The Small Faces – Lazy Sunday Afternoon

The Hit That Killed The Small Faces

Released in April 1968 and climbing to number two on the UK Singles Chart, “Lazy Sunday” should have been a triumph for the Small Faces. It topped the charts in the Netherlands, hit number five in Australia, and gave the band their biggest international exposure yet. But there was a problem: Steve Marriott and the rest of the band never wanted it released as a single. Written as a joke about Marriott’s noisy neighbors banging on his wall, the music-hall cockney romp was released by manager Andrew Loog Oldham without the band’s knowledge while they were touring Germany.

The song couldn’t quite dislodge Louis Armstrong’s “Wonderful World” from the top spot, but its success proved more damaging than failure ever could have been. While the public was charmed by Marriott’s exaggerated cockney accent and lines like “Gor blimey! Hello, Mrs. Jones, how’s your old Bert’s lumbago?”, the band felt trapped in poppy-land. They’d been moving toward harder, more experimental territory, and this whimsical singalong dragged them backward. The song spent weeks on the charts through the summer of 1968, but each week felt like a prison sentence to Marriott, who wanted to be taken seriously alongside the Claptons of the world.

The origins of that distinctive vocal sound trace back to a spat with the Hollies, who’d complained that Marriott never sang in his natural East London accent. Taking up the challenge, Marriott sang most of “Lazy Sunday” in a heavily exaggerated cockney drawl before reverting to his usual transatlantic style in the final bridge. Ronnie Lane’s peculiar backing vocals, those nonsense syllables everyone remembers, were actually imitating a member of the Who’s road crew that both bands had met during a recent Australian tour. The recording itself was packed with musical in-jokes: at 51 seconds you can catch a quote from the Colonel Bogey March, and at 1 minute 45 seconds, a cheeky nod to the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction”.

The track was recorded during the Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake sessions at Olympic Studios in London, with Marriott and Lane co-producing. The album featured state-of-the-art 8-track recording that allowed the band to layer in all those quirky sound effects, church bells, and birdsong that dissolve the song at its end. Ian McLagan’s bouncy electric piano drove the whole thing, giving it that music-hall bounce that made it so catchy and, in the band’s eyes, so damaging to their credibility. The low-budget promo film was shot at drummer Kenney Jones’s parents’ house on Havering Street in Stepney, with Jones’s actual neighbor pretending to strangle Marriott on camera.

“Lazy Sunday” appeared as the final track on side one of Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake, released on 24 May 1968. The album itself topped the UK charts for six weeks, packaged in a circular tin designed to look like a tobacco container. Despite this commercial success, the damage was done. The single represented everything the band was trying to move away from, and its unauthorized release without their consent became the final straw. On New Year’s Eve 1968, during a live performance, Steve Marriott walked off stage mid-song and never looked back.

The song’s influence stretched far beyond the Small Faces’ breakup. The Toy Dolls covered it as “Lazy Sunday Afternoon” on their 1995 album Orcastrated, bringing punk energy to the cockney charm. The Libertines recorded a raw garage-rock version for the 2003 film Blackball soundtrack, while Kaiser Chiefs performed it live on French radio in 2008. Most significantly, the song’s cockney style and playful attitude laid groundwork for Britpop bands like Blur decades later, proving that sometimes a joke can have the last laugh.

The irony cuts deep: “Lazy Sunday” gave the Small Faces their widest audience and helped make Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake a number one album, yet it also destroyed the band. Within months of its release, Marriott had formed Humble Pie with Peter Frampton, while the remaining members recruited Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood to become the Faces. A novelty song about noisy neighbors ended up being anything but trivial—it was the sound of a great band breaking apart in real time.