The Small Faces
It was the early hours of 20 April, 1991 and the people of the picturesque Essex village of Arkesden were woken by flames.
The firefighters fought their way through the charred wreckage of the thatched cottage but it was too late for the occupant.
As Essex firefighter Keith Dunatis told the papers the next day. “As soon as we found him we knew it was Steve Marriott. We all felt sad, we had been fans.”
Thirty years before the Britpop of Oasis and Blur, East End mod band the Small Faces had been the hottest thing in British pop music.
Lead singer Steve Marriott was born in Stepney in 1947, the son of Bill and Kathleen, and he grew up listening to music, as he later related.
“My dad was a pub pianist, which meant he got his drinks free, which was the point. Everybody was singing, everybody was drunk and everyone was happy.”
Music was in his blood and the young Steve started to earn cash by busking around the bus queues of Stepney with his ukelele.
But mum had bigger things in mind for her lad and put him forward for auditions in the stage musical Oliver!, penned by another musical cockney, Lionel Bart.
Steve wasn’t too keen but mum had her way, and he auditioned with a skiffle version of the Buddy Holly hit Oh Boy. Bart recognised the 11-year-old from his routine at East End bus stops and he got the job.
Ambitions
Just a year later Steve made his recording debut, on the Oliver! soundtrack album, singing lead vocals on Consider Yourself, I’d Do Anything and Be Back Soon.
But despite a spell at the Italia Conti stage school in Islington – “I didn’t really act, just played cockney kids, which is what I was anyway,” remembered Steve – his ambitions lay elsewhere. And it all started to fall into place when he bumped into Ronnie Lane in a music store in Manor Park.
Ronnie was a Plaistow boy and was in a band called the Outcasts, with drummer Kenney Jones, from Stepney. But the Outcasts were going nowhere and, with a shared interest in the music of James Brown, Smokey Robinson and Otis Redding, the trio knew they belonged together.
And they had a name when a girlfriend of early band member Jimmy Winston saw the three together and blurted out “Cor, ain’t you got small faces!” The final piece of the jigsaw fitted when keyboard player Ian McLagan joined the band.
Like the rest of the band, he was a diminutive Londoner with a cheeky sense of humour. Like four Artful Dodgers the Small Faces set forth to conquer the charts.
Between 1965 and 1969 the band were rarely out of the charts with hits like Sha La La La Lee, Itchycoo Park and All Or Nothing. The only mod band who were mods themselves, Marriott believes their distinctive sound could only have come from the East End.
“We were a mix of rhythm and blues and music hall. The R&B came from Detroit but the music hall came from Stepney. That’s what Itchycoo Park is about and all that sense of having a drink and having a party.”
But the party had to end. Like so many Sixties bands, the Small Faces didn’t read the small print when they signed their contract and spent most of their careers as megastars on £20 a week.
Steve spent the Seventies and Eighties playing in a variety of pub bands, but on that day in 1991 he had just returned from recording a new album with old musical cohort Peter Frampton. It was going to put them back in the big-time, but a jetlagged Marriott, befuddled by a mix of alcohol and valium, fell asleep with a cigarette burning – and the story of Stepney’s Artful Dodger was over.