The Deviants Story

The Deviants' security

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE HANGING …

The first thing required for any effective swansong is an effective entrance.
This final Hyde Park show of 1969 wasn't exactly made for grand gladiatorial arrivals. All the pomp and circumstance had been more than expended on The Rolling Stones a month or so earlier. A weary Peter Jenner and the rest of the tribe from Blackhill Ents, who were responsible for the free Park shows back in the '60s, had decided that this one was going to be easy on their heads, a reasonably low-key, home-town affair featuring The Soft Machine, our pals and rivals The Edgar Broughton Band, Quintessence and, of course, the bloody Deviants. A bunch of Hell's Angels were idly guarding a lackadaisically roped-off backstage. None of the bands there gathered had anything that amounted to a rabid fan following and thus 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 Bash Street Kid panache to change all that.

I recall the summer of 1969 was warm and sunny – although most summers are warm and sunny in 30-year hindsight. That was about all you could say in its favour, unless you count the Moon landing, the Manson murders and Woodstock. The '68 student revolt had crashed and burned leaving little but social secretaries on the make, incompetent wannabe terrorists, and scrag-end psychedelic clubs waiting for the coming of Disco. One bright spot we'd lucked into along the way, however, was a driver by the name of Vivienne Bidwell, an American hippy who had moved her tarot cards to London and transported us to gigs in a magnificently, if strangely, customized two-tone Zephyr 6 that was about as close as we were going to get to Elvis's Coup de Ville. Bidwell also favoured highly revealing outfits that were a definite style precursor of Xena: Warrior Princess.

Bidwell alone was responsible for the Deviants blasting into Hyde Park like a Chuck Berry 45. Engine gunning, tyres kicking up dust, the Ford barrelled right up to the very side of the stage and bollocks to any sensitive singer-songwriter who just so happened to be on the intense jingle-jangle. We were rock 'n' roll with fins immaculate and even Pete Jenner, who had seen it all before, could scarce forbear to smile. Bidwell, with no urging, was out of the car and, in not a lot of leopardskin, organizing the Angels: Sheena Queen of the Jungle issuing orders to her white trash shield thralls. Before we knew it, we actually had the Angels protecting us as we got out of the car.

Now, one of the Great Secrets of Rock 'n' Roll is that the average stoned, festival-going rock fan is a strange combination of the bovine and the curious. Most of the time they will content themselves with ambling aimlessly or sitting in one spot for hours on end, but show them authority figures apparently protecting something, and they will instantly go and take a look. As the Angels 'protected' us, we found that a crowd formed, pushing forward for a look, which in turn caused the Angels, who had been well bored up to this point, to become more businesslike in pushing back. All this escalated until we

found ourselves moving on a cleared path, between two flanking lines of motorcyclists, straight to the artists' beer tent with a curious mob looking on. I think I saw Robert Wyatt ruefully shaking his head. He knew what we were up to. It was the best display of backstage swashbuckling they were going to get that day.

OR MAYBE WE WERE JUST PLAIN ANTISOCIAL …

Almost from the moment I thought it up, I hated the name Social Deviants. It was just so hard to say. In situations where being a rock band was more than enough to earn one a beating from lorry drivers or the constabulary, it didn't improve matters that one was not only a long-haired poof but also some child-molesting, axe-murdering junkie pervert. "Did you say Social Deviants, sunshine? You taking the piss?" Thus it became shortened to The Deviants and, among the hardcore, just the Devies.

In the beginning, when we were The Social Deviants, just about everyone hated us, and I'll freely admit that we came up with plenty to hate. If the sound wasn't bad enough and the raps sufficiently offensive, there was always The Social Deviants' lightshow, run by an old St. Martin's artschool mate called Alex Stowell, who actually stood onstage like a red-bearded Borg with wires and electrical contacts attached to his hands playing this sparking and crackling guitar-like unit of his own creation. Where other lightshows were projected behind the band and sought to synthesize some mellow psychotropic experience, Stowell aimed 500-watt beams directly into the audience's collective retina, an experience akin to advanced KGB brainwashing.

The constant accusation that we couldn't play was tossed at us over and over again, until it simply became tired. Of course we can't play, you retards, but we make one hell of a ragged and magnificent din. Who was it set the goddamned rules, anyway? This is the bloody '60s and rules are being smashed right, left and centre. The arts had the Living Theatre and dangerously demented performance artists like Otto Meuhl, who tossed teargas into his audience if he couldn't find any other way to elicit a response. With all this in their heads, the Deviants were plainly too bizarre for the regular sub-Yardbirds circuit. One ill-conceived night we actually opened for Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band, and came close to being terminated with extreme skinhead prejudice. We lucked into a couple of multimedia art events like a Roundhouse happening by New York conceptual artist Carolee Schneeman, and Joan Littlewood had us over to some piece of mayhem at Stratford East, where we finished up doing an extra set outside in Angel Lane which got us arrested for the first time – but I also got my picture in the Waltham Gazette, fist clenched beside a uniformed inspector, like Che Guevara with an afro. After that, there should have been no holding us, except that, as it turned out, there were a few more of Jimmy Cliff's metaphorical rivers to cross.

At the start of it all, two men pretty much controlled the music of the London underground – John Hopkins and Joe Boyd. Hoppy was one of the founders of IT and, along with Joe Boyd, ran the UFO Club which was the Friday night, Tottenham Court Road, ground zero for the embryonic counterculture. Hoppy had long since decided that I was barking and seemed quite to like me. Boyd on the other hand had seen the band somewhere, pulled that face Lee Harvey Oswald made when he took the bullet, and swore that The Deviants would only play at UFO over his dead body. Joe Boyd was an American ex-pat who seemed to have a fixed idea that the music of the Brit underground should be a kind of neo-merrie folk rock, a philosophy from which, I can only think, stemmed his productions of The Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention. Nothing wrong in any of that, except it was one narrow view, and far too conventional for a man who, for a time, was in close to complete control of the music of the Revolution.

Being the era of peace and love, shooting Boyd was pretty much out of the question, but, after a while, The Deviants not playing UFO became plainly absurd. The underground was mushrooming and, for better or worse, I seemed to be in the thick of it. I was writing angry polemics and conspiring with Miles at IT, running the band, and had actually been hired by Hoppy to troubleshoot the door at UFO, dealing with tripped-out psychos, threatening skins and undercover drugs squad in Carnaby Street sunglasses. I even occasionally went on TV to explain this new hippy "movement" to Joan Bakewell. Back then, everything was much smaller and more accessible. The counterculture was a hamlet in which every one knew everyone else. Jimi Hendrix could sit in the corner of The Ship in Wardour Street before going to the Experience soundcheck at the Marquee. Jim Morrison could be encountered drinking in the Chelsea Potter and swallowing hashish by the quarter-ounce lump while in London for the Doors gigs at the Roundhouse. In this parish pump context, Boyd had ultimately to relent and we played UFO and then on to the Roundhouse, the Middle Earth and all that came after.

At first we were lumbered with the 5 am graveyard slot, playing to the demented or sleeping (the speed connection again). But after a while folks discovered that we might be inept but it was an entertaining ineptitude, and we were elevated to the kind of earlier spots alloted to Arthur Brown and his flaming head. Although we were now in, the clashes with Joe didn't end. I was always throwing shit fits over what I saw as concessions to corporate capitalism, and the backstage office reverberated to heated discussions as to why the cream of the underground bands were being sold off to EMI. Surely if we could get our shit together to distribute underground newspaters, psychedelic posters and comics, why the hell could we not do the same in the big-ticket field of rock 'n' roll? I may have been a tad hard on Boyd. I suspect his real motivation was to find himself a place in the legitimate music industry, and I could hardly expect everyone to share my weirdass politics, although at the time I did, loudly and violently.

Ptooff!

If for no other reason than to put our art where our mouth was (and also because no rational label would sign us) PTOOFF!, the first Deviants album, went exactly that underground route. As legend and linernotes recount, we borrowed £700 off Nigel Samuel, a boy millionaire, and went into Sound Techniques with no clue, a willingness to try anything and with Jack Henry Moore, a gay audio beatnik from the John Cage school who really rearranged our thinking. PTOOFF! broke some very odd ground and certainly proved its point, selling some 10,000 copies via completely DIY underground channels, right down to a crew of hired hippies working through the night for free drugs, folding the discs into the three-by-six-foot poster sleeves and packing them in boxes. It is by far my favourite of all the earlier recordings and I always figured The Deviants' great mistake, in the wake of PTOOFF!, was attempting to change themselves into a semi-legit rock band.

Backstage

READY IN 10 MINUTES, OK?

By this point, I'd been handed joints and had a few beers and much of the public execution fantasy had abated. It was time for nerves and business. Seventy thousand people were out there, stretching all the way to the trees, but stage fright had to be put on hold while we defined our objective. In Hyde Park, the only ones we had to worry about were The Edgar Broughton Band. The Soft Machine were topping the bill and that was their rightful place. The Pink Floyd might be heading for the stadia of the USA, but the Softs had more respect than you could load into a freight train. Quintessence, as far as we could tell, were from Narnia, so hardly relevant. The target for the day was The Edgar Broughton Band. It would be a lie to say that flower power had expunged all jealousies and rivalries. We may have taken a lot of acid but we weren't saints, and ego loss was one of the mighty myths. I might have worked for the macrobiotic, but among carnivorous rockers, forget it. We were always looking over our shoulders to see who was moving up on us.

The Broughton Band had an easy crowd pleaser in Out Demons Out, a mantric call-and-response originally conceived by Allen Ginsberg and The Fugs as a magickal means of halting the war in Vietnam by raising the Pentagon 10 feet in the air. Edgar had taken this demented performance piece and totally rocked it into a psychedelic terrace chant that could have every malcontent boggie in Christendom up and roaring his lungs out. The Deviants didn't have a set-piece of that kind – unless you count me ranting on over 20 minutes of The Velvet Underground's Sister Ray (an arrangement that would later surface as The Pink Fairies' Uncle Harry's Last Freakout) so if we were going to prevail, it would be through raucous determination.

Fortunately by luck of the draw Edgar had gone on first and thus we knew what benchmark of furore we had to top. As we climbed the 13 steps to the scaffold (the public execution fixation had not quite gone away), we discovered that we were benefiting from another piece of luck. The setting sun, still some way above the trees at the horizon, was directly in our faces. It was at exactly the right angle for us to cast long gunfighter shadows and generally come on hyper-dramatic, standing proud against the golden light that would all too soon fail – but not, we hoped, before we'd done our share of rama-lama. Not only were we working in a golden haze, but we'd also managed to look pretty cool that day in assorted lace, leather and velvet, and with Russell as close to being in drag as he could get without actually wearing a dress. Suddenly it seemed as though the peaks were breaking in our favour.