07/26/2026
Sometimes fate can be so cruel........
Arkesden, Essex. The 20th of April, 1991.
Half past six in the morning.
A driver passed an old cottage and saw the roof on fire.
He called it in. The brigade fought up the stairs.
They found a man in an upstairs bedroom.
He had died of smoke while he slept.
The inquest said a cigarette had set the bed alight.
Steve Marriott was 44.
He had landed from Los Angeles only hours before.
He was born in East London in 1947.
He was tiny. Barely over five feet.
He had a huge voice that made no sense.
As a boy he played the Artful Dodger in Oliver, on the West End.
Then he heard American soul and quit acting.
In 1965 he started a band with three other short men.
They were all under five foot four.
So they called themselves the Small Faces.
They became a defining mod band in Britain.
Sharp suits. Sharp haircuts. Sharp songs.
He wrote All or Nothing and it went to number one.
He wrote Itchycoo Park and Lazy Sunday.
Kids copied how he dressed and how he stood.
He was the coolest boy in England for a while.
Then he wanted to be heavier. Louder.
He walked off stage and quit the Small Faces in 1969.
He formed a new band called Humble Pie.
His guitarist was a young player named Peter Frampton.
They became a great live band in the early seventies.
Then Frampton left to go solo.
A few years later Frampton put out a live album.
It sold sixteen million and made him a superstar.
Marriott went the other way.
By the eighties he had nothing.
No record deal. He'd turned the labels down for years.
He was heavy and scruffy. The mod icon was gone.
He played small pubs around Essex for cash.
Two hundred gigs a year just to get by.
One of Britain's great voices, singing in back rooms.
Then in 1991 Frampton came back.
He flew to England and offered a reunion.
Come to LA. Make a record. Earn proper money again.
It was his second chance and he knew it.
Frampton set rules. No drink. No co***ne.
Marriott agreed. He broke it within days.
Drunk. Wired. Impossible to work with.
Frampton stopped the sessions and sent him home.
He'd been handed the door and slammed it himself.
He flew home on the 19th, foul-tempered and jet-lagged.
He argued with his wife at a friend's house.
She fell asleep. He took a taxi home alone.
Then the cigarette. Then the fire.
Broke, forgotten, one flight from fixing it.
He never made it to morning.
They gave him an Ivor Novello award five years later.
Outstanding contribution to British music.
Mojo named him one of the greatest singers ever.
The Small Faces made the Hall of Fame decades on.
Tonight, somewhere, a band covers All or Nothing.
The singer strains for a note and misses it.
The man who wrote it hit it easily. In a body the size of a boy.
Almost nobody in that room knows his name.
He died broke, hours after being sent home from his last chance.
~Forgotten Stories
