OZ was an underground alternative magazine. First published in Sydney, Australia, in 1963, a second version appeared in London, England from 1967 and is better known. The original Australian OZ took the form of a satirical magazine published between 1963 and 1969, while the British incarnation was a “psychedelic hippy” magazine which appeared from 1967 to 1973. Strongly identified as part of the underground press, it was the subject of two celebrated obscenity trials, one in Australia in 1964 and the other in the United Kingdom in 1971. On both occasions the magazine’s editors were acquitted on appeal after initially being found guilty and sentenced to harsh jail terms. (More from Wikipedia)
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.”
The remainder of the year 1970 was a busy one for Mick Farren as he began to move into other endeavors. One of the first items in the obituary on Mick Farren in the London newspaper The Daily Telegraph is the November 1970 disruption of the David Frost program: “Farren led the group of hippies which, in 1970, took over the television studio when the American Yippie Jerry Rubin was appearing live on David Frost’s show. As Rubin rolled and smoked a joint, Farren harangued Frost from the audience while the Oz magazine editor and future media mogul Felix Dennis squirted the enraged television host with a water pistol.”
