Dave Thompson (born 4 January 1960) is an English writer who is the author of more than 100 books, largely dealing with rock and pop music, but also covering film, sports, philately, numismatics, and erotica. He was born in Devon, and in the late 1970s wrote and published a punk rock fanzine. In the 1980’s he was employed by Richard Desmond’s Northern & Shell in London’s Docklands. He relocated to the US in 1989. He has written regularly for journals including Melody Maker, Rolling Stone, Mojo, Q, and Record Collector, as well as for the All Music Guide. (More from Wikipedia)
I laughed out loud when I first read the review of Dr. Crow by Dave Thompson for Allmusic, because it is all so true for us Deviants fans: “The thing with the Deviants is, either you love everything they do – in which case Dr. Crow is their most thrilling new release in the six years since their last one – or you just don’t get it. Sadly for the band’s dreams of world domination, most people tend to fall into the latter category; but anybody who has pursued mainman Mick Farren across the last 35 years of sonic and literary guerilla-ism will have Dr. Crow cranked up as loud as is humanly tolerable, not caring a toss for what the neighbors think. Because in the Deviants’ world, the neighbors don’t think -- their brains aren’t big enough.”
Or as Mick Farren himself put it in one verse of an earlier song, “Hard Times”: “Started me this rock and roll band / Thought that I would get real rich / Warner Bros. thought we sucked / Ain’t this modern life a bitch.”
(August 2013)
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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.”
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.”
