Notes and Quotes: "Itchycoo Park"

Jones: "Itchycoo Park" wasn't really a park, it was an overgrown bombsite full of stinging nettles in Ilford, which ran down to the railway lines. (Twelker and Schmitt, 46-47)

Lane: "Itchycoo Park" basically came from me. I lifted it from a hymn, "God Be in My Head"... It wasn't me that came up with "I feel inclined to blow my mind, get hung up, feed the ducks with a bun. / They all come out to groove about, be nice and have fun in the sun." That wasn't me, but the more poetic stuff was. (Badman and Rawlings, 91)

Note: He probably refers to the setting of the "God Be in My Head" by Sir Henry Walford-Davies. In particular, the upward leap in the melody probably inspired Lane, except that in the Walford-Davies setting, the upward leap is an octave, while "Itchycoo Park" features a rising major sixth.

Lane: We had a number of brilliant ideas, but that didn't always go down well with the sound engineers. They thought we were smart-arses when we insisted on something, and when we didn't get our way and said, "That's not how we want it!" they would reply categorically, "No, you can't do it that way, it's not right, it does not work technically nor ethically, and it's certainly not in the manual.." Things like taking tracks from different sound effects out of synch with other tracks, I mean, today everybody does it. (Twelker and Schmitt, 46)

Recording Note: The recording uses phase shifting for the drum track. Placing the track against itself, but slightly out of phase, creates the cascading wave effect as the track comes in and out of phase with itself.

Mark Cunninham: One of the most profound effects of the era, phasing, made its most obvious early appearance on The Small Faces' 1967 Immediate single, 'Itchycoo Park,' which was recorded by Glyn Johns at Olympic. Appled to whole track at the end of each middle eight section of the song the phasing had a most peculiar affect on Kenny Jones's drum fills. Although attributed to Johns, he claims it was his assistant engineer, George Chiantz who worked out the method using three tape machines. "George had been attempting to create this effect all morning and by the time I arrived for the session, he had it all figured out and played me something which knocked me out," says Johns. "So when we cut 'Itchycoo Park' I played an example of phasing to the band and they loved it." Small Faces frontman, Steve Marriott, had an altogether more colourful explanation for the effect when he was interviewed shortly after by BBC radio presented, Ray More. "I pissed on the tape," he grinned. ... One way to achieve phasing was to have two identical tape copies of a performance playing on machines that were synchronised together as closely as possible. If the engineer retarded the tape spool of one machine, the combined sound of the two recordings would go in and out of phase, and frequencies would be cancelled. (Good Vibrations: A History of Record Production. London: Sanctuary Publishing Limited, 1998: 114, 115.)

The construction of this song, although the text has taken on a surreal tone, is comparable to "All or Nothing." In other words, although the effects and subject matter of the song may be substantially different from their original material, the fundamental musical characteristics remain the same.

The verse material is in two parts: the first part is in the form of an arch (starting low, going higher, and coming back to a lower pitch) and the second part is in the form of a call and response, Marriott's intense response to an almost spoken statement building towards the refrain.

Schedule

5 March, 2014