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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.”

Mick Farren’s death last July affected me more than that of any musician since John Lennon back in 1980; he died a little shy of his 70th birthday, like three of my four grandparents. I determined to present a testimonial to him after a suitable period of time had passed.

Mick Farren’s mother remarried and moved to Worthing, Sussex; Mick attended the Worthing High School for Boys there and later went to Saint Martin’s School of Art in London. Of his childhood that was marked by the early loss of his father and not getting along with his stepfather, Mick Farren has said: “I spent a good deal of my life being exceedingly angry. I was constantly looking for trouble and hoping I’d come to the right place” – by which he meant London I imagine.

Mick Farren settled in then-unfashionable Notting Hill with an early lady love, Joy Hebditch; they later married. Like many in that era, Farren discovered the joys of marijuana and fell in with a radical crowd, including Scottish beat poet Alexander Trocchi and a black-power advocate named Michael de Freitas (who later took the name Michael X). Mick Farren called the movement that he helped found the “Psychedelic Left”.

On two of his albums, there is a short interview with Mick Farren at the UFO Club, a legendary London scene where some of the earliest psychedelic rock bands like Pink Floyd and Soft Machine held court; it was only open for about a year in 1966-1967. In the interview, Farren basically states that he is not a Marxist – he is simply stating that the society isn’t working, and that he is trying to create a world where “people can freely enjoy themselves”, but adds that “that is where the trouble started”.

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.

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) . . .”

“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.”

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.

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.”

In 1962, Dick Taylor was in a band called Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Brian Jones was recruiting members for his own band, and these three joined up along with Ian Stewart. Jones came up with the name Rollin’ Stones for the band; they went through several drummers before Charlie Watts joined the line-up.

The name of the Rolling Stones is taken from a truly great blues song that Muddy Waters recorded as early as 1948 called “Rollin’ Stone”; it is on almost everyone’s short list as one of the greatest popular songs ever. The lyrics (not to mention the music) echo through dozens of rock songs over the decades since: “Well, my mother told my father / Just before I was born / I got a boy child’s comin’ / He’s gonna be, he’s gonna be a rollin’ stone.” Rolling Stone magazine is also named after “Rollin’ Stone”, as is Bob Dylan’s signature song, “Like a Rolling Stone”. The song is a bridge from the raw blues of Robert Johnson directly to rock and roll; while it is basically a straight blues song, there are startling changes in the beat and cadences over the course of “Rollin’ Stone”. Within the blues world, it is a direct antecedent to Muddy Waters’ 1954 recording of the Willie Dixon song “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man” (Steppenwolf included “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man” on their 1968 debut album Steppenwolf, among numerous other covers by various rock musicians), Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man” (1955), and Waters’ answer “Mannish Boy” (also in 1955). I suppose that Bo and Muddy had a pretty good rivalry going back then, but on several occasions, I saw a performance of “I’m a Man” by Muddy Waters in later life on a series of films on TV called Living Legends of the Blues – that rendition even leaves the cover of “I’m a Man” by the Yardbirds in the dust.

Dick Taylor played bass guitar with the nascent Stones but quit after several months when he was accepted at the London Central School of Art; his replacement in the Rolling Stones was Bill Wyman. While there, Taylor met Phil May; and together they founded the Pretty Things in 1963. The band is still active and still vital, and Dick Taylor and Phil May have been there the whole time as far as I know. Ugly Things magazine, which published my article on Milan year before last, has something on the Pretty Things in almost every issue. The band name – and that of Ugly Things magazine for that matter – is taken from yet another Bo Diddley song that is not so well known, “Pretty Thing” – about as close to a love song as the great man ever got.

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”. Twink left the band after a short while, and Steve Peregrin Took became the bandleader with the other two plus Phil Lenoir (drums), and later Dave Bidwell (percussion). The band is often called Steve Took’s Shagrat and was the springboard for Took’s solo career.

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.”

However, the Wikipedia article on Shagrat states the following: “Shagrat was a British supergroup formed by Steve Peregrin Took and Mick Farren in February 1970 after they split with Twink, their partner in the prototype Pink Fairies supergroup of late 1969.” Thus, the tracks on Pink Jackets Required might not be by Shagrat, strictly speaking. According to the liner notes: “The Think Pink tracks [“The Coming of the Other One”, “The Sparrow Is a Sign” and “Three Little Piggies”] were recorded at Recorded Sound Studios, London 1969 with various members of ‘The Pink Fairies Motorcycle Club All Star Rock and Roll Band’. The ‘Demo Versions 1 & 2’ [all other songs] were recorded at Denmark St. Studios, 1969 & 1970”. Individual musicians credited are Steve Peregrin Took, Twink and Paul Rudolph.

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.”

Think Pink was another thrilling find for me; my copy was marked up in ballpoint pen (apparently by a DJ) including a note describing the album as “Underground”.

Mick Farren stayed around just long enough to help found this amazing band; one Allmusic review that I can’t find now included a passing reference to the Pink Fairies as being the perfect 1970’s British rock band. However, Farren was still closely associated with the band; he co-wrote one of the best songs on Kings of Oblivion with Larry Wallis, “When’s the Fun Begin”. Mick Farren also wrote the liner notes for the Pink Fairies’ comeback album, Kill ’Em and Eat ’Em (1987).

This incident sums up Mick Farren’s political activity, which can best be described as mischievous (that shows through in a lot of his music as well) – as far as I am concerned, he is about as far from a bomb-throwing anarchist as it is possible to be. 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.

One of the main reasons for the location of the original Woodstock was to lure Bob Dylan out of hiding – the idea was to throw a huge party practically on his doorstep that surely he couldn’t resist attending. Woodstock is the name of the town where Dylan lived (and also members of the Band); the festival itself was in Bethel. But resist he did; Bob Dylan instead signed up to appear at the Isle of Wight Festival and set sail for England on August 15, 1969, the day that Woodstock opened.

The following year, Mick Farren organized his idea of what a rock festival should be. Called Phun City, it took place from July 24 to July 26, 1970. Unlike Woodstock and most other similar festivals, there were no admission fees and no fences. After the funding for the concert was withdrawn, the organizers had to notify the bands scheduled to appear that they would have to perform for free. Most of the bands agreed to go on anyway; ironically, one of the few bands that didn’t play was Free, best known for their 1970 hit “All Right Now”. Rock musicians who did perform included MC5, the Pretty Things, Kevin Ayers, Shagrat, the Edgar Broughton Band, Mungo Jerry, Mighty Baby, and the Pink Fairies; the Beat poet William Burroughs was also there.

Along with many other figures from the underground press, Mick Farren moved to the influential New Musical Express (NME) in 1974. Quoting again from the Telegraph obituary: “Allowed free rein to explore the outer reaches of popular culture by its editor, Nick Logan, Farren turned in a series of memorable pieces on people such as the motorbike stunt-rider Evel Knievel and the avant-garde film director Kenneth Anger.

“In the summer of 1976, by which time the Sex Pistols were introducing Britain to punk, Farren’s NME piece headlined ‘The Titanic Sails At Dawn’ [again using a Bob Dylan lyric, this time from one of my all-time favorites, “Desolation Row”] was judged to have caught the mood among the generation of teenagers disaffected by giant stadium acts like the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.”

By the end of the 1970’s, Mick Farren had moved to New York and began writing for The Village Voice. I was taking a mailorder subscription to the iconoclastic weekly in the early 1980’s and saw several of his articles. The first one that I remember mused on why the British had such bad dental hygiene and featured a “quiz” showing photos of rotten teeth that could be matched to a list of the English celebrities that had them. He later moved to Los Angeles and began writing for the LA Weekly. In all, Mick Farren wrote 36 books, including 11 non-fiction works. I ran across several science-fiction novels by Farren in used book stores, and I read some of them. He is perhaps best known in this regard for The DNA Cowboys trilogy: The Quest of the DNA Cowboys, Synaptic Manhunt, and The Neural Atrocity.

More recently, Mick Farren attracted a lot of followers for his “Doc 40” blogspot: http://doc40.blogspot.com/. Except for his essential role in making the 1960’s what they were, you could almost wish Mick had come along later – he was born to be a blogger. His final post was on July 15, 2013.

Musicians on hand include Larry Wallis of the Pink Fairies and Wilko Johnson of Dr. Feelgood; supporting vocals are provided by Sonja Kristina of Curved Air and Chrissie Hynde, the lead singer of Pretenders (a year and a half before their first album, Pretenders came out).

The tape was thought to be lost for many years but later turned up in a box, marked “Dingwalls”; and several tracks from the show were released by Total Energy Records on a 2000 CD called Cocaine Blues 1974-1978 with an artist name of Wayne Kramer & the Pink Fairies. This is somewhat misleading, as the concert was actually circa March 1979, and only Larry Wallis had ever performed as part of the Pink Fairies at that point in time. The complete tape of the concert was released as Wayne Kramer – Live at Dingwalls 1979 on Captain Trip Records in 2001; I don’t have this CD as yet.

Other than a song about oral sex that is a little hard to take, Cocaine Blues is quite good and features renditions of the MC5 classics “Ramblin’ Rose” and “Kick out the Jams”.

“I used to envy Elvis, but then he got fat and died. / I used to envy Marlon Brando, but then he got fat and his kid died. / I used to envy Jim Morrison, but then I got out of the tub. / Now I don’t envy anyone, because it causes bloating, and far too many funerals.”

Another Deviants CD came out in 1996 called Fragments of Broken Probes and is more of a compilation, with an excerpt from The 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.

About this time, Suzy Shaw had discovered the Wikipedia articles that I had been writing, and I was delighted to see that she had started using some of the copy from them in advertising albums for sale on the Bomp! mailorder website. When I pointed that out, she told me that she was wondering who had written all of that. Suzy even mentioned that Mick Farren had commented to her how good it was – and what could my response be to that except, “I’m not worthy . . . I’m not worthy!” The autograph by Suzy Shaw on my copy of the Bomp! book reads: “Thanks for the brilliant work! Suzy Shaw ’08”.

As described on the funtopia.com website: “On his return to England in 2009, he 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.”

Well, I did it again; I exceeded the 65,536-character limit for a Facebook post and only had room for the Mick Farren tribute.