Ptooff! is the debut studio album by English psychedelic rock band The Deviants, released in 1967 by record label Underground Impresarios. Mick Farren and Russell Hunter had met 21-year-old millionaire Nigel Samuel who funded the £700 required for the recording of the album. The band sold 8,000 copies on their own Impresario label via mail order through the UK underground press, such as Oz and International Times, before being picked up and released by Decca Records. The album is self-described on the inside cover as the deviants underground l.p. (More from Wikipedia)
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.
* * *
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) . . .”
* * *
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.”
On the other hand, Mick Farren has had a lot of friends over the years who were much more radical than he was. For instance, Farren was one of the leaders of the British wing of the White Panthers, a group that Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton encouraged white sympathizers to form. But it wasn’t just radicals; Farren also befriended several members of the Hells Angels motorcycle club, and one of the quotations in the liner notes of Ptooff! is by Sonny Barger, a founding member of the Oakland, California chapter and probably the best known Angel. Moreover, Mick Farren demonstrated time and time again that he could be a very good friend indeed.
