The author sported the most impressive Afro ever seen on a male human of the Caucasian persuasion - including Bob Dylan, the late MC5 voclaist Rob Tyner, and your humble servant - throughout the rocker, beatnik, hippie, and punk eras and beyond.

Mick Farren was not the kind of sweet peace-and-love-man hippie parodied by Nigel Planer in The Young Ones. He came on like a cross between Abbie Hoffman and Charles Manson and fooled not a few people, despite being essentially a pussycat. Not only did Farren front the Deviants - a band sufficiently ahead of their time to have attained punk-like levels of raucous listener-unfriendliness during the Summer of Love - he was at various times, the doorman at the UFO Club, a leading member of the editorial collective of IT magazine, Minister of Information for the UK branch of the White Panther Party, a principal defendant in the trial of the underground comic Nasty Tales (historically overshadowed by the Oz trial), co-promoter of the epically disastrous but hugely enjoyable Phun City Rock Festival (at which all bands ended up playing for free except the group actually called Free), Germaine Greer's lover and a front-rank player in the NME's attempt in the mid-Seventies to deprave and corrupt the nation's youth.

Ironically enough, he and his posse of degenerates and subversives once lived in a flat above the Shaftesbury Theatre while Hair was playing. The Court should also take into consideration 17 novels, 18 albums, three plays, two poetry anthologies, innumerable articles and seven previous book-length works of non-fiction, only two of which were primarily concerned with Elvis Presley.

Farren could never quite make up his mind whether he wanted to be Lord Byron, Gene Vincent, Leon Trotsky, Bob Dylan, Dylan Thomas, William S Burroughs, or Harlan Ellison; though he would probably have settled for being the pre-bloat-and-flameout incarnation of Jim Morrison. In the end, he had to settle for being Mick Farren. As this reviewer can testify from personal seventies experience, Farren was (and, presumably, is) as entertaining a companion as has ever walked the earth with whom to share industrial-strength refreshment and plot serious cultural mischief. And Give the Anarchist a Cigarette is as engrossing and charming a memoir as any produced by my g-g-g-generation.

My favourite anecdote recounts the occasion on which the Deviants went to do a gig during a sit -in at Essex University. They found the Guevaras and Gramscis of radicalism's Next Generation starving to death and begging the visiting band for food. Since "true guerillas forage", the Deviants broke into the refectory and distributed soup, cheese and ice cream.

"What sometimes troubles me," Farren writes, "is that many of these wannabe world leaders, who couldn't organise themselves a hot meal without the help of a bunch of hungry and bad-tempered rockers, are the backbone of New Labour"