Part I    Part II    Part III

Photo Credits

By Mick Farren   From MOJO Magazine October 1999 (originally published under the title "We Mean It, Maaan!)
SHALL WE BEGIN AT THE HIGH END… I had ingested something. I can't quite recall what. I'm pretty sure it wasn't acid, more likely out of those alphabet-soup fringe psychedelics, ineptly manufactured from some hellspawned combination of nerve gas and horse tranquilliser, that either fried your mind or did nothing at all. In this case, the result was to make me paranoid and jumpy, and it transformed visuals into the cheap colours of a Japanese monster movie. Even though the discontent among we four Deviants was, by that point, growing like a festering boil, we all know that the afternoon's show in Hyde Park was significant and I had sworn that I'd behave myself. And so, being plainly drugged, I was already getting some dubious looks, particularly from guitarist Paul Rudolph and head roadie Boss Goodman. The final Hyde Park concert of 1969 had been moved by official decree away from The Cockpit beside The Serpentine, where The Rolling Stones had played, to the flat meadows that back onto Speaker's Corner. 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 early 19th century. Obviously, as a recreationally addled rocker with a decadent sense of history, this sent me off on a rampage of the imagination. I recalled that it was a 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 that culminated in glorious ritual death was self-evident – even though Ziggy Stardust was hardly yet 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. Although I, at least, refused to recognise the writing on the wall, the end of The Deviants as then constituted was definitely nigh. The Hyde Park show would, in fact, prove to be the last high hurrah. The stress of three years on the road alternately, playing commissar and nursemaid to this unstable concoction of a combo had taken its toll. For the past few months I had gone into a Caligula phase of believing the others to be plotting against me until I became so bloody unbearable to be around they were forced to conspire, if only to protect themselves.	Chez Farren
	In happier days, the band's baroque House of Usher apartment on London's Shaftesbury Avenue had witnessed pre-Raphaelite hippy scenes, like Sandy the bass player, Tony the now and again keyboard player, and a young David Bowie, fresh from Beckenham Arts Lab, sunbathing on the roof, taking photos of each other and posing coyly as sodomites. Lately, though, a shadow as of Mordor had fallen across the place. Bats circled the turret room (there really was a turret room) and ravens croaked on the balcony. My wife had taken up with our manager, the litter for the five cats had been neglected for months, the other women in my life were making untenable demands, and I was convinced in my gut that the third album sucked. It was the first one created by committee rather than the dictatorship of my personal megalomania, and about the only thing I really liked was the cut Billy The Monster. (The album title said it all – Deviants 3. Is that tapped out, or what?) In addition, on the cosmic level, I knew that much of what we'd achieved, collectively and individually, in the past two years, plus most of the hopes had dreams, were sliding rapidly into the toilet. I had accordingly shut myself in my room with the phone unplugged, refusing to come out and with a selection of cast-iron industrial objects readied to hurl at anyone who attempted to enter and reason with me. I had, however, promised to be good for the Park show, but here, in the car, almost there, I was loudy ruminating on the analogous prospect of the gallows. Dead band walking?

OR PERHAPS ON A HIGH CONCEPT… I've never admitted it before, but I guess at root, I'm a writer, and The Deviants were born as a literary concept. As a young lad in 1965-6, inundated with Kafka and Burroughs, Bob Dylan and Charlie Mingus, early Pete Townshend guitar solos and Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, I was obsessed by a less than tangible but high apocalyptic notion of an art from of total assault. I needed a medium that fully expressed the near insane rage that I carried round with me. The narrow confines of post-Profumo Merry England just begged for all-out cultural vandalism. I had tried painting it, I tried writing about it, but I knew the missing factor was the immediacy of an atonal rock'n'roll tsunami of howling noise. I fantasised it sweeping all before in a hurricane of raw electromagnetic power. (Yeah, right.)	tin, and who would always offer a cup of tea prior to the transaction. ("Cup o'tea, dearie?" "Thanks all the same, Queenie, luv, but I got a few things to do, know what I mean?") When we inherited the baroque and decaying luxury West End apartment of an on-the-run cocaine dealer, we graduated to marathon 36-hour conversations fuelled by ampoules of liquid methedrine, the only clinical use of which was the OR revival of the clinically dead. These were scored from an old croaker from a William Burroughs novel by the name of Dr Brody, who, when evicted from his seedy consulting rooms, was actually reduced to sitting in Boots in Piccadilly writing scripts for anyone who could pay. Apart from the fact that speed can all too easily turn the already angry youth close to psychotic, in our case it also maintained a weird psychic link with what would turn out to be our primary constituency, the disaffected young in the grey industrial towns of Harold Wilson's England – Luton and Dagenham, Coventry and Newcastle, Leeds and Manchester – former Mods in Take 6 paisley jackets and ex-rockers who kept their leathers but let their hair grow, unable to survive any longer on memories of Eddie Cochran, either still humping on the factory floor or attempting to live the street life on the sale of quid deals and National Assitance. They were the ones who saw through the middle-class hippy myth that the world was going to be turned into some Maxfield Parrish uptopia by the self-administration of a few doses of LSD25 and the odd mantra, thank you very much. They were the ones who seemed to recognise Deviant anger as the real deal and very close to their own, sussing that, even if we couldn't play for shit in the accepted sense, our aspirations to total assault and suicidal consumption were the genuine article and that alone – plus the fact that The Clash wouldn't be along for another 10 years – made us good for at least an anarchic giggle on a Saturday night. Later, when we were playing at marches, riots and college sit-ins, and becoming virtually the house band for the Revolution, we were strongly identified with radical students – to the point of having our truck pulled over by the Special Patrol Group on the M1 and searched for weapons – but these car factory, disaffected, psychedelic yobboes were the ones who went out of their way to make us welcome when we pulled into their local club or the hall next to the boozer. They were the ones who slipped us a half-dozen blues, a couple of mandies or a lump of Paki black while no-one was looking. They were the ones who made sure some geezers from the local art school put on a lightshow that had us performing against some old Quatermass movie, or provided us with Nembutal-impaired go-go girls like the Shindig dancers from Hell, or who not only hauled a Triumph Bonneville on-stage as a centrepiece but insisted on starting the engine at the climax of the set and almost asphyxiating everyone in the room.
The Deviants
With the inevitable irony, this towering manifesto was actually made flesh in the real word as an ill-equipped jug band of zero talent that attempted to be the West London Fugs and mainly succeeded in being banned from a lot of Irish pubs, even though we'd mutilate Irish rebel songs if offered Guinness. Later, however, we would acquire two things that pushed us a few steps closer to the dream of cacophonous apocalypse – 100-watt amplifiers and powerful amphetamine. All through that first '60s incarnation, The Deviants were associated with speed. Although, between us, we smoked dope, shot heroin, dropped every psychedelic known to man, and drank to destructive extreme, we were always tagged as speedfreaks. It started with the usual Moddy geezer pills – purple hearts, French blues, SKF yellows and typing pool green-and-clears. In the days when we were homesteading in the East End – coming home from gigs in a filthy Transit to find our next door neighbours, Kray Brothers' rank and file, respraying a stolen Jag right there in the street – we scored from a raddled old dominatrix called Queenie, who lived above a chemist's shop in Brick Lane, and dealt pills on the side, keeping them in a 1953 Peek Frean's Coronation Memorial biscuit

> Part II