Saturday 12 September 2015

THE FACES' KENNEY JONES INTERVIEW in SHINDIG! ISSUE 50


The 50th birthday issue of Shindig! is now in the shops and, if you excuse me whilst I play a quick little flourish on this here trumpet, includes my article on The Faces and interview with Kenney Jones as the cover story. Toot-toot-ta-toot.

I’d love to say Shindig! editor Jon Mills and I rocked up at Kenney’s country mansion in Surrey for beers on the lawn (which was a possibility at one stage) but the interview eventually took place, five weeks ago, at the offices of Universal Music in Kensington. We sat in one of their swish meeting rooms drinking coffee out of china cups and dunking biscuits whilst chatting for over 90 minutes. We decided beforehand to concentrate on the early days of The Faces with the focus being their first album and stuck to that quite firmly although obviously there was overlap with the Small Faces and later success. Wasn’t entirely sure how much there was to say but ended up with over 4000 words and the mag devoted over ten pages to the band (with some cracking photos). It did mean though I didn’t get to ask about Kenney’s time with The Who and drumming on “You Better You Bet”. One day.

One unexpected bonus was Kenney happening to mention The Action in glowing terms. Stick me within ten yards of anyone who was around the 60s music scene and it’s evitable I’ll ask them about my favourite band but Kenney’s tribute – “They should have been the biggest thing since sliced bread” - was completely unprompted, which made it sound all the more welcome and genuine.

There’s a new five-LP/CD set of the Faces’ four studio albums and a disc of rarities out now entitled You Can Make Me Dance, Sing or Anything. For a two week period I don’t think I listened to anything other than The Faces (with a side helping of early Rod).

And finally, to help Shindig! celebrate their 50th issue, they’re holding a knees-up at Rough Trade East down in Bethnal Green with The Pretty Things playing a live set on Thursday 8th October. Free entry, can’t be bad.

3 comments:

  1. I shall be buying that as I absolutely love The Faces and early 70s Rod The Mod. They had 'it': the cocksure swagger, the gang mentality and, above all, the music, be it out and out rockers with self depreciating (and often witty) lyrics or wistful country inflected tunes generally and great covers of soul records. At the expense of sounding like a modernist iconoclast I'd probably rate them above The Small Faces.

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  3. I can't really compare - always think of them as totally different groups - but am far more likely, these days, to pull out a Faces record than a Small Faces one.

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