Small Faces / The Immediate Years, Vol. 1 / 1967
Here Come the Nice
euphoric, breathless, slightly unsettling beneath the sunniness
A breezy mid-60s pop song on the surface, this track is widely understood as a coded tribute to a drug dealer, dressed up in the language of adoration and salvation. The narrator's gushing devotion to a mysterious, charismatic figure doubles as an account of the pull of amphetamines within London's mod scene.
drug culture adoration and dependency coded language mod subculture worship/idolatry
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addresses a 'you' who hasn't yet met the title figure, speaking with the fervour of a convert recruiting others; the voice is enthusiastic to the point of being unreliable, since the praise heaped on 'the nice' reads as too good to be true.
What happens
The song doesn't tell a story so much as build an escalating pitch: it introduces a figure who satisfies every need, repeats that claim with mounting intensity, and pushes the listener toward meeting him themselves, framing the whole thing as a kind of initiation.
How it's built
Built on a tight verse-chorus loop with almost no bridge or resolution -- the chorus's call-and-response refrain repeats nearly unchanged each time, mirroring the repetitive, ritualistic nature of what's being described rather than developing a plot.
Craft
- euphemism
- The title figure and the language around him ('the nice,' 'the man') never name what's being referred to directly, allowing the song to describe a drug and its supplier under cover of romantic or spiritual devotion.
- call and response
- The parenthetical chorus lines function like a congregation answering a preacher, reinforcing the sense of communal, almost religious conversion.
- anaphora
- The repeated title phrase opening each chorus line builds an incantatory, hypnotic momentum that mimics obsessive craving.
- irony
- Lines insisting you don't need money to gain insight sit oddly against the implication of a paid transaction, creating a gap between stated and actual meaning.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a thinly veiled ode to amphetamine use and the dealer who supplies it, a reading reinforced by the band's known immersion in mod speed culture and by Immediate Records' willingness to court controversy. A more innocent alternative reading -- that it's simply about a charismatic guru or social scene-maker -- is plausible on a purely textual level, since no explicit drug reference appears, but it struggles to explain the song's obsessive, converts-only tone and the specific emphasis on not needing money, which reads oddly for a purely social figure.
Context
Steve Marriott and the Small Faces were deeply embedded in London's mod scene, where amphetamine use was widespread; this track is commonly cited by critics and fans as one of the era's coded drug songs, though the band never confirmed this explicitly in verifiable statements, so some ambiguity remains.
Listen for
- the hypnotic repetition of the title phrase building almost ritual intensity
- the call-and-response structure between lead and backing vocals
- the tension between the song's bright, danceable arrangement and its darker possible subject
- the insistence that money isn't needed, which complicates a literal reading of the lyric
About Small Faces
The Small Faces were an English rock and pop band from London, founded in 1965. The group originally consisted of singer/guitarist Steve Marriott, bassist Ronnie Lane, drummer Kenney Jones and keyboardist Jimmy Winston, with Ian McLagan replacing Winston in 1966.
1965 - 1978 / United Kingdom
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