Description
Steve Marriott – Packet of Three – Remastered Double Vinyl Record with Bonus Tracks
Packet of Three documents Steve Marriott at Dingwalls in London during the early-1980s chapter that followed the Small Faces and Humble Pie. The setting is deliberately lean: Marriott sings and plays guitar with bassist Jim Leverton and drummer Fallon Williams, leaving no extra instrumentation to soften the edges. What’cha Gonna Do About It immediately connects the set to the Small Faces, but the performance is not an exercise in polite nostalgia. Marriott pushes the song through a rougher power-trio sound, and his voice carries the same mixture of rasp, soul phrasing and explosive attack that defined his earlier bands.
Fool for a Pretty Face and Thirty Days in the Hole bring Humble Pie material into the set, where the smaller lineup gives the riffs more exposed muscle. Shame, Shame, Shame and Bad Moon Rising show Marriott’s instinct for choosing covers that could survive a complete change of personality. He does not imitate the original singers; he bends the songs toward British rhythm and blues, hard rock and the looser feel of a club stage. The Cockney Rhyme provides a brief, unmistakably personal turn before All Shook Up sends the group back into foundational rock and roll.
The Fixer and All or Nothing underline the continuity in Marriott’s catalog. Songs associated with different bands and periods sound connected once they pass through the same trio, largely because his guitar playing is given unusual prominence. Marriott is often remembered first as a vocalist, yet the power-trio format reveals how strongly his chord work, fills and rhythmic attack could shape a performance. Leverton gives the arrangements weight without becoming rigid, and Williams keeps the music moving with the directness the room demands. The concert feels worked-in, not reconstructed for an archival release.
The later stretch leans into the blues and R&B repertoire that always sat beneath Marriott’s rock records. Five Long Years opens space for a more extended vocal performance, I Don’t Need No Doctor revisits a Humble Pie concert staple, and Big Train Stop at Memphis keeps the locomotive rhythm close to the surface. Walkin’ the Dog closes the complete program with the kind of song Marriott could make sound both traditional and entirely his own. Across thirteen tracks, the set moves naturally between signature material and sources, showing how deeply the covers and originals belonged to the same musical language.
The original Packet of Three was released independently by Aura Records in 1984 as a single LP and offered only an abridged view of the show. Iconoclassic’s 2023 reissue expands the album to two records and adds six performances that were not on that first edition, presenting the complete concert on vinyl for the first time. The audio is remastered, and the package includes new liner notes by Ralph Chapman based on interviews with Leverton and Aura head Aaron Sixx. UPC 843563163733 identifies this expanded configuration rather than the shorter vintage LP.
As a live album, Packet of Three succeeds because it preserves a particular working band rather than trying to summarize Marriott’s entire career. The repertoire naturally reaches backward, but the performances belong to the Dingwalls stage and to the trio playing them that night. There is audible sweat in the tempos, room around the instruments and no attempt to disguise the limitations or strengths of the setup. For listeners who know Marriott mainly through studio landmarks, the set provides a valuable view of his command in a close club environment, where voice, guitar and band chemistry have to carry everything.
Brand new, never played and still sealed in the factory plastic
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