All Or Nothing

The Small Faces and the Making of "All Or Nothing"

The Small Faces arrived at "All Or Nothing" in the summer of 1966 as a band that had already established itself as one of the most commercially successful and culturally significant acts to emerge from the British mod movement, but that had not yet delivered the definitive statement that their talent seemed to promise. Steve Marriott, Ronnie Lane, Kenney Jones, and Ian McLagan had formed in East London in 1965, the name combining the mod slang term "face," denoting a respected trendsetter within the subculture, with an acknowledgment of the group members' notably compact physical statures. They were, in the full sense of the phrase, genuine mods: East End working-class young men who had absorbed American rhythm and blues through the networks of clubs and record shops that made London's music scene of the mid-1960s uniquely receptive to Black American musical forms, and who translated that absorption into something energetically their own.

The genesis of "All Or Nothing" has the quality of sudden inspiration that good songwriting occasionally produces. Kenney Jones recalled to Uncut magazine that the group was on tour and staying at the Station Hotel in Leeds when Marriott ran down the corridor announcing that he had written their next hit. Whether the composition arrived as completely as that account suggests or was refined through subsequent work with Lane and the rest of the group, the song reached its recording session in a state of considerable readiness. The track was recorded on 25 July 1966 at IBC Studios in London, produced by Don Arden, the group's manager and a significant figure in British rock management whose relationships with his artists were frequently contentious. The session was completed efficiently, and what emerged was arguably the most powerful thing the Small Faces had yet committed to tape.

Written by Steve Marriott and Ronnie Lane, "All Or Nothing" was released on 5 August 1966 on the Decca label, with "Understanding" as the B-side. In the United States, the single was issued on RCA Victor, catalogue number 47-8949, though it received limited promotional support from the American label and did not achieve significant commercial traction in that market. The UK response was of an entirely different order. The single entered the UK Singles Chart on 17 August 1966 and rose steadily to reach number one on 15 September 1966, displacing "Yellow Submarine" / "Eleanor Rigby" by The Beatles, which had spent four weeks at the summit. The significance of replacing The Beatles at the top of the British singles chart was not lost on contemporaries; it represented a kind of cultural coronation for the Small Faces as one of the defining bands of their moment.

The single's production captures several qualities simultaneously. Jones's drum introduction was consciously modelled on Wilson Pickett's "In The Midnight Hour," connecting the track explicitly to the American soul tradition that the group had absorbed and were now processing through their own sensibility. Marriott's vocal performance was extraordinary, raw, physically committed, and technically assured in a way that made him one of the most compelling white British soul singers of the decade. McLagan's organ work added texture and harmonic colour without crowding Marriott's delivery, and Lane's bass provided the rhythmic anchor that gave the track its forward momentum. The arrangement was direct and unadorned in a way that suited the emotional urgency of the lyric, which demanded total commitment from a romantic partner or nothing at all.

The personal circumstances behind the lyric are, characteristically, somewhat disputed. According to Steve Marriott's mother Kay, the song was written about the end of his relationship with former fiancee Sue Oliver. Marriott's first wife Jenny Rylance subsequently stated that Marriott had told her he wrote it for her, following her own split from Rod Stewart. Both accounts have been accepted as having some degree of truth, which may simply reflect the way that experienced songwriters often draw on composite emotional material rather than pure autobiography. What is clear is that the lyric channels a recognisable emotional state with considerable force, the insistence that a relationship conducted on half-measures is no relationship worth having, that the stakes of genuine love are necessarily all or nothing.

Marriott himself maintained a strong sense of the song's achievement throughout his subsequent career. In a 1984 interview, asked which of his Small Faces compositions he regarded most highly, he identified "All Or Nothing" specifically, describing it as a song that, in his view, typified the era, and pointing to the feel and arrangement as what distinguished it beyond the lyrical content, which he characterised with characteristic self-deprecation as "a silly love song." His pride in the track's emotional and sonic qualities co-existed with an awareness that the lyric was not attempting philosophical complexity, and yet the song's longevity suggests that the simplicity of its emotional demand gave it a directness that more elaborate compositions often lack. It appeared on the 1967 Decca compilation album From the Beginning, which brought together earlier material from the group's Decca period.

The Small Faces would continue recording for Decca through the remainder of 1966 before moving to Andrew Loog Oldham's Immediate label in early 1967, which brought them into a creative environment that encouraged greater experimentation and produced some of their most celebrated work, including "Itchycoo Park," "Tin Soldier," and the album Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake. But "All Or Nothing" remained the commercial high-water mark of their Decca period and the song most consistently associated with the band's identity as a mod act. The group disbanded in early 1969 when Marriott departed to form Humble Pie, with the remaining members subsequently joining Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood to form the Faces. The legacy of "All Or Nothing" endured well beyond the band's original dissolution, acknowledged consistently as one of the defining British singles of 1966 and a high point in the mod movement's relationship with American soul music.