Steve Marriott and Ronnie Lane of Small Faces wrote this song, which is about skipping school to hang out at a park. Of course, with the lyrics, “What did you do there? I got high,” it was fairly obvious that they were doing in the park, although the band denied that it was about drugs. Marriott told Creem magazine in 1975:
The thing about ‘Itchycoo Park’ was that the era was wrong, and the word ‘high’ freaked everybody out. All the radio stations. But that song was real. Ronnie Lane and I used to go to a park called Itchycoo Park. I swear to God. We used to bunk off school and groove there. We got high, but we didn’t smoke. We just got high from not going to school.
Yeah, right.
On its release, the BBC immediately banned the song because of overt drug references – “What did you do there? – I got high” and “I feel inclined to blow my mind, get hung up, feed the ducks with a bun, They all come out to groove about, Be nice and have fun in the sun.” So Small Faces manager Tony Calder explained the song had an innocent interpretation:
We told the BBC Itchycoo Park was waste ground in the East End which the band had played on as kids. We put the story out at ten and by lunchtime we were told the ban was off.
A number of sources claim the song’s name is derived from the nickname of Little Ilford Park, on Church Road in the London suburb of Manor Park, where Small Faces’ singer and songwriter Steve Marriott grew up. The “itchycoo” nickname is, in turn, attributed to the stinging nettles which grew there. Other sources cite nearby Wanstead Flats (Manor Park end) as the inspiration for the song. Despite all the claims as to which park is the original Itchycoo park, in an interview Steve Marriott has stated that:
It’s Valentine’s Park in Ilford. We used to go there and get stung by wasps. It’s what we used to call it.
The song was one of the first pop singles to use flanging, an effect that can be heard in the bridge section after each chorus. Most sources credit the use of the effect to Olympic Studios engineer George Chkiantz who showed it to the Small Faces regular engineer Glyn Johns; he in turn demonstrated it to the group, who were always on the lookout for innovative production sounds, and they readily agreed to its use on the single. Although many devices were soon created that could produce the same effect by purely electronic means, the effect as used on “Itchycoo Park” was at that time an electro-mechanical studio process. Two synchronised tape copies of a finished recording were played simultaneously into a third master recorder, and by manually retarding the rotation of one of the two tape reels (flanges) using the fingers, a skilled engineer could subtly manipulate the phase difference between the two sources, creating the lush ‘swooshing’ phase effect that sweeps up and down the frequency range. Because the original single version was mixed and mastered in mono, the flanging effect in “Itchycoo Park” is more pronounced in its original mono mix, and is noticeably diluted in the subsequent stereo mix.
The Small Faces were founded in 1965 by members Steve Marriott, Ronnie Lane, Kenney Jones, and Jimmy Winston, although by 1966 Winston was replaced by Ian McLagan as the band’s keyboardist. Lane and Marriott met in 1965 while Marriott was working at the J60 Music Bar in Manor Park, London. Lane came in with his father Stan to buy a bass guitar, struck up a conversation with Marriott, bought the bass and went back to Marriott’s house after work to listen to records. They recruited friends Kenney Jones and Jimmy Winston who switched from guitar to the organ. They rapidly progressed from rehearsals at The Ruskin Arms public house (which was owned by Winston’s parents) in Manor Park, London, to ramshackle pub gigs, to semi-professional club dates. The group chose the name, Small Faces, because of the members’ small physical stature and “A ‘Face’ was somebody special, more than just a snappy dresser, he was Mister Cool.”
Their first out-of-town concert was at a working men’s club in Sheffield. Since the crowd was mainly made up of Teddy boys (a British subculture typified by young men wearing clothes that were partly inspired by the styles worn by dandies in the Edwardian period) and hard-drinking workers, the band were paid off after three songs. Despondent, they walked into the mod-orientated King Mojo Club nearby and offered to perform for free. They played a set that left the local mods wanting more. During a crucial residency at Leicester Square’s Cavern Club, they were strongly supported by Sonny & Cher, who were living in London at the time.
The band signed a management contract with management impresario Don Arden, and they were in turn signed to Decca Records for recording. They released a string of high-energy mod/soul singles on the label. Their debut single was in 1965 with “Whatcha Gonna Do About It”, a Top 20 UK singles chart hit.
Marriott and Lane are credited with creating the instrumental to the song, “borrowing” the guitar riff from the Solomon Burke record “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love”.
The lyrics to “Whatcha Gonna Do About It” were written by the Drifters band member Ian Samwell (who wrote arguably the first British true rock’n’roll record, “Move It”) and recorded by Cliff Richard and the Drifters, the UK band that would evolve into The Shadows.
By 1966, despite being one of the highest-grossing live acts in the country and scoring many successful singles, including four UK Top 10 chart hits, financially the band had nothing to show for their efforts. After a messy confrontation with the notorious Arden who tried to face down the boys’ parents by claiming that the whole band were using drugs, they broke with both Arden and Decca.
At home in England, their career reached an all-time high after the release of their classic psychedelia-influenced album “Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake” on 24 May 1968. It is widely regarded as a classic album, and featured an innovative round cover, the first of its kind, designed to resemble an antique tobacco tin. It stayed at No. 1 in the UK Albums Chart for six weeks, but reached only No. 159 in the US. Critics were enthusiastic, and the album sold well, but the band were confronted by the practical problem that they had created a studio masterpiece which was virtually impossible to recreate on the road.
Marriott officially quit the band at the end of 1968, walking off stage during a live New Year’s Eve gig yelling “I quit”. Citing frustration at their failure to break out of their pop image and their inability to reproduce the more sophisticated material properly on stage, Marriott was already looking ahead to a new band, Humble Pie, with Peter Frampton. After Small Faces split, Lane, Jones and McLagan floundered briefly before joining forces with two former members of The Jeff Beck Group, singer Rod Stewart and guitarist Ronnie Wood. This line-up dropped the “Small” tag and became “Faces”.
In 1996, the Small Faces were awarded the Ivor Novello Outstanding Contribution to British Music “Lifetime Achievement” award. On 4 September 2007, a Small Faces and Don Arden commemorative plaque, issued by the London Borough of Westminster, was unveiled in their memory in Carnaby Street. In April 2012, the Small Faces were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
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