This two-disc set, evidently produced under the auspices of the surviving members of the Small Faces, was part of a tiny wave of multimedia CDs that appeared at the dawn of the 21st century -- a similar CD/CD-ROM combination Yardbirds package came out around the same time. This one never sold the way it should have, perhaps because it was too vague in presenting its CD-ROM specs, which were fairly advanced at the time (technology has caught up since) and it also didn't sufficiently emphasize in its packaging that these were live recordings (that information is sort of buried in the text). The first disc is a 26-minute CD made up of the ten appearances that the Small Faces made on the German television programs Beat Club and Beat Beat Beat between September 28, 1966, and April 27, 1968. In those days, the two programs were exceptional in that most of the guests played live, and given the absence of a definitive Small Faces concert album, these tracks will prove invaluable to serious fans of the band. Actually, about half of this disc is precisely that, fully live and unfettered concert performances -- opening with a raw, searing performance of "Hey Girl," all ringing power chords and swelling organ fills over Steve Marriott's soulful lead vocals. The second track, an overpowering performance of "All or Nothing," is worth the price of the disc by itself, a sweaty, passionate, crunching, and grinding rendition that is also better recorded than the live version captured 17 months later at Newcastle Town Hall, with sharper detail and clearer vocals evident on this 1966 performance. "Whatcha Gonna Do About It" gets a similar all-stops-pulled-out performance, the only flaw of which is the slight under-recording of the organ -- but the closeness of Marriott's rippling guitar solo makes up for that slight defect. "Tin Soldier" also gets close to a definitive performance here, a simmering and searing rendition that's incredibly loud, even for this band.
The CD-ROM doesn't follow the same track order as the CD, but otherwise it is both a perfect companion to the CD and a powerful freestanding document -- the visual quality is very good, and if the band is without peer on the fully live tracks, they're also very impressive on the mimed and partly mimed cuts -- "Itchycoo Park" has live vocals, while "Lazy Sunday," which looks totally mimed, does reveal some of the fun that Steve Marriott and Ronnie Lane had while doing the song on-stage (the other bandmembers always goofed on the song, composed by Marriott for a laugh). The audio is mastered good and loud on both platters, almost (but not quite) to the point that the sound cracks, and the attack on their instruments on the fully live songs is a match for the best work of the Who from the same period. The 1966 appearances show the Small Faces at their peak as an R&B band -- maybe the best in England at the time (with apologies to the Rolling Stones and the Who) -- while the later songs cast them in a trippy, psychedelic mode. In the accompanying booklet to the deluxe version of this release, the bandmembers admit how uncomfortable they were with many of those later songs, especially "Itchycoo Park" (despite its being a huge hit), which showed their lighter, poppier side and Marriott's softer voice, as opposed to his raw soul-shouting -- that song and "Lazy Sunday" were also very difficult to do on-stage because they required an acoustic guitar, which would keep feeding back over the amplification systems used in those days. "Tin Soldier" was the late-era exception, a raw, impassioned piece of psychedelia that incorporated fully their soul influences, and the performance here captures the group in a transcendent moment, grinding away while Marriott screams like a dervish. This is a doubly satisfying release, for sound and visual content, and it's available in two different versions -- a simple narrow double-jewel-case format, with no frills, and a slipcased edition that includes a 48-pa

Rovi