** BG ** Small Faces - Itchychoo Park

Steve Marriott and Ronnie Lane of Small Faces wrote this song, which is about skipping school to hang out at a park. Of course, with the lyrics, "What did you do there? I got high," it was fairly obvious that they were doing in the park, although the band denied that it was about drugs. Marriott told Creem in 1975: "The thing about 'Itchycoo Park' was that the era was wrong, and the word 'high' freaked everybody out. All the radio stations. But that song was real. Ronnie Lane and I used to go to a park called Itchycoo Park. I swear to God. We used to bunk off school and groove there. We got high, but we didn't smoke. We just got high from not going to school." Yeah, right. On its release, the BBC immediately banned the song because of overt drug references - "What did you do there? - I got high" and "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." So Small Faces manager Tony Calder explained the song had an innocent interpretation: "We told the BBC Itchycoo Park was waste ground in the East End which the band had played on as kids. We put the story out at ten and by lunchtime we were told the ban was off." A number of 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 "itchycoo" nickname is, in turn, attributed to the stinging nettles which grew there. Other sources cite nearby Wanstead Flats (Manor Park end) as the inspiration for the song. Despite all the claims as to which park is the original Itchycoo park, in an interview Steve Marriott has stated that "It's Valentine's Park in Ilford. We used to go there and get stung by wasps. It's what we used to call it". The song was one of the first pop singles to use flanging, an effect that can be heard in the bridge section after each chorus. Most sources credit the use of the effect to Olympic Studios engineer George Chkiantz who showed it to the Small Faces regular engineer Glyn Johns; he in turn demonstrated it to the group, who were always on the lookout for innovative production sounds, and they readily agreed to its use on the single. Although many devices were soon created that could produce the same effect by purely electronic means, the effect as used on "Itchycoo Park" was at that time an electro-mechanical studio process. Two synchronised tape copies of a finished recording were played simultaneously into a third master recorder, and by manually retarding the rotation of one of the two tape reels (flanges) using the fingers, a skilled engineer could subtly manipulate the phase difference between the two sources, creating the lush 'swooshing' phase effect that sweeps up and down the frequency range. Because the original single version was mixed and mastered in mono, the flanging effect in "Itchycoo Park" is more pronounced in its original mono mix, and is noticeably diluted in the subsequent stereo mix.