Ronnie Lane Fest at the Cadogan Hall

ANDY WORTHINGTON

On September 15th, in the Grade II-listed splendour of Chelsea’s Cadogan Hall, a full house of nearly a thousand music fans gathered for ‘Ronnie Lane Fest’, a celebration of the music, the life and the legacy of Ronnie Lane (1946-97).

From the mid-‘60s and throughout the 1970s, Ronnie played a major role in the UK’s hugely influential pop and rock music scenes, as the bassist and a key songwriter in the Small Faces, and the Faces, and, latterly, in his own band Slim Chance, until, sadly, the development of multiple sclerosis (MS) largely cut short his career. Reassuringly, funds from this event were raised to support the MS Society.

The evening began with an energetic recreation of the Small Faces in their prime, via tribute band the Small Fakers, when it was, to be honest, hard not to be struck by a kind of surreal time-warp quality to the proceedings, as a group of 40-somethings, channeling a band whose members, with one exception, are no longer with us, animated a largely white-haired crowd who, themselves, had first fallen in love with the Small Faces’ songs — including hits like ‘Itchycoo Park’ and ‘Lazy Sunday’ — when they were first written and performed.

At the end of their set, a guest performance by the legendary singer P. P. Arnold, who had first come to London in 1965 as a teenaged backing singer for Ike and Tina Turner, cut through the nostalgia, as she reminisced about the London scene of the 1960s and ‘70s, and belted out a couple of numbers that were drenched in the driving, rock-tinged soul of the times, and were also a testament to the enduring power of her voice, even at the age of 78.

After a touching performance by the country duo My Darling Clementine, Slim Chance took to the stage, and collectively brought Ronnie’s post-Faces music (and the defining songs he wrote and sang with the Faces) back to life through a kind of creative alchemy.

Put together in 2010 by former members of Slim Chance, the soulful, pastoral folk-rock band that Ronnie created in the Shropshire countryside after he left the Faces, the re-formed Slim Chance, all sharing vocal duties, have, for 15 years, fulfilled their mission of keeping Ronnie’s musical legacy alive, via the core members — multi-instrumentalist Charlie Hart, bassist Steve Bingham and keyboardist Geraint Watkins, with saxophonist Frank Mead joining more recently.

Sadly, lead guitarist Steve Simpson, another original member, recently passed away, and will be forever missed, but at Cadogan Hall a Slim Chance super-group, with twin drummers, and lead and acoustic guitarists joining Charlie, Steve, Geraint and Frank plus guest vocalist Rumer, fused their considerable musical talent and expertise into a powerful celebration of Ronnie’s music.

As the set progressed they coaxed sing-alongs from the audience, and even some dancing in the aisles, via Slim Chance classics like ‘One for the Road’ and ‘Kuschty Rye’, plus their always profoundly moving version of Ronnie’s Faces classic, ‘Debris’, heartbreakingly sung by Geraint, and the perennial ‘Ooh La La’, whose line, “I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger”, was particularly poignant for an evening in which the passage of time, the joys of youth and the weight of mortality all figured so prominently.

Hopefully, ‘Ronnie Lane Fest’ will become an annual fixture at Cadogan Hall. As this concert showed, the appetite is clearly there, both from the fans, and from those keeping Ronnie’s spirit alive on stage.