Steve Marriott: The forgotten rock star

Thirty years ago, Steve Marriott died in a house fire. He had almost certainly been smoking in his bedroom, and trying to escape in the middle of the night he opened the wrong door and walked into a cupboard instead of out of the room to safety. In that bizarre manner, the world lost one of its greatest rock stars.

A lot of people under the age of 40 might be somewhat bemused by that statement, as they won’t have even heard of Marriott. For this chirpy, cheeky cockney, the leader of two world-famous bands, has become the forgotten rock star, a man whose talent should have placed him in the pantheon of rock immortals, but who went from selling out arenas and stadiums to playing to a few hundred people in pubs, and whose name is now rarely mentioned.

Add to this the fact that his voice, envied by his most famous peers, was the most soulful of any white singer, and a remarkable life story with colossal drink and drug abuse and an inner demon – given its own name, Melvin – who was responsible for wrecking not just hotel rooms but relationships with band members and wives.

On the question of his voice and talent, no need to take my word for it. It was long a music industry joke with more than a grain of truth that when he left his celebrated sixties mod band the Small Faces, it took two people to replace him. And as the two in question were no slouches, Ronnie Wood and Rod Stewart, it says a lot about his singing, guitar playing and song writing.

The testimonials and the people only too eager to give them also speak volumes. “The best vocalist that this country has ever produced,” said David Bowie. “Simply an amazing talent,” opined Bob Dylan. “One of the best British rock singers of all time,” said The Who’s Roger Daltrey. And for real insight on Marriott’s influence, this from the writer Irvine Welsh: “Steve Marriott is one of Britain’s great white soul voices … and his cockney music-hall vocals paved the way for musicians like Bowie and the Pistols to sing in hometown accents while also influencing people like myself to write in their local dialect. A towering cultural icon.”

And one testimonial that is particularly worth noting comes from Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant who said simply: “I wanted to be Steve Marriott.” Worth noting because Zeppelin’s biggest hit ‘Whole Lotta Love’ sounds uncannily like an earlier Small Faces track ‘You need Loving’. Listen to both and prepare yourself for a shock. Marriott did and said in an interview in his normal direct manner: “I would hear it come on the radio while driving in America and I would think, go on my son, until one day I thought fucking hell, that’s us, the bastards. He took it note for note, word for word.”

Listen to Marriott’s novelty song for the Small Faces “Itchycoo Park” with its hippy chorus “It’s all too beautiful” to hear the gentle sweetness in his voice. Listen to the same band’s All or Nothing to hear the great white soul voice that entranced Welsh. Listen to Rolling Stone on the album Rockin’ the Fillmore by Marriott’s next band, Humble Pie. There you get a voice full of soul, allied to cockney humour and unique interaction with the audience. If you only listen to one track from the Humble Pie years, make it that one.  

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The soul, the sweetness, the humour again were all evident in another celebrated sixties novelty track for the Small Faces, Lazy Sunday, with its opening lines: “Wouldn’t it be nice to get on with me neighbours. But they make it very clear they’ve got no room for ravers.”

The ups and downs of Marriott’s personal and professional life are brilliantly documented in a new authorised biography All OR Nothing by Simon Spence. Spence says: “Steve Marriott was a freak of nature, a little man just over five foot tall, with the biggest of soul voices and the most overwhelming of personalities. He was a show-off, a loudmouth, a child star, a pop star and a rock star, a drunk and a drug addict. He was lovable, kind, funny and charismatic, but could also be vicious, belligerent, reckless, violent, sadistic, quite evil (especially when alcohol was involved). Above all, he was a performer.”

Yes, a child star. As a boy he started off in the West End cast of Lionel Bart’s musical Oliver. Bart described him as “one of the best Artful Dodgers I had”. That is a truly remarkable compliment as Steve never played the Dodger on stage. He was the understudy. But such was the effect he had on Bart.

After parts in a few British films, Marriott formed the Small Faces with his song writing partner Ronnie Lane (later to die of multiple sclerosis) and had a string of hits, playing to hysterical, screaming audiences on world tours. The band was managed by the larger-than-life Don Arden, father of Sharon Osbourne. Around this time Jimmy Page tried to prise Marriott away to front the band Led Zeppelin he was trying to launch. Page recalls that the approach filtered back to Don Arden, who replied: “How would you like to have a group with no fingers, boys?” The approach was dropped.

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The Small Faces epitomised the mod look that was the height of fashion at the time. Faces was the name often applied to mods. And Marriott and his bandmates were all short of stature.

Desperate to leave the world of pop behind for a more bluesy and improvised sound, Marriott formed Humble Pie with one of the best young guitarists of the time, Peter Frampton (formerly with the band The Herd, and dubbed by the music press ‘the face of 68’), the accomplished drummer, Jerry Shirley, and bass player Greg Ridley. Humble Pie became huge in America, their live shows legendary. Yet when I interviewed Marriott in 1987 it was in a pub in Putney where he was about to perform, having put the Pie, stardom and two of his three marriages behind him. He was still very much the funny cockney with a huge personality, occasionally alluding to previous traumas. “I’ve been a silly boy, David,” he would say.

Interestingly, Jerry Shirley is quoted in Spence’s biography talking about the golden years of Humble Pie from 1969-71, saying that Marriott was loving playing and touring and recording, was affable and was happy in his marriage. “He was the nicest man you could care to meet,” before adding: “I never saw that Steve Marriott again.”

At this point, one should introduce Melvin. When Humble Pie were playing in Dallas, Steve and Greg Ridley wrecked the hotel suite. Jerry Shirley told Spence for his book: “Steve had to do some quick thinking. He noticed an American Wrestling Federation sign in the lobby and said in a typically convincing way that the party had been gatecrashed by a bald wrestler called Melvin who had run riot through the whole place and trashed the whole place. So convincing was he that the hotel bought it. Thus Steve’s drunk, coked-up, pain in the arse alter ego was born and christened Melvin. Cocaine, sadly, in Steve’s case was bringing out the worst. He became someone else.”

On another occasion Marriott was jailed in the US for drugs possession. When they got him out, Shirley recalled that he “was very destructive. Smashing up rooms, causing trouble. Steve was in an advanced state of Melvinosity … had not seen a bed in over a week.”

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Even later in the seventies when Marriott reformed the Small Faces for a reunion tour, his old sparring partners quickly tired of him. The now deceased Ian McLagan, the keyboard player with the Small Faces, recalled: “He had a big old moustache and he was dirty. He didn’t have any decent clothes. He was a coked-out, over-singing arsehole. When he came to your house he’d pretty much stay until there was nothing left to drink. He drank us out of everything. Eventually I stopped answering the phone to Steve.”

His then wife Pat Marriott Land, whom he had married after divorce from his first wife Jenny Dearden, also recalled: “They’d call me when they were on the road and say ‘You got to get here, Melvin’s here’ because I could handle Melvin. He literally had a different personality. He’d drink and his eyes would get real glassy and he’d look up and I’d say ‘Steve?’ And he’d go ‘No, Melvin’ and that’s when he got crazy. When he was sober I’d start telling him things he did or said and he’d start crying.”

Marriott agreed to produce an album for a San Francisco band. One of them recalls: “Steve stayed up for 72 hours straight to produce. He had a scraggy beard, crazy hair… walking around in his shorts with a smoking jacket, work shoes with the socks rolled down. He looked a wreck and of course there were stimulants.”

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In a way, things got even stranger when Marriott married his third wife, Toni Poulton, a hard drinking, hard partying girl from Essex, who at 26 was 14 years younger than Marriott. She had already been convicted of drunk-driving resulting in the death of her older sister, a passenger in her car, who was decapitated in the crash. The car had veered off the road and into scaffolding, which decapitated her sister, Joanna.

By this time Marriott had tired of the rock star scene and big stadiums, and was playing in his trio of musicians on the London pub circuit. Toni was unpopular with his friends and fellow musicians and became even more so after his death when she refused to allow his children by previous marriages and relationships to have any of his estate (he had died intestate). She also infuriated both his fellow musicians and fans by releasing everything available including demos that Steve had been working on and would never have allowed to be released.

Toni, who was not in the house the night of Steve’s death, was, after Marriott’s death, later sent to prison, after once again being the cause of a fatal crash while drunk driving, actually on the same stretch of road as the crash that killed her sister.

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The Steve Marriott story has more than its share of sadness as well as the rock’n’roll high life, the wild, wayward life of a magnificent performer. And it was performing that was the true love of his life, be it at the legendary Fillmore in New York or at a pub in south-west London. He is a true star, waiting to be rediscovered by a new generation. Yes, it’s true what Paul Rodgers of Free and Bad Company said: “I loved Stevie, just a fantastic singer. But he pissed off everyone around him.”

But it’s also true as Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream said: “Steve Marriott’s voice is as sweet and soulful as Otis or Aretha.” And perhaps it was put most memorably by Mick Jagger: “He could sound like a pixie with the sweetest pipes. He could have led children off a cliff with that side of his voice. And then he could bray like a donkey, gale force and the power of his voice would turn your skin to ice.”