Mona — The Carnivorous Circus is a 1970 album by the UK underground artist Mick Farren. The album was recorded to fulfill contractual obligations. Farren had recently returned from a tour of the west coast of North America with his band The Deviants, who had risen up against him and sacked him. Farren had, however, previously discussed the idea of a solo album for the second LP of three on the Transatlantic contract (after The Deviants 3), with the third LP to be an album by the other band members, potentially also featuring drummer Russell Hunter’s girlfriend Jenny Ashworth as frontwoman – an idea with which the three sidemen had been toying around the time of the contract signing. (More from Wikipedia)
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 certainly can’t compete with the description of Mona – The Carnivorous Circus provided by Dave Thompson for Allmusic, so I won’t even try: “Mick Farren convened a more-or-less all-star band from the same disreputable circles he’d always moved in. Carnivorous Circus was cut, the first essential album of the 1970s, and it’s still one of the most unrepentantly nasty, gratuitously ugly records ever made. Rock history loves to bandy those terms around, then apply them to this week’s most fashionable long-haired gnarly snarlies. And it’s true, the Pretty Things, MC5, the Pink Fairies, the Broughtons [Edgar Broughton Band], any of the myriad ’60s freakbeat bands captured on sundry Nuggets and Pebbles type collections, they’ve all dipped a toe into those malevolently murky waters. Some of them have even swum around a little. Carnivorous Circus goes the whole hog and then some, holding its breath and descending to the seabed. Now it owns a roadhouse and wrestles giant squid for fun.”
Mick Farren himself writes that “I was crazy when I did Mona – really mentally ill. If I listen to it I can still feel it. Maybe I should have chilled out for a few months before making the album, but I was a bit depressed, and I thought I’d just do it entirely my own way for the first time.”
The musicians on Mona – The Carnivorous Circus include compadres that Mick Farren worked with over the years, including Steve Peregrin Took (previously in Tyrannosaurus Rex with Marc Bolan, who found great fame after shortening the band name a few years later to T. Rex) and Twink (real name: John Alder), who is best known as the drummer for the Pretty Things when they made one of their most renowned albums, S.F. Sorrow.
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The murky beginnings of the Pink Fairies – a more guitar-driven psychedelic rock band that eschewed the political stances of the Deviants – are hard to untangle; stories vary, and I don’t have any of the books that have been written on and by the bandmembers. According to the liner notes on an early retrospective album by the band, Pink Fairies, the original Pink Fairies were Mick Farren (vocals), Steve Peregrin Took (guitar) and Twink (drums). Together with Twink’s girlfriend Sally “Silver Darling” Meltzer (keyboards), Wikipedia reports that they “hooked up in October 1969 for one shambolic gig at Manchester University, billed as the Pink Fairies”. The three men later worked together on Mona – The Carnivorous Circus.
Mick Farren left the fold shortly afterward, and Twink and Steve Peregrin Took formed a band called Shagrat with Larry Wallis (guitar) – who later appeared in several incarnations of the Pink Fairies – and Tim Taylor (bass). The band name is taken from a character in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and Took is credited on the Mona – The Carnivorous Circus album as “Shagrat the Vagrant”.
