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

Read the I-94 review of "This CD is Condemned"

Review of "On Your Knees Earthlings" on the Dead Flowers site

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