The back cover states "How Elvis gave to the birth to the Angry Brigade" and this lineage from 50s youth culture to 70s counter-culture is an ever present theme throughout the book. Whilst tracing the development of youth culture from the 1950s Farren includes his own reminiscences, from records of his youth such as "Rock Island Line" by Lonnie Donegan, and "All Shook Up" by Elvis to the rock festivals of the counter-culture such as Phun City and Isle of Wight 1970. Farren argues how the establishment soon co-opts any youth phenomenon that is remotely threatening and repackages this rebellion into something more wholesome and saleable to the masses . Therefore, 'the man'would always attempt find a way of a sanitising a movement and taking its threat away (still true of today). In a wider political context an ever increasing theme throughout the book is that the system oppresses us by means of exploitation at work, censorship, and indoctrination by the dominant establishment media, to name a few. By Mick's own admission, as well as being a history of rebel youth culture, Watch Out Kids is also a political rant. So, what may at first appear to be a fairly standard romp through a history of teen culture soon becomes a somewhat paranoid indictment of straight society, as well as a revolutionary portent of an alternative lifestyle. The argument continues that increasing disillusionment with a capitalist society that is decaying and eating itself and us with it could lead to a future scenario in which an alternative society based on the ideals of free festivals and self-sufficiency would emerge. It would defend itself, to use the old Malcolm X adage, by any means necessary. Farren says; 'When we have to fight, we will fight like crazies. Killer acid-freaks turning up where they are least expected, destroying property, and structure, but doing their best to save minds'.

It is easy thirty years down the line to dismiss such ideas as way off mark, but at the time the bombs of the Angry Brigade and the IRA and the constant state of strikes and other industrial action were very real. And even if the ideal of the free festival is a wistful memory in light of the huge, bloated corporate monsters that festivals have become today - Glastonbury included - for a while free festivals did become a way of life for many people. Farren wasn't too far off the mark when he refers to 'Tribes of super-nomads, musicians artists, craftsmen who can gather and spread information first hand'. This was very prescient of an alternative travelling culture which emerged in the 1970s and adopted a nomadic lifestyle that revolved around a yearly circuit of free festivals and fayres - Stonehenge being the most celebrated. That was until capitalism, under the auspices of Thatcher, began reasserting itself in the early 80s and putting the boot in.

If the anti-establishment anarchism of Farren's polemics doesn't grab you then the immediacy of the layout will . Visually, Watch Out Kids is a hybrid of IT and Nasty Tales in book form. It includes all the striking colourful pictures and text superimposed over each other that characterised IT, as well as many of your favourite underground press cartoonists such as Skip Williamson, Robert Crumb, Spain Rodriguez, Gilbert Shelton and of course Edward Barker. So, what is an already readable book is made even more interesting by the use of pictures and cartoons that would have probably appealed more to yer average freak on the street than a standard text book laid out with chapters, end notes and no pictures.

Farren's millenarian vision came at a time when the underground was clearly on the wane. The aspirations of the counter-culture were diverging and the ideals of peace of love alone seemed to be getting nowhere and were not the only options anymore in the unstable social and political climate of the early 1970s. The underground press was also increasingly feeling the heat from a newly elected Conservative government. Farren himself had already been raided by the Special Branch during the investigation into the Angry Brigade Bombings and was awaiting trial under the Obscene Publications Act for the Nasty Tales comic when Watch Out Kids was published. The book's message then was, as its title suggests, a warning. It is a call to arms and an appeal to the youth. "Watch out kids" know your enemy, and who's trying to fuck you over. Don't get fooled again. As the old cliché goes, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that they're not out to get you!