Small Faces – Itchycoo Park

This song was released in 1967 by The Small Faces and it peaked at #16 on the Billboard 100, #1 in Canada, and #3 in the UK. I was born in 1967 and cannot remember a thing but this song makes me feel like I was there. It was written by Ronnie Lane and Steve Marriott. A psychedelic song that hit on both sides of the ocean which was rare for the Small Faces who never toured America.

Ronnie Lane had been reading a leaflet on the virtues of Oxford University which mentioned its dreaming spires. Several sources claim the song’s name is derived from the nickname of Little Ilford Park, on Church Road in the London suburb of Manor Park where Small Faces’ singer and songwriter  Steve Marriott grew up.

The park is Manor Park’s Itchycoo Park (officially Little Ilford Park) in London. An “Itchycoo” is slang for a flower found in the park called a “Stinging Nettle,” which can burn the skin if touched. Ronnie Lane said “It’s a place we used to go to in Ilford years ago. Some bloke we know suggested it to us because it’s full of nettles and you keep scratching.”

Producer Glynn Johns used a new technique of phasing in the drum breaks. He got credit for doing that but it was his assistant that came up with it. The flange effect could be made by placing a finger on the supply reel creating drag, causing the machine to slow down, which increased the delay and lowered the pitch of the notches. The sound could be swept upward by doing the opposite…touching the take-up reel and speeding it up slightly.

Glyn Johns: I have often been given credit for this, but in fact the method used to achieve it was discovered by my assistant at the time, George Chkiantz, who demonstrated it to me as I arrived for the session. I thought it was a fantastic effect and decided to use it on the track we cut that afternoon. This happened to be “Itchycoo Park,” a song about taking LSD, as coincidence would have it, and if you listen you will see why it was so effective.

Glyn Johns: This was one hell of a band. They had a massive amount of energy that was unleashed on their audiences from the minute they hit the stage until they left it. If they had ever made it to America, they would undoubtedly have been as successful as any of the British bands that took it by storm in the sixties. That was not to be, as they broke up in 1969 before ever going there.

Ian McLagan: “I never liked ‘Itchycoo Park’ because me and Ronnie had to sing, ‘It’s all too beautiful,’ and you sing that a few times, and you think… It’s not. The ‘bridge of sighs’ is the one in Cambridge. The ‘dreaming spires’ are a reference to Oxford. Then ‘to Itchycoo Park… That’s where I’ve been,’ Ronnie was saying, ‘I didn’t need rich privilege or education. Found beauty in a nettle patch in the East End of London.”

Itchycoo Park

Over bridge of sighs
To rest my eyes in shades of green

Under dreaming spires
To Itchycoo Park, that’s where I’ve been

(What did you do there?) I got high
(What did you feel there?) well, I cried
(But why the tears there?) tell you why
It’s all too beautiful, it’s all too beautiful
It’s all too beautiful, it’s all too beautiful

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

I’ll tell you what I’ll do (what will you do?) I’d like to go there now with you
You can miss out school (won’t that be cool?) why go to learn the words of fools?

(What will we do there?) we’ll get high
(What will we touch there?) we’ll touch the sky
(But why the tears there?) I’ll tell you why
It’s all too beautiful, it’s all too beautiful
It’s all too beautiful, it’s all too beautiful

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
It’s all too beautiful, it’s all too beautiful
It’s all too beautiful, hah

It’s all too beautiful, it’s all too beautiful
It’s all too beautiful, it’s all too beautiful
It’s all too beautiful, it’s all too beautiful

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Author: Badfinger (Max)

Power Pop fan, Baseball, Beatles, Alternative music, old movies, and tv show fan. Also anything to do with pop culture in the 60s and 70s... I'm also a songwriter, bass and guitar player. Not the slightest bit interested in politics at all.

42 thoughts on “Small Faces – Itchycoo Park”

    1. Phil I don’t remember the sixties…but a few songs like this…trick me into thinking I do. They were one of the best bands I’ve seen on film live from that time.

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    1. You are right about the park. Yea that planging or phasing technique… probably was hard duplicate perfectly every time but it worked.

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    2. I’ve always liked effects that were simple but not simple – light shows produced with colored water and oil on an overhead projector, reverb units using springs, a finger on a tape reel…the 60s were often about invention. Technology caught up later.

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      2. Well since their manager kept them broke…they never toured America and by this time they only had a year or so to go before they broke up…partly because of mismanagement and partly musical things.

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      4. Not being a musician nor an engineer, my knowledge is limited. 1) I understand phasers and flangers were developed soon after this to reproduce those sounds live via signal-processing in real-time. 2) Part of live performance is to produce a unique sound rather than reproduce a record so exactly that it could be lip-synched. (It took a few tries to actually find this song live. The first were clearly lip-synched to the recording.) 3) The ability to do things in the studio that can’t be reproduced live seems to be a key to the recording industry. (See the overdub work of Les Paul, not to mention Sgt Pepper’s.) Sometimes messing around with equipment in the studio leads to discoveries to reproduce live later. (Sampling and use of a Vocoder being other examples.)

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    1. Yes I agree… I like both as well. No other band ever had two singers of that caliber…
      I know more Faces than Small Faces and I want to dive more into the Small Faces…I know a little from their Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake album…they only had 3 original albums but also 6-7 non album singles.

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    1. If they could have toured…I think it would have made all the difference….but Ozzy’s future father in law Don Arden…ripped them off.

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  11. my fave Small Faces record this one, not for 1968 oddly, though, for 1976 when it went top 10 again in January and I got into it proper. It wasn’t the only oldie in the chart either – Chubby Checker’s double A Let’s Twist Again/The Twist went top 5 and Laurel & Hardy’s Trail Of The Lonesome Pine was a number 2 over Christmas 1975 and into January it was still charting. Before the year ended we’d had a Beatles singles invasion, Motown oldies, Glenn Miller EP, The Who’s Substitute, and Lullaby Of Broadway, a 30’s hit from Winifred Shaw all going top 40.

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    1. Yes that is when they regrouped again for a while minus Ronnie Lane for the most part. The mid sixties to me….in my opinion was the most exciting time in rock/pop history.

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  12. I wasn’t aware of this first time around, but very much recall Lazy Sunday. They had a unique sound that reflected London at the time. Paul Weller would never have done what he did if it were not for the influence of the Small Faces.

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    1. Oh I like Lazy Sunday really well. I totally agree with you about Paul Weller. Marriott is probably…next to Lennon my favorite British rock vocalist. He had such a great voice.

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      2. I would have liked those of course and some of the Psychedelic stuff we have went over. What an interesting time…. you had such variety out there. Cream, Small Faces, Who…and on and on.

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      4. 50 years later…and that says a lot about the music. Ron and I talked about something CB…can you imagine listening to music from 1920 (not blues) in the seventies? Or even Glen Miller….and yea I like some….but a 15 year old Max…probably wouldn’t have.
        The 60s music has held together really well…young people still like it.

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