100 Greatest Songs of The 60’s #33 The Small Faces – Itchycoo Park

Released: 1967

It can be a tough old game, music. Frequently you don’t get what you deserve, victims of shifts in taste and timing. Too often an artist will have influence at an inverse proportion to the quality of their output; names could be dropped here, but you’ll have some ideas of your own on candidates for those.

The Small Faces are or were in retrospect victims of the opposite; fronted by Steve Marriott they produced in four years a catalogue as diverse and innovative as any of their contemporaries, bar none. But despite embracing soul, psychedelia and R&B and being a touchstone for the Mod movement, by actions like releasing a concept album in 1968’s Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake, their bravery was also arguably their downfall.

Ironically the idea for Itchycoo Park came to Marriott via a hymn, ‘God Be In My Head’, whilst the concept of this idyll came from an article in a stranded magazine left in his hotel room. Despite being steeped in hippie idioms, it retained a uniquely British character, a gift for idiosyncrasy that was skillfully employed. At first thought of by the quartet as a joke, it’s become the band’s signature moment, and now is as gooder place as any to dive into a repertoire which seldom gets the admiration it deserves.