Saturday, July 5, 2025

Got No Room for Ravers


Samples Small Faces's "Lazy Sunday"! 

The bit about his grumpy next-doors objecting to the noise of loud fun - "wouldn't it be nice to get on wiv' me neighbours? / but they make it very clear they've got no room for ravers"


Features the phrase "mustn't grumble" - the soul of Englishness (pre-ravers, at any rate) quintessenced

There is also a blink-and-you'll-miss-it  comb-and-paper quotation of a Stones song - "Satisfaction" it says at Wikipedia, although it sounds almost more like "Let's Spend the Night Together" to me

I should have put "Lazy Sunday" in my list of Greatest Number Two

The album as a whole I've never quite clicked with except for the opening title track with its amazing colorized bass and phased drums and keyboards.


And of course enjoy the Stanley Unwin element




Got this album 



"Lazy Sunday" is very much rooted in the same oh-so-English world as Carry On


A-wouldn't it be nice to get on with me neighbors?

But they make it very clear they've got no room for ravers

They stop me from groovin', they bang on me wall (what's going on in there?)

They doing me crust in, it's no good at all, ah

Lazy Sunday afternoon

I've got no mind to worry

I close my eyes and drift away

Here we all are sittin' in a rainbow

Gorblimey, hello, Mrs. Jones

How's old Bert's lumbago? ("He mustn't grumble")

I'll sing you a song with no words and no tune

(Tweedle-dee bite) to sing in the khazi while you suss out the moon, oh yeah

Lazy Sunday afternoon, ah

I've got no mind to worry, ah

Close my eyes and drift away, ah

A-roo-dee-doo-dee-doo

A-roo-dee-doo-dee-die-day

A-roo-dee-doo-dee-dum

A-roo-dee-doo-dee-doo-dee

There's no one to hear me

There's nothing to say

And no one can stop me from feeling this way, yeah

Lazy Sunday afternoon

I've got no mind to worry

Close my eyes and drift away

Lazy Sunday afternoon

I've got no mind to worry

Close my eyes and drift

Close my mind and drift away

Close my eyes and drift away


 You probably essay an, er, essay that claimed for Ogden's Nut Gone Flake what Greil M claims for The Band, i.e. the ravers (Sixties version of) generation mending the breach with the parent generation....

Which (despite "She's Leaving Home") already started happening on Sgt. Pepper's, to some extent

Or perhaps simply that for all the trips and the dabbles with Eastern spirituality and all the other neophiliac stuff, you still wake up in England, embedded in centuries of history... 

Tale "Itchycoo Park" 

Spiritually hungering Ronnie Lane got into Sufism by 1968, but he lifted the melody or part of it from a 16th Century hymn, "God Be In My Head"   while "the theme to the words" came from "a hotel in Bath or Bristol. There was a magazine in the room with a rambling account of some place in the country and it was about ‘dreaming spires’ and a ‘bridge of sighs’ – there was a write-up on this town – and I just thought they were nice lines.”

Steve Marriott meanwhile said lyrical inspirations come from stinging nettles and an actual park in Ilford:

"Ronnie Lane and I used to go to a park called Itchycoo Park... 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. Itchycoo Park is the nickname of 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.



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