That, of course, refers to the original U.K. release. For the American market it appeared as There Are But Four Small Faces, resequenced, some tracks dropped and three singles (Itchycoo Park, Here Come the Nice and Tin Soldier) slotted in, and the CD version that ended up in my shelves has no fewer than forty-eight (count ‘em!) tracks, largely due to the presence of monaural and stereo versions of just about everything, and for a little under twelve dollars when I bought it (twelve months ago, currently “unavailable”) it was remarkable value.
As far as I can see, there are at least three ways of looking at this.
First, of course, you can look at the whole reissued package, bonus cuts, double versions and all, and conclude that, yes, it’s pretty good value for money if you don’t have the material already. That’s fine as far as I’m concerned. I didn’t, although I did have the singles thanks to a couple of other packages.
On the other hand, strip out the extras, go back to the original fourteen track U.K. release and you’ve got a very interesting example of the speed at which things were evolving in the mid-sixties. There’s nothing here to match the heights subsequently achieved on Ogdens’, but you wouldn’t really be surprised by that, either.
As a substantial advance on what had gone before it’s interesting enough in itself. In mid-1965 Steve Marriott and Ronnie Lane had pinched the riff from Solomon Burke’s Everybody Needs Somebody to Love but needed someone to supply the words for what subsequently became Whatcha Gonna Do About It, and about twelve months later they’ve got that first Small Faces album. Run things on another twelve months and you’re looking at a much more experimental approach rather than a continued mining of the R&B vein.
Looking at it from a twenty-first century perspective, there’s probably not that much that’s really remarkable here. Fourteen fairly short tracks, half an hour’s playing time. If someone whacked this out at full price in 2012 you’d certainly feel you were being short changed. As far as the actual contents go, most of it works pretty well, which is what you’d expect given a lead vocalist like Steve Marriott.