Ooh La La, the ‘stinking rotten’ drug-fuelled album that split Rod Stewart from the Faces

Fifty years ago, the former Small Faces had their first chart-topping album. Then cocaine – and their pompous frontman – tore them apart. Photo / Getty Images

For the Faces, the process of formally falling apart began at the Roanoke Civic Center, in Virginia, on May 12 1973. As the group waited in the wings for their cue to take to the stage, bassist Ronnie Lane informed bandmate Ian McLagan that he was quitting the group. “Bollocks, you c***,” came the keyboardist’s reply. Suddenly speaking in anger, Lane leaned in close and seethed, “F*** off, you c***”.

“Things took a nastier turn onstage that night, when he came over to the piano and swore at me in the middle of a song,” McLagan recounted in his book All The Rage. “I ran after him, kicked him up the a*** and chased him off the stage. I’m not proud of it, but he asked for it.”

On the face of things, the Faces should have been on the summit of the world. That same spring, the English quintet’s fourth album, Ooh La La – the title track of which has recently been revivified by the Amazon miniseries Daisy Jones & The Six – became their first and only LP to top the British chart. Out in the New World, its svelte form (top-to-tail, barely half an hour’s worth of music) cracked the top 10 in Australia as well as the top 30 in the United States.

But within the band, division had taken root. For all its comedic inarticulacy and slapstick violence, the events in Roanoke were nothing less than a coup mounted by Ronnie Lane against their popular singer Rod Stewart. In accepting the bassist’s resignation, the Faces effectively passed a vote of no confidence in a man they would later identify as representing the soul of the group. From this point on, all was lost. As Ian McLagan duly noted, “[Lane] wanted to take the power away from Rod but by leaving the band he gave it all to him, and the balance was off”.

All groups are dysfunctional – none more so than good-time geezers who apparently lack a care in the world. The problems faced by the Faces, wrote Rod Stewart in his autobiography Rod, “were political, and slow-burning, and mostly arose as a result of the success I was having with my own records, which created all sorts of complicated tensions and anxieties. Ronnie [Lane] and Mac [Ian McLagan] were clearly asking themselves suspicious, vexed questions: what was I giving more time to? Where were my best energies going? Was the band my priority, or me?”

Certainly, the set-up was unusual. As well as being the band’s front man, “Rod the Mod’s” increasingly successful career as a solo artist saw him employ fellow Faces as backing musicians on hits such as Maggie May and You Wear It Well. Unsurprisingly, on the road, confusion reigned. Defying the group’s stipulations, concert promoters would adorn marquees with the words ‘Tonight: Rod Stewart & The Faces’. Back at the hotel, the man with the microphone would often find himself booked into a suite while the musicians with whom he was supposed to share equal-billing were given single rooms.

“Of course, I could have refused the key and insisted on downgrading,” the singer once said. “But then… well, I wouldn’t have had a suite, would I?”

Laugh if you must, but such fripperies will eat away at a band’s load-bearing columns. As well as this, the Faces themselves had come into being only as the result of the fracture of their original selves, the Small Faces, in 1969. By drafting in guitarist Ronnie Wood, along with Rod Stewart, as replacements for Steve Marriott, the quintet added the swagger of American-style rock’n’roll to their once trenchantly English sensibilities. But as the singer himself would later note, audiences were often “suspicious of us because they couldn’t quite make out what our connection was with the Small Faces, whose chart hits in the Sixties had left them with the image… of a ‘teenybop’ act”.

Bill Wyman, Ronnie Wood and Ron Wood, Rod Stewart and Kenney Jones and Ian McLagan. Photo / Getty Images

They were also adept at spiking their own guns. As Ooh La La hovered into view, Stewart told the New Musical Express that the group had made a “stinking rotten album”. Finding his rhythm, he opined to the Melody Maker that the LP was “a bloody mess”, adding: “I shouldn’t say that, should I? Well, I should say it in a few weeks’ time. Not now. I mean, the public ain’t gonna like me saying it’s a bloody mess…” Rowing back while still ploughing on, speaking to Rolling Stone he claimed that what he’d meant to say was that the Faces were “capable of doing a better album than we’ve done. I just that don’t think we’ve found the right studios, or the right formula.”

Sure, let’s go with that. Never mind that the singer later admitted that “recording sessions with the Faces always started out in the pub” and that “quite often we were in the pub longer than we were in the studio”. Or that Ian McLagan took the view that “ever since we’d formed the band, getting Rod in the studio for a Faces session had been difficult enough, but when we started Ooh La La it was worse” because – and, ouch – “Rod has always been mean with his money, but he was even meaner with his time”.

Upon the release of Ooh La La, one judicious reviewer warned listeners that “if you are interested in this month’s great record, the one that will be reviewed and broadcast… this isn’t it. Nor is it a classic.” Because how could it be? Rod Stewart’s decision to absent himself entirely from three of the LP’s 10 songs suggests an inattention to detail that is close to a dereliction of duty. Elsewhere, his bandmates sound as if they’re pulling in different directions. Worse still, they’re not even pulling very hard.

The Faces performing in California, 1973. Photo / Getty Images

Such is the torpor, in fact, that one wonders if moments of magic arrive by accident or design. Certainly, the LP’s evergreen title track, sung by Ronnie Wood, might have been little more than a hoary old fable were it not for a chorus that transcends the song’s boundaries to the point of universality. Because who doesn’t “wish that I knew what I know now when I was younger”? Sometimes I even like to think that these 12 words are somehow a warning from the Faces to the Faces, as the band themselves were falling apart.

If only they were minded to listen. Informal to the point of anarchy, the Faces were a band that snorted cocaine from behind their amplifiers between drinks served to them from a bar on the stage staffed by a waiter in full livery. In order to circumvent a worldwide ban from a leading chain of hotels, they pretended to be Fleetwood Mac when checking in to Holiday Inns. (“We used to push Rod to the back,” said drummer Kenney Jones.) They replaced Ronnie Lane with a bass player (Tetsu Yamauchi) who drank Teacher’s whisky for breakfast.

But it was “drugs, coke specifically, [that were] the real issue,” according to drummer Kenney Jones. “Rod wasn’t interested, and neither was I. But Mac and Woody, they were all over the white powder, which would keep them up for days, with barely any sleep at all.” In what might just be the most incongruous rock’n’roll story I’ve ever heard, the morning after one notable gig at the Locarno Ballroom, in April 1973, Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood joined an AFC Sunderland training session at Roker Park at which the guitarist discovered that powdered drugs had burned a hole in his septum.

“In a private moment, beside the pitch, ostensibly while watching what was going on, Woody pushed his face towards me, with his head slightly tipped back, and said, ‘Here, have a look at this, would you?’” Stewart recalled. “And by adjusting the angle of my head and looking up his nose, I could make out a small ray of sunlight where, in the conventional way of things, it really shouldn’t have been, passing through his septum.” The band’s solution to the problem of nasal decay was to start imbibing cocaine anally.

“Let’s not forget… what a grim place Britain was in the early 1970s,” is Stewart’s likeable reasoning in his book Rod. “[It was] in a slump, economically hammered, riven by strikes, its streets stacked with un-cleared litter, the land of the government-enforced power cut. Those were a brown and dingy few years, and the Faces, down to earth but not downcast, brightly attired and three sheets to the wind, couldn’t help but look like a rainbow in the drabness.”

Apart from one thing, of course. Unlike rainbows, the Faces had an end point. Cocaine made the group brittle and edgy, while drinking to excess encouraged the kind of sloppiness that only an exceptional leader can corral. Upon joining the Rolling Stones in 1975, Ronnie Wood got just this in the form of Mick Jagger. The Faces, meanwhile, failed to record another album.

“Right to the end, right until it became clear that Woody was off, I wanted to be in the Faces – wanted to continue to be part of it,” was their singer’s poignant protestation, decades after the fact. “I always had. I didn’t want to strike out on my own. Striking out on my own wasn’t really in my nature. If I could have been a member of the Faces for the rest of my life, I would have been happy.”

But at least Rod Stewart did get to record his own version of Ooh La La. Released in 1998, this younger but somehow older take by a singer with a sandpaper voice sounds like a song designed to last forever. And maybe it will. Certainly, he’s still performing it live.