Notes

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Stand back all, something takes shape within the swirling mist. Mick Farren and mates Andy Colquhoun, Paul Rudolph, Larry Wallis and Andy Powell have conjured up the music muse once again and this collaboration of new and unreleased material shows that the spirit of progressive rock and roll lives on. All hope is not lost. Larry Wallis worked with Jack Lancaster again when they worked on two Mick Farren/Deviant albums Fragments of Broken Probes (1998). The album features Mick Farren (guitar), Andy Colquhoun (guitar), Larry Wallis (guitar), Jack Lancaster (wind), Spike Baron (bass), and Alan Powell (drums). And again for The Deviants Have Left the Planet (1999). The album features Mick Farren, Jack Lancaster, Andy Colquhoun, Larry Wallis, and Phil Taylor.

The Deviants Story by MICK FARREN:

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.

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.)

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 biscuittin, 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.

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. 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.

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.

It was then that I looked out at the crowd, thousands upon thousands of the bastards, stretching as far as the eye could see, all expecting us to do something significant, to entertain them, to pull the energy out of the air and get them going. In the first second, all I could read was an inertia comparable with that of a small asteroid. How the hell was I going to get this lot up on its feet and doing the dirty boogie? We had played a few other largish festivals in the past, but they had always been at night; here we were dealing with a bloody awesome biblical multitude, and without a loaf or fish between us. Then, at the very moment that my legs and stomach had decided to turn into jelly, Paul Rudolph, who very rarely spoke to the crowd, turned from plugging in his Fender and adjusting his boxes and leaned into the microphone.
"Now we're going to have a little fun."

The response was a ragged cheer. They'd had the rabble rousing from the Broughtons, pastoral psychedelics from Quintessence, Soft Machine would be giving them class – we were expected to bring the anarchic fun to the party. The fact that the normally reticent Rudolph had made the move also completely changed the dynamics. It was no longer me, it was us. Despite the terminal internal angst, we were suddenly a unit again. We could come solidly together for one last careless rapture.

ALL THE HELP WE COULD GET

At various points on their journey to enlightenment, a band needs a friend, a patron, and despite The Deviants' generally mean and filthy demeanour, we actually locked into more than our fair share of boosters. One of the first was Jack Braceland who, along with Mark Boyle, had created the first light-shows for The Pink Floyd back in the formative All Saints Hall days. Jack had converted a basement ex-strip club and shebeen at 44 Gerrard Street in darkest Soho into a psychedelic club and named it Happening 44, and during the time that Joe Boyd wasn't having us at UFO, Jack offered us a residency on Saturday nights.

Happening 44 was one of the weirdest hippy dungeons anywhere. The back room was filled with cans of ancient porn loops and bits of bondage hardware that were now and again dragged out to be part of the show. Serious gangsters of the Richardson family in camel-hair coats would shoulder their way down the stairs thinking the gaff was still a late-night drinker. Fortunately a bottle was always at hand to keep them happy. I recall getting very drunk with Eric Burdon, who mumbled that The Deviants were the shape of things to come. Another time, John Mayall inexplicably stopped by to show off his hand-carved Laurel Canyon guitar. Of all who stumbled into Happening 44 by mistake, we were most pleased to see the strippers from the other clubs who'd sometimes shake it with the band in stockings and G-string like their equivalent of sitting in.

Maybe the most influential characters to aid The Deviants in their rise to notoriety were Phil May and The Pretty Things. I'm not sure why Phil initially semed to take such a liking to us. Maybe he was present at the Speakeasy the night we inflicted audio class war on the trendies by performing our 15-minute dirgelike reading of Dylan's The Ballad Of Hollis Brown, or maybe he just sussed us as kindred spirits. Whatever, an alliance was formed and we started being booked round the country as one of the most mayhem-prone double bills ever to grace a stage, often with Steve Took, Viv Prince and even Legs Larry Smith in additional attendance. A new venue, a new outrage: Twink pelting the crowd with eggs at Chelsea College, madness in Parliament Hill Fields, a scrubber orgy in the top balcony of Newcastle City Hall while Pink Floyd closed the show, and all the while the redoubtable Boss Goodman attempted to keep the gear functioning, preparing for the percussion uprising that was inevitable when some jobsworth pulled the plugs.

Those shows with The Pretty Things were close to life savers at times, something to look forward to when the drudgery of the road torpedoed our spirits, and hangover, cold, exhaustion, the need to get laid or just cop some mandies and go to sleep made one more round of the hoarse and ragged vitriol snarl nothing more than an unwelcome chore at the end of a 200-mile drive. Or those funny-afterwards but catastrophic-at-the-time mishaps, as when The Deviants and the early Led Zeppelin cowered in the dressing room at Exeter Town Hall while a hundred homophobic farm boys tried to beat down the door and lynch us for the length of our hair.

Another cat who provided us a great deal of moral support when we needed it was the late lamented Howard Parker, commonly known as H. While he was guitar roadie for Jimi Hendrix, H always made sure that we got as close to the man as possible without actually squatting on the stage. Later, when H was DJ at the Speakeasy, he first turned me onto The MC5's Kick Out The Jams, demonstrating that, even though they were more proficient than The Deviants, they were running on the same rails. Later he'd play me The Stooges; then I knew we weren't alone.

WHEN THE FUN BEGINS

A dark-haired young woman, bombed as Hiroshima, and baring most of herself in something negligée-like, was suddenly beside me, shaking her stuff, intent on exhibiting her breasts and more to the assembled throng. I was more than happy to dance with her during one or more of Paul Rudolph's interminable guitar solos, but the bikers hustled her away as though she had defiled the sacred stage of rock 'n' roll, or maybe simply to have her for themselves. Later, while in post-gig carouse at the Speakeasy, the early editions of the Sunday papers came and I discovered that she and I were on the cover of the News Of The World. Another 15 minutes of bogus fame.Although many of the hippy elite were highly dismissive of them at the time – and Altamont notwithstanding – the bikers played a crucial role that day in the park. Thumbs in their belts, doing their head ducking, shoulder-jerking ritual dance, they, plus a crew of European gay guys who had maybe taken our name too literally, generated that first shot of Reichian energy that Rudolph had promised. In appreciation, and as a nod to the London Angels' 59 Club/Billy Fury roots, we played our deformed version of Buddy Holly's Midnight Shift, about the girlfriend who takes up hooking.

By this point, the power was palpable, better than any drug I'd ever taken, spreading from Loser, Gnasher and Nasty Pete in their studs and Nazi regalia, to the main body of the crowd, only to be re-metabolized, and quantum-looped back to us, pushing the four of us in the band to greater efforts. We were winning, we were vindicated and it was wonderful. To think Mick Jagger does this every bloody day, tour without end. There aren't half some clever bastards.

EPITAPH

Within a matter of weeks, the treacherous bastard musicians would toss me out of the band in Vancouver, Canada, and throw in their lot with Twink, to chance themselves reincarnated as The Pink Fairies. Of course, this was by no means the end. The future would see revivals, reunions, more records, co-operations with the likes of Larry Wallis, Jack Lancaster, Andy Colquhoun and Wayne Kramer. There was life after The Deviants, in fact a truck load of life. But I don't think I can state too forcefully that those early days were so goddamned unique we were probably lucky to get out with the majority of us alive.

Phuuu.....