by Mick Farren
Imperial courts are invariably closed and poisonous snake pits, and with Nigel well on the way to forming his weird empire, his was no exception. The alternative society was not without its alternative social climbers, and outside our immediate circle there were plenty of Samuel hangers-on ready to advise on how the Deviants’ album should be made, or possibly not made at all. By the time he offered to finance the record, Nigel seemed to have financial fingers in most of the enterprises in what remained of the underground. He had moved himself into a piece of penthouse property on the north side of Cavendish Square, which served as his dark tower where he could brood, drink and drop lighted cigarettes on the priceless Persian rugs. He had moved in one of the ladies of the Exploding Galaxy dance troupe to make his life somewhat more comfortable, but his demons still beset him.
In addition to a wild-child girlfriend – who I believe later became a wild-child wife – he had also bought a Lotus Elan, which was even more suicidal than the Ferrari. By far his biggest investment, however, had been in IT. He had provided it with a permanent home in Betterton Street, just five minutes from our flat in Shaftesbury Avenue, and, to prove that he was serious, he’d had the outside painted a garish orange with a large blow-up of the IT girl overlaid in black. Although it was the IT building, the paper took up only three of the floors. Nigel retained the top floor for his own use, and the basement was rented to ECAL, Miles’ distribution company. In his own weird way Nigel Samuel was attempting to give the revolution a corporate structure. I fancy, had I been part of IT, that I would have resisted Nigel’s masterplan with all the vocal volume I could muster, but Dave Hall and Bill Levy seemed to enjoy it, so I continued to dismiss it as none of my concern. I had an album to make, and I had to ensure that it wasn’t masterplanned out of existence.
The first move was to start recruiting the extra people we’d need over and above the actual members of the band. Although Nigel was financing the deal, it didn’t mean that we had unlimited funds to piss away. The budget was going to be tight, and it had to be made clear to all involved that this was going to be for love, fun and free dope and beer; no one was going to get rich behind PTOOFF! As we metaphorically rode around recruiting a team, like Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen in The Magnificent Seven, our first call was on Jack Henry Moore. I don’t know if Jack appreciated what I was doing, loved me because I was crazy or simply liked the idea of having a well-equipped recording studio as a temporary playground, but he instantly signed up for the duration all the same.
In all respects, with Jack Moore, we’d struck gold. First blessing: Jack was totally acclimatised to Nigel and his ways. Also the Arts Lab was up and running on Drury Lane, and Jack’s sound equipment was all in one place, set up and ready for psychedelic pre-production. We could also rehearse in the basement cinema that, after a few months of after-hours orgies, was starting to smell a little strange. With digital technology and sampling nothing more than a science-fiction dream, the pre-production was a matter of mix, match and make do, with Heath Robinson set-ups using tape loops and two stereo recorders set ten feet apart, rolling the same continuous tape. We repeated, we echoed, we pillaged industrial sounds and primitive percussion, and even attempted phoney phone calls decades before the Jerky Boys. By using the trick of the two machines and one tape, patched to an outside phone line, it was possible to call someone and have them talking to a delayed echo of their own voice.
We made calls to a selection of leading lights in the underground and the avant-garde, thinking that most would realise what was happening. It transpired that we’d greatly overestimated the intelligentsia. Most simply hung up on us, while others became flustered, confused and even angry. One well-known poet started screaming increasingly vitriolic abuse until he’d reach a peak of both volume and profanity, and then slammed down the phone. The only one who twigged, and turned the mystery into an impromptu performance, was Yoko Ono; when I later got on the line and explained what we were doing, Yoko – who, even then, had a formidable reputation as a hard-nosed businesswoman – was more than agreeable to us using the tape.
The second recruit to the team was Steve Sparks. Steve had a Romany gypsy background and was another ex-mod from East London, who thought that pop music had ended with Phil Spector, but still took a delight in anything that might cause trouble. He was one of the old-style mods, the ‘modernists’ who pre-dated – and rightly thought themselves infinitely superior to – the scooter boys who followed. The ‘modernists’ were essentially stylish beatniks, working-class existentialists who smoked Gitanes, drank Guinness, looked at the pictures in Salut Les Copains although they couldn’t read a word of French and worshipped Miles Davis in his golden era of cool, copying his silk suits and perfect mannerisms. Steve had, in his glory days, been written up in Harpers or Man about Town as one of the leading trendsetters, and had engaged in an intense rivalry with Mark Feld, another early pretender to the spurious title ‘King Mod’, who would later grow his hair, write ‘Hippie Gumbo’ and change his name to Marc Bolan.
Like so many others, Steve had entered the music business as a social secretary – in his case at Barking Technical College – and by organising folk and rock shows in the East End. With a pretty unerring eye for happening talent, he booked acts as diverse as the Who (when they were still the High Numbers), all the way to Bert Jansch and Davy Graham; he even boasted having paid Cream a mere seventy quid to play an early tryout gig. I first met Steve at UFO. Like any old mod with a mouth on him, he always had some creative reason why he should get in for free, and after a while all pretence was abandoned and I simply waved him through. Usually he’d come back later and we’d chat. Unless he knew Joe from elsewhere, Steve must have made other contacts at the club, because when Boyd set up Witchseason, his production and management company, Steve was hired as the publicist. At the same time he agreed to work with the Deviants as publicist, manager and mentor.
I think Steve believed that I saw him as some kind of East End super-hustler who would make me a star, but the truth was that there was always a strong streak of parody in our relationship, a tongue-in-cheek Tom Parker to a hopelessly preposterous Elvis, although I was grateful even for that. We were so damned young that few realised, as the one walking permanent point on this mission, that I was subject to a high degree of wear and tear and needed someone to flatter my ego occasionally. As a co-conspirator, Sparks was the perfect foil. He would support anything outrageous and would even, at times, come on stage with us, to set fires and detonate explosions. He also turned out to be a damned good publicist, although there were times when I got tired of being pitched as the ‘worst band in the world’. A sample of his hyperbolic style can be gleaned from a 1988 interview. No human could have survived in the myths that Steve conjured up:
The Deviants’ fans were psychotic. Our groupies were the ugliest in the world and also among the most aggressive in the world. You didn’t turn down a Deviants groupie else you’d get your legs broken. Really, really strange people. Take acid in a room full of Deviants fans and you’d end up screaming, jumping out of a window.
What Steve really wanted to do was produce the album, a process that involved him chainsmoking Gitanes and nodding knowingly with his eyes closed. Unfortunately Nigel had already installed an overseer/producer of his own, but, by way of a consolation title, we called Steve our A&R man – whatever the hell that was supposed to mean – and his production input became part of the process. At first we assumed that Jonathan Weber, our imposed producer, would be nothing more than Nigel’s stooge, reporting back to him every time we fucked up, or lifted our noses from the grindstone, but as it turned out he was affable, knowledgeable and an invaluable help, and created a much-needed bond of confidence with Victor, the engineer, who like to be referred to as ‘Sister George’, but clearly considered the rest of us fascinating in our abnormality. And a great deal of confidence was needed. We were working with the same four-track technology as the Beatles had used to cut Sgt Pepper, but the Beatles had
burned up more than 700 hundred hours on their masterwork. All the Deviants had was a worryingly incalculable timeframe that would end arbitrarily the day that Nigel looked at the meter and blew his stack.
The difficulty with four-track is that, since you have to constantly mix down the layers of recording progress, a great deal of pre-planning is needed, and irreversible decisions have to be made long before the overall picture becomes at all clear. In this, the unlikely trio of Jonathan, Jack and Steve succeeded beyond all expectations and, with no false modesty, I was also grasping the logistics very quickly, learning as I went. We made it easy for ourselves by restricting the album to three or four more or less conventional rock songs, plus three long and more involved pieces with various movements, which became the vehicles for most of Jack and my pre-production loops – although we couldn’t find a context for Yoko. With cutups, blackouts, singing and spoken word, it was ambitious stuff for first-timers, even though shamelessly Zappa-influenced. The riff of one of the longer rock songs, ‘I’m Coming Home’, resurfaced four years later on David Bowie’s ‘Jean Genie’. Creative happenstance (and flattering), but ironic that a song supposedly about Iggy Pop was set to a recycled Deviants riff.
While the recording progressed, more individuals came into the fold. The Firm became involved in the distribution of the record, and would eventually take over the entire thing, persuading Nigel to sell them the rights in perpetuity – a perpetuity that Peter Shertser and I continue to fight over to this day. Miles and John Peel supported from the periphery, with Miles occasionally interceding with Nigel when matters grew too fraught. And fraught increasingly became the condition, as the working relationship with Nigel grew more tortuous and his pirouettes and wobblers more frequent. Fraught also seemed to be the name of the game being played by our new-found bass player.
Cord Rees was manoeuvring, but I was too inexperienced in the ways of rock groups to be able to spot it until it was all but too late. As the sessions proceeded, he seemed to be working very hard to be Nigel’s friend. Not that there was anything wrong with that. God only knows, Nigel have could used a few friends, but Cord was so transparently playing the courtier when Nigel was around that I should have warned myself to watch my back. After he and Nigel had spent the evening together, I’d have Nigel on the phone the next day in some absurd fit of anxiety about the recording, which I could only figure came directly from Cord, or maybe Cord in concert with some of the often hostile, non-Deviant entourage.
I finally realised what was happening only when he finally tried to take me out. Cord’s ploy was to wind up Nigel on the exhausted subject of how Mick couldn’t sing. (Yeah, and Jackson Pollock couldn’t draw, so what’s the relevance?) The first I knew of this was when I was summoned around noon one day by an odd-sounding Nigel to his top-floor office in Betterton Street. I’ve never taken kindly to summonses, but the tone of today’s dementia sounded extra-strained and so, instead of telling our boy-patron to fuck off, I dressed and ambled over. When I walked into his office Nigel had already been drinking for a while. Without preamble he launched into the most stunning piece of craziness to date. My voice wasn’t up to recording an album, and the lead vocals should be done by a session singer. At long last I lost it. ‘Fuck you, Nigel! I don’t have to listen to this garbage.’
He took a step back. The self-destructive can be unstoppable when they no longer care. ‘It’s what I do and why I’m doing it, and if you’ve got a problem with that, you’d better find some other demented guinea pig to front your “first record to emerge solely from the underground”.’ Shit or bust-time, and I warmed to my rant. ‘Of course I can’t sing in the conventional sense, but the time to worry about that was when you made the initial offer, not halfway through the bloody sessions. You always knew what you were getting into.’
Now that the penny had finally dropped, my instincts told me that Cord was pitching to do all the vocals himself. Meanwhile, Nigel was ashen-faced. I don’t think anyone had screamed at him like that in a very long time. Surrounded by courtiers, he’d forgotten what righteous fury was really like. I decided it was time to flip my hole card. ‘I very much doubt if Sid, Russell, Jack and Sparks will go along with this shit, and even if they do, it’s going to be a bitch for them to finish this record, because a lot of crucial information is only in my head. Ask Jonathan Weber.’
Nigel retreated behind his large antique desk, which dominated one end of the room, and flopped petulantly into his high-backed Citizen Kane mogul chair. This was always the move when he felt under pressure. ‘Yes.’
That was all he said. No argument or counter-measure, just ‘Yes’. Then he poured himself a Scotch from the ever-near decanter and, after a slight hesitation, poured me one. Finally he picked up the phone and started making someone else’s life miserable. I assumed it consituted a kind of oblique apology and an instruction to forget the whole conversation. The matter seemed to be settled, but on the way out of the building I was dazed. Now something had to be done about Brother Cord. The son-of-a-bitch had been given an extremely fair shake in terms of the recorded limelight. He’d already sung on one tune, the gentle folk-mawk ‘Child of the Sky’, and had contributed an acoustic interlude dedicated to his wife, who went by the less-than-elegant pet name of ‘Bun’. All his parts were done, since the bass invariably goes down first, and in theory I could fire him without any practical loss. I held off, though; I didn’t want morale taking a nosedive in the last furlong.
Once again, blind luck held. Cord Rees solved all my problems by going spectacularly mad. Just two or three days after I’d been screaming at Nigel, he walked into the flat on Shaftesbury Avenue and dropped a bomb of epic proportions. Bun had died during a miscarriage. We were horribly shocked – not least Nigel, who had quite a thing about death after his father’s suicide. We told him to take all the time he needed and that we’d stumble on without him. It was impossible to cancel the remaining sessions, but we’d cope.
Then, a couple of days later, Sandy spotted the allegedly deceased Bun walking down the other side of Oxford Street as large as life and twice as healthy. Sandy swiftly darted between cabs and buses to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating or witnessing a paranormal phenomenon.
‘Hey, Bun! Hang on!’
‘Sandy . . .’
‘Are you okay?’
She looked at him as though it was she who should be asking the question. ‘Of course I’m okay, why shouldn’t I be?’
Sandy mumbled his way out of both the impasse and his own shock, then dashed back to report to the rest of us. Cord’s head was in some aberrant place that none of us felt equipped even to enter. Without further ado, we hustled him out of the band and out of our lives. Callous perhaps, but this was a rock band, not a therapy group. Anyway, we’d only known Cord a matter of weeks, and if there was any therapy going spare, it would have to be used on Nigel, who had been effectively rendered a basketcase by this psychiatric detonation.
Oddly, when mixed, PTOOFF! not only came out rather well, but sold in reasonable numbers for its limited and experimental distribution. By a bizarre irony, the record still enjoys a weird vogue today, both as an icon of the low-fi, techno fans and as an artefact prized by psychedelic collectors. I guess it’s like John Huston, playing the infinitely corrupt patriarch Noah Cross in the movie Chinatown, remarked, ‘Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.’ Conceivably the same thing applies to strange pieces of recorded music.
Road Warriors
To have our ideas, dreams and even our fears and neuroses turned into a solid physical object like a long-playing record, a plastic artefact that people were actually going into shops and buying with their hard-earned cash, can have a decidedly sobering effect. Perhaps ‘sobering’ is the wrong word for the Deviants, considering the band’s avowed dedication to never drawing an unintoxicated breath, but we certainly faced the realisation that we had to treat seriously what we were doing. We’d taken the king’s shilling and
were now expected to behave like a commercial rock band and go out on the road to promote our album. On another level, however, we were also assumed to be packing the entire counterculture into the truck, and taking it round the country like some revolutionary revival show. In this, we really had very little choice, even though many moments of doubt ensued when individual band members, and sometimes even the entire band, wished it were otherwise. We were perceived as the rockers from the underground and, in the territory we occupied, perception was everything. If the sentiments and implied commitments made with the music on PTOOFF! were not just cynical or mindless posturing, we had to take the same rant and confusion out on the road.
The greater excesses of the counterculture had really been confined to London and a few major cities, and when we rolled into the medium-sized towns we were expected to bring a part of the excess with us; all that stuff they had read about in IT, or, in more garbled and lurid form, in News of the World. We were supposed to re-create the party they’d missed. They also wanted signposts – they wanted a taste of the alternative. Some even thought we should be handing out free acid, like Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. We were expected to fight a weird good fight night after night, venue after venue, town after town, with the surrealism of history continuously repeating itself and the uneasy sense that we could never fully meet all the expectations, short of strapping dynamite to our bodies and blowing ourselves up. I could see why Pink Floyd had so swiftly abdicated from the psychedelic underground and into their own art. The Deviants, however, didn’t have that choice and remained the killer-clowns of the revolution.
Now my own view of the world began to distort. I was travelling all over the country. I was unquestionably in a unique position to observe as the rock ’n’ drug culture spread to the provinces, and as our embryonic alternative society became increasingly politicised, but all the observations came through the context of being in a bloody rock band. The dilettante gadfly was dead, and I was looking at life through the windshield of a Ford Transit. Of course, I couldn’t complain. It was the job I’d always craved. I was no longer writing for IT; in fact, I was hardly writing anything, except song lyrics and related poetry. This is not to say that I was solidly on the road throughout that period, but the Deviants were my focus.
