by Mick Farren
The dispute – fuelled by amphetamine paranoia, and complicated by constant skirmishes with the forces of authority – was never resolved and it would eventually tear the Deviants apart in Vancouver, Canada, in the fall of ’69, at the start of a collapsing tour of North America. Paul, Sandy and Russell would go on to form the Pink Fairies, and cut Never Never Land, while I recorded the solo album Mona. The split wouldn’t prove irrevocable, though. In the years to come, the four of us would all work together many more times, both live and in the studio.
Even what seemed to be the final days of decline and fall weren’t without miraculous high points. Just two weeks before we flew to disaster in Vancouver, the Deviants played a final, hometown London show in Hyde Park along with the Soft Machine and the Edgar Broughton Band. Buzzing on mild acid, and feeling like battered gods, we picked the perfect time slot and played directly into a magnificent late-summer sunset. All the pissed-off anger and confusion welded into an assault of energy that had even the Hell’s Angels up and dancing and naked girls storming the stage and getting us on the TV news and the front page of the next day’s tabloid News of the World.
I guess it was the way we wanted to remember that Wild Bunch phase of our lives and how we wanted it to be remembered.
I really have nothing more to add except that the title Deviants III should have said it all. It plainly announced that we were so creatively tapped-out we couldn’t even come up with a snappy name for the damned record, something that I’ve always managed, both before and since. To get a little more psychiatric, the title could well have been a subconscious expression of the way I saw the situation. Three Deviants and one rapidly disintegrating singer. No one writes totally negative booklet notes for a CD that the company hopes will sell a few copies, so I’d tried to remain upbeat and let the intervening thirty years soften the bitterness. The actual truth was a great deal bloodier. If I’d been more of a grown-up, I would have quit the band even before we started making the third album.
My downfall had really picked up momentum during a period in Cornwall in which we’d ‘gone to the country to get it together’. ‘Going to the country to get it together’ was all the rage with bands at the time. I considered it a pastoral waste of time, but the others fancied the idea, so why should we be different? Through the sorry duration of the entire trip about the only thing to work out was the weather. Although an early spring chill sharpened the air, the sun shone and everyone was able to get out and about, which was just as well. Had it rained for the entire week, murder might have been on the agenda. Even so, the games began to verge on a three-against-one mind-fuck. The equipment had been set up in the local school hall, but suddenly no one wanted to play. In the morning the conversation would go as follows.
‘Let’s go rehearse.’
‘Can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Russell’s gone to the beach with Jenny.’
In the evening there’d be another variation. ‘Let’s go rehearse.’
‘Can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Sandy’s gone to look for UFOs.’
Needless to say, I played into the stupidity by assuming that everything was deliberately and specifically directed at me, and was designed to make me even more desperate and unhappy. I responded by making myself as totally rigid and unapproachable as I could. I’d come across Sandy and Tony, the driver, staring square-eyed and stoned at a dead seagull at high-water mark and immediately suppose that the entire encounter had been arranged to mess with my head. I drank heavily and took all the drugs I could get my hands on. I prowled the night, climbed cliffs, at risk to life and limb, and hid in every way I could, while my head threatened to cave in under a near-suicidal paranoia that screamed like the horse in Guernica.
Later in life I’d realise that a band is really only a floating crap game, to be organised on a project-by-project basis, recruiting the most suitable musicians one can find and, while still doing everything possible to create the most agreeable working conditions, trying not to get excessively involved at any emotional level beyond the task in hand. Unhappily, a first major band is rarely organised with such mature sanity. All too often it’s a sharing of dreams and ambitions that may not be wholly healthy, a tension-fraught collective marriage. And we were still supposed to be fighting the revolution, which made quitting uncomfortably close to desertion. ‘They shall not pass’ doesn’t easily translate into ‘Take to the hills, I’m having a nervous breakdown’.
Even if quitting had been on my menu of options, two substantial carrots were being dangled in front of me. The first was that we were booked by Pete Jenner at Blackhill for the last of the year’s free Hyde Park concerts, and I’d be damned if I was going to let the other three reap the benefit of the goodwill I’d cultivated, and the hard work I’d put in, to make this landmark show possible. The second carrot was that, according to Jamie, we were going to do a tour of America. At first this seemed highly implausible, but then letters and expensive phone calls were exchanged with a promoter in Vancouver and, on paper, the excursion started to make a degree of sense. Our records had been picked up for release in the USA by Seymour Stein of Sire Records (who would later launch the careers of both the Ramones and Madonna), and he’d expressed a qualified willingness to support a tour if one could be put together, although he didn’t exactly specify what form that support might take.
Jamie was now playing an increasingly prominent role in the business of the band. Steve Sparks, by that point, had wafted out of the picture and found other things to keep himself amused. Jamie had earned the nickname Ace, because every day he’d hammer away on a typewriter working on a hard-boiled detective novel about a shamus called Ace Smith. I was reluctantly willing to let Ace pick up some of the administrative slack, even though he did seem to act as Rudolph’s consiglierei most of the time. Before the park show, and before the possible American tour, we had to go back into Morgan Studios to cut the third album. It was the first one created by committee, rather than the dictatorship of my personal megalomania, and I hated the process. A committee rarely has vision, and Rudolph lacked the balls to have it all his way. About the only thing I really liked was a cut called ‘Billy the Monster’.
Watch out, Billy, as you walk around
There’s ugly people living underground.
The sessions were tense, but by restricting ourselves, as far as possible, to beer and marijuana we pretty much managed to keep our tempers in check, although Russell now claims that he can’t remember anything about the recordings at all. The two things that stand out in my recall are that, even though I tried to put an enthusiastic face on it, I was convinced in my gut that the third album sucked, and, while it was being made, I commenced a brief but memorable affair with Germaine Greer.
That relationship was all John Peel’s fault. I don’t recall how it was that one Sunday night he invited me to ride up with him to Mothers club in Birmingham to see the Who, but I wanted to see the Who in the worst possible, and was grateful that John had thought of me. This gig at Mothers was allegedly one of their very last club dates, part of the tour that yielded the classic ‘Live at Leeds’. When I arrived at Peel’s mews house in St John’s Wood, I discovered that another passenger would be riding up the M1 with us. She was a tall, square-jawed Australian with curly hair that almost qualified as an afro, an angular Amazon of talkative energy in a Thea Porter, A-class groupie costume. Hey, hey, I thought, who the hell is this?
To say that Germaine Greer was complicated is like describing quantum physics as a brain-teaser. Even her job description boggled the mind when I first met her. Three days a week she was the outrageous radical English professor at Warwick University. Then she hopped on a train to Granada TV in Manchester, where she hosted a teen-show called Nice Time. The rest of the week she was down in London, in the alternative social whirl, running with compatriots like Richard Neville, contributing to OZ and to Bill Levy’s Amsterdam-based porno tabloid, Suck. She stayed in P
eel’s spareroom when she was in London, but would soon move into her own place in the fashionable Pheasantry on the King’s Road. She had just made a deal on her first book. This was going to be The Female Eunuch, but, still unwritten, it meant nothing to me at the time, except that some opinion-makers considered her the up-and-coming radical girl intellectual. On the ride to Brum I went from interested to fascinated, to captivated. The woman was so damned bright, and the more attention I paid her, the more I believed I sensed a reciprocal stream of pheromones.
At Mothers, the Who were nothing short of magnificent, even though 1,000 people seemed to be jammed into a club designed for 600. All the breathable oxygen had been used up by halfway through the set, and Moonie collapsed and was revived with God knows what. Nights like that contributed greatly, I believe, to Pete and John Entwhistle now being as deaf as posts. After the show, our departure snagged on a moment of awkwardness. Peel was going to detour and drop Germaine off in Warwick, where she’d be teaching the next morning. I was dismayed. ‘That’s a pity, I’d hoped we’d go on talking.’
Germaine’s solution was simple. ‘So come to my place.’
She invited me and I went, and Peel looked a bit miffed that he’d have to make the drive back on his own. Germaine and I spent a boudoir night, of sex, conversation and red wine, that set me thinking about her for all of the next week, and even treating the band with a more amiable courtesy. I sent her a thank-you note, along with what I thought was a very sexy picture of me performing. We spent the next weekend together and so it went on. Now ensconced in her new pad at the Pheasantry, we had a lot of sex and we talked and talked and talked. God, she was bright, but of course we were frequently at odds. She considered violence unthinkable under any circumstances, and I had a long list of people who’d be improved by a bullet. Needless to say, the discussion frequently returned to gender. Germaine, for as long as she believed such a thing was possible – and she believed it for longer than many – did not want to see the counterculture become just another revolutionary micro-patriarchy. She frequently waxed angry at what she saw as squaw hippies, relegated to rolling joints, making tea and boiling lentils. She refused to accept my contention that the role of women in the underground was not as subservient as she made out, and that much distaff power was wielded behind the scenes, as it had been by generations of matriarchs and courtesans. Her mouth would set in a determined line and she’d proceed to decimate me with her brilliance. Behind the scenes was no longer acceptable.
In her brilliance, however, I feared an oddness festered. She was sensual, but cerebral in that sensuality; she was sexy, but sex also seemed a banner for which none of us boys could provide a sufficiently strange device. I think she enjoyed her liaisons with low-lifes on an earthy level of lust – including a three-day marriage to George Lazenby, the forgotten James Bond – but I couldn’t help suspect an element of Diane Fossey and her gorillas. Were we also case studies? For someone who would become a feminist icon, Germaine went to unusual pains to please her man. We took baths together, and she decorated her new apartment in the nude, pointing out the practicality. She was always getting on my arse to start writing seriously again, which I found flattering. She made breakfast, and I could count on beer always being in the house. When I invited her to the recording studio, she charmed the others, flirting with both Rudolph and Sandy, although Russell remained decidedly reserved. Did she do all this because she wanted to make me happy, or was she acting out some deliberate charade of oppression? I also found it a little strange that she flatly refused ever to visit me in 212. Did too much proximity to my world threaten her, or was she just too well aware that men are domestic pigs?
I’m hardly qualified to comment on the depths and ramifications of Germaine. Most of the time I didn’t have a clue what was going on. To complicate matters we had also become something of a public couple – the rising feminist star and the crazy motherfucker. We saw the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park together, but at Blackhill’s backstage garden party her social shrill began to grate, and I escaped to hunt stimulants, leaving her with Ginger Baker, a former paramour. I also flanked her when she held court in the Speakeasy on the night the early editions of the News of the World devoted all of page five to an exposé of her. A dirt-digging reporter had put together the triple threads of Germaine’s life and turned it into a ‘Do we need some rockband-fucking commie tramp hosting a show for our TV pop kids?’ I think that was the end of Nice Time.
To this day my regret is that Germaine and I were together at a time that I wouldn’t have inflicted on an enemy, let alone a warm and emotionally generous woman of whom I was very fond. When I went into my act of lunatic hiding from the world and the phone, and refused to speak even to her, she decided enough was enough and the affair was at an end. Instead of a dramatic breaking up, she wrote a scathing piece in OZ profiling me as a semi-brilliant emotional ruin, referring to me as ‘Il Duce’ and describing my life as nothing short of a ‘tyrannical dance with death’. Apparently I’d never find ‘fulfillment and true orgasm’ until I’d faced down squads of coppers with a blazing AK-47, and my screaming paranoia was about to hurtle me straight out of the band in which I’d invested so much time. The former was fanciful, but the latter proved right on the money.
Concert at Tyburn
I had ingested something. I can’t quite recall what. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t acid, more likely one of those alphabet-soup fringe psychedelics, ineptly manufactured from some hell-spawned combination of nerve gas and horse tranquilliser, which either fried your mind or did nothing at all. In this case the result was to make me paranoid and jumpy, and transform visuals into the cheap colours of a Japanese monster movie. We all knew that the afternoon’s show in Hyde Park was significant and so, being plainly drugged, I was already getting some looks from Rudolph and Boss. While breaking up with Germaine, I had moved into a terminal Caligula phase. I’d decided that everyone was plotting against me, and my dreams were sliding rapidly into the toilet. When I’d shut myself in my room with the phone unplugged, and refused to come out, I’d also had a selection of cast-iron industrial objects ready to hurl at anyone who attempted to enter and reason with me. When slightly recovered, I’d promised to be good for the park show, but in the car, almost there, I wasn’t acting too chic. Dead band walking?
The final Hyde Park concert of 1969 had been moved, by some inexplicable official decree, away from the Cockpit beside the Serpentine, where the Rolling Stones had played, to the flat meadow that spreads out from Speakers’ Corner. Originally it was supposed to have been a giant extravaganza with the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and Joni Mitchell, but this was cancelled because of ‘problems in America’. Now we had a more manageable domestic bill that included the Soft Machine, the Edgar Broughton Band, Al Stewart and us.
Rounding Marble Arch, I noticed the sign commemorating the fact that this had formerly been the site of Tyburn, the place of public execution up until the late eighteenth century. Obviously, with my decadent sense of history, this sent me off on a rampage of the imagination. I recalled that it was common practice for big-time highwaymen and other popular criminals to regale the waiting crowd with jokes, moral lectures, salutary speeches and even a song or two before the hangman sprang the trap. The atavistic fantasy of a performance for the multitude, culminating in glorious ritual death, was rock ’n’ roll self-evident – even though Ziggy Stardust was hardly a gleam in Bowie’s eye. As I began to babble out my Dick Turpin stream of consciousness, the looks graduated from dubious to exasperated. Fortunately some threadbare fragment of common sense asserted itself and I cooled it. We were almost there and I definitely wasn’t going to parade my mania in public.
The first thing required for any effective swansong is an equally effective entrance. This final Hyde Park show of 1969 wasn’t exactly made for grand gladiatorial arrivals. All the pomp and circumstance had been used up on the Rolling Stones a month or so earlie
r. A weary Pete Jenner and the Blackhill tribe had decided that this one was going to be easy on their heads, a reasonably low-key, hometown affair. A bunch of Hell’s Angels was idly guarding a lackadaisically roped-off backstage. None of the bands had a rabid fan following, and the bikers found themselves with little to guard and almost no one from whom to guard it. It required the Deviants to roll in with sufficient panache to change all that. One of the best things we’d lucked into during that otherwise fraught summer was a personal driver called Vivienne Bidwell, an American hippie who had moved her tarot cards to London, and who now transported us to gigs in a magnificently, if strangely, customised two-tone Zephyr 6 that was about as close as we were going to get to Elvis’ Coup de Ville. Bidwell also favoured highly revealing outfits, style precursors of the costumes for Xena: Warrior Princess. We liked this. It made us feel like hot stuff. Boss and Tony weren’t so keen, though, as they were now relegated to the truck, with just the gear and each other.
Bidwell rose to the moment and blasted the Deviants into Hyde Park like a Chuck Berry ’45. Engine gunning, tyres kicking up dust, the Ford barrelled right up to very side of the stage, and bollocks to any sensitive singer-songwriter who happened to be on the intense jingle-jangle right then. We were rock & roll with fins immaculate and even Pete Jenner, who’d seen it all, could scarce forbear to smile. Bidwell, with no urging, was out of the car and, in not a lot of leopardskin, was organising the Angels; Sheena Queen of the Jungle taking command. Before we knew it, she actually had them protecting us as we got out of the car. As I’ve already pointed out, there was really nothing to protect us from, but – and this may be one of the Great Secrets of Rock & Roll – the average stoned, festival-going rock fan is a strange combination of bovine and curious. He or she will be content to amble aimlessly, or sit in one spot for hours on end, until shown authority figures apparently protecting something, and then will instantly go and take a look.
