The groundbreaking circular artwork for Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake – with its cover based on a Victorian tin design lent to Immediate by the Liverpool-based tobacconists, and inner image of a pack of rolling papers bearing the word “Sus” (as in “suspect activity”) – has rightly been much-examined and celebrated down the years.
Less explained is another feature of its fold-out design: the intricate psychedelic collage illustration, with its profusion of flowers and butterflies, shadow of a fly, and reclining figure smoking a hookah pipe. Nick Tweddell, co-creator of the imagery (along with Pete Brown) hasn’t spoken about his contribution to the artwork in the near-60 years since its creation. “No one’s ever asked,” he now laughs to MOJO.
Tweddell and Brown were art school pals of Ian McLagan, also performing alongside the keyboard player in the Muleskinners, the blues band McLagan left to join the Small Faces. “It kind of happened all very casually,” says Tweddell of the art commission. “Mac wanted us to do it, and we did it. It was an illustration for the Happiness Stan story [side two's Stanley Unwin-voiced narrative].
“There’s lots of images in there which directly link to it. I don’t think people really ever picked up on that, which is a bit weird, because all the elements are in that illustration. The main thing for me was the [black and white] drawing in the background, which is a moonscape. That took me quite a long time to do, because we had to cut it up to go within the roundel. Right up in the top left corner, there’s a half-moon. It’s actually a waxing crescent moon, a very romanticised version.
“I also collected Victorian cut-outs… ‘scraps’ they were called, so those are the butterflies and flowers. The fountain of butterflies is Happiness Stan’s sort of happiness head coming out. There’s a fly in the middle, which is the fly [from The Hungry Intruder] and there’s Stan smoking his happiness pipe down there, getting ready to go on his psychedelic trip, to discover where the other half of the moon went.”
At the time, Tweddell and Brown had a very English style of psychedelia in mind. “For us, that psychedelic thing in Britain, in those times with Peter Blake and people like that, it was very romantic. It wasn’t like some of perhaps the US psychedelia. It was always kind of grounded in romanticism.”
Incredibly, the illustrator doesn’t even own a copy of Ogdens’, having not held onto one of the initial (and now incredibly rare) pressings sold in a metal tin, discontinued when it proved to be both costly and impractical. As Tweddell points out, “the original round ones literally rolled off the shelves.”
"Are you all sitting comfortybold?"
This article appeared in MOJO 388. As an expanded reissue of Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake emerged, MOJO revisited the Small Faces’ psychedelic masterpiece with help from its survivors, telling a tale of dosed neighbours, defenestrated record players, revolution and regret. More information and to order a copy for delivery HERE!
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