Small Faces drummer Kenney Jones has recalled the band’s early days when they hung out with the then unknown David Bowie.
And Jones says when the group and Bowie spent time together at London’s La Gioconda cafe in the 60s, the late singer was almost like their “fifth member.”
Jones tells Uncut: “David Jones, as he was then, was like a fifth member of the Small Faces when we got together. In the very early days, we’d hang around Denmark Street at the Gioconda. David was always in there – an ace Mod like us, completely unknown.
“We’d tell him we were playing Loughton or Epping and he’d ask to come along. We said, ‘no problem, as long as you help us unpack the van.’
“We got on great together and we’d like to have adopted him a lot more, but he was doing these Ban The Bomb songs, protest stuff. He’d be in the crowd and ask when he could come up and sing with us, and we’d keep telling him to wait. Then, when it was the break, we’d say, ‘up you come’ and he’d come on as we went off.”
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Jones continues: “The great thing is that he was exactly the same size as us, but he was a very careful dresser – everything was cut in proportion, so if you looked at him you’d think he was 6ft.”
Jones is currently involved in an animated project based around the Small Faces classic concept album Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake. And he says he’d planned to ask Bowie to contribute before the singer died in January aged 69.
Jones adds: “I’m making an animated version of the Happiness Stan story in Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake and have got all these people to write songs like Pete Townshend. But I always planned to ask David as the voice of The Fly. I know he’d have said yes.”
