A trip down Ronnie Lane: from child busker to international star

Thirty years ago, I worked for a while in a shop in Soho selling vintage newspapers and magazines. The holy grail for some customers might be the 1955 Playboy featuring Bettie Page or the 1976 Daily Mirror with the Sex Pistols’ ‘Filth & the Fury’ headline. But those of a born-again Mod persuasion were usually looking for 1960s publications with the Small Faces on the cover – preferably the August 1966 copy of the teenage music and fashion bible Rave, showing Ronnie Lane and Steve Marriott from that most style-conscious of bands, complete with a double-page poster of the group inside.

Now, nearly six decades after their formation, there is, arguably, an even greater interest in the Small Faces, who, after the singer Marriott left, evolved into the equally well-regarded Faces, teaming up with Rod Stewart and Ron Wood. There have been various books about the Small Faces, and also Marriott, while the keyboard player Ian McLagen and the drummer Kenney Jones both wrote autobiographies. But this is the first work devoted to the bass player Ronnie Lane.

This may sound like an overcrowded market, when certain million-selling performers deliver a smoothly polished and utterly sterile ‘live’ experience by miming to backing tracks onstage and one of the biggest shows in London relies on holograms of a group which split up 41 years ago. But the reading public’s appetite for stories about the times when music still had rough edges and no safety net seems ever greater.

Anyone looking for the last characteristics would find no shortage of them in Lane’s career, and Caroline and David Stafford display the same dry wit and careful research that informed their previous excellent biographies of figures such as Lionel Bart or Kenny Everett.