Jimmy Winston, founder-member of the Small Faces – obituary

Jimmy Winston, who has died aged 75, was an actor, musician and an original member of the Small Faces, the influential Mod band founded in 1965.

James Edward Winston Langwith was born on April 20 1945 at the Pigeon’s Hotel at Stratford in east London, and moved with his family aged 11 to the Ruskin Arms in East Ham, where his father was the publican.

As a teenager he wanted to be an actor and appeared in a few films as an extra. He went on to train at a theatre workshop drama school, but the week he left he was doing a spot of compering in his father’s pub, when the singer and guitarist Steve Marriott and bassist Ronnie Lane came for a drink.

“Steve said, ‘Can I play some harmonica?’,” Winston recalled. “Afterwards they ended up staying and having a few beers and talking. We all went back to my place in Stratford... I hadn’t met [the drummer] Kenney [Jones] yet, but the three of us got fairly plastered on ideas and all the possibilities.”

A girlfriend of Winston’s came up with the name “Small Faces” and the band would practise in a room upstairs in the Ruskin Arms, where they wrote their first songs. In the early days Winston played a Rickenbacker guitar, but Marriott was determined that he should be the lead guitarist and, as Winston recalled, “after much discussion (and beer) I decided to change to keyboards”.

Soon after, they began gigging they were taken on by the ruthless pop impresario Don Arden, who got them a recording contract with Decca. “Within six weeks of the band meeting we went into the charts with all the acts of the period – Sonny and Cher, the Stones, the Animals. It was a whirlwind,” Winston recalled. Their debut single Whatcha Gonna Do About It reached No 14 in the charts.

Arden arranged for the band to appear in the teenage B-movie Dateline Diamonds (1965) as a promotional vehicle for I’ve Got Mine, the follow-up single. However, the film’s release was delayed and the song failed to chart.

Shortly afterwards Winston left the group to be replaced on keyboards by Ian McLagan.

According to Winston, Arden, and other band members, objected to a deal agreed in the early days under which Winston’s brother was paid 10 per cent of earnings for being their roadie: “Don Arden told me that this wasn’t going to work and suggested I put another band together and he would record us. I wasn’t particularly happy about the situation... but at the same time we were not getting on, there were a lot of rows and it was becoming a drag.”

Ronnie Lane, however, put it down to a clash of personalities: “He couldn’t play – I mean, none of us could play, but we was keen. Jimmy Winston couldn’t play, and on top of it he had an ego as if he could play the piano, so he had to go! We chucked him out of the Small Faces.”

Winston formed Jimmy Winston and the Reflections, which morphed into Winston’s Fumbs, a psychedelic rock band whose only single, Real Crazy Apartment (1967), is considered a Mod classic: “We supported Johnny Hallyday in Paris, did a big show with the Animals. That was a lot of fun.”

Afterwards Winston rekindled his acting career, appearing as General Grant in the original London cast of Hair at the Shaftesbury Theatre and in 1970s television series including Hazell and the 1972 Doctor Who serial “Day of the Daleks”, in which he played Shura, a guerrilla fighter opposing the Daleks in 22nd-century Earth.

Later on he established a sound equipment business.

He was married with two children.

Jimmy Winston, born April 20 1945, died September 26 2020