The Small Faces are down in history as the second most important British mod band, the first being The Who. This has caused them to be viewed as a second-rate Who which is, of course, unfair. While bearing obvious similarities to the Who's music (thrashing drums, brimming R'n'B energy…) the music of The Small Faces deserves to be considered in its own right. For one, and I know I'm going out on a limb here, The Small Faces didn't have one major handicap of The Who: i.e. Roger Daltrey poncing around the place. Ok, so they had Pete Townshend's distinctive guitar-work, but, in my humble opinion, many a song was spoilt by Daltrey's overacting.
Another comparison with The Who can be made over the "concept album" thing. Ogden's Nut Gone Flake can be considered, at least partly, as one of those "concept albums".
These days, of course, criticism has it in for "concept albums". It's a complex debate. A question of aesthetics. Today, concept albums are seen as a departure from rock'n'roll instead of an extension of it. Here, I'm talking about the late sixties batch. Things like The Who's "Tommy" or "S.F. Sorrow" by The Pretty Things. These concept albums are seen as an indulgence. The "beginning of the end", the thing that would slide into prog-rock, glam-rock, half-hour guitar solos and all that during the 70s. They're seen as overly literary. Accused of trying to resemble a different art form: literature, with a linear story, developed from beginning to end.
Like all aesthetic theories, there's no point getting carried away with this anti concept album stance. Those die-hard proponents of the 2 and a half minute rock format are missing some of the point as well. All you can honestly say is that some "concept albums" have stood the test of time and some haven't. For example, "Arthur", by The Kinks, is a great little "concept" album. The songs are concise, efficient, moving. Each one a vignette, a snapshot of some human situation. On the other hand, when I saw a remastered version of "Tommy" in the shop the other day going for the bargain price of seven pounds I still didn't feel tempted to buy it. But then again, I could be wrong. And after all, you don't want to take what I say too seriously. Especially considering the fact that I actually bought "The Wall" (even though it was for a lesson plan, me being a teacher at the time).
So, Ogden's Nut Gone Flake is, in some respects at least, a concept album. Side two tells the story of a young man's quest to discover why the moon isn't always full, or something along those lines. At the end he doesn't exactly get rational astronomy for an answer but he seems satisfied and the whole thing ends in a party.
So this album may be a concept album in part but the point I'm going to try to make is that The Small Faces had incredible foresight and decided, with Ogden's Nut Gone Flake, to take the piss out of this whole over-serious, over-literary, concept album thing. Of course, this is probably not true ! The band probably just wanted a laugh. Or they felt that one of their trademark's was humour and cockney roots so they set out for a "concept" album that mirrored that. Whatever the truth, the effect is there. A cockney, sing-song reading of the "concept" mood of the day.
At the height of hippie-dom, Ogden's Nut Gone Flake is heavily drenched in a psychedelic aura. The mean blues that makes up the backbone of the record is treated with true psychedelic indulgence which makes the whole experience resemble a long, happy trip. But although the album is spaced-out and acid-drenched, you feel the band can never really adhere to hippy peace-and-love type lyrics. There are some of those lyrics in there, but, predictably, they don't really work. And at least some of them are tongue-in-cheek and are not meant to be taken seriously. How otherwise to interpret the lyric "If tomorrow was today, it wouldn't be yesterday" ? "Duh!" as Homer Simpson is wont to utter. What comes through from the hippy scene is not the peace and love crap but the euphoria, the altered states of mind and the parties. What shines through is a cockney, happy-go-lucky approach to life. A band of mods living life to the hilt with their "raving" (as in "Lazy Sunday", the best track here). A hedonistic philosophy and a sense of humour to defuse the absurdity of the human condition (oooh, now that's a fancy sentence, isn't it ?). This is of course both stronger and further reaching than any hippy crap. "Happydaystoytown", the album's happy conclusion remarks on the absurdity of life before encouraging everyone to just get on with it and enjoy it. It contains these classic lyrics, the only time in musical history that the human condition has been compared to a bowl of breakfast cereal: "Life is just a bowl of all-bran, you get up every morning and it's there."

So is this Britpop, then ?

The whole "concept" side is treated in a cockney, happy-go-lucky mode, with cockney raconteur (I forgot his name) linking the songs with a mixture of cockney rhyming slang and his personal brand of gibberish.

But what of the rest of the album, then ?

A lot of care is given to the production (which is also a characteristic of those ambitious "concept albums") with the inclusion of strings in the opening psychedelic instrumental that gives it's name to the album. The album kicks off into heavy psychedelia before veering into a more traditional format: the sing-along, pub-song qualities of songs like "Rene" and "Lazy Sunday". These are the "Britpop" classics of the album (along with the last song on the album: "Happydaystoytown").
"Rene" is about a popular prostitute and "Lazy Sunday" pits the partying singer against his conservative, older, neighbours. Paradoxically, the song's creator (I forget which one of the band members it was) only intended the song as a joke, as some kind of gimmick, and he was opposed to it appearing on the album and dismayed when it became a smash hit. Funny, because in a lot of people's opinion (mine included) it's the finest song on the album.
So, in many respects, Ogden's Nut Gone Flake is the best of both worlds. The concise, blasting, working-class rock format of "Rene" and "Lazy Sunday" on the one hand and a cockney bash at the "concept album" thing on the other.
On a psychedelic level, the album drifts into states of altered reality throughout the album. From the spaced-out, bluesy psychedelia of the opening tracks, through the mixed structure of "Lazy Sunday" (starting as a kind of cockney chant before drifting into psychedelia) to the open fantasy of the second side of the album. The second side of the album comes over as if the band members got their inspiration stoned in front of the daily children's shows on the telly. Especially the concluding number "Happydaystoytown". It rings like "Noddy" on acid. Or Trumpton. Or the Magic Roundabout.
 

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