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The
DEVIANTS were winding up the hippy establishment a decade before
punk. Kafka, Burroughs, Quatermass movies, Maxfield Parrish,
LSD 25, riots and amphetamines were complementing their sound,
inspired by the Fugs, Eddie Cochran, British R&B and the
Mothers Of Invention. |
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The
Deviants
: alive0014
Ptooff! - CD
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Farren/Lancaster
- Deviants
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alive0013
- Deathray Tapes CD
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Mick
Farren & The Deviants CD
This CD Is Condemned NER 3027
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Social
Deviants
:
EPCD - NER 3007
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Mick
Farren & The Deviants CD
On Your Knees Earthlings! NER 3031
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The Deviants : alive0015
Eating Jello with a Heated Fork
CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT
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| Mick Farren is one of the greatest
madcaps Britain has yet to produce, I hereby loudly exclaim,
and "On Your Knees" gathers together yet another full
hour's worth of luscious musical lunacy spanning he and his Deviants'
past quarter-century-plus of service towards inhumanity. Indeed,
wherever to begin?! Perhaps with a cover of one of Frank Zappa's
earliest and best salvos of social dung-tossing (yes, the "Freak
Out!"-vintage "Trouble Coming Every Day"), not
to mention a perversely Sabbath-sounding rendition of His Bobness'
"It's Alright Ma." Along similar lines, a wickedly
Dylanesque take on Nanker Phelge's "Play With Fire"
(complete with wholly appropriate background choruses of chiming
Marianne Faithfulls to boot) is soon enough followed by a frighteningly
apt "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean," served here
Stooges-style I kid you hardly, lest this particular musical
circle be at all unbroken. Then from the mighty pen of Farren
himself comes, to cite only several, "All In The Picture"
(Beefheart meets Buzzcocks!), "I'm Coming Home" (utterly
worthy of Eric Burdon's New Animals circa "The Twain Shall
Meet") and a trio of songs, "Deviation Street"
especially, which SO easily out-Barretts the extremely early
P. Floyd with one bottleneck tied behind its back. Yet still,
I only touch but the tip of the sonic iceberg here my friends,
and can only now urge all to seek out this disc, and its companion
collection "Th is CD Is Condemned," as very quickly
as you possibly can. Promise, everyone? - Gary Pig Gold / In
music We Trust |
| Ever thought of crossing Bo Diddley
(by way of The Rolling Stones, Now!) with side four of the Mothers
of Invention's Freak Out, then adding a liberal-indeed wallop
of Ozzy Osbourne vs. Kim Fowley? Me neither... 'til I heard this
definitive-and-THEN-some 19-song, 29-year overview of Mick Farren
and Co. Insane, indefensible, and extremely indispensable, I
tell you all! - PIGPROD (THE DEAD FLOWERS MONTHLY TOP-10 LISTS
/ #1 Deviants) |
| For the nearly thirty years that this
maniac has been making manic music, it is sad that Farren remains
relatively unknown. From psychedelic to insanity and back to
surf garage, THE DEVIANTS has made some music that needs to be
known, yet remains as ensconced within the unknown as it is outside
the norm (although listeners new to this band would think it
olde hat despite it initially being far ahead of its time and
rivaled only by such renowned luminaries as Frank Zappa and MOTHERS
OF PREVENTION, Sun Ra, THE STANDELLLS, early PINK FLOYD, CAPTAIN
BEEFHEART and THE DAMNED). Angry Thoreauan |
| Review of "On Your Knees Earthlings"
on the Lollipop
site / Read
Ken Shimamoto's review of "Give the
Anarchist a Cigarette" |
MICK FARREN's notes for PTOOFF! A thousand miles of
barbed wire starts with the first barb...
There I was, cocky and
paranoid, yet another anarchist art student teenage asshole,
rebel without a clue, too dumb to recognize the impossible but
with that burning desire to do it. It was 1967, and all things
seemed possible, we wanted the world and we wanted it now. Vietnam
was getting ugly and LSD-25 was hitting the headlines. To make
PTOOFF!, I'd hit up an alcoholic kid millionaire
who'd inherited his old man's real estate empire at age seventeen.
(He'd later finance an abortive Marxist revolution on the island
of Trinidad. After that, his family got together with government
and had him locked up in The Big Clinic.) The grand plan was
to cut, press, package, and distribute PTOOFF! to
freaks clear across the planet. The PTOOFF! sessions
were only the second time I'd set foot in a recording studio.
The first had been a bizarre encounter with some fake Bob Dylan
tunes in the key of E that I'd hacked out on my Hofner acoustic
for a Denmark street hustler with designs on my young, amphetamine
skinny body. We, The Deviants, embarked on our voyage of the
damned with no record company, no restraining hand, no real idea
of what we were doing. We were also highly confused. Sid Bishop
and Cord Rees still hung in the wanna-be pop star world where
you made a fortune and bought a Cadillac like Elvis or John Lennon.
(Yeah, right, and that was going to happen in a band calling
itself The Social Deviants?). Me, Russell Hunter, and Duncan
Sanderson were full-time psychedelic dropouts. Sanderson was
even working as Yoko Ono's assistant. We'd been raised on Gene
Vincent, Phil Spector, and the Pretty Things. The Fugs had convinced
us that incompetence could prosper, and the first Mothers Of
Invention records had hit our radar like a bad alien spacecraft.
We'd heard an advance demo tape of the Velvet Underground at
some King's Road party and immediately stolen it. Beyond that,
the remaining reference points were Roland Kirk, Charles Mingus,
and what Pete Townsend could get up when he was totally out of
his brain. Our one advantage was a rabidly homosexual lunatic
sound collagist called Jack Henry Moore, who'd studied with John
Cage (and also been on the road with Little Richard) who turned
us onto tricks like running infinite tape loops between two Grundig
recorders some twenty feet apart, and taking snatches of sound
from TV and radio on a mono cassette machine and feeding them
straight into the four track. He'd constantly repeat the line
that Tuli Kupferberg stole from Plato; "When the mode of the music changes,
the walls of the city shake".
Some say the cover of the album was a bigger hit than the record.
The original fold-out was six feet square, silk screen printed
at the same factory that turned out indecipherable posters for
hippie freakouts. We stole the imagery from Steve Ditko and Jack
Kirby, that era at Marvel Comics when Dr. Strange and the Fantastic
Four got weird. DJ John Peel wrote the liner notes. You wanted
"underground"? Damm, did we have underground. For a
while there, we thought we were making glorious revolution. Later,
it turned out that we really were only making our first record.
Yeah, but you live and learn, don't you? A thousand miles of
barbed wire starts with the first barb. - Mick Farren,1995 |
| MICK FARREN's notes for DEATHRAY TAPES
Nels Cline's New Music
Night at the Alligator Lounge in Santa Monica was a crap game
of audio art where Thurston Moore could and did rub shoulders
with New Wave virtual oboes imitating humpbacked whales. The
more we played there, particularly when Wayne Kramer became a
regular guest, the more the sound expanded in volume and aggression,
until Cline (an ear bleeding sonofabitch himself) dubbed it "avant
garde stadium rock." It was lucky we met Doug Lunn at the
Alligator, a bassist of subtlety and intelligence, or we might
have exploded in raw sound. Doung brought Anastasios Panos, as
razor precise and rock steady drummer as any iconoclast could
desire. We had the nucleus, and when Patrick Boissel at Alive
wanted to know if we could cut a live album, the answer was "ready
as we gonna be boss". After a bunch of rehearsals, an orientation
gig at the Alligator Lounge, a vocal workout for me at a poetry
joint called the Onyx, ready was the truth. The Pink is a Santa
Monica performance bar. I'd had a play of mine A Criminal
Sorority, produced there a couple of years before and
I knew it had a crisp, manageable sound, a helpful attitude,
and also a liquor license. On June 7th, a truckload of digital
equipment was loaded in. Peter Kelsey, an old friend of Jack's
and a hero of mine on account of his work with Jean-Luc Ponty,
was given the helm. Andy Colquhoum, Wayne Kramer, and Brad Dourif,
who is not a psychopath, but plays one in the movies, were added
to the chemistry. Finally an audience of the discerning and near-famous
were rolled in and the result was The Deathray Tapes.
So what do you do when the music you're making is all but unclassifiable?
You got it. Break into psychotic laughter and look out Mexico.
Mick Farren, 1995 |
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