by Mick Farren
I opted for the tincture rather than the paste and, for two or three months, before the stocks ran out and the whole adventure became history, I would pick up a prescription from Sam every Wednesday. After a chat with Sam, I’d take a cab over to the upper-crust chemist’s on Wigmore Street to collect my half-pint of sinister green cannabis tincture; the same green that, in the Nineties, The X-Files made synonymous with invading alien nastiness. The prescription was dispensed with a perfectly straight face by one of the counter staff, and I then scuttled back to Shaftesbury Avenue, where a coterie of my closest mates, which always included the dauntless Boss Goodman, and often Twink and Took, awaited my return with some anticipation. In the living room, in front of the yellow-painted telly, I’d uncap the magical bottle with a ceremonial flourish, take the first swig and then pass it around. Like Hopi at a peyote ceremony, or maybe more like drunks on a bombsite, we swigged and passed. Since the extract of cannabis was in a solution of pure alcohol, the first effect was that we all became exceedingly drunk, fell around and babbled aimlessly. When, however, the effects of the alcohol began to wear off, we found ourselves as high as kites, higher than one could reasonably get just by smoking the stuff.
That we were never busted at 212 was nothing short of a miracle. We could only suppose that Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher – the notorious ‘Semolina Pilchard’ from the Beatles’ ‘I Am the Walrus’, the scourge of all dopefiend rockers – was too busy chasing luminaries like Brian Jones and John Lennon to bother with a band as humble as us. The Deviants seemed to pass completely under his radar, and very glad we were too, at least for that aspect of our apparent lack of fame.
A Cold Day in Hell
The heater in the truck was broken, our record label had turned out really to be owned by bluebeat gangsters and another winter of discontent was upon us. We’d been up North: Durham, Newcastle, all the way up the entire bloody country, with rain turning to sleet and the slapping of the windscreen wipers like Chinese water torture, no matter how many Motown classics we sung to raise our spirits. It wasn’t that we weren’t having any fun at all. Intoxicants abounded. The good gigs still counterbalanced the bad. The wild shows with the Pretty Things were always a satisfactory laugh. We were amassing a following at clubs like Middle Earth in London and Mothers in Birmingham. We had even spent an amusing, if bizarre, evening at the Royal Festival Hall, playing a benefit to help cover the legal costs of one of the satirical magazine Private Eye’s innumerable libel suits.
Sharing a bill with what was accepted as the liberal/arts establishment – Peter Cook, John Wells, John Bird, George Melly and the like – we decided to make the absolute maximum effort. Exaggeratedly making ourselves up like a quartet of silent-movie vamps, years before the New York Dolls ever picked up a lipstick, I was amazed at just how fundamentally conservative these people really were. Only Melly seemed to realise that what we were doing was a theatrical put-on, although Russell seemed to be actively enjoying himself and would repeat the process at subsequent gigs, making himself look as much like Helen Shapiro as he could. The door of the dressing room kept opening, as familiar faces like Eleanor Bron and William Rushton peered in at us as though we were a collection of exotic mutants on loan from the galactic zoo.
With only ten minutes playing time allotted, we decided to do the short and snappy single from Disposable called ‘You Gotta Hold On’, and then grind into as much of ‘Sister Ray’ as we could get away with. At least, that was the plan. As it turned out, we were only a matter of bars into the brief set when the audience went into what can only be described as a fugue state. A representative percentage, particularly those in the fifty-quid seats, who had come along expecting to see the likes of Johnny Dankworth and Cleo Laine, and comedians being slightly risqué, seemed to forget that they were essentially supporting freedom of speech and expression and took an immediate and vocal dislike to us, yelling at us to get off the stage. This triggered a smaller, but louder, faction to attack the complainants for their intolerance. No fist fights broke out, but, from the stage, it was fascinating to watch the effect we were having on this entirely novel audience. The net result was that we played much longer than we intended and screwed up the entire schedule, because we refused to stop playing until the conflict resolved itself and didn’t want to appear to be retreating under hostile pressure.
Events like the Private Eye benefit were high-voltage intervals, rather than the norm, and only briefly dispelled the gathering gloom. I suspect that the real problem in the band was that we’d started to count the cost of what we were doing and were becoming more aware of the wear and tear. We were working a lot, but somehow the ends never seemed to meet. The gigs were becoming increasingly routine and, without a record blazing a trail across the sky, we felt like hamsters on the wheel, running continuously but getting nowhere. We’d been hyped into believing in instant gratification, but all we faced was an endless grind. And this sets a band to the kind of bitching and whining that is only a short jump from conspiracy, mutiny and professional assassination. The madames in old-time brothels used to complain that whores with too little to do got religion. Likewise, musicians with too much repetition turn ugly and recalcitrant. Just to complicate matters, Mandrax, the easily abused hypnotic sleeping pills that Americans call Qualuudes, had also come into the picture, and some members of the band were constantly stumbling, wobbling, unconscious or suffering bleak and bad-tempered hangovers.
The scapegoat for the growing dissent among the ranks was Sid Bishop. At root it was petty. There wasn’t too much wrong with his guitar playing, and the major accusation that could be levelled against him was that he wasn’t of quite the same demography as the rest of us. Bear in mind, however, that the rest of us were, by this point, total degenerates, and Sid had only one foot in the slime. As Russell would admit, years later, ‘We got rid of Sid because we didn’t like his wife.’ Sure, his wife Jill epitomised the conventional housewife and did little to hide her horror at the crew with which Sid had thrown in his musical lot, and, evil bastards, we did everything we could to divorce him from her influence. We even tried in vain to set him up with Jenny Fabian, but even that bohemian temptation couldn’t break up his semi-detached, suburban domesticity.
Russell’s admission was less than the entire truth, however. The root cause of the discontent with Sid was geographic. In order to maintain Jill in the style that she desired, he lived in darkest South London. Streatham or thereabouts. With Boss and Tony out in the eastern hinterlands of Goodmayes, Sandy and me in the West End and Russell in Ladbroke Grove, collecting and depositing Sid in South London at the beginning and end of trips constituted a major detour. Picking him up became a pain in the arse, but dropping him off afterwards, when we only wanted to lie down and die, became a resented last straw for a bunch of tired and spitting camels. It may sound ridiculous to the outside observer, but that’s how the small inconveniences become magnified into capital transgressions, when a bunch of men have been around each other far too long and have heard all the jokes.
On the road up North I had become so heartily sick of the Edgar Allan Poe vibe permeating the truck that I asked to be dropped off in Carlisle to spend a couple of days with Carol and then return to London by train. A big error in that I’d given the band, on the apparently miserable drive back to London, far too much time to talk about me behind my back. When I got back to the capital, the first person I heard from was Steve Sparks.
‘You’ve got big trouble.’
‘I have?’
‘Oh yes.’
As Steve told it, a plan had been hatched to get rid of both Sid and me, get a new guitar player and bring in Russell’s girlfriend as lead singer, thus turning the Deviants into the West London Jefferson Airplane.
‘You’ve got to be kidding.’
Steve shook his head. He wasn’t kidding, although he may have been exaggerating.
‘It’s fucking crazy. They’ll never pull that together.’
‘Did anyone
ever claim the Deviants were sane?’
He made sense, but I wasn’t prepared to see the band come to ultimate grief on the rocks of an unworkable malcontent fantasy. For once in my life, I made a fast and highly self-serving move. Despite Disposable turning out to be something of a débâcle, Steve – as a way to reinstate himself after defecting to the Doors – had drummed up the chance of a recording deal with Nat Joseph at Transatlantic Records, who had taken it into his head that there might be a percentage in creating a roster of progressive and psychedelic bands. To head off the benighted ugliness that seemed to be festering among my comrades, I got Sparks to instigate a meeting with Nat and, after talking and drinking his boardroom Scotch for a couple of hours, we came out of his offices on Marylebone High Street with a three-album deal. My hole card was that only two albums would be by the Deviants and the third would be, if I so decided, a solo Mick Farren work.
The Transatlantic deal was less than ideal in many ways. The advance was far from fantastic, but that came as no surprise. Steve had warned me that Nat was parsimonious, not to say cheap, but losers can’t be choosers, and I urgently needed both a stick and carrot to drive and lure the insurgents back into line. Also Nat had no real experience of selling rock ’n’ roll. He was a dapper businessman whose first love was folk music. He’d given first-album shots to Bert Jansch and John Renbourne, and also held the UK rights to the Folkways catalogue, which meant he was the local connection for Woody Guthrie, Big Bill Broonzy and Blind Lemon Jefferson records. The closest he came to rock was when he discovered that he owned a couple of albums by the Fugs as part of a catalogue licensing deal. He had also released the legendary psychedelic single ‘Granny Takes a Trip’ by the Purple Gang, but the record’s underground success was so immediate that Nat hadn’t been able to press copies fast enough for it to make the charts, even though the demand was there.
I didn’t, of course, relay these misgivings to the rest of the band. The fait accompli that I laid on them was that we had a shot at making another album, but I was also, down the pike, going to be doing another record on my own. This raised a few eyebrows, but they were provisionally lowered when I told them about the possible third album. If they were still set on being the bloody Ladbroke Grove Airplane, they could go right ahead and pitch the idea to Nat as the third record on the contract, and I wouldn’t say a word. In calling their bluff, I had also covered my own arse. Nothing comes without a trade-off, though. A couple of days later, after brooding on it, Russell and Sandy – backed up by Boss and Tony – made it clear that, if the Deviants were going to continue and make this next album as the first of three, Sid had to go.
Enter the Canadian
Paul Rudolph was a huge lumberjack from British Columbia with hair past his shoulders and a withered right arm. He’d had polio as a kid and been given a guitar as occupational therapy. He had arrived at Heathrow with a cherry-red Gibson and a Fender Precision bass. What clothes he had were stuffed into any spare space in the two guitar cases. He had checked into the airport at Vancouver with a suitcase as well, but, when Air Canada told him that his luggage was overweight and liable for surcharge, he had dumped it in favour of the instruments. The move was typical of Rudolph. The Deviants’ new guitar player had virtually no interest in anything except playing his music, smoking the best dope he could get his hands on, occasional sex and, as we’d learn later, riding state-of-the-art racing bicycles. He never went to the movies, only watched TV by default, infrequently listened to anyone’s music but his own and the joke was that he’d read a book once, but hadn’t liked it and hadn’t tried again. His sense of style was all but non-existent, as was evidenced by the way he arrived in London in hideous elephant-cord bell bottoms and a shirt that appeared to have been stolen from a convict.
With so little in common, it was hardly surprising that Rudolph and I didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye. I really dug his guitar playing, but this wasn’t quite reciprocated in his attitude towards me as a poet and performer. It wasn’t that we didn’t get along. On the surface he was amiable, but the Freudian waters ran deep. The conspiring factors that had landed him, his guitars and his Freudian waters in our world were, to say the least, complicated. The fulcrum had been another Canadian called Jamie Mandelkau, plausible, good-looking, bespectacled, with flowing Haight Ashbury locks, who started showing up at 212 essentially at Joy’s behest. I had no grounds or even much motivation to complain when the two of them started seeing each other. Joy and I were doing nothing more than sharing an apartment. I brought girls home fairly regularly and, after some vestigial awkwardness, the situation settled into a reasonably workable routine, a little out of the ordinary perhaps, but by no means outrageously unorthodox by the standards of the time. Or maybe I was both deceived and deceiving myself. Let’s not forget that, after some three years in the depths of the underground, my appreciation of the orthodox was extremely atrophied.
That Jamie should actually move in was never discussed, but rather came about by increments and fait accompli. The actual transition from Jamie the gentleman caller to Jamie the resident was also camouflaged by an outbreak of high drama. As far as I could piece the story together, Jamie had been hanging out in Earls Court with a partner who went by the name of Longhaired John. John unfortunately wound up dead, apparently the victim of some bad speed that someone may or may not have given him by accident. Cloaked in a crisis that hinted at possible murder, Jamie, shocked and grieving, came seeking aid and comfort from Joy, and somehow never went away.
Okay, so he turned up with his stuff, such as it was. That was understandable. The heat was on, and it made sense that he should stay away from his old haunts in Earls Court. When some days had passed and he was still ensconced in Joy’s room, it seemed churlish to ask when he might be going home, since clearly he had no home to go to. Jamie rapidly became a fact of life, part of the 212 community, and that seemed to be that. Again it might have been okay, had some boundaries been observed. Jamie was funny, friendly, easy to get along with and a consummate hustler, who actually talked his way into both the pub and the off-licence giving us credit. He was also my size and I could borrow his clothes. He contributed when he could to the domestic expenses, with money from sources that had nothing to do with the Deviants. This on its own scored him a hell of a lot of points. The problem for a band, or part of a band, living in the same place is that they stand or fall by a common fortune. If Jamie had just kept his opinions to himself, all might have been well; needless to say, he didn’t, and it wasn’t.
Jamie had an opinion on just about everything. Some I agreed with, and others were simply full of shit. He even had an opinion during the endless bickering about the band and what we were going to do about Sid. He started telling us how he knew this shit-hot Hendrix-style guitarist back in Vancouver, who would jump at the chance to join us. I probably should have told Jamie that, while I had no quarrel with his fucking my wife and living in the end bedroom, he really should keep his nose out of my business. The problem was that we functioned as a community round at 212 and, as a community, free speech was an absolute article of faith, so individual business rapidly became family business. To some degree, the Deviants really were everyone’s business. If we didn’t have a working guitar player, the phone and electricity bills didn’t get paid. To compound the situation, Sandy, Russell and Boss became quite fascinated with the idea of Paul Rudolph, this guitar god on the other side of the world. In short order, avenues of communication were opened and it was decided that, if Paul wanted to give it a shot, we were willing to do the same.
When the first rehearsal was convened in a room above a pub in Islington, it turned out that Jamie, although prone to exaggeration in most things, had told it to us straight. Rudolph really was a shit-hot Hendrix-style guitar player. He also had a pleasing personality, a love of marijuana and a tendency to drop into the persona of a cartoon pirate called Black George, exclaiming catchphrases like ‘avast there, you lubbers’ in a bad Robert Newton/Long John Silver
accent. Sid had jumped ship seconds before we were going axe him, sparing me from feeling like too base a betrayer, but we were under the gun. We’d cancelled a couple of weeks of gigs, but a promoter in Southampton kept phoning, claiming he’d sold a lot of tickets and we just had to put on a show. With only two rehearsals behind us we played our first gig with Paul, after which the promoter had the gall to burn us for half the money, claiming that we’d played a short set and didn’t sound together.
In the beginning, it seemed as if Rudolph was the answer to our collective prayers. The band took on a new lease of life. The novelty of a new member in the van lowered the level of acrimony, and the music not only came back alive but quickly developed a more plausible edge. My only complaint was that the guitar solos grew longer and longer, which left me with that Roger Daltrey, onstage redundancy of hopping from one foot to the other and banging a tambourine or some other infant noise-maker while the great guitar screeched and thundered on and on.
Deviants Three and Me
When the album Deviants III was reissued in 1997 by Capt Trip Records in Japan, I provided the following sleeve notes.
In the time space that this album was recorded and released, Apollo 11 landed on the moon, the Manson family went on their kill spree in Los Angeles, Jan Palach burned himself to death in Prague, protesting the Soviet occupation of his country, Lt William Calley was sent for trial for the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, and the world population reached 3.5 billion. In the realm of the counterculture, optimism peaked at Woodstock and then crashed and burned to the sound of the Rolling Stones at Altamont. 1969 was a time of chaos and violent confusion, both in the world at large and, on a much smaller scale, within the microcosm of the Deviants.
After two albums and two years on the road – even riding in a two-tone Ford with fins, and a female driver with outrageous breasts and a taste in skimpy, comic-book costumes – the Deviants were getting kind of frayed at the emotional edges. We’d received a positive morale boost at the beginning of the year from the arrival from the wilds of British Columbia of lumberjack guitar giant Paul Rudolph (who would go on, after stints with both the Deviants and the Pink Fairies, to play with Brian Eno on Here Come the Warm Jets and replace Lemmy in Hawkwind). Rudolph, however, also brought a fresh set of problems to the band – primarily the question of whether the band was going to continue its unique creation of rock & roll anarchy or, with Rudolph’s superior guitar chops, become a more conventional guitar band. That basic conflict is, good and bad, what this album is really all about.
