The Small Faces - Live: 1966-1968 | Albums That Should Exist

 

The Small Faces - Live: 1966-1968

Paul says: I recently got a request by a commenter to post updated links for all the Small Faces albums I've posted. (Sorry, I forget the commenter or where that request was.) I'd like to update all the upload.ee links eventually anyway, so I decided to do that. But that also reminded me that I have this album I made a long time ago and never got around to posting. It's a collection of stray live tracks.

So, first off, note that, as of today, I did post updated links to nearly all the existing Small Faces albums on this blog. The only exceptions are the two BBC ones. I want to make some fixes and additions to that, enough to create a third volume, so expect those to be reposted soon.

There never has been a widely officially released Small Faces live album, and even bootlegs are few and far between. However, note that I did post a great concert from 1966, which I've called "Live 1966." Here's the link, in case you missed it:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-small-faces-twenty-club-mouscron.html 

Aside from that one recording, plus some BBC stuff, we just have dribs and drabs, sometimes with poor sound quality. So this gathers the best of the rest. Most of it is non-BBC, except for the first four tracks, which all come from a 1996 session in front of a cheering audience, and were released on "The Decca Years" compilation. I put that here instead of on one of the BBC albums I've made mostly because most of the songs are ones that repeated on other BBC sessions around that time.

The next song, which may or may not be called "Baby Please Don't Go," is from a video I found on YouTube. It shows the band performing in a small club in 1966, and apparently was taken from some unknown British news program that was showing what the rock scene was like at the time. There were two snippets of other songs, but I didn't include them because they were well under half a minute each. And this song is incomplete and fades out, but I thought it was good enough to include anyway.

The next three songs, tracks 6, 7, and 8, are from the German TV show "Beat Beat Beat." The next year, it was renamed "Beat Club." The band made more appearances on that show in 1967 and 1968, but all of them were lip-synced, so I didn't include them. This appearance, though, was fully live. 

The next two songs, tracks 9 and 10, are from an appearance on "The Morrcambe & Wise Show" in 1967. Like the "Beat Beat Beat" songs, they're still unreleased.

The remaining songs, tracks 11 through 15, are from a concert in Newcastle, Britain, in November 1968, a few months before the band broke up. They all were first released on the "In Memoriam" album in 1969, shortly after the band broke up. There were more songs recorded from that show, but they were lost. They also had fake audience noise slathered over them. Decades later, they were released on the "Here Comes the Nice" box set without the fake audience noise, which is where I got them. 

But I discovered the lead vocals were very low relative to the instruments. So I fixed that using MVSEP. I think they sound much better now. Also, there were some spoken words, which I have put on track 15. They were so very low in the mix they were almost unheard by me. First I boosted the volume greatly, again using MVSEP. But I still couldn't understand what was being said, so I ran the comments through Adobe's Enhanced Speech program as well. Now, I can at least catch the gist of the comments.

That leaves just the bonus track, "Long Black Veil." This comes from a bootleg of a concert in Vienna, Austria, in January 1969. This was one of the band's very last concerts, as they broke up by the end of that month. Unfortunately, the bootleg is only about 20 minutes long, and the sound quality is poor. So I only included one song as a bonus track, because the others were done live elsewhere. Yet this is a song that has no other recording, official or otherwise.

This album is 42 minutes long, not including the bonus track. 

01 Sha La La La Lee (Small Faces)
02 Whatcha Gonna Do about It (Small Faces)
03 Comin' Home Baby [Instrumental] (Small Faces)
04 You Need Love [You Need Loving] (Small Faces)
05 Baby Please Don’t Go (Small Faces)
06 Hey Girl (Small Faces)
07 Whatcha Gonna Do about It (Small Faces)
08 Sha La La La Lee (Small Faces)
09 All or Nothing (Small Faces)
10 I Can't Make It (Small Faces)
11 Rollin' Over (Small Faces)
12 If I Were a Carpenter (Small Faces)
13 Every Little Bit Hurts (Small Faces)
14 All or Nothing (Small Faces)
15 talk (Small Faces)
16 Tin Soldier (Small Faces)

Long Black Veil (Small Faces)