Ian McLagan picks ten top tunes from his 40-year career as an ace Face

"You'll have to excuse me," croaks Ian McLagan, the diminutive erstwhile Hammond organist with the Small Faces, the Faces and now solo artist with five albums to his name including his most recent, the goodtime rock'n'roll of Rise & Shine!

"I'm terribly hungover and more than a little hoarse from shouting out 'Henry' all night. It's not the easiest name to holler, it's all throat you see." Turns out McLagan spent the evening at Austin's Cedar Street watching New Orleans piano player Henry Butler cut his stuff. "My wife says I'm old enough to know better but I'm such a fan, I couldn't keep quiet."

It's this kind of hero worship that inspired McLagan to pick up the organ in the first place. Having heard Booker T And The MGs' Green Onions he was hooked.

"I saw them play live in '67 when the Stax Volt tour came over to the UK - them, Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Arthur Conley, Eddie Floyd. The curtains opened and the Small Faces were sat on the balcony of Hammersmith Odeon, the MGs struck up Green Onions and I could have gone home happy straight after that. The organ wasn't very loud but it was just incredible. Then sax player Andrew Love and trumpet player Wayne Jackson of the Mar-Keys came on, they did a couple of songs. They had no idea how popular they were. When I finally met the MGs later on in my career I said I like that song, Can't Be Still and they looked at each other like I'm mad, the same way I looked at Paul Weller when he said he liked the Small Faces' Get Yourself Together, and I replied I've never heard of it, I couldn't remember it. A lot of those early songs we only played through once in the studio and that was it, forgotten."

Of course it's not just Paul Weller who remembers the Small Faces' intoxicating mix of cheeky mod beat and psychedelic pop - a Small Faces covers LP Long Ago And Worlds Apart featuring Primal Scream, Ocean Colour Scene, Buzzcocks, Ride and Dodgy appeared in 1996 while this April witnessed the Ronnie Lane Memorial Concert which boasted an impressive line up of Mick Jones, Pete Townshend and Paul Weller.

Today Ian's faced with the monumental task of picking 10 key recording moments from his extensive canon - four albums with the Small Faces, four studio and one live LP with the Faces, numerous Rod Stewart solo efforts and appearances with the likes of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, the Stones and more recently Billy Bragg and the Blokes. "There's been so many," he reflects, "it's nigh on impossible." Thankfully, he agrees to give it a go.

SMALL FACES: Grow Your Own, B-side to Sha La La La Lee (Decca) 1966

"It was great in those days because a single was just that, recorded as a single and not just a track pulled from the album. Sha La La La Lee, the A side was the first Small Faces track I appeared on and for the B side it was a case of coming up with an instrumental jam off the top of our heads.

"Steve loved the Hammond sound, he started it off and we just played. It was a complete homage to Booker T and the MGs - they had Green Onions and Red Beans And Rice so we wanted our own theme to run through our songs hence Grow Your Own, Own Up Time and Almost Grown which was also a title of a Chuck Berry song. Of course we wanted to just say, 'smoke dope' but we couldn't so we phrased it more subtly.

There was no rehearsal for the song, the equipment was already set up after the A side so we just jammed until something special turned up."

SMALL FACES: Tin Soldier (Decca) 1967

"This is easily the best Small Faces track we ever recorded and again it's a tribute to Booker T, the chorus, there's an instrumental by them - Carnaby Street - and they either got it from our chorus or we nicked it from them, it's a straight steal. Our producer Glyn Johns got the best sound, out of us - the Wurlitzer, grand piano, M100 is perfect, Steve's vocal is unbelievable, as is his guitar, then PP Arnold provides some beautiful backing. We'd just had a number three hit with Itchycoo Park, which I wasn't too keen on, it was too pop for me, so to come back with Tin Soldier was just fantastic. It was Steve's song, about his first wife Jenny. Everything with us was about the first or second take. The Stones were like, 'Take 67', but we got bored too soon. We never laboured it. Tin Soldier is a very classy song. Its follow up, Lazy Sunday spelt the beginning of the end for us. Immediate put it out against our wishes. It was a hit but we didn't like the direction so Steve retaliated with The Universal, which was recorded in his garden."

THE FACES: Pineapple And The Monkey from First Step (Warners) 1970

"With the Small Faces we recorded specific tracks as singles. For the Faces it was more about the albums until the end when we put out Pool Hall Richard and You Can Make Me Dance, Sing Or Anything. When we first got together, Ronnie Lane, Ronnie Wood and me, Ronnie Wood had the idea for this instrumental. He had a flat in the West End and we'd go over there and I'd take a piano and we always did Pineapple And The Monkey. I have endless tapes of us rehearsing it. When Ronnie moved to Henley we spent all day with keyboards and drums and fine-tuned the song. We nailed down the parts but never wrote them down, so the time signature is all over the place, it needed editing, the intro was too long but we never thought to tidy it up. After Steve (Marriott) left the Small Faces we were very upset and vowed we'd never employ a lead singer again but none of us had a lead voice, hence Rod came along! We met Woody through Steve. I just remember his funny little black eyes and beaming smile. He was immediately engaging. It's his first step guitar book on the front of the first Faces LP."

THE FACES: Just Another Honky from Ooh La La, Warners 1973

"Four years ago I was on tour with Billy Bragg in Italy and trying to put together a track listing for a Faces box set (due out on June 28 entitled Five guys walk into a bar…). Someone had sent me a bootleg of tracks and so as we were on this long bus ride through the Italian countryside I was having a listen and heard my piano playing on the song and was really impressed by me! There were no titles listed and I knew Billy would know what the song was and it was Just Another Honky. I always had to play at my best because we were often only given one shot at it.

Ooh La La was Ronnie Lane's LP. He was the Faces' most prolific songwriter but he never got to sing his songs live. I was often at a loss as to how to accompany his beautiful songs but he'd always have a melody to throw in or start with and that would lead me off."

THE FACES: Stay With Me (Warners) 1971.

"The ultimate track by the Faces. Of course it only took us a few takes and I make a mistake, I goof at the end before it goes to the last riff, I come in to end then carry on playing as if I planned it. Ronnie Wood's guitar and Kenney Jones' drumming is unbelievable, really fired up and Rod's vocal is astounding. Ronnie Wood and Rod Stewart made a fantastic writing partnership, Rod would never finish the vocal until the end, he'd record the track with a guide vocal, by the time we'd completed a couple of run throughs he'd have finished the lyrics. It was an un-poetic way of writing but it worked. Woody would have a riff, Rod would latch onto it and get him to play it again. Rod was like the traffic patrol, he'd be, 'Wait, stop, go to the chorus there'. He was always sharp. He knew what it took to make a single. His arrangements were first rate.

"With Steve gone we never wanted to play tracks like Lazy Sunday again. I started out as a blues pianist and on Stay With Me we just rocked out, rebelled against everything."

IAN MCLAGAN AND THE BUMP BAND: Little Troublemaker from Troublemaker (Mercury) 1979.

"I'd already written a few songs for my debut and was thinking about putting a band together comprising Bobby Keys, drummer Jim Keltner and bassist Paul Stallworth. I got Bobby to come over to the house and was playing him my ideas and half way through he said I've got a song for you. He put the demo in my cassette player and after the first few notes I was wow, that's a great song who is it? It turned out it was Johnny Lee Schell, he sang, played and wrote it and we covered it."

IAN MCLAGAN AND THE BUMP BAND: Truly from Troublemaker (Mercury) 1979.

"This was the first solo track I ever cut. I went solo because I didn't have a band and everyone was going solo - of course there was Rod and Ronnie Wood had cut two solo albums and Kenney Jones had cut tracks on his own too. I'd moved to the States in 1978 and befriended Ronnie Wood's manager. He suggested I have a go and said he'd get me a deal at Mercury Records, which he did. We were touring with the New Barbarians at the time and I asked Bobby Keys if he fancied playing on it. He said yes but that I should get Keith Richard too. We used to jam on Truly, this reggae tune, and Keith loved it. We only did one take, kept playing for 20 minutes until the engineer came in and said he'd only captured the first 12. We edited it down to seven and Keith thought 'Bloody Hell, Mac got a free track out of me'. It was funny, I'd never been a lead singer before and I didn't know how to behave like one. Keith said, 'Mac, order us about, tell us what to do, crack the whip!'"

IAN 'MAC' MCLAGAN AND THE BUMP BAND: Don't Let Him Out Of Your Sight from Best Of British (Maniac) 2000.

"This is my tribute to Ronnie Lane. I was very sad when he died and it took me a while to get over it. One day I was missing him and this came out of nowhere. I'd had the melody since the David Lindley band in '89 and I was actually thinking of making it into an orchestral sounding instrumental then it just clicked and I cut the demo at the house in my studio.

"My guitarist 'Scrappy' Jud Newcomb played a slide solo that made me cry, it was so beautiful, so when we cut it properly, he played it again, replicated it perfectly, and I put a live guide vocal over the top. We cut it on Ronnie's birthday, April 1st, and when I came back to the studio to record a proper vocal the engineer just shooed me away and said there was no need, they'd gone with the live one!"

IAN MCLAGAN AND THE BUMP BAND: You're My Girl from Rise & Shine! (When!) 2004

"I wrote this song about 20 years ago, while I was living in Highland Park in Los Angeles when we had no money. I've played a version of it with every Bump Band I've ever had. It's basically just a simple teenage love song for my wife Kim and now I've re-recorded it on my latest LP and I'm just very proud of the way it's turned out."

IAN MCLAGAN AND THE BUMP BAND: Date With An Angel from Rise & Shine! (When!) 2004.

"This is one of the most personal and spontaneous songs I've ever written, penned as I was driving my truck to meet Kim at a Thai restaurant called Little Thailand. I'd been in the UK and just got back, Kim had gone to work and we said we'd meet there as it was halfway between the two of us. I got home, the battery was flat on my truck, it was 105 degrees at least, my neighbour jumpstarted the truck but warned me not to use the air conditioning as it would drain the battery so I had the windows down going faster and faster to create a breeze while at the same time thinking I just want to see Kim and I started writing this song. I stopped at the side of the road to jot down the verses and sung the melody down my answerphone. Soon as I got home from dinner I cut it in my studio, I sung and played all the instruments bar drums."