Notes

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Japan 24-Bit Remaster

Out of the Ladbroke Grove UK Underground Community, a number of bands would emerge. Perhaps the most anarchistic band of the Underground was the Deviants founded and fronted by singer/writer Mick Farren, the Social Deviants, later just the Deviants, made three bizarre albums in two years. Mick Farren states that The Deviants were a community band which "did things every now and then - it was a total assault thing with a great deal of inter-relation and interdependence". Musically, Farren described the Deviants as "teeth-grinding, psychedelic rock" somewhere between the Stooges and The Mothers of Invention

After the Deviants folded in 1969, Farren recorded a solo album, Mona, with a short-lived Pink Fairies line-up that featured ex-Pretty Things drummer/singer Twink and Steve Peregrin Took. When this first Pink Fairies fell apart and Twink ran off with the name to form Pink Fairies mark 2, Farren initially considered continuing to work with Steve Took using the band name Steve Took's Shagrat with Larry Wallis. Took and Farren fell out so it didn't happen.

Many of the band members for the Deviants and the Pink Fairies were interchangeable and both names have been used for various one-offs over the years. In February 1984, Farren was joined by ex-Pink Fairies member Larry Wallis and original Deviant (as well as Pink Fairies member) Duncan Sanderson. They were billed as the Deviants and played a London gig at Dingwalls which was released as the album Human Garbage. Mick Farren's latest incarnation of the Deviants, Dr Crow, in 2002 which opens up with the title track "When Dr Crow Turns On His Radio".

As a lyricist Farren provided the words for 'Lost Johnny', recorded by Hawkwind(1975) and Motörhead(1977); as well as for several songs on Larry Wallis' first ever solo album Death in the Guitarfternoon released in 2002.

Michael 'Mick' Farren (born 3 September 1943, in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire) is a UK Underground/counterculture radical and anarchist.

He was lead singer with the Deviants. He went on to write for the main stream New Musical Express, as well as developing a prolific career as a sci-fi/horror author, cultural journalist, and critic. In addition to non-fiction, Farren has also written a number of biographical and autobiographical books. At the NME he wrote the article The Titanic Sails At Dawn, an analysis of what he saw as the malaise afflicting then-contemporary rock music which described the conditions that subsequently gave rise to punk.To date he has written 23 novels (including the Victor Renquist novels and the classic DNA Cowboys sequence), 11 works of non-fiction (including four on Elvis Presley) and a plethora of poetry. His prophetic 1989 novel The Armageddon Crazy deals with a post-2000 America which is dominated by fundamentalists who dismantle the Constitution. He has released at least fifteen musical albums.

Farren organised the legendary Phun City Festival in 1970. He has long been associated with the Hells Angels - UK who provided security at Phun City. They even awarded Farren an 'approval patch' also in 1970 for use on his first solo album the strange and bizarre Mona which also featured Steve Peregrin Took (who was credited as Shagrat the Vagrant). His second solo album was Vampires Stole My Lunch Money. It features Dr. Feelgood's guitarist Wilko Johnson and Chrissie Hynde. His most recent releases are Dr Crow with the Deviants (2002), People Call You Crazy: The Story of Mick Farren (2003), and To The Masterlock (Live In Japan) (2005). Since 2003, he has been a columnist for the weekly Los Angeles CityBeat.

Many in the blossoming underground movement were influenced by 1950s Beatnik Beat generation writers such as William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, who paved the way for the hippies of the 1960s. During the 1960s, the Beatnik writers engaged in symbiotic evolution with freethinking academics including experimental Psychologist Timothy Leary.

An example of the cross-over of beatnik poetry and music can be seen when Burroughs appeared at the Phun City festival, organised by Mick Farren with underground community bands including the Pretty Things, the Pink Fairies, The Edgar Broughton Band and, from America, The MC5.

The Underground movement in the UK was focused on the Ladbroke Grove/Notting Hill area of London, which Mick Farren said "was an enclave of freaks, immigrants and bohemians long before the hippies got there" (1). It was depicted in Colin MacInnes' famous novel Absolute Beginners depicting street culture at the time of the Notting Hill Riots in the 1950s.

The Underground paper International Times (IT) started in 1966 and Steve Abrams founder of Soma summarised the underground as a "literary and artistic avant-garde with a large contingent from Oxford and Cambridge. John Hopkins (Hoppy) a member of the editorial board of International Times for example, was trained as a physicist at Cambridge"

Police harassment of members of the underground (often referred to as "freaks", initially by others as an insult, and later by themselves as an act of defiance) became commonplace, particularly against the underground press. According to Farren, "Police harassment, if anything, made the underground press stronger. It focused attention, stiffened resolve, and tended to confirm that what we were doing was considered dangerous to the establishment."

Key Underground (community) bands on the time who often performed at benefit gigs for various worthy causes included Pink Floyd (when they still had Syd Barrett), Hawkwind, Deviants (featuring Mick Farren), Pink Fairies, other key people included, in the late '60s Marc Bolan who would leave 'the Grove' to find fame with T Rex and his partner Steve Peregrin Took who remained in Ladbroke Grove and continued to perform benefit gigs in the 'anti-commercial' ethos of the UK Underground. Sci-Fi writer and sometime Hawkwind member Michael Moorcock remembers:

"everything happened in Ladbroke Grove in the sixties and seventies. I mean it was just nice and I happened to live in Ladbroke Grove and it all happened around me. You couldn’t actually move for bloody Rock and Roll bands." (Reference - personal communication with author Fee Mercury Moon)

Within Portobello Road stood the Mountain Grill greasy spoon (working man's) café which in the late 1960s and early 1970s was frequented by many UK Underground artists such as Hawkwind featuring, at the time, Lemmy. It was of sufficient import to the members of the UK Underground that in 1974 Hawkwind released an album titled Hall Of The Mountain Grill and Steve Peregrin Took wrote Ballad of the Mountain Grill.

The Underground Movement was also symbolised by the use of drugs. The types of drugs used were varied and in many cases the names and effects were unknown as Deviants/Pink Fairies member Russell Hunter, working at International Times (part of the Underground press at the time), recalled. "People used to send in all kinds of strange drugs and things, pills and powders, stuff to smoke and that. They'd always give them to me to try to find out what they were! (Laughs)".

Part of the sense of humour of the Underground, no doubt partly induced by the effects of both drugs and radical thinking was an enjoyment at "freakin' out the norms". Mick Farren recalls actions sure to elicit the required response. "The band's baroque House of Usher apartment on London's Shaftesbury Avenue had witnessed pre-Raphaelite hippy scenes, like Sandy the bass player (of the Deviants and Pink Fairies), 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".