The Faces The Best of The Faces (1977)

From Sounds, 30 April 1977

“AAALRIGHT: HERE’S one you may well know, you may not know it; and if you don’t know it, I really don’t know where you bin.”

Yeah, it’s the Faces again. Just how we all remember them. Loud, raucous, drunken and delirious. SingalongaRod, crank up the stereo and pass round the bottle of Mateus Rose. A good time to be had by all.

In fact, if you were ever into the Faces, you could throw a party this very weekend, spin these four sides instead of hiring a disco and your dance floor would stay as packed as the Chelsea Shed for almost two whole hours.

A non-stop alcholic lurch, The Best Of The Faces proves that Messrs Stewart, Lane, Wood, McLagan, Jones and occasionally Yamauchi were the finest good-time boozers’ band this country, or any other, has ever produced.

But although this is a hard, stomping, staggering album that frequently goes well over the top (after all it includes such gems as ‘Had Me A Real Good Time’, ‘Memphis’, ‘Stay With Me’, ‘Cindy Incidentally’, ‘Pool Hall Richard’ and ‘You Can Make Me Dance, Sing or Anything’) The Best Of The Faces is nevertheless a lot more than just a collection of greatest hits.

From the riotous rock’n’roll, blues and soul of their 1970 debut album First Step to those final chart topping singles it traces the steady development of the Faces’ inimitable musical style to the very day that Rod the mod was drawn irresistably to the sirens and spotlights on Hollywood Boulevard. It charts the course that took them from a shambolic combination of Small Faces and Jeff Beck band cut-outs to a high calibre pop act well within the superstar bracket.

Listen to ‘Around The Plynth’, ‘Sweet Lady Mary’ and ‘Three Button Hand Me Down’ (with a refrain that runs dangerously close to the R’n’B classic ‘Some Kind of Wonderful’) all on the first side and you’ll hear prototype versions of the three basic Faces styles. That’s Ron Wood’s slide guitar scorchers, Ian McLagan’s piano based whimsy and, of course, the football club special in Stewart satin which audiences all over the world learnt to know and love. Check out ‘Flying’ and you’ll find the Tartan Terror’s own solo career is there on the drawing board too.

The characteristic Faces sound is also readily indentifiable from the start, even though it’s in poor focus. Before Glyn Johns came on the scene they produced themselves and came up with a strange, almost acoustically chaotic texture to the obviously electric instruments which immediately created a feeling of warmth and intimacy. By the time they’d cut their second album, the partially live Long Player, the Faces defined themselves as the band-next-door. That connection made with the kids, take-off was only a countdown away.

And yet, viewing the band’s recorded achievements in some kind of retrospect, The Best Of The Faces suggests that it was more discipline and not simply good vibes that really pulled them through. Much has been made of the Faces’ hedonism, I know. And indeed, the non-stop partying and round the clock raving lay at the very core of their musical identity. But listen to them crowd-pleasing now, all these years after the event, and great as they doubtless were live, stage-numbers like ‘Around The Plynth’, ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’, ‘Memphis’, ‘That’s All You Need’ and ‘Miss Judy’s Farm’ are remarkably heavy-handed, even tedious on record. In many cases it seems that the song itself was but a weak excuse for some pretty flatulent looning and, well, once Ron Wood steps out solo from behind his blow-torch rhythm guitar, the band suddenly becomes very ordinary if not actually clumsy.

The singles, on the other hand, represent a fine distillation of the Faces magic. Three minutes of staggering bass, lurching drums, a pub piano and a hangover guitar carefully slotted together in a care-free fashion that cannot hide a keen sense of drama and economy.

The perfect backing for one helluva fine singer. Okay, so Rod Stewart you like or Rod Stewart you don’t like, but you can’t deny he did his job well. The Best Of The Faces features his Southern Comfort voice on all but three tracks (Plonk Lane’s mellower songs ‘Nobody Knows’, ‘Ooh La La’, Ron Wood’s vocal debut, and ‘Flags and Banners’ being the exceptions) and, in fact, the album, like the band before it, rapidly becomes a showcase for Stewart’s talents. But his talents when he was still hungry and hard, when he was strutting rather than prancing, when he was an earthy R’n’B shouter with a rude twinkle in his eye and not the all round Mr Wonderful he is now:

And as such this album is a classic in the same way as those Beatles’ greatest hits albums are, or the Shadows’ golden greats (or whatever it’s called). An enjoyable set of ‘do you remember when?’ memory jerkers as well as a not unimportant piece of rock documentary. One question though. After the rap at the beginning of McCarney’s ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’, who sang the first five lines? It doesn’t sound in the least like Rod or the two Ronnies.