might still not translate to American ears since its narration by U.K. comedian Stanley Unwin is filled with near-incomprehensible Cockney wordplay. But it’s easy for anyone to comprehend the tuneful, rocking songs like “Song of a Baker” and the British hit “Lazy Sunday.” This latest box set reissue goes all out, reproducing the circular sleeve of the original with a circular container as well as three discs of music. The album is presented in mono and stereo mixes and there’s a disc of previously unreleased rehearsals and rare mixes. In all, it’s a comprehensive package, although completists might wish for the single edit of the exquisitely soulful “Afterglow” and the alternate U.S. LP mix. Still, there’s enough great music here to confirm that this remains a genuine British rock classic, and the first-rate mastering, which eschews overcompression, makes it a pleasure to listen to. And boy, could Steve Marriott ever sing. .....~

Personnel Steve Marriott − lead, harmony, and backing vocals, electric and acoustic guitars, harmonica, piano on "Happiness Stan" and "Every Little Bit Hurts", Hammond organ on "Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake", bass guitar on "The Journey", shared lead vocals on "The Hungry Intruder" and "HappyDaysToyTown" Ronnie Lane − harmony and backing vocals, bass guitar, electric guitar on "The Journey", upright bass on "Mad John", lead vocals on "Song of a Baker" and "The Journey", shared lead vocals on "The Hungry Intruder" and "HappyDaysToyTown" Kenney Jones − drums, percussion Ian McLagan − backing vocals, organ, piano, harpsichord, Mellotron,[23][24] electric guitar and bass guitar on "Long Agos and Worlds Apart", lead vocals on "Long Agos and Worlds Apart"

Tracklist 

A11 Ogden's Nut Gone Flake A2 Afterglow A3 Long Agos And Worlds Apart A4 Rene A5 Song Of A Baker A6 Lazy Sunday B1 Happiness Stan B2 Rollin' Over B3 The Hungry Intruder B4 The Journey B5 Mad John B6 Happydaystoytown

[johnkatsmc5]

Who "Who Sell Out" 1967 UK Pop Art,Mod,Freakbeat(The 40 Greatest Psychedelic Albums of All Time,The 40 Trippiest Albums Ever, Mojo magazine) ( 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time,Rolling Stone)

The Who Sell Out's pirate-radio concept goes south in the album's second half--the Who ran out of time before they could write enough faux commercials--but it still remains in many ways their best and most entertaining album. Pete Townshend and John Entwistle supply song after great song, and along with Keith Moon play them with power and focus. The classic single "I Can See for Miles" is matched on at least a handful of tracks, including the opening psychedelic-pop blast of "Armenia City in the Sky" (written by Townshend pal Speedy Keen), the hilarious social-interaction tales "Odorono" and "Tattoo," and the majestic mini-opus "Rael." This remaster's bonus tracks are occasionally too much of a good thing, but the Tommy rough draft "Glow Girl" is brilliant. --Rickey Wright....~ A cool concept album about modern stuff you buy. And a song about a girl masturbating as well. ( mary ann with the shaky hands) which is a cool song in that the boys are thinking about how it would be like to be a girl sort of. girls gotta have fun too ya know. But the rest of the stuff here is great. The deluxe version improves on it all by giving us rare tracks and alt tracks and such. The who were right on too. These are not people who looked at making money and lied and said we don't care about it. Hell no. we even do commercials and they did. Because why not? Not a bad song on here , and it's unusual too , to hear songs about underarm deoderant. What a hoot this is. Not their most popular release for sure. but it's great and that's the who.....Michael Dobey....~ Deep into my quest for the great unplayed music I finally hit a very rich vein. I can remember hearing Can't Explain on the radio in 1965 or 6. But music does not become a mystical presence in my life until I discover my very first Top 40 Countdown in February of '67, a mere four weeks before the March 20 DJ Pick of the Week: Happy Jack. I couldn't get enough stacked vocals in my songs back then and still can't. I bought the 45 because my allowance was too small to take a chance on an album. The song made Top 5 in Syracuse, N.Y. on the threshold of the big psychedelic push. By October I was stunned by one of the most in-your-face records I'd ever heard: I Can See For Miles. I bought that 45 before it reached it's peak. Now, mind you, there might have been Hendrix or The Airplane or harder groups, but their album cuts were off the radar of regular radio. I wore this record out and must have driven my mother over the edge more than once. Again, I could not afford an album. Tonight is the first time I've ever heard it and it's fantastic. It hints at the transition into Tommy the following year, only this is much more light hearted. If you only know the later period that began with Won't Get Fooled or Baba O'Reilly this may not be for you. A lot of my friends would call it too fluffy. Not me. I have always enjoyed less ego driven guitar and blown speakers. The songs would have held up on their own, but they are loosely blended into a concept album by the vintage radio segues. Don't waste your money on the regular version of this CD. The deluxe version gives you the mono and stereo mix plus some well appreciated bonus material. It's hard to recall but the B side of one of those 45s had Mary Anne with the Shaky Hands. At first I was disappointed with the album version until I realized the U.S. mix was here as well. It sounds incredible. And here is my only warning: DO NOT buy this CD set for the mono version of I Can See For Miles. Disk one gives it to you in stereo - the vocals and guitars seem to be battling for attention. The mono mix is one of the worst remasterings I've ever encountered. The guitar is out in the back garden except for some of the loud, harsh middle notes (but not the break); the drums may as well have been an early tentative demo except for a smashing tinny cymbal that sounds like it's off a child's set; and the vocals sound like they were song into a coffee can. What were they thinking? This is the high point of the entire album. Could my memory be off? Not this time. The bonus material gives you an early mono mix. It is note for note an exact replica of my 45 except it is before the double tracked voices were added. Really? I got so annoyed I logged on to Amazon's MP3 to see if I could find a better version and discovered, supposedly, that the version on Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy (greatest hits) is mono. I will borrow it from a friend, I will play it through my best speakers, and if it is the better mono version I will rip a copy and use it to replace this one. If the rest of this CD wasn't so good I would have given it 4 stars.....cryptic pop.....~ Now this is excitement! The third installment from The Who and it packs a mighty wallop! From Armenia City in the Sky to Rael this album rocks and explodes at the same time. But, that's not all! This is the Japanese version of the Deluxe Edition and there is another disc full of bonus tracks which include unreleased tunes and alternate versions of some of the songs from the album. You will be amazed to find something they had not done in a while, an instrumental, and it's called, "Hall of The Mountain King" that is really rockin' with excitement. Within this package is also several paper sleeves of this album from around the world. A true rock masterpiece. If you wish to see a couple of these sleeves, view the main Sell Out page. There are two of them that come with the Japanese version. There's so much to be heard between these two discs, 53 tracks to be exact, and all is so unbelievable. The only drawback that I have why do we need 4 tracks of Mary-Anne with the Shaky Hand. I mean I love the song, but 4 times. Come on other things could have been on there. Like the song Melancholia which is on the Domestic version of Sell Out as a single disc on MCA. Melancholia can not be found on any other version foreign or domestic of Sell Out or any other cd or album. Great song by the way. Well that is all I have for this set, and I still think it is a great set. In fact, I love all The Who's Deluxe Editions. By the way, this particular version of the Sell Out Japanese veraion is no longer available on Amazon. As far as to my knowledge, but there is a new version with just a single disc and I believe less tunes and they are charging for this single disc the same price I paid for the two disc version with all the extra goodies. Talk about inflation?!....Joe Eastlack......~ This one has grown on me tremendously since I first got it. I would say it took a few listens before I really appreciated it. I cannot speak as to what it meant at the time compared to other late 60's releases as I was born in 1970 and grew up listening to 80's heavy metal. I have a huge appreciation for the incredible late 60's and early 70's bands. Probably a pinnacle is music from around 1965-1975 with so much great stuff it is ridiculous, Beatles, Stones, Black Sabbath, The Who, Hendrix, on and on. This Who album contains brilliant songs with intermittent comedy jingles. I have grown to like the comedy sections but do wish they were set as separate tracks on the CD in case you wanted to delete them and listen to a straightforward album. I would rank this slightly below the all time classics such as Who's Next, By The Numbers, Tommy, and Quadrophenia. Maybe a 4.5 rounded up. Some truly great songs on here though and a must for any Who collection. I cannot wait to hear the vinyl on headphones!.... White Chicken.....~ This is a brilliant album, with some great songs. As has been stated elsewhere the concept of the album is to ape pirate radio with jingles and mock adverts. Side one concludes with the brilliant I Can See for Miles. Keith Moon used to tell the story of a fan coming up to him when I Can See for Miles was in the charts as a single, “I love the hidden meanings in the song man” he said, to which Moon replied, deadpan “It’s just about a guy with really good eyesight.” I love everything about the record itself, great quality vinyl, sounds great; I can’t fault it. The cover is well reproduced with some obvious adaptations on the back; record label, barcode and so on. This is a nice poster included, albeit suffering from the need to fold it to fit into an album cover, but this relates to the reason why I nearly didn’t give this album five stars. There is a really nasty little sticker on the front of the cover, not on the film wrap but actually on the cover. What makes this unforgivable is that is is anything but easy peel. You don’t discover this, of course, until you have tried to peel it and thus you are left with a messy sticker still ther with a wrinkled edge.....Kevin H......~ THE WHO SELL OUT, The Who's third album, is one of those records which just gets better with age. Many albums from the 1960s and '70s seemed to have emerged as instant classics while others, like this one, have grown in stature with the passing years. Somewhat overlooked during the Christmas rush of 1967, today THE WHO SELL OUT stands as one of The Who's most enjoyable collections, an album which represented a tribute to the recently outlawed pirate radio ships (specifically Radio London) and the band's own last salute to the world of pop before The Who's graduation to the podium of rock royalty with TOMMY (1969). Above all, from the amusing pop art-inspired sleeve to the band's "Track Records" chant cut into the run-out groove, more than any of their other albums, THE WHO SELL OUT captures Shepherd's Bush's finest having fun. This is a fine vinyl reissue of THE WHO SELL OUT from Universal Music - the company that was responsible for a sumptuous Deluxe Edition CD version of the album a few years back. As expected with vinyl reissues these days, the record itself is nice and weighty and comes with relatively faithful reproductions of the Track Records' labels on both sides (the major difference being a new catalogue number). Audio purists will possibly take issue with the fact that the stereo mix has been used over the mono version; however, at the time of the album's original release, stereo was beginning to overtake mono in popularity and so deciding which is the "true" version of THE WHO SELL OUT is arguably an irrelevance (whereas many believe that the mono version of The Beatles' SGT. PEPPER - released just six months earlier - is the genuine format for that LP). Sound-wise, everything is fine, with the original Radio London jingle track-links and gentler songs like 'Tattoo' and 'Sunrise' sounding particularly nice. The hit single 'I Can See For Miles' also manages to cut through with power and presence. Finally, that iconic sleeve is all present and correct as is, thankfully, the Osiris-designed psychedelic poster that came with original copies of the LP. However, the sleeve does have a matt finish rather than the glossy, laminated look that was commonplace on British album covers from the 1960s and which the recent Beatles vinyl reissues have preserved. All in all, though, this is a great reissue of THE WHO SELL OUT and, at less than twenty-five quid (at the time of purchase), it comes considerably cheaper than trying to find a mint-condition original copy, complete with that poster!... Mr. L. F. G. Ballinger....~ Having read through a lot of reviews/comments about this album, I find the accepted view to be, that it is a great album, comparable to their best and that this 'version' comes with some good, but not necessarily essential, bonus material. Oh, and there are even some people who don't like it. Well I actually count myself lucky that I came to this album only recently because it means my view of it wasn't skewed by familiarity with its much shorter former incarnation. I actually played it as is, unaware that the additional tracks had not been part of the original release. My impression was one astonishment. Why was this album not widely trumpeted as one of the greatest works of the sixties? Why was "Tommy" considered a better album? I was mystified. A double album(as it must have been judging by its length)of this quality would surely be included in all those 'Best Album...' lists. The truly amazing thing is the way that, although it is not a 'concept album' the music fits together to create an incredible barrage of striking imagery that all coalesces perfectly to create a 'whole' that really is greater than the sum of its parts. One of the strengths of the album is the lack(!) of well known tracks(the only one I knew beforehand was 'I Can See For Miles') this gives the record a lovely 'balanced feel'. I find it very strange, now that I am aware of the original track listing, to think that the album was ever released without 'Early Morning Cold Taxi', the stunning instrumental showcase 'Hall of the Mountain King' and perhaps the gem of the whole album 'Girl's Eyes'(a perfect and sympathetic depiction of the fixated fan/band relationship). It isn't the easiest "Who" album to like(it took me a few plays before it started to 'click'), and in this form there is so much more to digest than before, but I would suggest it has the potential to be the most rewarding long term listen of all their albums..... William J. Walker.....~ By the turn of 1968, The Who had been a prominent part of British pop culture for three years. Their reputation as a live force, and Pete Townshend’s growing ambition as a writer, was taking them beyond the bounds of throwaway chart music, and ever closer to the grand concepts of their later work. Now they took a major step in that direction with their third album, The Who Sell Out. The album was Townshend’s big statement about commercialisation and the demands on himself and the band to be presented as a product — and they certainly had some fun with it. Designed by David King, art director at the Sunday Times, and Roger Law, later the co-creator of the mercilessly satirical Spitting Image series), it had bold front cover images of Pete with his “Odorono” deodorant and Roger Daltrey in his bathtub of Heinz baked beans. By the turn of 1968, The Who had been a prominent part of British pop culture for three years. Their reputation as a live force, and Pete Townshend’s growing ambition as a writer, was taking them beyond the bounds of throwaway chart music, and ever closer to the grand concepts of their later work. Now they took a major step in that direction with their third album, The Who Sell Out. The album was Townshend’s big statement about commercialisation and the demands on himself and the band to be presented as a product — and they certainly had some fun with it. Designed by David King, art director at the Sunday Times, and Roger Law, later the co-creator of the mercilessly satirical Spitting Image series), it had bold front cover images of Pete with his “Odorono” deodorant and Roger Daltrey in his bathtub of Heinz baked beans. On the back, Keith Moon supposedly hawked Medac spot cream and John Entwistle was the beneficiary of a Charles Atlas bodybuilding course. The mock advertising commercials that separated the tracks continued the theme, on a record presented as a pirate radio broadcast with real jingles from the recently-outlawed “Wonderful” Radio London. The Who Sell Out was released on December 13, 1967, making its British chart debut on the new year chart of January 13. It contained three Entwistle compositions, for which he performed lead vocals, and an opening track, “Armenia City In The Sky,” written by John “Speedy” Keen of Thunderclap Newman. Keen’s most famous song, that band’s UK No.1 “Something In The Air,” was produced by Townshend. The album also boasted a major hit single, in the form of the psychedelic marvel “I Can See For Miles,” which previewed it in the fall and reached No.10 in the UK. Townshend, however, was expecting much more, and was deeply disappointed that the song didn’t go to No.1. “To me it was the ultimate Who record, yet it didn’t sell,” he said. “I spat on the British record buyer.” The song did, however, become The Who’s only top ten hit single in the US, where it peaked at No.9 on the Billboard Hot 100. By the turn of 1968, The Who had been a prominent part of British pop culture for three years. Their reputation as a live force, and Pete Townshend’s growing ambition as a writer, was taking them beyond the bounds of throwaway chart music, and ever closer to the grand concepts of their later work. Now they took a major step in that direction with their third album, The Who Sell Out. The album was Townshend’s big statement about commercialisation and the demands on himself and the band to be presented as a product — and they certainly had some fun with it. Designed by David King, art director at the Sunday Times, and Roger Law, later the co-creator of the mercilessly satirical Spitting Image series), it had bold front cover images of Pete with his “Odorono” deodorant and Roger Daltrey in his bathtub of Heinz baked beans. On the back, Keith Moon supposedly hawked Medac spot cream and John Entwistle was the beneficiary of a Charles Atlas bodybuilding course. The mock advertising commercials that separated the tracks continued the theme, on a record presented as a pirate radio broadcast with real jingles from the recently-outlawed “Wonderful” Radio London. The Who Sell Out was released on December 13, 1967, making its British chart debut on the new year chart of January 13. It contained three Entwistle compositions, for which he performed lead vocals, and an opening track, “Armenia City In The Sky,” written by John “Speedy” Keen of Thunderclap Newman. Keen’s most famous song, that band’s UK No.1 “Something In The Air,” was produced by Townshend. The album also boasted a major hit single, in the form of the psychedelic marvel “I Can See For Miles,” which previewed it in the fall and reached No.10 in the UK. Townshend, however, was expecting much more, and was deeply disappointed that the song didn’t go to No.1. “To me it was the ultimate Who record, yet it didn’t sell,” he said. “I spat on the British record buyer.” The song did, however, become The Who’s only top ten hit single in the US, where it peaked at No.9 on the Billboard Hot 100. The Who Sell Out peaked at No.13 in the UK, well below the Top 5 heights of their first two albums, and stalled at No.48 in America. But as a forerunner of the big ideas that were soon to emerge from the band, it was a significant release indeed. John Dougan’s book on the LP, for the 33 1/3 series, would describe it as “a reflective work, one that struggles with rock and roll as a cultural expression that aspires to aesthetic permanence while marketed as ephemera. From this conflict emerges a pop art masterpiece.”...By Paul Sexton....~ With "Sell Out" The Who entered the upper echelon of rockdom. Everything about it is miles and miles better than their previous two energetic but inconsistent albums and even their harshest critics had to take notice. Is it a concept album? Not really. My thought is that Pete Townsend was so frustrated with their inability to achieve a number one single in the corrupt, payola- infested radio business of that era that he decided they would just create their own station complete with authentic-sounding commercials and incidental promotional spots placed between songs. In essence, satirically "sell out." Even the hilarious cover photos are a tongue-in-cheek slap in the face of crass consumerism. In the midst of all this witty sarcasm, though, they made one of the most creative, influential and yes, "progressive" albums of the 60s. Progressive rock is much, much more than just out-of-the-ordinary music. It is a state of mind. It's a matter of thinking outside the established box of normality and this record is all that and more. It is, in a word, incredible. And one hell of an entertaining ride. Because radio never stops or even pauses you are greeted by a voice box reciting the days of the week ad infinitum before the band launches into the delectable psychedelia of Speedy Keene's "Armenia City in the Sky" featuring backwards guitar loops, a dense organ sound and a very trippy vocal from Roger Daltrey. It's acid rock at its finest. After a quick word from Radio London you are presented with John Entwistle's lively mock-commercial for "Heinz Baked Beans" that is quite reminiscent of the zany fun the group had on the previous LP's "Cobwebs and Strange." While the single "Pictures of Lily" is unashamedly about self- stimulation, the highly melodic "Mary Anne with the Shaky Hand(s)" is the logical next step as it points out that the most popular girl in town isn't necessarily the prettiest or smartest but the one who knows how to please a man. The flamenco-styled guitar solo also reveals that Pete was not just a power chord maniac but a true guitar virtuoso, as well. The Who's playful humor is one of their most endearing traits and it's never as apparent than on the funny "Odorono" where the lady protagonist loses out after an important singing audition because, in the tragic end, her inferior deodorant lets her down. Keith Moon adds some dynamic, booming floor toms to spice up the otherwise smooth-flowing number. Skin art is rather prevalent in the 21st century but back then it was still a taboo reserved for very tough sailors and such. Keep that in mind while listening to the wonderful "Tattoo" where two adolescent brothers decide to make the jump into manhood by acquiring one to the chagrin of their parents. "Dad beat me 'cause mine said 'mother'/but my mother naturally liked it and beat my brother/'cause his tattoo was of a lady in the nude/and my mom thought that was extremely rude." That's a great lyric and the over-the-top, aria-style backup vocal at the end is a hoot. After the nostalgic radio chorale reminds you to "go to the church of your choice" you are treated to the pure power-pop of "Our Love Was (Is)" which demonstrates Townsend's continuing advancements in understanding song structure and arranging with its cascading vocals and dramatic key changes. Love the fat guitar tones, too. Preceded by a blatant pitch for Rotosound strings (wink, wink), the inimitable and huge E-chord onset of one of the greatest progressive rock songs of the 60s detonates as "I Can See for Miles" knocks the door down and ransacks your home. It doesn't follow the orthodox pattern of any rock & roll song of its day, it has Moon's rolling drums that spit out accents right and left, Pete and John's guitar sounds are monstrous, the complicated close harmonies of its chorus are unique and no other band has done anything that sounds even remotely like it before or since. It stands alone. You've also gotta love the "you've cheated on the wrong outlaw this time, missy" attitude that Daltrey delivers with a steely vengeance. It's an amazing piece of work. Pete's pensive "I Can't Reach You" follows and it's a much calmer cut that shows the bounding leaps they had made in their studio recording know-how and techniques. It's a pristine track about an old geezer who has a heartbreaking crush on a much younger babe but can't do a damn thing about it. The scourge of acne is addressed in John's "Medac," a sure cure for that ailment (that will leave your mug as smooth as a baby's bottom) before you enter the psychedelic realm of "Relax," an organ-heavy tune that was probably inspired by Townsend's admiration for Syd Barret's Pink Floyd. Entwistle's "Silas Stingy" is next and its ironic twist is that miserly Silas is so worried about someone stealing his money that he spends it all trying to protect it. A swirling trumpet lead and very deep organ tones distinguish this memorable tune. If you need further proof of Pete's versatility and skill on guitar look no further than on "Sunrise," a flawless solo performance that is stunning. This poignant torch song is just flat-out gorgeous in its simplicity. If you find their first mini-rock opera "A Quick One" a little too whimsical then "Rael" might be more palatable to your taste. However, if you are looking for a plot here you might save yourself some time because even Townsend himself has gone on record as saying that even he doesn't know what it's about exactly. (Rumor is that it has something to do with the Red Chinese eradicating all religion and, therefore, Israel) No matter, it is the obvious precursor to the full-scale behemoth that is "Tommy" and it is exhilarating in its combination of feels and textures. Face it, Pete was a visionary and an extraordinary trailblazer. This extended cut inspired countless musicians to break the three-minute barrier on a more consistent basis, thus paving the way for progressive music to blossom in general. The 1995 reissue includes the psalm-like coda of "Rael 2," (which adds little to deciphering the mysterious story line) as well as some B-sides, outtakes and unfinished demos. Mixed in are more faux commercials that didn't make it through the final mix for products like Coke, Top Gear, John Mason's car dealership and the clever CD-ender for Track Records (only LP enthusiasts will get the joke, though). "Glittering Girl" is pedestrian British pop but "Melancholia" is an interesting track that seems to reflect Townsend's respect for operatic melodies and overwrought drama. Mexican trumpets are predominant in John's enjoyable "Someone's Coming," a cool ditty about a couple sneaking around to avoid the girl's suspicious father. Heavy drums and intense, screaming guitars characterize the odd "Jaguar" and a song written by Roger with one of the roadies called "Early Morning Cold Taxi" is dull and repetitive. Their rave up instrumental version of Grieg's "Hall of the Mountain King" is suitably noisy and rowdy for four young men having a party in the studio, Moon's "Girl's Eyes" is predictably weak but charming, the alternate ending to "Odorono" adds nothing new to the song and the different recording of "Mary Anne with the Shaky Hand" (with Al Kooper on organ) is not as good as the earlier version. But it's "Glow Girl" with its macabre tale of a passenger on a plane that's about to crash that may be the most haunting. It contains yet another musical theme that will soon be part of "Tommy" except here Townsend sings "It's a girl, Mrs. Walker, it's a girl." I just about wore through the grooves of my vinyl copy of this album and I must say that the remastering job that Macpherson & Astley did is remarkable in that they preserved the spirit of the recording while bringing up the little nuances that were hard to hear before. If there's an album that I would pick to justify The Who as being proto prog this one is it. There's not a Chuck Berry cover, a blues jam or a riff-based rock anthem to be found here, just inventive rock and roll with a very progressive attitude behind it. It will always be a masterpiece in my mind, regardless of how later generations may label it. Essential.....by Chicapah.....~ Okay, I know that I'm supposed to think of this as a Sergeant Pepper album, but every time I hear it, I keep drifting back to Stand Up. For one thing, it's as varietous as hell, but secondly, and more importantly, compare the album to the previous effort, A Quick One, and you will be totally blown away that this is the same band. A Quick One was fun and experimental (like This Was), but patchy (like This Was). The Who Sell Out is fun, experimental, and it kicks ass. A LOT of ass. Supposedly "I Can See For Miles" prompted the Beatles to do "Helter Skelter," but the main difference is that the Beatles have to want to rock, the Who can do it in their sleep. And for that reason, I will always like the Who more; the Beatles can keep their tireless experimentation and sparkling melodies, I want pretentious headbangery! Oh. Sorry. That became a sort of Who defense/Beatles attack. Back to the album. The Who Sell Out also reminds me of another Tull album, one Thick as a Brick. Much like good ole Thick, this is a fairly comical attack on the music industry, the listening public, and the band itself, all provided by the concept of the radio station. And, much like Thick, this concept really holds the thing together. The first sound you're hit with is a radio station ID. If you don't like it, well, then you'll probably hate the album; Pete always has been infamous for playing up the whole "concept" bit of "concept album." But what follows is psycho rocker "Armenia City in the Sky." The melody is okay, but all those feedback noises backed with Keith's bashing? Cool. "Heinz Baked Beans" is just plain awesome. It's hardly a highlight, of course, since it's just a "commercial," but it's hilarious having Entwhistle play the mother (and of course, you know it's the lads themselves playing the brass band). "Mary Anne with the Shaky Hand" is an enjoyable folksy pop rocker. And yeah, it's about just what you think it's about. "Odorono" is an okayish pop rocker that it totally made by the subject: it's a VERY thinly disguised commercial for deodorant. Hilarious lyrics. "Tattoo" is quite the opposite; despite the goofy lyrical matter, the tune turns out to be a very charming acoustic number. Everyone harmonizes with Roger to create a very pretty atmosphere. "Our Love Was" largely what tattoo was; gorgeous atmosphere, except the tune is a little more thought out. And it's heavier; the guitar solo almost spoils it. Almost. But true heaviness is in the album's "classic" number, and probably the best song on it: "I Can See for Miles and Miles." That chuggin' intro is good enough, but the chorus with Roger wailing, Keith tearing his kit apart and Pete just banging out the same note over and over again? Fantastic. "I Can't Reach You" though is not much worse; a gorgeous (and slightly heavy) piano rocker. There's true beauty in the descending chorus. "Medac" is an amusing, if throwaway, Entwhistle commercial. "Relax" is a fairly forgettable organ based rocker. There are some good ideas in it, but it's too repetitive for its own good. Another organ based rocker, the creepy "Silas Stingy" is an Entwhistle number. After goofy crap like "Boris the Spider," John doesn't disappoint; the chorus is surprisingly catchy. The Pete solo number "Sunrise" is pretty, but it doesn't really do anything, pure atmosphere. I think it's okay, maybe you'll like it. Pete's second mini-opera "Rael" is a bit of a let down for me, at least compared to "A Quick One." It's certainly nobler, and the flow from tune to tune (movement to movement) is much more natural. But I just find it to be less memorable as a whole. Oh well, it's a decent album closer (I'm not saying it's evil or nothin'), and besides, some basslines got reused in Tommy or sumpthin'. The little commercials within the songs are brilliant without a doubt; you'd hardly expect something so varietous to flow so well, but the ads create perfect little bridges that are, at the same time, enjoyable one their own ("Radio London reminds you...go to the church of your choice." Gets me every time!). I still cannot believe that this album is another "Sergeant Pepper rip off." For one thing, it takes the concept seriously. A secondly, the concept. The company was ALWAYS after Pete to write something the public honestly wanted to hear, so this is effectively his way of saying, "Alright FINE! I'll give 'em a soulless pop album!" So the "Sell Out" part is both Pete's bowing to the company's desires, a hope for the fate of the album, and a serious insider joke. I mean, c'mon? The Who selling out? Never. Not a shred of artistic integrity is lost on the album. And even if you don't like the music (which is...technically impossible, seeing as how there's so many styles explored anyways), you can't not love the cover. Roger in baked beans! Pete with a deodorant stick bigger than his nose! John in a jungle suit! The Dark Side of Keith Moon! Hmm...why does that sound so familiar... (It seems that the lads recorded a lot more songs to fit into the concept, but not everything made it. The remaster is literally loaded with more songs and more commercials; the commercials are usually amusing (in fact, some of the "outtake" styled ones are downright hilarious), but the songs make it clear that (most of) the best stuff got on the album. Here we go. "Rael 2" is less than a minute long, but it somehow manages to be more memorable than the rest of the opera...why wasn't it included? Could the time restraints be that bad? Oh well. "Glittering Girl" is a solid pop rocker, but nothing special. "Melancholia" is, as the title suggests, a spooky rocker. Might have been a highlight for a lesser band, but for the Who, just decent. "Someone's Coming" is Entwhistle's, and it's actually kind of disappointing. Considering the subject matter, I'd have expected some dark humor injected in it. As it stands, the horns are fun, but there's not enough for the tune to stand on. "Jaguar" is a fairly straightforward rocker, once again, nothing special. "Early Morning Cold Taxi" is Roger's offering to the altar. It's okay, but it seriously stinks of the first part of "I Can See for Miles." Well, he was never the best songster. "Hall of the Mountain King" is the Who's bit 'o classical fusion. Which was, of course, not unheard of in the late sixties. However, Pete and the lads make this song their own; dig those sick basslines coupled with all that ghostly (eventually hilarious) wailing. Some have compared this song to early Pink Floyd, but it's way heavier than that stuff. Even Pete's soloing is cool; best bonus on the remaster. "Girl's Eyes" is a fun, if slightly throwaway, pop rocker from Keith. Cool acoustic soloing though (and dig the crazy drums). "Mary Anne with Shaky Hands" is an "(Alternative Version)." It's no worse, just a little less layered. "Glow Girl" is another operatic bit that found its way into Tommy. Now, this might not be the best, but surely all this makes you realize that the Who were one of, if not the, best bands on earth at that time; knock off some of the weaker Sells Out tracks and add "Mountain King" and "Rael 2" into the appropriate places, that thing would be literally perfect. Of course, the remaster as a whole is far from perfect, but still fun. No change in the overall rating, but a highly recommended archive document. Love those liner notes; read the story behind "Rael.") by The Whistler...~ Just like their preceding A Quick One, Sell Out didn't do that well back in those days, probably because it wasn't that obvious that the quartet was well ahead of their times in some ways. Indeed after the semi-conceptual Quick One with the title track the first rock- opera, with Sell Out we have a full concept album, but it got a bit over-shadowed by their non-album singles flying about and the future career-launching Tommy. Actually if Sell-out benefits of some newly acquired critical acclaim, it's partly because of a few hints to the upcoming Tommy album, namely Daltrey bathing in baked tomato beans and I Can See For Miles, a track that stands out here, but would've felt right at home in Tommy. Based on the loose but story-less concepts of a hypothetical UK pirate radio and the spoof advertising, The Who tries to upstage Monty Python, but they never get close to Frank Zappa's humour in music, even though their attempts give most progheads a jolt or two. Of course one of The Who's advantage was to sound very different than most of their contemporary in 68: while most groups where increasingly heavier, much of The Who's music remains whimsically-tainted and lightly psychedelic pop-rock, even if they had an occasional violent outburst (My Generation or See For Miles) and Entwistle's frequent use of the horns gave them another edge that none other had. The Who sort of describe UK's pre-hippie era society (much the same way Genesis would with SEBTP in 73), but without being too much Swinging London either. Mixing 50's and 60's radio-related ambiances throughout the album ensures enough of a unity for the other "songs" to melt together as one: Starting with Armenia City In The Sky where Entwistle's horns and Townshend's Hendrix-like guitar, the album is definitely a step up to what they'd been up to until now. The "radio interludes" are usually fairly experimental (the weekdays through electronic filters, rather filled with fun and sound collage that Zappa wouldn't disown. And as mentioned above we also get a glimpse of the future with See For Miles (the only hit from the album), that prefigures Tommy, with Townshend's energetic guitar crunches, Moon's incredible drum fills, but what's amazing here is that the sound is completely different, as if recorded in a different studio, a few years later. Other tracks are still too much stuck in the mid-60's pop-like mode Mary Anne or Tattoo, but often not that straightforward, either. Medac, and Stingy are also up that alley, but somehow, you'd have to wonder if Daevid Allen didn't revisit this album before writing some of his RGI trilogy with GonG and in early Soft Machine. While The Who avoided endorsing too widely the then-over-powering psychedelia of the times, with some of their songs, they could easily match Floyd's Syd Barrett's "Emily Layne" and the Sell Out album can be considered their "Satanic Sergeant Pepper Majesty" album. The closing track, the two-part Rael tune, the first part is still too 60's-ish, while the second will be used as blueprint for Underture/Sparks of the Tommy opera. The "Legacy" remastered series has the same bunch of bonus tracks from the mid-90's (which were adding much to the original album, since these "bonuses belonged to these sessions) reissue, but also sports a second disc offering the mono album and again another bunch of tracks, this time of a lesser interest. Coming in a superb double Digipak with an adapted booklet, it is too bad that the lyrics are absent. Sell Out is probably just as important as The Nice's Thoughts or Procol's debut (except that it wasn't a debut album) in developing the classic rock sound . Almost essential....by Sean Trane.....~ What do I think of The Who? Quite simply, I think they are perhaps the best darned rock and roll band ever. Yes, The Beatles were bigger and more influential, the Stones had more staying power, sensuality and bad boy menace, Zeppelin more mystique (and maybe more stadium-shaking power), but no classic rock band has moved me through the years, and supplied the soundtrack of my youth, as The Who have. I had a book about them as a young teen, I loved the movies, bought the T-shirts, played along with Pete Townshend on my air guitar, identified with the lyrics, bought the early solo albums, lived QUADROPHENIA when it came out, and like a good "mod" wannabe, wore 'my wartime coat in the wind and sleet.' To this day, I still love The Who, and I return to their classic albums again and again. So, what of this album? Dating from the end of 1967, THE WHO SELL OUT is a brilliant, absolutely audacious pop masterwork and simply the most fun album The Who ever made. It's a fully-realized concept album that prefigures TOMMY -- and, for me, it's more successful than the flawed TOMMY in that its grasp equals its considerable reach. Here the working concept is much more straightforward than the visions of flawed messiahs, generational divide and roiling adolescent angst which would follow on TOMMY and QUADROPHENIA. Here, as the title implies, the concept is pop culture and commercialism. Listening to THE WHO SELL OUT, you are submerged in a simpler time, a pre-hippie 50s to early 60s pop world of the latest songs, soft drinks, skin care products, guitar strings, cars and... canned beans. The war is well over, folks are safely back to work, kids and teens are everywhere, and everything's for sale -- even rock and roll bands. Faux ads, jingles and songs are all seamlessly linked via the clever device of a supposed pirate radio broadcast on "wonderful Radio London -- the A.M. Sound." THE WHO SELL OUT was re-mastered in 1995, and that's the version I'm reviewing here. This edition has 23 tracks compared to the original's 13, with loads of extra songs, alternate versions, jingles -- all recorded during the original 1967 album sessions. There's also a very interesting and thorough essay on the album and its place in pop history, plus extra artwork and liner notes. The linking "radio" material (it is NOT filler!) is terrific, but the songs themselves include some of the strongest in The Who's catalog. First up is "Armenia City in the Sky," where Roger Daltrey employs the higher, almost feminine register he'd later largely abandon (proof that as a singer, he had more range than he's often credited with). Other standouts include that cheeky ode to a (ahem) handy gal, "Mary Anne with the Shaky Hand," the masculine coming-of-age anthem "Tattoo," the sensitive Townshend-sung "Our Love Was" and, of course, the essential "I Can See for Miles." There's even a captivating multi-part mini "opera" about a troubled faraway fantasy land in "Rael 1," which was quite ambitious for its time. The best bonus track closes the album on an especially high note -- even if it's about a plane crash: "Glow Girl" dates from 1968, and first appeared on the B-sides and leftovers compilation ODDS AND SODS. It's a fabulous rocker that points the way to Tommy via its fadeout vocal of "It's a girl Mrs. Walker, it's a girl." If you've never heard this clever and unique album, you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy ASAP! If you're already a fan, but don't own the newer, fleshed-out version, you need to get this edition for the full experience. If, lucky sod, you have this version, then what are you waiting for? Go put it on, crank it up, and smile! From 1967 to today, no album was ever more purely pleasurable than THE WHO SELL OUT. It's the most fun you can have at home with your clothes on, and a genuine vintage rock and roll masterpiece!...by Peter....~ 1967 was one hell of a year for rock and roll. Most people would probably call this the first great Who album and a few call it the best Who album. The CD reissue contains extensive liner notes by Dave Marsh where he goes even further, calling it the greatest rock album of its era, better than Sgt. Pepper or Pet Sounds. I'm reading Marsh's biography of The Who as we speak and one thing I was not aware of was the amount of acrimony in this band. I don't know if they came to like each other later (haven't read that far yet) but in the 1960s, it's not a stretch to say the lads despised each other a good deal of the time. They fought openly, publicly, and even on stage. Depending on who you believe, there were times when Daltrey came to blows with Townshend. Moon was already getting out of control by the late 60s, the band were broke due to their massive instrument budgets, and Entwistle felt unappreciated in his contributions. The band were pressured to tour incessantly and come up with new singles to pay the bills. Its been said before that out of conflict can come memorable albums and here's another that supports the theory. "Sell Out" is something of a concept album although not entirely. As Marsh notes it lacks a firm storyline from track to track, but the underlying theme is an homage to the late 50s-mid 60s period when kids were immersed in the hits and the transistor radio heyday. They masterfully constructed what feels like an evening listening to London pop radio, with each of the tracks separated by public address spots and commercial product jingles. These bits are brilliant as they teleport the listener directly to 1960s London and the songs themselves reflect the theme and the period very well. Musically the album is still removed from the raging rock they would become known for a few years later, though you can hear the seeds planted in the ominous opening of "I can see for miles." But most of the material here strikes me as just brilliant pop music with a bit of Beatles psych influence, although The Who never allows flowers and beads whimsy to take over the bus. Rather Townshend shows off a more sensitive side here with the gorgeous melodies of "Mary Anne with the Shaky Hand" and "I can't reach you." "Odorono" has a funny punchline ending but the song itself has a certain loneliness in an English "Eleanor Rigby" way. "Silas Stingy" is the closest we get to pure whimsical silliness but it works in this setting quite well. All of the members are really starting to discover their personalities on this album, you can hear it especially in a track like "Tattoo" which sounds like trademark Who. Moon is beginning to smolder, Daltrey is finding his classic wail, and Pete is gaining confidence big time as a songwriter. While my initial reaction to Sell Out was disappointment, it was based on my expectation that The Who had to be loud and more like their 70s selves. But after some time I realized just how great this collection was despite the somewhat lighter touch. Many of the tracks, while they are sometimes dissed for being too simple, are highly memorable. This album captures a moment in time very well, as the innocence of the radio days were passing the torch to the counter-culture. Townshend handles the concept very well, paying tribute to something special without being overly sweet, and writing material that manages to sound fresh even today. It all makes Sell Out nearly essential to any comprehensive rock music collection. The 1995 reissue is the way to hear this album. It takes the original album's 13 tracks and adds another 10 quality songs all from the same era, many which could have been used on the album. I still prefer to listen to the original 13 but as far as bonus tracks go this is as good as it gets. Excellent liner notes with dates and places of recording provide ample documentation for the history geeks (like myself.) "....it is testimony to the greatness of Sell Out that, on the spot, in the midst of all that tumult, they wrote such a beautiful epitaph....without denying the dark side, they got it right. They made the trivial sublime....capturing the moment, making treasure from trash." -Marsh from the CD liner notes....by Finnforest....~ Opening with what must have been been one of the coolest beginnings to any album in 1967, a robotic voice naming the days of the week, this is the most consistent '60s Who album. I love all the fake radio segments and commercials in between the songs. If the Who weren't always progressive in a strictly musical sense, they certainly were in a conceptual one. This really must be listened to as album all the way through. I have the 1995 remaster and it is full of bonus tracks. In fact, I'm not even sure what the final song on the original LP was..."Sunrise" I guess. Which means there are 11 bonus songs here. Impressive considering the quality of this bonus stuff. Forget Tommy, they should have made this one into a double-album. The only well-known song here is "I Can See For Miles" but it's not even the best song. The Who Sell Out contains, IMO, some of this band's all-time best songs like "Armenia City In The Sky", "Tattoo" and "Silas Stingy". In many ways you could say this album was the beginning of the band's 'golden era'(which ended with Quadrophenia). There is really not much more I can say about the original album, the bonus stuff deserves a seperate review of it's own! So, let's go through the highlights of the bonus material shall we. "Rael 1" is a great example of 'proto-prog' from 1967. At the end of "Glittering Girl" there is a really rockin' song dedicated to Coco-Cola which goes: "Coke-after-coke-after-coke-after-Coco-Cola..." on and on. I could listen to this forever. "Melancholia" is one of the greatest things the Who recorded in the 1960s. "Someone's Coming" should have been a single. Love the horns here. "Jaguar" is another fine example of proto-prog. At the end of "Early Morning Taxi" we get another rockin' ode to Coca-Cola. The version of "Hall Of The Mountain King" here is excellent. Proof that the Nice were not the only British rock group at the time who could 'rock the classics'. The original album itself I would rate about 3.5, but with the bonus material it goes up to 4.5. So I'll give it this overall 4 stars.....by zravkapt....~ Whatever the arty origins of their auto-destruction stage act may have been, the resulting column inches from those exploding drum kits and wrecked amplifiers demonstrated that The Who were one of the most media-savvy bands around. Their grasp of the importance of image comes as no particular surprise given Mod culture’s attention to personal grooming and having the correct look at all times. Pete Townshend once said that the idea of interspersing the tracks of The Who Sell Out with radio jingles came from a desire to disguise what he felt was a weak collection of songs. Thus the iconic cover and the audio adverts conspired to become a satirical swipe at rampant consumerism – hey presto, a concept album of sorts. Well, almost. Ironically, the album is an advert of sorts for their follow-up record, containing as it does, many of the seeds that would flower into Tommy. Townshend was partially right about some it not being up to scratch. John Entwhistle’s “Mingy Stingy” and the psychedelic “Armenia City In The Sky” (written by Speedy Keene, later of Thunderclap Newman and Motorhead producer, trivia fans), as well as his own “Mary Anne With The Shaky Hand” and “Our Love Was” may well be innocuous tosh but tosh nevertheless. Things get on firmer Townshend ground with the tongue-in-cheek tale about the nature of masculinity, “Tattoo” which has such a glorious uplifting melody that Roger Daltry could’ve sang lines from the Yellow Pages and it would’ve been just as spine-tingling. The plaintive “Sunshine” (with its hint of “Pinball Wizard”) is an attractive enough love song, and like “Rael 1” - the album’s only true concept track - shows his keenness to extend his craft and serve notice of the shape of things to come. Generally though, things are pretty tame by The Who’s standards, and lacking stylistic coherence. The exception is “I Can See For Miles.” Its glowering presence overshadows everything else here. The rumbling salvos of Keith Moon’s tom-toms brilliantly herald the cathartic release of the song’s pulsating, obsessive chorus. A classic chunk of Who and a highpoint in 60s pop....Sid Smith ....BBC..review......~ You could call the album cover for The Who Sell Out (1967) tongue-in-cheek, but that would imply some sort of subtlety on behalf of the British rockers. The Who may have been the ultimate "stick it to the man" band of the 1960s, even when they enjoyed substantial commercial success. The problem with being an anti-corporate band that's immensely popular, though, is that over time your rebellious anti-whatever attitude is eventually bought and sold, turned into a brand. What was Pete Townshend, at the height of the Who's popularity, but a windmilling advertisement for rock and roll? What was Keith Moon but an Animal from the Muppets-esque endorsement of rock debauchery? That said, the design of the cover is a nice little nod to the idea of selling out and how, in many ways, it's an unavoidable part of being in the music industry. It's that whole die a hero or live long enough to become the vill... blah blah blah, The Dark Knight. With The Who Sell Out, the band managed to both play the game by acknowledging the inevitable co-option of their style and attitude, while also creating a cover that pokes fun at the ludicrous nature of commercialized music. Four panels adorn the original LP, with all photographs taken by David Montgomery. The farce of the cover is the fact that the branding is so outsize that it's practically cartoonish. Pete Townshend is seen with a giant roll of Odorono deodorant, and even wrote "Odorono" for the album, a song about a man named Mr. Davidson who leans in to kiss a female singer before being completely turned off by her body odor (I wish I was making that up). Keith Moon is seen applying Medac to a disgusting pimple and John Entwistle is dressed in leopard skin with a tall blonde while the caption proclaims the wonders of the Charles Atlas weightlifting program. It's all a big joke, partly a dissection of capitalism and partly an understanding that it's nearly impossible to evade the system. While the cover, and the album more generally with all of its commercial jingles, is an extended gag, Roger Daltrey didn't find too much to laugh about while shooting the cover. On the front, he's immersed in a tub of Heinz baked beans holding an oversized can of the product. In an interview with the BBC a few years ago, Daltrey recalled that the shoot was horrendous, the effect of taking a baked-beans bath completely miscalculated. "I got pneumonia! The beans had just come out of the freezer." The beans had been shipped in "these two huge army-sized tins," ice-cold, but they had to shoot anyways. "So to solve the problem, someone stuck an electric fire up my arse at the back of the tub. The back of me was cooking, and the front of me was freezing, and so I got pneumonia." To be fair, having electric fire up your arse is probably the most anti-sellout, rock-and-roll thing you could possibly do....By Kyle Fowle....~ The Who Sell Out is the third studio album by The Who, released in 1967. A Concept Album, it is formatted as a collection of unrelated songs with fake commercials and public service announcements in between them. Part of the intended irony of the title was that The Who were making real commercials around this time. Lawsuits followed the album's release due to the mention of real-world commercial interests in the faux commercials and on the album covers, and by the makers of the actual Radio London jingles, who claimed the Who used them without permission. The album is best remembered for "Mary Anne with the Shaky Hand" and "I Can See for Miles", the latter which indirectly inspired The Beatles song "Helter Skelter" on The White Album. Paul McCartney had read that The Who had written the "heaviest rock song ever" and, without having heard the actual song, felt that they should top that. And they pretty much did. The album was listed at #115 in Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time.....~ In 2001, Universal Music began to treat Who fans by issuing deluxe editions of the band’s original discography. Since the bands fifth LP, Live at Leeds, was chosen as a starting point, predicting the next Who LP that will receive the deluxe overhaul has been a shot in the dark. As it turned out, the following year Universal Music made a strange but welcome choice and issued a deluxe edition of The Who’s debut LP, My Generation. In 2003, both Who's Next and Tommy were given a deluxe makeover. And then….nothing! I was really disappointed because, as previous reissues have proven, The Who’s vault is only about dime short of a being treasure chest. Not only that, their catalogue has greatly benefited from its recent renovations. Six long years later and what email notice do I receive from Amazon? A deluxe edition of The Who’s greatest LP, The Who Sell Out will be released next month. “Pre-order today”. “Wow!!! I believe I will be doing just that very thang”. Like most deluxe edition’s, The Who Sell Out will thrill those that already know and love the album and The Who. Apart from the fact that there are tons of little goodies that are new to our ears, this is the first time the original mix of the album has been remastered and released on CD (don’t worry, the unedited version of ‘Rael’ is included as a bonus track). If you are game for upgrading your Who collection – a practice I’m always up for – the light ain’t gettin’ no greener, son. The previously unreleased tracks ‘Sodding About’ (aka ‘Trying To Get Through’) and alternate version of ‘Summertime Blues’ or worth the price of admission alone. If you do happen to be new to The Who Sell Out, and money is no object, well get the lead out already. You will not be disappointed. Everyone else, enjoy your vinyl and/or 1995 remixed version. Unfortunately, as with every deluxe edition, there are a few pitfalls to look out for. First off, if you happen to be one of those people that cannot tolerate CD’s that are mastered to compete with the present day loudness war, you may want to take a step back. This isn’t only the loudest version of The Who Sell Out I’ve ever heard, it is also the least dynamic (the studio dialogue at the beginning of the demo version of ‘Glittering Girl’ sounds as if they are talking through rolls of toilet paper). The mono mix - featured on disc two - suffers greatly due to the mass amount of compression applied during mastering. All the original recordings clicks and pops are pushed to the fore. The bass dominates the mix as the remainder of the instruments fight for space. It’s kinda cool to here Entwistle jacked up to eleven but, overall, it does not compliment the recording. But who listens to psychedelic LP’s in mono anyway? One of the things that really irritate me about Universal Music's deluxe editions is the intentional withholding of previously unreleased material recorded during the sessions for the featured LP. In this case, a track titled ‘Bob Sings Soul’ - noted in Andrew Neill and Matthew Kent’s excellent book Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere: The Complete Chronicle of The Who 1958-1978 – is not included. Allegedly, this is a novelty track that features The Who's road manager Bob Pridden taking the lead vocal. It’s easy to reckon the reasoning behind the decision to pass this obvious filler over; however, I’m sure it’s being tucked away for a rainy day. Hello, The Who Sell Out: The Complete Sessions!!! Call it a pet peeve, nitpicking, or just plain anal, but what is with the grouping of two or more songs into one track? Do today’s industry audio heavies not have access to standard editing software such as pro-tools? Is there a reason the unedited version of ‘Rael’, the backing track of ‘Armenia City In The Sky’, and the ‘Great Shakes’ commercial are allocated to one track number? No? Just laziness? Hey, word to bird. We live in world where shuffle and playlists are standard features on modern audio equipment. Not everybody wants to hear all three songs in a row with a long silence between them. Break it up. This can be done using Nero! OK? OK!!! I’d like to think the deluxe edition of The Who Sell Out will be the final word on the album; however, so long as innovations in audio come forth, ‘Bob Sings Soul’ is in the vault, and a couple thousand fools like myself have forty dollars to burn, I have my doubts.....mofoking .....~ Much like the Rolling Stones (and much unlike The Beatles) The Who arrive very suddenly, out of goddamn nowhere they get reeeeaaaally good. Call me nuts but their first two albums are confused and mediocre. The debut is largely cute but futile R&B Rock stuff. Mods? I don't get em'. Next was an album that was pushing and pulling all over the place, ending on a neat but corny epic song. In fact though I'd say The Who are and always have been a confused band, one that would have been so much better with a more screwed on head. I just don't really think the Rock Operas are all that, I find Townshend's obsession with his fairly run of the mill stories clouds the real point, the music, weighs it down a bit. Possibly their best album ends up being a FAILED rock opera? What's going on! Trying too hard, failing and succeeding, sheeeet. But there is one exception to this wonderful much of confusion, one actual focused laser beam that makes for a really pleasurable mix of concept and tunes. And it's the OTHER possibly best album they made, this one! The Who Sell Out is just...it's really just wonderful! For a bunch of unrelated reasons and that's rare to be able to say. For starters I love the basic sound most of these songs have, it's a bright shining almost reverbed sort of guitar pop, very 80's like in a way! I don't know if most would agree, but it sounds like Jangle to me. I think it's not impossible to hear echoes of this in XTC or The Smiths and British Janglers like that. They know how to use it too, this shimmering gorgeous sound. I'm currently trying to figure out how I didn't notice the magnificent tune on Tattoo the first time I went through this album. Was I fucking asleep or what? They also start sounding like...well The Who here. That sort of modestly epic simple rock music that would become both their trademark as well as their legacy. If you can't also hear part of where U2 came from here I don't know what to tell you. And modestly epic? Sounds kind of bad, but I don't mean it like that at all. It's never overblown and Arena rock like, not horribly corny like Journey (one of the worse legacies of The Who) it's always just measured enough, classy, satisfying. And it doesn't get old either, since they pull this trick on most of the songs except for the Entwistle ones. All of these are attractively alongside eachother without them getting samey, they don't have to fight for your attention. But the main cool thing about this album? It's an incredibly ahead of it's time parody concept album. And an incredibly beyond it's genre choice of doing so. Yeah yeah, with Zappa around parody based rock was nothing The Who could claim on. But the way they do it? Very different. Zappa parodies are obvious parodies, it's always completely obvious Zappa is joking around when he is. The Who are playing it straight, these are songs about silly thing mostly, like deodorant (Odorono). Yet only by really listening to the lyrics would you get that. And that makes it much funnier! Odorono can for real, be enjoyed as deadpan parody, or a beautiful little song. The truly innovative thing though? The little comedy skits. Most Rock fans won't make note of it, but I'm more than a rock fan, I'm also a Hip-Hop fan. The skits here? Framing the album like a radio playlist with advertisements and so forth? This is a very common sort of thing you see in Rap. Namely I think of the group who made it big over in that genre, De La Soul. Both their debut and second album make heavy use of skits that remind me A LOT of this. It's simply awesome to see it here both where and when. Too often people treat genres like Cold War enemies, the idea that Rock and Rap have contributed to eachother's evolutions over time is seen as SINFFUUULL by many. Bulllllshit. I almost expected Roger Daltrey to start hosting a game show and shit.....Zephos .....~ Sell Out is the Best and Most Original Album from The Who The Who Sell Out is among the most original works the Who ever released, and the fact that it was so soon into their career is a true testament to the true creativity that Pete Townshend, and the rest of the band working with him, brought to the table. Sell Out, as a concept album, is successful because it takes an idea that's easy to grok and follow along with. Here's a fictional pirate radio station, broadcasting a variety of pop, punk, and hard rock tracks with some commercials filling in the space. In a way, these commercials serve as a predecessor to the skits that would become popular in rap music - they provide a consistent transition between the otherwise unrelated songs, and in the case of Sell Out, the songs are absolutely terrific, some of the best and funniest in the band's catalog. I would absolutely recommend this album to anyone - the terrific variety of sounds present is sure to grip someone with something, and this remains my favorite studio album by The Who.....johhnnyD14 ....~ Now, we’re getting deeper into the mindset that would be The Who for the next years: intricate themes, not to the point of the Opera Rock stuff they would get later on, but an idea carried on throughout the album. It’s nice to see this kind of thing happen, not only because there’s a meaning on top the songs, but also for there’s room to give a message much more transcendental than a record which has its songs scattered over the place. This one, in particular, uses satire as a form of critique, and one, in fact, would very well recognize in a better way their work. Sure, some parts aren’t perfect, but it certainly delivers, and in a comedic kind of way.....Jules_Eliseus ...~ The success of the mini-opera "A Quick One, While He's Away" made Pete Townshend think big while he plotted out the Who's third album. Inspired by the pirate radio stations docked near England, he wrote a series of songs linked together by fake commercials for actual products like Heinz Baked Beans and Odorono deodorant. Songs like "Tattoo" and "Mary Anne with the Shaky Hands" are fantastically weird, while "I Can See for Miles" may be the greatest song that Townshend wrote in the 1960s. He was absolutely crushed when it failed to become a big hit in America. The Who Sell Out wraps up with "Rael," which contains the musical seeds of a story about a blind, deaf and dumb boy that would transform the Who into one of the biggest bands on Earth....OFRSS ....~ This is one of those records where I have heard it so much that I have trouble reviewing. But worse, I've only ever heard the extended version with all the fake ads and many more songs (some of them better than those that made the cut). This was the most ambitious Who record to date and I really do think a full hour of it would have not been a bad thing. But I'll try to think about the 30 minute version. The Who pretty much ignored psychedelia like the Kinks did, though they did do a hilarious Pink Floyd parody of a cover of Grieg that didn't make the cut. Instead they went more commercial, in some sense, trying to get money from existing companies and making what they thought was super disposable music. But Townshend has grown as a songwriter and the sheer variety of the record marks it out as clearly different from the earlier "Maximum R&B" records. You can feel Townshend straining against pop music conventions and it makes sense that the next step was a rock opera. Perhaps the strongest record they made prior to discovering synthesizers.....schicken46 D....~ "Who's Next", "Tommy" and "Quadrophenia" are more ambitious and therefore get most of the attention from the rabid fans but this one is more fun and although the songwriting is less sophisticated, I prefer these tunes to the pomp that followed. The later albums have their moments but the early modpunk sound does a lot more for me than the later proggy area rock does and this album is the early sound at its best with a dab of psychedelia. The were never more gleefully acid-tinged than on "Mary Anne With The Shaky Hand" "Odorono" and "Armenia, "City In The Sky", never prettier than on "I Can't Reach You" and "Sunrise". Bonus tracks (including bonus fake radio jingles and an insane version of "Hall of the Mountain King") have made the album twice as long- and twice as good....hellaguru ....~ 

Rock 'n' Roll have started as an antithesis of the easy listening 50s Pop. With it's wild, even violent image, the young Rock musicians hope to transmit their aspiration for authenticity, which was the complete opposition for the commercial fake Pop. This is the reason that we may easily find in the texts of the 60s Rockers, and especially in The Who's lyrics, declaration like "I hope I die before I get old" ('My generation'), "I don't need to fight to prove I'm right" ('Baba O'riley) or "I am free and I am waiting for you to follow me" ('I'm Free'). These statements indicate an rebellious, authentic, and non-conformist attitude, which is an declaration of war on the commercial pop contents. 'The Who Sell Out' was not only a turning point in The Who's career, it was a radical revolution as long as it concern to the relation between Rock music and commerciality. In this fascinating masterpiece, The Who imitate the sound of Radio London in the 60w, and adopt the most commercial medium - the advertisement. Some of the tracks are an exact imitation of the commercials style, another mini-commercials are placed between the tracks, and some of the songs start like some regular (well, not exactly regular, but wonderfully written and performed) classic rock songs, and only the punch line expose the commercial content ('Odorono', 'Medac'). This is far more innovative than it sounds. When the difference between an artistic rock tune and a commercial advertisement does not exist, the whole striving for authenticity becomes non relevant for the artist. The basic starting point of art creation in general and rock music in particular - aspiration for self expression of the artist - becomes uncertain, because work of art is now based on imitation, reproducing, and a materialistic purpose. True, the album is criticize the commercial world. In 'Odorono', my favorite song in this album, Pete Townshend tells the story of a girl that lost her love and her musical career because she forgot to use her Odorono deordorant. When he sings "Odorono could have saved your day, could have helped her to get the part, odorono and he would have stay to help her to save her heart", we clearly understand the sarcasm. Towsand isn't really think that romantic love, and even music, is a required by the quality of a commercial product. But he shows a sharp mirror for the commercial American culture, with skills that may be compared to Andy Warhol's artistic work during that time. Besides it's revolutionary relation to commerciality, 'The Who sell out' bravely deal with another cultural taboos and controversial issues: drug trips ('Armenia City in the Sky'), masturbating ('Mary Ann With the Shaky Hand'), tattoos ('tatoo'), inter-generational romantic relationship ('I Can't Reach You'), and the American lust for wealth ('lust for wealth'). The mix of the controversial contents and the commercial style, is a revolutionary technique that continue the thematic guide line of the album: where comes the border between the authenticity and the protest, and the commerciality and conformism, and what is the use of that border. The musical performance of the tunes of the album is perfect. There is even something exciting in the performances in this album: the stirring drumming in 'I Can See for Miles', the heart rending singing in 'Our Love Was', the beautiful touching guitar in 'Sunrise', and the skilled bass playing in all of the tracks. The production is great as well: the advertisement songs sound exactly like advertisement, and everything is in it's right place: the piano in 'Can't reach you', the effect in 'Armenia' and the rhythm changes in 'Real One'. The well-made music helps to make the deep themes and the complicated lyrics of the album accessible and easily acceptable. The early rock 'n' roll and classic rock albums introduced answers, truths and declarations. After you listen to 'The Who sell out', you find yourself with more question than answers. By bringing it's pop for it's ambiguous, doubtful point, The Who created one of the most unconventional popular music pieces has ever made.....brutuslevi ....~ There are all sorts of 1967 pop and rock albums I prefer to The Who Sell Out. Albums such as the Beatles two '67 releases, the Doors' first two LPs, and Hendrix's first two. And the Moody Blues' first album featuring their classic lineup, Days of Future Passed. And the Byrds' classic Younger than Yesterday album. Even Something Else By the Kinks, which I consider to be far from their best work, is better than The Who Sell Out. Hell, the Stones' Between the Buttons, which the band has virtually disowned, it seems, blows this album away. And at the risk of appearing completely crazy, I'll take either of the Beach Boys' two '67 albums over this Who record. In a heartbeat. There's some good stuff here, but goddamn, there's a lot of middling stuff to go along with it. Too much. I get that several of these numbers are radio commercial parodies, but that doesn't make them good! And too many of the non-joke songs just aren't good enough to match up to what was being offered by the other top groups in 1967. This is one of those records I really want to like, but just don't.....Rocket88 ....~ The first thing I think about The Who Sell Out is the cover. Two separate frames on the front show Pete Townshend holding a gigantic deodorant to his armpit and Roger Daltrey in a tub full of Heinz baked beans. The back cover features pictures of John Entwistle with a babe on his arms and Keith Moon applying acne medicine from a giant tube. They are fake ads for Who-endorsed products, and come with amusing words to go along with them. These ads are also incorporated as musical pieces on the album. Like the cover, "Odorono" and "Heinz Baked Beans" are on the A side, while "The Charles Atlas Course" (the product Entwistle is hucking) and "Medac" are on the B side. They play like short commercials, with "Odorono" being the exception. At two-and-a-half minutes it is the longest, it is constructed like an actual song, and consequently it is the best of the four. What we have here is a concept album of commercials! Well, not exactly. Though on the surface, it looks like The Who Sell Out is a satire on consumerism, that's only the half of it. The album plays like a 1960s rock music radio program, complete with commercials. More to the point, it plays like a 1960s pirate-radio program, the kind that was pumping rock music onto the British airwaves and providing many a British teen with an alternative to the prudish BBC programming. Radio London is this signal's chosen title, and maintains the masquerade for about two-thirds of the album. When it works best, like in the transition from "Heinz Baked Beans" to "Mary Anne With the Shaky Hand" (in the form of a male voice chanting "more music more music more music"), the concept seems ingenious. However, for some reason The Who abandoned the concept after "Medac" appears as the second cut of Side 2. I don't know if they thought that the concept had worn out its welcome that far into the album, or if they felt it was time to get serious. (And if the latter is true, they didn't help themselves much by putting the weakest songs toward the end.) In any case, only an inner groove jingle of "Track Records" (courtesy of which brought you the album) give any connection of the final four songs to the radio-plus-commercial concept of the first side. For his part, Townshend wrote a fine collection of tunes that seem to mimic the diversity of the finest pop music that a pirate station might have played back in the day. The acoustic "Mary Anne With the Shaky Hand," an ode to hand jobs, is set to a lilting, Flamenco beat. Another acoustic number, "Sunrise," sounds like something out of the Simon and Garfunkel songbook, what with its rhythm suggesting light bossa nova. It is performed by Townshend as a solo piece. "Our Love Was, Is" and "I Can't Reach You" are love songs inspirational and yearning, respectively. These cuts are also sung by Townshend, who seemed to become more confident in his tenor voice. They are also two of his best ballads and, under different circumstances (i.e. if The Who were a bigger group at the time), could have been hits in their own right. As it was, the big hit off The Who Sell Out was placed right in between "Our Love Was, Is" and "I Can't Reach You." That song is "I Can See For Miles," which ended Side 1 of the vinyl edition in definitive fashion. Moon's rolling drums, Townshend's taut guitar strokes, and Daltrey's understated singing all bubble under the surface of this accusatory song of a lover betrayed. This song offers hints of psychedelia with the dizzying repetition of "miles and miles and miles and miles and miles" sung in the chorus. "I Can See For Miles" is the culmination of a strong first side of The Who Sell Out. The whole side sort of builds up to this point. Though the album opening "Armenia City in the Sky" sounds dated to me now, its psychedelic bent was a good fit in its time. Other songs are ballads ranging from the naughty-but-nice "Mary Anne With the Shaky Hand" to "Tattoo," about two brothers who decide that the answer to "what makes a man a man" is body paint. The song breaks down at the end but not before it foreshadows the current fascination of covering all of one's body with tattoos. And the commercial interludes are zippy transitions. Like I said, Side 2 is where the commercial/pirate radio concept breaks down, as they make way for minor numbers like "Relax" and Entwistle's "Silas Stingy," a nursery rhyme that reflects the composer's quirky sense of humour but little of his melodic chops. Both songs feature an organ that I think takes away from the group's dynamic sound. Fortunately, the album closes strongly with the mini-opera "Rael," about a ne'er-do-well who sails back to his war-torn homeland and is abandoned by his mutinous crew. "Rael" features a musical interlude that Townshend would recycle as the "Underture" in Tommy. If nothing else, The Who Sell Out demonstrated that the group could poke a little fun with their marginal fame (at the time). It also showcased Townshend's growing strength as a composer. Just how far his ambition would take him we would see in the albums to come.....Pantagruel ....~ This is probably one of the most underrated and misunderstood albums in Rock history. British wild rockers, The Who, recorded this album in the midst of the blooming Psychedelic era, with their contemporaries home (Beatles) and across the pond (Beach Boys) producing concept albums, which are considered masterpieces to this very day. Wild as they were, and a bit mad (or even more that a bit) vocalist Roger Daltrey, guitarist Pete Townshend, bassist John Entwistle and drummer Keith Mood responded to all that psychedelic hullabaloo with their version of temporary insanity. The album was initially intended to be a concept album of sorts, about an imaginary pirate radio station, including jingles, chatter and commercials. Sadly never actually completed as such, the underlying concept of the songs is still very much there, being romance or the convoluted male / female relationships. Of course anything touched by the Who turns into mayhem, madness and above all typical British absurd humor. Even the album's title, which is of course an oxymoron to anybody familiar with the band, serves a purpose. In fact the Who are much closer here to Frank Zappa ("We're Only In It For The Money" – sounds familiar?) than to their saccharine British mates. Of course there is plenty of great music here as the band rocks harder and mightier that anybody else at the time. This new edition is a goldmine for the Who fans, with dozens of bonus tracks and both the stereo and mono mixes of the album. To all the people who never got this album, this is an opportunity to wake up. Essential brilliant music...Jazzis ....~

This is easily my favourite Who album, and makes for an amazingly enjoyable listen. This is the album where all the elements finally gelled. It marks Townshends complete ascendency as preeminent songwriter of the group, and shows a new level of maturity both creatively, instrumentally, and vocally. Beautiful harmonies abound, and Townshend's guitar playing had never sounded better. Nearly all the material is top notch, with the only clunker in my opinion being "Silas Stingy", but even it has its charms, mostly due to the lyrics. The rest is excellent. Personal favourites include "Armenia City in the Sky"; "Odorono"; "Our Love Was"; "I Can See For Miles"; "Can't Reach You"; "Relax"; and "Sunrise". In some ways this album marks the peak of the Who's recorded output. They would release more popular and more renowned albums like Tommy , and Who's Next , but for me those albums lack the charm of this stellar LP. I truly love this album and can only hope that others enjoy it as much as I do. Happy listening!....deadlybreakfast ....~ The closest they ever got to a pop masterpiece. A conceptual album! And a good one at that! Apparently great care was taken of all the details here. The first side is presented as an extract from a pirate radio station program, with fake ads and tiny commercials (all written by the band) popping in and out and creating cute little links between the actual songs. Funny, too. In fact, strange as it may seem, I've grown so used to them that I cannot even picture 'Our Love Was' without the preliminary 'RADIO LONDON REMINDS YOU - GO TO THE CHURCH OF YOUR CHOICE!!!' or 'Tattoo' without the preliminary 'It's smooth sailing with the highly successful sound of wonderful Radio London...' You have your hungry family longing for 'Heinz Baked Beans' ('WHAT'S FOR TEA DAUGHTER?'), your teenage skin problems ('Medac') and rock band equipment ('Premiere Drums'). And some of these even have good melodies - imagine that! 'Odorono', a pathetic story about a performing girl being left by her adorer because she stank, features a magnificent ringing guitar line and I bet it could have even been a hit if it featured a different set of lyrics. Plus, the concept is carried over to the album cover, and yes! 'tis one of the funniest album covers I've ever seen: Pete using a deodorant, Daltrey sitting in a tub of beans, John showing off his muscles and Keith applying cream to his face. Wow! And don't forget to read the actual ads, too! As far as I can understand, the whole concept was a somewhat self-ridiculizing idea: The Who were perfectly aware of the fact that their LPs never really sold well, and the very idea of 'the Who selling out' was an obvious oxymoron at the time. On the other hand, the album title is really a pun accentuating both meanings of the word 'sellout': significant commercial success, on one hand, and a 'go-for-the-average-public-taste' approach at the same time. So it's simultaneously a self-parody and a parody on pop tastes in general, with all the fake comic ads on here. But just don't you go off thinking that this album's greatness lies entirely in its concept. Nope. The concept is funny, but little more. The songs are astonishing, though! First of all, they are extremely diverse. Some people get annoyed at it, but I say swell! I like diversity, and I raise my thumbs up! Nearly every song sets different moods, and that's not a thing that just any rock band could do on a single album. Led Zep? Certainly not Led Zep! Beatles? Yeah, the Beatles could manage it, but apart from the Beatles, well... Oh, see for yourself: the album opens with a psychedelic crashing feedbacky-backwards-solo-all-that-stuff rocker 'Armenia City In The Sky' (if I recall it right, credited to one John Keene), where Daltrey finally begins to fully display his vocal talents. Next comes the acoustic folky 'Mary Anne With The Shaky Hand' which may seem fillerish - for a moment, but you're sure to appreciate its melody with a couple more listens; and yes, the lyrics are about wanking off, whatever doubts you may hold. The beautiful ballad 'Tattoo' is actually a joke - about two brothers sharing the idea that it's a tattoo that 'makes a man a man'; but, joke or no joke, the vocal harmonies on that one are enough to knock you off your seat, and the pretty pretty arpeggiated chords that herald the song are worth the price of admission alone. The next ballad is 'Our Love Was (Is)', with a soaring chorus ('soaring' in all senses, 'cos they sing 'our love was soaring') and a guitar line which could have easily been stolen from The Beatles' 'Dear Prudence' were it not for the fact that The White Album came out a whole year later. Just when you get the impression you're gonna be routed in these pop ballads forever (not a totally unpleasant idea, even considering that it's the Who we're talking about), crash bang whallop comes the mighty 'I Can See For Miles' - another psychedelic rocker, this time an original and an absolute classic. Many people regard it as the band's finest moment, and I can easily understand them. The combination of crunching block chords, wild drumming and extremely complex vocal lines (just try to sing along with the sweeping chorus and you'll know what I mean) makes it a highlight indeed. After the storm, the calm: another ballad ('Can't Reach You', and again, beautiful vocals from Pete). 'Relax' is the only serious stinker on here (an acidified rocker, probably influenced by Pink Floyd), just because it sounds somewhat weak in the company of all the other masterpieces. 'Silas Stingy', the Entwistle contribution, is yet another childish spooky song, and it could have been nice were it not for the constantly repeating annoying chorus ('Money, money, moneybags'). 'Sunrise' is one of Pete's most astonishing ballads, where it's just Pete and his guitar, and the way he sings a single verse in three different keys constantly changing the sound effect is really unique (not to count the complex, but brilliant melody). And the album closes with Pete's second attempt at a mini-opera: a conceptual oeuvre called 'Rael' ('Is-Rael'?) which is nice but borrows too much out of traditional war marches, so I'm not that impressed. The funny thing is, it also features the theme that would later become 'Sparks' in Tommy. All said, this is one of the most magnificent Sergeant Pepper offshoots, and if you are not acquainted with the Who's early period - start here. The Who sell out! Actually, they hadn't (just as the previous ones, the album sold miserably 'cos the stupid Brits were still fawning all over Hendrix). But lend 'em a hand! The new release, as usual, has some bonus tracks, but the album was so almost perfect in the first place that they really add nothing much, unlike the ones on A Quick One: there are some decent ballads, like Keith's 'Girl's Eyes', an unconvincing Entwistle comedy number with heavy emphasis on a brass section overdubbed in Nashville ('Someone's Coming'), and some plain hard-rockin' jammin' ('Jaguar'). Plus there's 'Glow Girl' which is taken directly from Odds And Sods, so it's redundant, and an alternate, electric version of 'Mary-Ann' which is nice but actually adds little to the original besides some additional lyrics. The weirdest of these is a four-minute instrumental called 'Hall Of The Mountain King', said to be a rendition of the corresponding extract from Grieg's Peer Gynt suite; it hardly sounds like Grieg here, anyway, and the main function of the composition is to evoke thoughts of (naturally) King Crimson and (unnaturally) Pink Floyd, because in parts it sounds exactly like 'Interstellar Overdrive'. Which is not that surprising, on the other hand: Piper had just come out, and it certainly did have an impact on Sell Out. But if Townshend would have decided to sling 'Hall' onto the record, he'd have been sued for sure, for both blasphemizing of classics and plagiarizing Syd Barrett at the same time. Nevertheless, one can only imagine the Who's state of mind at the time: psychedelia gripped them by the collar and made them really engage in some of their most vicious and straightforward sonic experimentation ever. Another interesting thing about the bonuses is that they feature some more 'publicity' grooves from the boys, and the whole coda is designed to look as the 'Lost Third Side Of The Album'. It doesn't quite work, though, because the songs are really inferior, and I can understand Pete for shoving them into the vaults......George_Starostin ...~ Top notch album, listening to this should be a part of every school's curriculum. It's a shame though, even back in '67 people were too preoccupied with Sgt. Pepper's and the booming hippie movement to give this thing the attention it deserved, damn hippies really missed out. Brilliant songs, brilliant concept (a parody of pirate radio stations that along with songs includes fun, catchy faux-jingles and faux-commercials), brilliant execution. This is the finest album that I have ever had the pleasure to listen to. The first side of this is flawless, every song is absolutely top notch spectacular (Especially "Our Love Was" which, in my opinion, is the second best song on the album). The second side however isn't nearly as consistent. None of the songs are bad, but there are only two that I can say that I really love ("Sunrise", "I Can't Reach You"). I compare it to having a class comprised mostly of geniuses with a few above average ones thrown in. So that is really the only flaw on this thing, the songwriting isn't consistently spectacular, but none of it is bad. The centerpiece and highlight of this masterpiece is "I Can See For Miles". This alone solidifies Pete Townshend's place among the greatest pop songwriters ever and The Who as one of the finest acts in the history of rock. This song is intense, the Moon-Entwistle bass/drum combo creates a thunderous havoc that makes you feel like your about to be run over by a locomotive. This is probably the best example of how great those two could be together. Roger's vocals also add to the intensity of the song, singing as someone who's lover has betrayed his trust. The harmonies! My God the harmonies the band performs during the chorus are stunning! Pete's guitar playing is fantastic on this track. The angry tone his guitar has also help define the mood of the song. Those twangs he does during the chorus show how great the little things he does are, and the rapid, vengeful flutter of his guitar in the middle of the song still gives me chills, even after hundreds of listens. This is Pete Townshend's greatest achievement and one of the best songs that I have ever heard. This is just one of those albums that you really have to experience before you die....HappyJack1991 ... Pete's first attempt at a full-length concept album, going for the general feel of a pirate radio station and as such varying the sound considerably between from song to song, is a gigantic leap over the Who's first two albums and featuring a set of funny commercials in between songs, a significantly better concept record than Tommy, and probably the Who's third-best studio album. Not bad at all, considering this is still the Who pre-synthesizers, pre-Daltry's roar, pre-Entwistle's insane bass, pre-pretty much everything that makes them the Who, except of course the concept. I mean, if I was a bigger '60s dude, I'd be ALL OVER this shit, and even then, I like it plenty nowadays. There are, of course, a few issues. "Armenia City in the Sky" is a fan favorite, but it always struck me as a mess of a song, piling on psychedelic effects but not having much of a melody. Fortunately, this is the group's lone attempt at full-on psychedelia. Unfortunately, it's the first song here, setting the tone in a bad way. While it's hard to properly set the tone for such a diverse album, the general tenor of this record is better summed up by a string of catchy, folk-flavored rockers: "Mary Anne with the Shaky Hands," "Tattoo," "I Can't Reach You," "Our Love Was" (nice use of John's horn here) and "Sunrise," making this one of the group's softest efforts. "Tattoo" in particular takes advantage of the newfound mellowness, with some terrific layered harmonies that are probably the best vocal shit you'll hear on a pre-Live at Leeds Who album. Good stuff all, and the group stakes a claim with these songs at being an unexpected influence on Big Star. Of course, let's be real here: it's the loud stuff most people come to the Who for, and there really isn't a lot of that here. The only particularly hard rocker is the tense, electrifying "I Can See for Miles," which rides on clashing guitars and crashing rhythms and one of early Roger's strongest vocals. While Keith adds his usual drive to "I Can't Reach You" and "Our Love Was," nothing else reaches the sheer cacophony of "I Can See for Miles," definitely one of the strongest songs here, although I personally prefer "I Can't Reach You." Probably just me, though. However, fans of the more operatic Who will find that "Rael 1" (and "Rael 2," included as one of the thousand bonus tracks of the expanded edition that's now standard-issue... you probably pirated this, of course, so not like that matters) is a prequel to Tommy. I personally am not a big fan of it, but it's got its historical place, so hey. It does introduce us to one of the cooler riffs from "Sparks," in turn one of the better songs on Tommy, which is definitely a plus. Outside of "I Can't Reach You" and "Sunrise," there's not really a lot to this album's second side. "Relax" slips in nicely with the folk-pop goodness of the "Marianne with the Shaky Hands"/"Tattoo"/"Our Love Was"/"I Can't Reach You" power quartet, but outside of a moderately rocking, moderately trippy bridge, it doesn't really do a lot of interest. "Silas Stingy" has a baroque flavor that makes it completely unlike anything else the Who ever did, but it's not very good, although I do sort of like the "money, money, money man" overlapped harmonies. Not enough to rescue the song from mediocrity, but y'know. And it's not one of Entwistle's funnier songs. Ain't got nothing on "Boris the Spider" or "My Wife." So the key side here is really side one, because other than "Sunrise" and "I Can't Reach You," the disc's second half loses me a little, although the worst song here is still the first. Still a fine album! Belongs in your Who collection, if you're the Who-collecting type....finulanu ...~

Pete Townshend's best collection of songs apart from Who's next presented like an hour of 60s British pirate radio, including jingles and commercials. This is the most fun you'll ever going to have listening to a Who album. "Armenia city in the sky" sets a high standard right away. The Who rocks hard on this wonderful song written by Thunderclap Newman's John Keane (remember Townshend produced the band's hit single "Something in the air?). The "Heinz baked beans" jingle is a funny filler, which takes us to "Mary Ann with the shaky hand". A lovely pop song filled with acoustic guitars and great harmonies. Wasn't 1967 a strange time to come up with a song about masturbation? "Odorono", an overlooked Who classic sung by Townshend follows. "Tattoo" (the only song of this album that became a live favourite) and "Our love was" are both catchy pop songs again, in between we have the great jingle "Radio London reminds you, go to the church of your choice", that bit always sticks in my head for days after listening to this album. Side one is closed by what is probably the Who's finest 4 minutes (at least according to Pete Townshend and myself), "I can see for miles". It has John Entwistle and Keith Moon on fire and it is simply Townshend's best song, in my opinion. That Eiffel Tower line always comes up whenever I'm in Paris. Wow, that was side one. "I can't reach you" is a great pop song again, in the same style as "Odorono", but this time more piano based. "Medac" is unremarkable but it's over within a minute. "Relax" is also not one of the album's finest moments, but fortunately it is followed by another highlight, the catchy "Silas Stingy". "Sunrise" is just vocals and acoustic guitar, while "Rael" closes the album with another one of Townshend mini operas. The guitar riff was used again in Tommy for "Sparks" and "Underture". Whenever that bit comes up in Tommy I always start singing "He's crazy if he thinks we're coming back again". That was side two. Townshend has never wrote songs as melodic, lovely and catchy as these again. It may sound totally different from what we're used to hearing from the Who (apart from "I can see for miles" and "Armenia city in the sky"), but that doesn't make the album any less brilliant. Like the 1995 reissue claims: CLASSIC WHO. No home should be without it....mdekoning ...~ 1967 was the year of new blood. Jimi Hendrix, apart from being a shock to everyone’s system, was a source of inspiration to a lot of the London acts. The Doors released a debut album that was very different from anything that was in the popular musical conciseness. And The Beatles changed music on an international level all together that summer with the release of ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’. ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ was the album were The Beatles contemporaries either accepted the challenge, or threw in the towel. The Who accepted the challenge. ‘The Who does psychedelia’ is a concoction that the laws of nature may have duly humbled in the same fashion it had thrust upon Eric Burdon’s ‘Winds of Change’ LP. Pete Townshend had publicly announced his distain for hallucinogens. But magic did its thing and The Who meets studio experimentation took the bands sonic assault to new creative heights. ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ initiated the era of the concept album. Its concept, mostly assumed by the listener, is that The Beatles have adopted an alias of a 1940’s brass band. The Who decided to base their albums concept around the idea that you are listening to a radio show. Radio London, that is, with commercials courtesy of Entwistle and Moon. God, why doesn’t anyone even try to be that entertaining these days? ‘The Who Sell Out’ is packed with brilliant pop pieces that keep the bands humor in tact. It’s refreshing as a lot of other artists at the time were focusing on more serious themes (i.e. the Vietnam War). It remains refreshing today as many of today’s ‘artists’ are afraid to utilize their wit lyrically in favor of self pity. Maybe Nickelback wouldn’t be so miserable if they acknowledged the lighter side of things. As far as the ‘psychedelic’ angle, The Who understood its characteristics to be hard panning, backwards guitars, vibrato and overdubbing more drums. What’s better than having Keith Moon on the drums? How about two Keith’s? Sounds like heaven to me. Apart from including ‘I Can See For Miles’, an all time Who great, ‘The Who Sell Out’ saw the conceptionof ‘Tommy’ take another step forward on the epic ‘Rael’. ‘Rael’ is one of those monumental Who tracks that get overshadowed by the gargantuan legend of ‘Tommy’. However you can’t help but hear its orgins on ‘Rael’. One of its main guitar riffs was later used in ‘Tommy’ on the instrumental ‘Sparks’. In my opinion ‘The Who Sell Out’ is The Who at their peak. Although legend has it ‘Tommy’ is their crowing glory, this belief is confused for their most complex and adventurous. Bottom line is, if you are over the age of 19 and don’t own this album yet you are a loser. But it’s never too late to change. Pick up the expanded remaster. The sound has been greatly improved and it contains additional outtakes and songs that were being recorded for their aborted follow-up EP, ‘Who’s for Tennis’....mofoking ....~ Pete Townshend's best collection of songs apart from Who's next presented like an hour of 60s British pirate radio, including jingles and commercials. This is the most fun you'll ever going to have listening to a Who album. "Armenia city in the sky" sets a high standard right away. The Who rocks hard on this wonderful song written by Thunderclap Newman's John Keane (remember Townshend produced the band's hit single "Something in the air?). The "Heinz baked beans" jingle is a funny filler, which takes us to "Mary Ann with the shaky hand". A lovely pop song filled with acoustic guitars and great harmonies. Wasn't 1967 a strange time to come up with a song about masturbation? "Odorono", an overlooked Who classic sung by Townshend follows. "Tattoo" (the only song of this album that became a live favourite) and "Our love was" are both catchy pop songs again, in between we have the great jingle "Radio London reminds you, go to the church of your choice", that bit always sticks in my head for days after listening to this album. Side one is closed by what is probably the Who's finest 4 minutes (at least according to Pete Townshend and myself), "I can see for miles". It has John Entwistle and Keith Moon on fire and it is simply Townshend's best song, in my opinion. That Eiffel Tower line always comes up whenever I'm in Paris. Wow, that was side one. "I can't reach you" is a great pop song again, in the same style as "Odorono", but this time more piano based. "Medac" is unremarkable but it's over within a minute. "Relax" is also not one of the album's finest moments, but fortunately it is followed by another highlight, the catchy "Silas Stingy". "Sunrise" is just vocals and acoustic guitar, while "Rael" closes the album with another one of Townshend mini operas. The guitar riff was used again in Tommy for "Sparks" and "Underture". Whenever that bit comes up in Tommy I always start singing "He's crazy if he thinks we're coming back again". That was side two. Townshend has never wrote songs as melodic, lovely and catchy as these again. It may sound totally different from what we're used to hearing from the Who (apart from "I can see for miles" and "Armenia city in the sky"), but that doesn't make the album any less brilliant. Like the 1995 reissue claims: CLASSIC WHO. No home should be without it.....mdekoning ....~

  Line-up / Musicians 

- Roger Daltrey / lead & backing vocals, percussion - Pete Townshend / electric & 12-string acoustic guitars, lead & co-lead (3-6,8,10,12,14,15,19,22,23) & backing vocals, keyboards, percussion (penny-whistle, banjo, sonovox (1) are not confirmed) - John Entwistle / bass guitar, lead (2,9,11) & backing vocals, horns, keyboards, Fx - Keith Moon / drums, percussion, lead (18,21) & backing vocals, Fx With: - Al Kooper / organ (13,22) Tracklist 

Armenia City In The Sky Heinz Baked Beans Mary Anne With The Shaky Hand Odorono Tattoo Our Love Was I Can See For Miles Can't Reach You Medac Relax Silas Stingy Sunrise Rael (1 And 2)

[navalpost]

Sonardyne Tests Navigation Systems for Autonomous Systems for UK MOD

Sonardyne Tests Navigation Systems for Autonomous Systems for UK MOD

Marine robotics company, Sonardyne International Ltd. has demonstrated technologies that will aid autonomous vehicle operations in challenging environments under a project funded by the UK’s national Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA).

Working with a 12 m-long SEA-KIT X class unmanned surface vehicle (USV), Sonardyne tested and validated sensors already used by unmanned underwater…

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[jennbarrigar]

DOD selects team with U.K. to tackle AI research - Fedscoop

The Department of Defense has selected an academic team of researchers to embark on building frameworks for humans to “more truly team” with artificial intelligence. AI is a huge focus area for the DOD, which announced Tuesday the selection of a bilateral team of researchers from the United States and the United Kingdom for the Bilateral …

[johnkatsmc5]

Toby Twirl "Toby Twirl" 1968 - 1970  UK Mod,Beat Psych Pop Rock 2017 debut album 

Unreleased studio recordings by both line ups of Toby Twirl: side 1 features Holly on vocals, side 2 features Steve. Limited to 250 copies on 180gram black vinyl, 60s-style laminated flip-back sleeve with 12" x 12" printed insert and download code....~

Toby Twirl was a late 60's UK pop/psych band. Best known for their original classic, Romeo and Juliet, they released several catchy harmony singles, all compiled here. Think Grapefruit or Pinkertons Assorted Colors. Essential new addition to your collection.....~

Legendary '60s beat combo Toby Twirl are set to release their debut album on Mega Dodo this October. Originally from Newcastle, England, the band was founded in 1968 and recorded three classic, and now highly collectable, singles for Decca in the late 1960s. This their long overdue debut long-player mixes original songs with a selection of carefully curated hits of the day.   The recordings were discovered by the band’s drummer, John Reed, in a dusty box of reel-to-reel tapes in his attic. The band made several demo and showcase recordings at various studios in the late ‘60s, but they were thought lost forever. Reed’s chance discovery uncovered a veritable goldmine of late ‘60s recordings by both line-ups of the band. Side 1 of the LP features vocalist Dave ‘Holly’ Holland, while side 2 features vocalist Steve Pickering. As you’ll hear, the quality of the recordings is as professional, crisp and tight as the band and have been professionally transferred and mastered with the minimum of 21st century jiggery-pokery to preserve their sonic integrity. Mega Dodo will release these historic Toby Twirl recordings as a limited edition 180gram LP with an insert telling the band’s story illustrated with previously unpublished photos in a ‘60s style flap-back sleeve. A CD with an 8-page book will also be available.  .....~

Toby Twirl hailed from Newcastle upon Tyne in the North East of England. Formed in the 60's and originally called 'The Shades of Blue'. After being signed to Decca Records by Wayne Bickerton, a name change was called for, as there was a US group of the same name. The group released three singles on Decca - 'Back In Time ', Toffee Apple Sunday' and 'Movin' In'. Although critically acclaimed in later years, none of the singles charted due to lack of major radio play. The group concentrated on the cabaret circuit for live work during the late 60's and early 70's and were a top draw around the North of England. The line up was Dave 'Holly' Holland (vocals), Barrie Sewell (keyboards), Stuart Somerville (bass), Nick Thorburn (guitar) and John Reed (drums). Stuart was replaced by Dave Robson after he was tragically drowned in Tynemouth and Holly was replaced by Steve Pickering. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.....~

It seems incredible that it’s taken 50 years for pop-psych band Toby Twirl to release their first long player. The roots of the band started at Rutherford College in Newcastle in 1963 and originally named Shades Of Blue where Barry Sewell, Jim Routledge and Stu Someville who were all in the same form. From 1968 the band, now called Toby Twirl, released recorded three highly revered singles for Decca. Jason Barnard speaks to John Reed, with contributions from band mates Barry Sewell, Nick Thorburn and Dave Holland, about the group’s history and new release. Hi John – This is the first time there’s been a full length Toby Twirl release. How did this come about and can you tell me more about the record? The album is a collection of recordings we made at rehearsals. I was into recording and bought a Ferrograph tape recorder (which I have only just sold), some extra mikes and reverb/echo chamber. We had a pretty sophisticated mixing desk for the time and took a feed from that. Trial and error and a love of the recording process helped us to achieve some good results. Most of the tracks were one take. It helped us to listen back to the tracks to see if they worked before adding them to our live set and evaluate arrangements like ‘When Will I Be Loved’. I never thought that one day they would be good enough to be used on an album but engineers who love mono analogue tapes worked wonders!There were a number of line-up changes for the band – can you talk us through the line-up changes from when you signed to split. The first change was when the band wanted to go professional and the current drummer, Richie McConnell had just got married and his other half did not want him travelling off for weeks on end. Toby Twirl played a gig at The Seaburn Hall in Sunderland with a local band called The Quandowns who had just returned from Hamburg. They were impressed with the drummer and after a short conversation with him (John Reed) and Stu Somerville in a backstage corridor an audition was arranged and John was invited to join the band. The next change was when Holly left the band over personal differences and he was replaced by Steve Pickering on vocals. The last and most traumatic change was when Stu Somerville, the original bass player was drowned off the Tynemouth coast in a canoeing accident. This affected the band enormously. Dave Robson replaced Stu, but it seemed the life was kicked out of the band after this and it folded a few months later. How did the band get signed up to Decca? The band made demos of ‘Utopia Daydream’ and ‘Quarter Past Lovely Day’ and sent them to Decca. Wayne Bickerton got hold of them, like what he heard and decided to offer the band a contract. Toby Twirl’s first release ‘Back in Time’ was written by the band’s producer Wayne Bickerton. How much influence did the band have on the songs chosen and in the recording process? Initially no choice. Wayne had just written ‘Back In Time’ with his wife Carole and selected this along with ‘The Fantasy World of Harry Faversham’ and ‘Utopia Daydream’ for the first session. After that, Wayne would come and visit us somewhere on the road. He would turn up at our digs with a portable tape recorder and play us tracks. I remember he visited us in Southport where we were playing the Casino there. It was here we decided to do ‘Romeo & Juliet 68’ and ‘Toffee Apple Sunday’. An interesting fact is that this single contains the only two tracks we played on as musicians and is regarded as our best. All the other tracks were done by session musicians with us adding vocals. John, you co-wrote with guitarist Nick Thorburn the single ‘Toffee Apple Sunday’ – what inspired that track? ‘Toffee Apple Sunday’ was inspired by a trip to The Spanish City fun fair at South Shields. It was immortalised by Dire Straits in ‘Tunnel of Love’ but Toby Twirl got there first! Were you aware of The Fourmyula’s version of the track at the time and what do you think of it? Yes. The original publisher of the track sent us an acetate of the recording. We had no idea that the band were as big as they were in New Zealand. We were very flattered that they had covered the track and really like their version. What is an amazing story is that many years later, John Reed was recruited to work for Polydor Records which also marketed and distributed Fiction Records. Fiction Records main act was The Cure. Fiction Records was started and owned by Chris Parry who was the drummer in The Fourmyula! It was not until I had actually left Polydor that I realised Chris Parry’s previous life! Did you record much for the BBC and, if so is this material kept/available? We did a couple of sessions for the BBC 50 years ago like dozens of other groups at the time. The BBC had what they called ‘needle time’ restrictions imposed by the Musicians Union and were limited to the amount of records they could play. Nothing has come to light on any compilation to my knowledge. As we did not have any hits the recordings were probably wiped years ago. Fifty years is a long time!John: “This is a very rare colour photo from the film we made for Southern Television’s Tony Blackburn Show. This was ‘The Fantasy World of Harry Faversham’ and directed by Mike Mansfield. Sad that we have not been able to get hold of a copy. Southern Television no longer exists and the whereabouts of those shows is a mystery. Filmed on the beach at Bamburgh as well as the castle. I do remember it was freezing cold all day hence the overcoats on some. The girl was an actress hired by the tv company to play the damsel saved by Sir Harry. Holly found this photo and claims he was trying to calm a horse off camera. Holly had to ride one along the beach with the girl which was a scary experience having never rode one before! If only that film could be found.” Photo by Gordon Smith. The new album is a mix of original material and popular covers – is this reflective of the material you played in your live shows? Most of the material we played were ‘covers’. We were out and out a commercial band who wanted to entertain an audience and gave them a set of songs they wanted to hear. Some of the original tracks on the album were demos we recorded for consideration for Decca as we were trying to make our way as writers. There was a thriving live music scene in the late 60s – what were the most memorable venues and favourite groups you played on the bill with? The North East had dozens of clubs which, like most industrial towns in the 60’s, were thriving as people wanted to discover this new wave of music that had erupted from nowhere. The BBC treated rock n roll as a passing phase and dished up token bits on the ‘Home Service’. Radio Luxembourg became legendary pumping out what the kids wanted to listen to from 7pm every night until 2am. They only other access for kids were the coffee clubs. The Club A Gogo in Newcastle, The Cellar Club in South Shields and El Cubana in Sunderland were intimate clubs where the kids could get up close to the bands almost every night of the week. One memorable night was supporting The Small Faces at the Top Rank Suite in Sunderland. Another memorable venue was The Batley Variety Club. It was the size of an aeroplane hangar. They had a big in house band and the brass section was led by the legendary Red Price who played sax in Lord Rockingham’s Eleven. We used to end our act with ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and the brass section came on stage each night and joined in. That was quite special. The third and final Decca 45 was released in January ’69, ‘Movin’ In’. That’s another track that got airplay but didn’t fly up the charts. None of our records got anywhere like decent airplay which resulted in them not achieving chart success. One has to remember that in the late 60’s there were around 200 singles released per week. If you didn’t get onto playlists like Radio 1 week one, the single was dead as there were another 200 coming the following week. The new album contains a lovely version of ‘Something’ – I assume The Beatles were a great influence on Toby Twirl? The Beatles were a huge influence on the band and why wouldn’t they be! So innovative and if you played a Beatles track, everyone would be on the floor dancing and that was our job – to entertain. The band had two very distinct sets. We had the cabaret set which was a tried and tested set of songs with medleys, comedy and rock n roll. This set was pretty much set in stone and the only song which would be updated would be a current chart song which would be changed as and when. We then had a set of songs which we would use for second set in working men’s clubs or Universities when the audience were dancing rather than ‘listening’. There’s also a reggae influenced version of The Everly Brother’s ‘When Will I Be Loved’ – it works really well. Whose idea was this? Consensus from the band is that it just evolved one day at rehearsals. I am sure Barry, our keyboard player had a big hand in the arrangement. There were a few ska/reggae tracks around and it seemed a cool idea to do the song that way. Did you have much contact with Focal Point, given you shared the same label and producer? No contact at all. Recording was pretty much drive to London, load in to Decca’s studios in West Hampstead for a 2.30pm start, get everything recorded by 5.30pm and then off to somewhere like Birmingham to do a gig that night! Not much room for the creative process! Why did Tony Twirl split? There were a number factors but early mis-management did not help. When ‘Back In Time’ was released we were working 6 nights a week as we were very much in demand. SAS Management who were the agency within the Bailey Organisation decided to get us to do a lot of promos in all their clubs to get the single heard. These were unpaid gigs and we were still getting our weekly wage. We soon ran up a ‘debt’ which hung over us all the time. Whenever we mentioned getting a rise the debt was always shove down our throats. The result was that although we were now doing cabaret, sometimes doing ‘trebles’ i.e. a first set in a working man’s club, then off to do a 10pm and 12am spot in two night clubs, we were making about a third of what the solo artist who was supporting us was making. So we were top of the bill, packing the crowds into the clubs but not getting the reward. Also loosing Stuart kicked the heart of the group as well. It was hard to take the death of a good friend being so young and we were all very close. When did you become aware of the escalating prices for the Tony Twirl singles and the cult following for the band? A few years ago I discovered Facebook. Playing around with the site one day. I noticed that you could start additional pages. Just for fun I started to scan a few photos I had of the band and started a Toby Twirl page. I had no idea where this would lead and I was amazed at the response. When we split up, it was quite traumatic and at the time you just think ‘Well that’s that!’ You have no real idea you had any impact on people or your music meant anything to anyone. Through an internet sixties site I noticed someone had given ‘Romeo & Juliet 68’ and ‘Toffee Apple Sunday’ an amazing review. So I replied to the review and the next thing I am in touch with Hugh Dellor who was a writer for Shindig Magazine. A huge fan of 60’s psychedelia and all round good guy, he was a big fan of the band. The result was a huge feature in Shindig Magazine. Something the like of which we had not experienced when the band was actually together. It was Hugh that alerted us to the fact that our second single was exchanging large amounts on ebay. What did you do after Toby Twirl and did you keep in touch with the guys? When we disbanded, it felt like a void. We were incredibly professional in every aspect. Other options seemed to be second best. I personally ended up doing a residency in a club on drums which was soul destroying. I was lucky that I kept up contacts and moved to London to pursue a career at the other side of the fence. Working in music publishing, Radio Luxembourg and for major record companies RCA Records and Polydor so I managed to have a life in music. Barry and Nick formed a duo and did the clubs for many years making a good living before splitting. Barry still plays keyboards and Nick went into social services before retiring. Holly managed various pubs around Blyth. Dave left and joined FOGG, a Newcastle band that John ended up helping to manage. A record deal with EMI resulted in three singles and an album and a couple of singles for Warner Bros Records. Happily, the band have stayed in touch and there have been two reunions in Newcastle in the past couple of years. The second of which was attended by our erstwhile roadie, Colin Hart, who now lives in Florida. Colin went on to work for Mathews Southern Comfort, Deep Purple and Rainbow....Strange Brew....~ Seeing that 60s Psychedelia really didn’t hit the UK provinces full on until 1970, there was always a flip side to Swinging London. For every band of dilettante acid dandies freaking out at the Roundhouse or getting it together in the country there were a dozen hard gigging bands playing the northern clubs and discotheques every weekend. Apart from a few isolated pockets outside of the groovy epicenter, the fall out from the Summer Of Love was a London thing…………that’s where the really ambitious bands had to base themselves, however seeing that the Pop charts were full of hip tunes, a watered down version of Psychedelia seeped into almost every town in the UK. There were loads of venues and a load of bands available to play them, they were hardworking professional musicians who could make a decent living mixing a dash of cabaret and comedy with a set of Freakbeat/Psych tinged pop tunes and if they were lucky they would be given an opportunity to record a single. Toby Twirl were one such band, originally from Newcastle they were playing regular gigs between 1968 until 1971, they had the threads but were slightly uncool and no doubt the closest they came to a psychedelic experience was the hallucinogenic effects of Newcastle Brown Ale, but by the sound of their long overdue debut album they could really tear up a dancefloor on a Saturday night in Blackburn. The tapes of previously thought lost demo and showcase recordings were recently discovered by the band's drummer, John Reed, which have been carefully transferred to a digital medium and professionally mastered.....~ Tracklist A1 Baby What Good Is Love A2 Dark Time Of The Year A3 Something In Your Eyes A4 Love Is Love A5 Baby You’re A Rich Man A6 Movin’ In B1 Born To Be Wild B2 Marjorine B3 Something B4 When Will I Be Loved B5 Gonna Have A Good Time (Good Times) B6 American Woman