From my first exposure to his remarkable body of work back in the late 1970’s, Mick Farren became one of my very favorite rock musicians. He has released solo albums, and he has been in a number of amazing rock bands also: the Social Deviants, the Deviants, the Pink Fairies, and others. Early on, Farren wrote lyrics for another of my long-time favorite bands, Hawkwind. One of Farren’s long-time collaborators, Andy Colquhoun is a past UARA. Mick Farren was also a prolific writer on a host of subjects and published numerous science-fiction novels. The Allmusic entry on him by Chris True begins: “To say that Mick Farren was a ‘jack of all trades’ is putting it mildly.”
Being the man behind the legendary psychedelic rock album by the Deviants, Ptooff! would be enough to put Mick Farren among the giants of rock music; the thing is, he did so much more besides. Allmusic lists 10 albums in the discography of the Deviants alone; Wikipedia has 11.
In 1967, Mick Farren launched his first rock band, the Social Deviants with himself as vocalist, pianist and songwriter, plus Pete Munro (bass guitar), Clive Muldoon (guitar), Mike Robinson (guitar), and Russell Hunter (drums). After Muldoon and Munro left the band, Sid Bishop (guitar) and Cord Rees (bass) joined up, and the name was shortened to the Deviants.
As related in Wikipedia, Mick Farren has stated that the Deviants were originally a community band which “did things every now and then – it was a total assault thing with a great deal of inter-relation and interdependence”. Musically, Farren described their sound as “teeth-grinding, psychedelic rock” somewhere between the Stooges and the Mothers of Invention.
With the backing of Nigel Samuel (the 21-year-old son of a millionaire), the band’s debut album, Ptooff! was one of the first truly independent album releases and one of the earliest albums to come straight from the Counter-Culture – it was first sold through the British underground press and later became one of the earliest records on the venerable label Sire Records (home of Madonna, among many others) back when their releases were distributed by London Records (original home of the Rolling Stones, among many others). The album has been reissued at least four times, most recently in 2013.
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I can still remember the incredible joy I felt when I first found this remarkable album by the Deviants called Ptooff! that I knew only by reputation. The cover is a comic-book style science-fiction scene with two quotes in “balloons”; one of them – “When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake!!” – was adapted from a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson. What a wonderful subject this album cover would have made for a painting by pop artist Roy Lichtenstein!
The extensive liner notes by legendary London DJ John Peel proclaim the album as “the deviants underground l.p.” and present a host of quotes from literary and counter-cultural figures. I had heard of the concept of “underground rock”, and here was an album that proudly proclaimed itself as coming straight from the British underground!
Many critics have noted the amateurish, even sloppy nature of the album, and I suppose they have a point; but the album easily transcends any such limitations: The music is earnest and compelling, and the jams always cook. For instance, “Garbage” is structured like a series of gonzo radio or TV commercial jingles, with the product offered always being “garbage”; it opens: “We got garbage . . . we got garbage . . . we got garbage . . won’t you buy, buy some garbage . . . .” Another one goes: “Garbage is so good for you, just the thing that you should do.” Again: “Garbage can make you feel so good, makes you feel like you think you should, garbage can make you feel so large, put two cars in your garage” – and then after that one, the band immediately launches into a vulgar call-and-response: “Why can’t you feel it (why don’t you pick it up), why can’t you feel it (why don’t you hold it your hand), why can’t you feel it (why don’t you fondle it), why can’t you feel it (why don’t you stroke it), why can’t you feel it (why don’t you s--k it) . . .”
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About the longest track “Deviation Street”, the website Music-news.com offers this description in its 2013 review of the Deviants’ album Ptooff!: “A heavy rock guitar blasts in and goes on for a little while, before all comes to a halt and [Mick] Farren’s voice reveals ‘A giant, talking CIA man smiles and hands out candy to the laughing hippies’ (chorus, mock laughter and a twaaang guitar sound in the background). Followed by ‘And a dirty old man peeps into the window of a “funny” bookshop’ (bizarre voices and laughter in the background), followed by ‘And the little children play war games in the gutter’ (machine gun sounds, aaaargh-I’m-dying-now sounds, shotgun blast, and loud applause in the background). This is a sonic theatre of the sarcastically and fantastically absurd!
“Music takes up again (make that screeching guitars), followed by muffled voices, and the chanting of ‘speed, speed, speed’ before the pace breaks again. Oh, did I mention we’re only just halfway through the track?
“OK . . . we then get to hear rock music again, with more chanting and percussion in the wings. Suddenly, Farren puts on a mock-African accent and, calypso-style, sings ‘I’ve been in dah banana boat all night long, chwalah-laah . . . I wanah get stoned . . .’ Right. That would explain a few things at least!
“After further musical oddities, he finishes with the conclusion, “And after all this, I’m sitting here, grooving to the spiritual patterns on my wall . . . ”
The quote finishes (if memory serves): “. . . and I believe I can say with perfect clarity that I am a complete and adequate human being”.
Allmusic states the musical and historical importance of Ptooff! well in their entry by Dave Thompson: “Talk today about Britain’s psychedelic psyxties, and it’s the light whimsy of Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, the gentle introspection of the Village Green Kinks, Sgt. Pepper, and ‘My White Bicycle’ [by Tomorrow] which hog the headlines. People have forgotten there was an underbelly as well, a seething mass of discontent and rancor which would eventually produce the likes of Hawkwind, the Pink Fairies, and the Edgar Broughton Band. . . .
“But the deranged psilocybic rewrite of ‘Gloria’ which opens the album, ‘I’m Coming Home’, still sets a frightening scene, a world in which Top 40 pop itself is horribly skewed, and the sound of the Deviants grinding out their misshapen R&B classics is the last sound you will hear. Move on to ‘Garbage’, and though the Deviants’ debt to both period [Frank] Zappa and [the] Fugs is unmistakable, still there’s a purity to the paranoia.
“Ptooff! was conceived at a time when there genuinely was a generation gap, and hippies were a legitimate target for any right-wing bully boy with a policeman’s hat and a truncheon. IT and Oz, the two underground magazines which did most to support the Deviants ([Mick] Farren wrote for both), were both publicly busted during the band’s lifespan, and that fear permeates this disc; fear, and vicious defiance.”
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After Cord Rees left the Deviants, Mick Farren’s flatmate Duncan Sanderson became the new bassist. This line-up produced the band’s second album Disposable in 1968. Although the musical ideas and commitment of the band were just as strong as on their debut, the execution was a little lacking in places, so this album is something of a disappointment. The cover shot shows a whole crowd of people, so maybe there was a “too-many-cooks” problem.
Next, Sid Bishop got married and exited; the band recruited a Canadian guitarist named Paul Rudolph and then put out their third album, Deviants #3 in 1969. The gatefold cover shows a nun and a young boy curled up on the ground. The nun is clearly a man in drag; both people are sucking on multi-colored Popsicles that I have only ever seen in that creepy Stanley Kubrick movie, A Clockwork Orange (although that film didn’t actually come out until 1971). I am not sure exactly what the cover is supposed to mean, but it is rather disturbing.
While not nearly so classic as Ptooff!, Deviants #3 has some great moments. The oft-quoted lines that open “The People’s Suite” (which lasts all of 2½ minutes) sum up every parent’s fears about the New Left and the Counter Culture and indeed rock music:
We are the people who creep in the night
We are the people who hide from the light
We are the people who pervert your children
Lead them astray from the lessons you taught them
We are endangering civilization
We are beyond rehabilitation.
The opening song “Billy the Monster” is also brilliant and cracks the door into the myriad musical visions that Mick Farren would produce in years to come. In actuality, Farren was moving in a different direction from the rest of the band; and the Deviants would break up during their tour to support this album. But not for good, thankfully.
The three remaining members of the Deviants at that point – Russell Hunter, Duncan Sanderson and Paul Rudolph – became the core members of the Pink Fairies, though not immediately.
First on the agenda for Mick Farren as the Sixties came to a close was to fulfill his recording contract after he was thrown out of his own band. In March 1970, Farren released Mona – The Carnivorous Circus; essentially, this was Mick Farren’s first solo album, although the album is often credited to the Deviants. The album is bookended by the great Bo Diddley song “Mona”, though the largest part of the album was the meandering two-part “Carnivorous Circus”. There is also a rendition of the great Eddie Cochran song that was later made famous by the Who, “Summertime Blues”; their first release of “Summertime Blues” was on their 1970 Live at Leeds album.
I picked up a 2001 CD by Shagrat called Pink Jackets Required, and it is a delight. This music was evidently made by the earliest lineup of the band. In the review of the album for Allmusic, Dean McFarlane gives it four stars and reports: “This album was recorded in 1969 just before Tyrannosaurus Rex embarked on their first U.S. tour and was completed on [Steve Peregrin] Took’s return. Although it is in effect a collection of demos, and some of the tracks will be known to fans of Think Pink – primitive takes of ‘The Coming of the Other One’ and ‘The Sparrow Is a Sign’ will be familiar – in fact, Pink Jackets Required is one of the most astonishing albums either of the pair recorded, and in popular opinion and rock-evidence surpasses the Twink Think Pink album. The name Shagrat was bounced around for an incarnation of one of Twink’s other groups with members of the Pink Fairies, but that unit was entirely different from the genius brilliance of the project with Steven Peregrin Took. Simply, this should be tracked down and given serious attention by those who love A Beard of Stars [by Tyrannosaurus Rex], Deviants, Pretty Things, and early T. Rex.”
Mick Farren, Steve Peregrin Took and Twink had actually teamed up a few months before their October 1969 gig as the Pink Fairies, during the July 1969 recording sessions for Twink’s first solo album, Think Pink, which was released in 1970. Farren produced the album, Took was on guitar and vocals, and Twink was on drums and vocals. Paul Rudolph, previously in the Deviants and later in the Pink Fairies, played guitar and bass and also provided vocals.
Standout songs on Think Pink include “Ten Thousand Words in a Cardboard Box”, “The Coming of the Other One” and “The Sparrow Is a Sign”. Dean McFarlane in his Allmusic review also gives Think Pink four stars and writes: “Think Pink is an incredibly varied album with no two songs resembling each other, but then one assumes an acid masterpiece like ‘Ten Thousand Words in a Cardboard Box’ will stay on high rotation for at least a week on the stereos of most psychedelia fans, so overall album flow may not be such an issue. This is pure psychedelic acid rock of the highest order. If one can imagine a fusion of the Incredible String Band, Deviants, early Pink Floyd, and a fair dose of Twink’s heredity as a member of Tomorrow and the Pretty Things, you get an idea of what he was up to. Not known for doing things in halves, he shows little restraint in the assembly of a group designed to tear the roof off the psychedelic scene.”
The Pink Fairies proper began to take shape when Twink connected with the three remaining members of the Deviants after Mick Farren was sacked: Russell Hunter, Duncan Sanderson and Paul Rudolph. This line-up produced the debut album, Never Never Land (1971). The album features classic Fairies tracks like “Do It”, “War Girl”, and “Uncle Harry’s Last Freak-Out”, but not the early single that is probably their best known song, “The Snake” (yes, that is a penis reference).
Otherwise, most of Mick Farren’s latter-day music has been released under the Deviants or Mick Farren and the Deviants. The Deviants along with Wayne Kramer returned to Dingwalls in 1984, and a record of this concert called Human Garbage was released on CD – mine is the 1997 reissue on Captain Trip Records. Mick Farren proclaims at the beginning of the show that “we even rehearsed this time”, and he is a little hoarse, plus the sound quality is not perfect; but they are in great form, particularly on “Police Car”, “Takin’ L.S.D.” and “Hey Thanks”.
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The 1996 CD Eating Jello with a Heated Fork is one of my favorite Deviants albums of them all – the band name is given as Deviants ixvi (“96”), and the line-up is basically the same as on The Deathray Tapes. The bizarre imagery on “Three-Headed Lobster Boy” – and his adventures with the “ever hungry bikini women” – has to be heard to be believed; and the Apocalypse feels close at hand indeed on “You Won’t Make it Here”, “God’s Worst Nightmare” and “Rivers of Hell”.
Another Deviants CD came out in 1996 called Fragments of Broken Probes and is more of a compilation, with an excerpt from Beginning of the End (the horror flick about giant grasshoppers) and a description of the Tunguska event, where a comet or asteroid exploded over Siberia in 1908 (a much smaller but similar explosion in Russia was caught on video last year) interspersed among Deviants recordings from a variety of sources. They include what might be their best live performance, of “Half-Priced Drinks”; and other treats include “Outrageous Contagious”, “Broken Statue” and “Shock Horror”. The closing track, a monologue called “Dog Poet” name-checks the Hashashim – whence came the words “hashish” and “assassin” – and the Anti-Christ in its wild tale of adventures on the outer fringes of humanity.
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Other live albums, plus several retrospective albums by the Deviants.followed – This Vinyl is Condemned and This CD is Condemned (depending on the format), The Deviants Have Left the Planet, On Your Knees, Earthlings!!!, etc. – along with what turned out to be the coda, the 2002 CD Dr. Crow.
As described on the funtopia.com website: “On his return to England in 2009, he [Mick Farren] reconvened his band the Deviants along with his long time friend and musical collaborator Andy Colquhoun and original 1960s era Deviants and later Pink Fairies, Russell Hunter and Duncan ‘Sandy’ Sanderson. They played a number of well received gigs since reforming, including The Spirit of ’71 stage at Glastonbury [Festival] in 2011, as well as the Sonic Rock Solstice Festival in Wales, June 2013. The Deviants also released a new single on Shagrat Records in July 2013 called ‘The Fury of the Mob’. Mick collapsed on stage whilst the Deviants were performing at the Atomic Sunshine Festival at the Borderline Club on Saturday 27th July 2013. He never regained consciousness.”
