History recalls them as the runt of the litter. In their prime, they were considered to be one of the greatest live acts in the world, but they never quite captured that energy and excitement on record, and thus got left behind in the Great British Rock Boom of the late 60s and early 70s. Yet Humble Pie bestrode the era with a confidence and swagger that few could match.
The band formed in 1969 around 22-year-old former Small Faces singer/ guitarist Steve Marriott and 19-year old former pretty-boy guitarist-singer with The Herd, Peter Frampton, augmented by previously unknown 17-year-old drummer Jerry Shirley and 21-year-old former Spooky Tooth bassist Greg Ridley, and the initial idea was to play a mashup of post-psychedelic pop, earth-bound blues, a whisky-tumbler of country roots, and heavy-as-a-hammer rock with a capital ‘R’.
Jimmy Page – a big Small Faces fan who had originally approached Marriott about fronting Led Zeppelin (before Marriott's manager Don Arden threatened to break his fingers) – arguably took many of his ideas for Zeppelin from the full-spectrum direction Humble Pie initially took. As did Rod Stewart’s Faces, Free, and a great many other lesser lights of the era.
Unlike all those other bands, however, Humble Pie had limited commercial success at home: just one hit single, their debut, Natural Born Bugie (No.4) and just one hit album, Smokin’, which reached No.20. In America, however, it was a better story: three chart albums, sold-out tours, and a reputation as one of the shit-hottest bands on the live circuit.
But when has commercial success ever been an accurate measure of how good or bad something is? The truth is, they didn’t release an album that came close to matching the extraordinary power of their live shows. Marriott was living, breathing pyro, and the band were capable of roasting audiences alive.
They did, however, eventually realise an impressive and unique catalogue of high-grade material scattered across those albums that makes the tremble-tremble metal and rock-by-numbers young pretenders of today look and sound like the blank ammo they are.
As Marriott sang on one of Humble Pie’s biggest showstoppers: ‘I don’t need no doctor, for my prescription to be filled.’
