Farren: Is there life after Dingwalls? by Salewicz.

This interview was first published in NME , September 30, 1978, p.29.

DESPITE the silk shawl wrapped about its neck to prevent its head falling off, there is a dignity, a pride, even a sense of all knowingness, about the stuffed ant-eater as, from its corner in the room, it maintains an unceasing vigil on the British Relay Colour 26-incher.
  Just like Mickey might've planned it, Crossroads is showing.
  We sit, Mickey and I, on the cushions on the floor, smoking and drinking tea.
  Mickey isn't drinking anything stronger than tea at the moment (though that's not to say he won't have changed his mind in an hour or so).
  Drinking makes Mickey go and do strange things.
  Like make albums with interesting titles like "Vampires Stole My Lunch Money".
  This is why I'm sitting on Mickey's floor right now.   Mick Farren cut "Vampires" in the early spring of this year at Pathway Studios in North London. He was, he says, "pretty ill" at the time.
  He was pretty ill from too much booze.
  Mickey likes the odd tipple.
A couple of months before he'd cut the album, I sat in the very same room on a different cushion in Mickey's top floor flat just off the W10 end of Ladbroke Grove, and watched him get interviewed about punk by a U.S. film crew. During the course of the interview, as well as consuming many other things, Mickey drank a whole bottle of Chivas Regal malt whisky.
  Why does Mick Farren drink so much?
  "Because I'm paranoid and insecure."
  Mick talks about the album.
"Most of the songs were written during a period of, like…" he hesitates, "pretty serious alcoholism both on the part of Larry Wallis (producer, guitarist, and co-songwriter) and myself. It just seemed to come out of all that, really. We were tapering off and drying out to such an extent that when we got outside the studio we cried 'No whisky!'...
  "We did actually lapse a little as the days went on, but we were working 18 hours a day.
  "So making the album was almost a drying out process."

AS READERS of this paper, it's unlikely that you pop kids can have missed out on the news that Baron Farren of Ladbroke was once an ardent word arranger within these pages. "The Titanic Sails At Dawn", the Nashville epics, The Doors, lots of stuff about watching TV…Don't miss the coming retrospective of his finest features at the ICA.   In addition to being a mere scriber in a pop paper, though, Farren's name has been turning up all over the place for the last twelve years: former editor of IT, science fiction novelist, Yippee activist and, ulp, leader of the British White Panthers - even his very own Old Bailey obscenity trial when Nasty Tales got busted.
  Plus - and here lies the heavy new wave credibility -in the late '60s Mickey used to have his very own rock band, The Social Deviants, one of the most anarchic combos ever to grace a stage.
  One morning shortly after last Christmas, an executive voice from Logo Records woke Mickey up. The executive voice told Mickey that Logo had acquired the rights to the Deviants' material, and that they were intending to re-release some of it.
  "Don't do that!" begged Mickey from underneath the bed-clothes. "Let me come round and talk to you about this."
  Mickey met the man from Logo. Like so many other episodes of Mickey's life, the pair "got talking and had a few gins." By the end of the gins Mickey appears to have managed to blag himself a somewhat frugal record deal.
  Instrumental in scoring the Logo deal, of course, was the Farren EP Stiff put out at the end of last year.
   "We played it to them and said, 'This is what we're into doing - only over and above it'.
   "Because in some respects the EP was a look back at the past: it had Paul Rudolph on it and we done one old Deviants tune on it" - "Let's Loot The Supermarket (Again, Like We Did Last Summer)" - "and a couple of the other songs were very much about what had gone down previously."
  In its turn the EP had been sired somewhat by Mickey's sudden realisation that not only was he not scorned by the new wave, that he was actually treated with a measure of respect. "You get people like Mick Jones telling you when you're both drunk how he used to go and see the Deviants at the Roundhouse when he was 14 or something. I hope it doesn't make me sound like Lord Sutch saying, 'Oh, we were doing all that stuff nine years ago' - but it's sort of 'true.
   "I mean, no one understood what we were doing in the '60s. There were two sets of people - Iggy and The MC5 - who were the only people who came anywhere close to it. We used to really freak out people who were on acid. This wall of noise would come howling out and everyone'd jump about and scream: 'Enough!'"

IT IS NOT merely the mixture of five star brandy, cheap cigar stubs and throat virus cultures in which Mickey soaks his vocal chords when he takes them out at night that accounts for his wounded bear recorded growl. In common with other great un-singers like Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa, Mickey nicks his vocal licks from Mr Howlin' Wolf.
  Not only his vocal licks, in fact, but even his guitar lines. Mickey is delighted with the Hubert Sumlin licks Wilko Johnson put down on "People Call You Crazy" on "Vampires".
  Just like Keef did when Ron Wood was cutting his first solo LP, Wilko dropped by one day to parody himself on the "I Wanna Drink" cut and stayed to play lots more.
   "Unfortunately," says Mick, "a general lack of time and money and organisation did tend to mean that Wilko'd be putting down a guitar part after the harp part had already gone down - which can mean that it sounds a bit odd.
   "Though hopefully that's the sort of thing that can be rectified next time we do something together."
  Yes indeed. Provided Logo maintain their support - and at the moment "Vampires Stole My Lunch Money" is selling a thousand copies a week, so there seems to be no reason why they shouldn't -Mickey will be returning to the studio shortly.
   "What I'd really like to do is continue recording with Larry Wallis and myself and a few other people. Larry's album's got to be done at some time. He can't afford to stay in bed and watch TV much longer. "Then I'd like to get much more of a Brill Building situation. I've never previously come anywhere near having a parent attitude from a record company where they'd just let me exploit my daft ideas. For example, after I'd seen Star Wars last year I wanted to do a Darth Vader record with this this peculiar voice on it. To do it almost as a disco record with lots of weird electronics on it.
   "You see, there's an awfully big pool of talent about and a lot of people that don't really gell into standing bands. I mean, I don't want to be in a band. It's just a question of following through everything you've learnt."
  Current Farren follow-ups to what he's learnt include selected live dates with The Good Guys (who feature an approximation of the musicians who played on "Vampires Stole My Lunch Money"), a novel entitled The Feelies that's being published this month, plus a futuristic private eye novel he's in the process of putting down on paper.
  He freely admits to having been influenced by the greater sense of artistic freedom that the advent of the new wave permitted.
   "I mean, it's like Don Letts. Now I've got no great desire to make movies at the moment but now…"
  …Now it seems possible to…
"Right! But there still is -though it seems a lot less than it was a while ago -a lot of petty hostility shown if you want to step outside your avowed profession: 'Oh, you can't do that, man. You're a writer!'
   "Bollocks I can't! Just watch me!
   "'Ere! Which way's this going?"
  In the corner the ant-eater sits in silence practising the Zen art of nodding in agreement without moving its head.