Re-Issue

Latest CD releases reviewed

THE SMALL FACES
Ogden's Nut Gone Flake Sanctuary

This album is a psychedelic pop classic from Mod geezers the Small Faces, which embraced the mid-1960s/Swinging London flower power aesthetic in a breezy laff-a-minute manner. It's been re-issued many times, but this occasion is different in that it comes (a) boxed in a genuine circular flake tobacco tin like the one your great-grandad used to have all those years ago; and (b) it comes with an extra disc: a BBC Radio 1's Classic Albums documentary. It also comes in mono and stereo versions. If you haven't heard this, then you're in for a pop-psych treat - a cockney band in their prime setting the controls for the heart of the currant bun. Often mistakenly viewed as a novelty record (primarily due to the involvement of idiosyncratic comic linguist "Professor" Stanley Unwin), this is actually one of the best examples of 1960s pop adventurism: self-assured, slightly out-there, and supremely tuneful. Better than Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band? No. More representative of the British 1960s psychedelic experience? Yes. Tony Clayton-Lea