Faces / Ooh La La / 1973
If I'm On the Late Side
gentle, reassuring, slightly wistful
A plain, tender travel song built around a small domestic anxiety: two people trying to meet up, and one partner reassuring the other that a delay is no cause for panic. It trades the swagger typical of the band for a quiet, almost folk-plain intimacy, using train and street imagery to stand in for trust and eventual reunion.
trust in separation travel as metaphor for commitment reassurance urban wandering domestic devotion
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses a partner directly, asking them not to worry if he's delayed. The voice is calm and devoted, not anxious, functioning as the reassuring party rather than the one seeking comfort.
What happens
The song opens with an instruction: if the speaker is late, the partner should go ahead without him, trusting he'll turn up. It moves into a request for a small sign of safety - a message left with someone - then shifts into a memory or present account of him walking through the city trying and failing to catch her before she leaves. It closes by returning to the original reassurance, now with an image of eventual reunion at day's end.
How it's built
The song works almost like a plainspoken message set to music rather than a conventional verse-chorus pop structure. Its opening lines return near the end in slightly altered form, framing the middle verse - the account of the failed meeting in the street - as a kind of aside or flashback that explains why reassurance is necessary in the first place.
Section by section
Opening verse
The speaker front-loads the song's whole argument: don't panic, go ahead, trust that he'll appear. This isn't an apology for likely lateness so much as an assurance of inevitability - he frames arrival as certain, just perhaps delayed.- The plainness of the language matches the plainness of the sentiment.
Second verse
“I don't want a sad sack”
Here the speaker explicitly states what he wants from the exchange: not sympathy or worry but a small, practical confirmation of safety. The request to leave word with a porter domesticates the drama - it's not about grand declarations, but about a note passed along a chain of strangers.
Third verse
The account of walking across the city and narrowly missing his partner functions as evidence for why the reassurances of the earlier verses are necessary - it dramatizes the very kind of near-miss he's been asking her not to worry about. The specificity of place names lends the failed meeting a documentary plainness rather than melodrama.
Final verse
“laying down beside you”
The closing return to the opening lines resolves the tension established by the near-miss: even though timing may go wrong, the outcome - being together at day's end - is treated as inevitable. The final image trades travel language for domestic intimacy, closing the emotional distance the rest of the song has been managing.
Craft
- synecdoche
- Trains, stations, and porters stand in for the larger anxieties of being apart; the physical mechanics of travel become the language through which trust and devotion are expressed.
- refrain with variation
- The instruction not to worry if he's late opens and closes the song, but the closing version adds a physical image of reunion, converting a repeated reassurance into an emotional resolution.
- concrete geography
- Naming actual-sounding London locations grounds the song's small drama in a lived, specific city rather than an abstract romantic setting, giving the missed-connection plot a believable, everyday texture.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a small love song about faith under the friction of ordinary logistics - trains missed, streets crossed at the wrong moment - where the emotional stakes are kept modest and believable rather than symbolic. A secondary reading might push further, seeing the travel imagery as a broader metaphor for commitment itself: the song's insistence that lateness doesn't threaten arrival could be read as a statement about relationships that survive rough patches, with the missed street meeting standing for whatever obstacles life places between two people who still trust they'll end up together.
Context
Ooh La La (1973) was the last studio album Faces made with Rod Stewart, and it leans more toward Ronnie Lane and Ian McLagan's plainer, folk-inflected songwriting than the band's usual boozy rock stomp. This track fits that quieter, less flamboyant side of the record - closer to pub-folk sincerity than arena rock swagger, and easy to overlook next to the album's more famous title track.
Listen for
- the contrast between the loose, conversational vocal delivery and the tightness of the song's small narrative
- how the instrumentation stays understated, letting the plain lyric carry the emotional weight
- the way geographic specificity (streets, a station, a porter) keeps the song's stakes small and human rather than grand
- the returning refrain and how its final variation quietly resolves the earlier anxiety
About Faces
Faces are an English rock band formed in London in 1969. They formed after Small Faces lead singer and guitarist Steve Marriott left to form Humble Pie, and the remaining Small Faces—bassist Ronnie Lane, drummer Kenney Jones, and keyboardist Ian McLagan—recruited lead singer Rod Stewart and guitarist Ronnie Wood, both formerly of the Jeff Beck Group, and shortened the band's name to Faces.
1969 - 1975 / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue