First published in International Times, February 1972

When Joshua fit the Battle of Jericho the walls came tumbling down. That's revelation. The holy Ghost talking. So it can be done. The way to crack a mirror or shiver a wineglass is to find the right frequency and pound it. Like those strobe lights that picked up the B-rhythms of some kids dancing around in Ealing or somewhere, and threw them into epileptic fits. T.C. knows a cat in Australia who used to make strange music sitting between two huge columns and singing into them and feeding and feeding it back and back. Finally, he burst a blood vessel in his head and now he's crazy. If you sit a man with a bucket on his head and let a water-tap drip onto it, he'll be crazy within hours. The Japanese taught some Australians that. Music hath charms to tame the savage breast, as Shakespeare noticed. Music hath alarums to wild the civil breast, as well, as Tuli Kupferberg pointed out. It is partly a matter of the mode of the music, but then as well something to do with the ears the music exists in. He that has ears to hear, let him hear. The bell tolling in the desert makes no sound. What, then, is the mode of revolutionary music in October 1969? And who's it for? Mick Farren is right to agonise over the superficiality of the rock revolution. The underground is falsely complacent, living on an exaggerated notion of its own importance and effectiveness, which Mick Farren tirelessly deflates and derides. He looks back with furious nostalgia at the time when ugly, desperate, grinding songs were million sellers. When shop-girls, mechanics, storemen, packers, gasfitters, wharf labourers and their girls, found dignity, lust and anger in the music of rock. It is painful to hear the skinheads saying as they look over the crowds, past the enclosure where the beautiful people bask in a cloud of Mick Jagger's spittle, "Well, the Stones are one of us, arnay'!" Expensive drugs, more expensive butterflies, dead mates, Baby Jane Holzer's dildo, no, baby, the Stones are not one of you. By Marianne Faithfull's sacred Mars bar they are not one of you. They are being protected from you by the Underground's favourite scapegoats, the poor old phoney Hell's Angels. In the official souvenir of that concert there is a photograph of the groupies' enclosures backstage, which features, in filthy yellow plush trousers, Ibiza vest, chain, and dilly-bag, the underground impresario himself. The expression on his face sums up the whole blind alley of revolutionary music. "Why isn’t it working" those hot eyes are saying. "What the fuck happened?"   Why did Mick Jagger not tell those quarter of a million people to take over the city? Why did they behave so well and pick up all their garbage? They were celebrating their togetherness, boasted the underground. They showed the parent-generation how they were gentle and loving and co-operative. Mick Farren knew that that was not how it was. The phenomenon had been contained. No one need be afraid of the Rolling Stones any more. They couldn't change a thing. They didn’t want to change a thing. They arrived at the head of the pop wave, expressing the vague discontent of their generation. They were rewarded with money and initiated into the fancy vices of the upper class, drugs, buggery, cruelty and vicarious violence. Home video of the Aberfan disaster with "Yes sir, that’s my baby" for a backing. Loving, gentle, co-operative my arse. Still, it was genuine. The greasers, the rockers, the mods, the skinheads, the hippies, the yippies, all of your genuine working class youth would have been corrupted in the same way. Only the bourgeois revolutionary can spurn the insidious rewards this society offers to successful subversion. Only the middle class rebel yearns for the proletariat. Someone told the times are changing But looking around it seems the same Buying selling running hiding Wondering if the World has any shame Looking from my window Blank faces queue for something new to come But nothing ever changes And their dreams all wither in the sun - the Deviants The rock revolution failed because it was corrupted. It was incorporated in the captiatlist system which has power to absorb and exploit all tendencies including the tendencies towards its own overthrow. The Rolling Stones have been absorbed, and their music has been corrupted too. Honky Tonk Woman like the Salt Of The Earth is merely a new perversion, a kind of self-conscious slumming. It stinks. And yet, even if Frank Zappa has had to throw Mick and Marianne out of his house in Laurel Canyon, Mick Jagger is still a better man than he, because the deficiencies in his revolutionary theory do not matter, because the corruption and faggotization of his own character are irrelevant. What is only important, is that the Rolling Stones found the frequency, they sounded the chime, they dripped the tap onto the bucket, they cracked the mirror and busted the glass. Satisfaction can never be unwritten. It has been heard, for there were ears to hear. Frank Zappa is more intelligent and a better musician than any of the Stones, and that is probably why he would never risk immolation as a pop hero. For Mick Jagger is a victim, after all, and it makes little difference whether he is aware of the fact. Though, when he chooses to dance in a studded dog collar and his white clown suit, perhaps we may assume that he has an inkling. Zappa may enjoy his artistic and other sorts of integrity, but he will never make a contribution to the revolution of sensibility which is the prerequisite of political revolution. The converted seek out Zappa and learn more about their attitudes from him, but the Stones helped thousands of kids to bust out. What pains Mick Farren, and it pains him terribly all of the time, is that the bust out was so trivial in its immediate effects. So his music dashes itself against the horns of a polylemma – every proposition has its but. Music must reach a mass audience, but it will then become commercial. Music must please those who hear it, but it must not make the unbearable bearable. Music must be violent and exciting, but it must not provide harmless expression for violence and frustration. In such a conflict Mick Farren’s Deviants could only use music as a weapon. Time, harmony, rhythm were a bunch of Uncle Tomisms. The Deviants were offensive. Mick screamed, Russ battered. When the equipment collapsed, or silence ensued for any reason, Mick bawled at his audience, pleading with them to tear the hall down, to fuck or shit, telling them the home truths about the management, libelling, protesting, complaining, cursing. But the audience remained an audience. They listened. They stood still, patient under barrages of feedback and Mick’s incomprehensible yelling. They wanted to have a good time, and there was this wheezing Jeremiah begging them to hate something. They were too good mannered even to hate him. Mick ended up hating nearly all of his audiences. He meant to yell at their parents, but he ended up yelling at them. We are the people who pervert your children Who lead them astray from the lessons you taught them We are endangering civilization We are beyond rehabilitation - The Deviants But they aren’t endangering civilization. It’s all fantasy. The Stones could claim this, they still could, but they never would. Mick Farren is convinced, passionate, sincere and unsparing of himself in his service of the revolution, and that’s just what’s wrong with him. Electronic music was a glimpse into the possibility of liberation, not expounded but demonstrated on the nerves; kids began to dance, to leap, and their want was born. Mick Farren understood the phenomenon politically, intelligently. He is still the best critic the English Underground has, and like Jeremiah he ought to be heeded. But he cannot sing. He cannot sing because, although he has a freaky throat, he cannot hear. And he never did hear what rock music really was, in terms of guts and glory. He is an impresario, but he does not understand exactly what it is that he’s peddling any more than any other Denmark Street wheel-and-dealer. The most significant part of the rock revolution, because it did happen, was that kids got into their bodies. Music is a curious medium. Utterly abstract in its construction, but comletely sensuous in its apperception. Tunes, rhythms can only be conveyed by exact mimicry. They are not ideas. Mick Farren writes lovely prose, he has good, tough, sharp ideas, but he is not and never will be into the body. He is a victim of one of the meanest tricks that our sick civilization plays upon the body-soul hookup, chronic asthma. As a result of it, he is addicted to a particularly brutal form of stimulant. This tyrannical dance with death has too much to do with the kind of music he makes and with the deadly if microscopic efficiency of the Pink Fairies’ operations in fucking up other people’s music. King Crimson are still apologising for the gig they did at the Speakeasy, which is the only regime which the Pink Fairies will ever upheave, because they were put off and harrassed by a more than usually drunken and drugged Twink, Steve Took and Mick Farren.  But something has happened. The Deviants are no longer Mick Farren’s Deviants. Under all the bullshit flummery of the Pink Fairies something was really happening. A leather giant with a deformed arm and a natural Charles II mane, leans into the mike and says with a maniacal smile, "Let’s have some fun," before he drives off on deranged lead guitar. That’s it. That’s the pulse. He has it. The bass player can find it from him and Russ boxes out the frenzy on drums. The words are inaudible. The band practices these days. They dig it. They are into it. Soon their audiences will fuck without being told. The Deviants have discovered music. They used to be frail and pious. Mick’s yelling was still preaching after all. Now Paul Rudolph’s "Let’s have some fun" could set up a sympathetic vibration in the foundations of the Home Office. Mick has responded to the pressure, which looks these days like bouncing him clean off the stage, with a change in the group’s public image. He is no longer Il Duce. Russ and Sandy and Paul talk to the papers too. Mick has swapped "The Pink Fairies are organising a musical attack on authority, like the MC5 in Chicago (sic) a strategic, organised and effective attack on the straights" type bullshit for the "If Nat Joseph thinks you’re sincere he just lets you get on with it your way" type bullshit. Factory has yet to publish its deal on the Pink Fairies, with its special record and all that. If it does it really ought to change its name to Fantasy. The basic weapon of the Pink Fairy conspiracy is conservative. The machine gun that will rip open a policeman’s chest and furnish Mick Farren with a satisfactory orgasm at last is the weapon of the straights: to kill a man is simply murder, it is revolution to turn him on. It is not the groups who call themselves Underground who will provide the music that will shake the walls of the city. It is not the polemicists who choose a microphone and electronic backing to continue an argument who will enlighten the straights who continue to be born. It is not the best musicians, and it is not the worst. But it will be done with music. Beware a man who is not moved by sound He’ll drag you to the ground Come dance with me, come dance with me in (Wilson’s) land Come dance with me, we’ll beat that hoary band - Tuli Kupferberg