Deviants

Don’t ask any questions and you won’t hear a lie

Deviance remains one of the most misunderstood concepts in the sprawling bestiary of sociology. Perhaps because of that sharp, peremptory hiss of a word, most people tend to equate it with delinquency, even though the textbooks suggest otherwise: a deviant is not someone who breaks the law, but someone who draws the disapproval of the community they belong to. That's why gambling (illegal in most countries, but generally not condemned on moral grounds) isn't regarded as a deviant activity, while the use of a legal substance can be, if it runs against common sentiment. What's at stake, in short, isn't the legal category of lawful/unlawful, but the ethical one of Good/Evil.

Someone like Mick Farren is a deviant squared, in the crosshairs of both bourgeois society and the alternative underbrush. Within his own context, he's a minority within a minority, an outcast among outcasts. Numerically speaking, British hippies are a small thing compared to the long-hairs across the ocean. As in the American motherland, some retreat to the countryside while others lay siege to the metropolis: on one side, an escape into the haunted forests of Merry England, wilder than the rural communities of the post-Woodstock era; on the other, a clenched-fist, tazebao-style armed militancy, fuelled by African-American unrest. If the former manage to secure themselves a carriage on the psychedelic caravan (think of the Incredible String Band or Donovan himself), the latter can only be ghettoized in a country too hypnotized by fashion to know riots: we're talking about people like Third World War, the Edgar Broughton Band, and, of course, the Deviants — originally Social Deviants, just to be clear.

The latter are the most dangerous of the lot, being the most determined to carry out an all-out subversive agenda. As the driving force behind the English branch of John Sinclair's White Panthers, Farren is a cross between Rob Tyner and Abbie Hoffman. He despises the frivolity of Swingin' London and wants to be despised right back: to bowl cuts, miniskirts and colourful shirts he responds with the unpleasantness of someone born with dynamite in his pocket. More convinced than ever that radical aims require equally extreme means, he doesn't limit his guerrilla warfare to words and attitude: the music he has in mind is the most chaotic ever heard on the other side of the Channel, with a repertoire of provocations ranging from parody to white noise, not to mention collage and sampling techniques well ahead of their time.

The Deviants' sound is an iconoclastic anti-rock, a proto-noise allergic to flower power, the sound of a shattered Molotov cocktail slowed down and looped. An alien at home, it finds few parallels even on the other side of the Atlantic: to find anything similar we have to turn to the sulphurous outrages of the Stooges or the "free form freak out" of Red Crayola. The kinship with the Fugs' cabaret is also faint, though he does absorb their sharp sarcasm: rather than vitriolic satire, what's here is a terroristic yearning that instils genuine fear. Despite a uniform still firmly rooted in '68 codes, Farren is decidedly Europe's first anarchopunk.

To gauge just how serious they are, one need only pick up "Ptooff!" (1967), the first machine-gun burst, destined to remain the manifesto of the Ladbroke Grove scene. A title with Futurist echoes, a pop-art cover in the style of Roy Lichtenstein, and a quote (attributed variously to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Allen Ginsberg or Tuli Kupferberg) that reads "When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake!": no, they're not joking at all. With a genesis worthy of a genuine criminal plot (funding came from the mysterious twenty-one-year-old millionaire Nigel Samuel, a sort of psychedelic Giangiacomo Feltrinelli), the Deviants recorded it independently for their own label, Underground Impresarios, distributing it by mail to underground magazines.

"The Deviants album!", announces a voice somewhere between a circus barker and a BBC anchorman, drawing sardonic applause. Farren enters shortly after, feet first: marching over an obsessive bassline, as brash as a back-alley Jagger, he heads straight for some unspecified house. His intentions are as dubious as can be: exaggerating the cliché of the ravenous lover ready to devour his prey, he seems capable of any atrocity. The metaphorical reading is more than credible: Farren is a looter determined to break into all our homes, guilty of nothing more than having one. The tension builds until it explodes in a duel of ultra-distorted guitars, restores the opening theme filtered through reverb and tremolo, returns to the attack more relentlessly than before, and finally consumes itself in its own fury. Few albums can boast an opening as menacing as "I'm Coming Home".

So much noise is followed by "Child Of The Sky", a Barrett-esque ballad for Spanish guitar and flute. The mood is dreamlike, but the words open up terrible rifts, piling up enigmatic images as in a reimagining of Paul Celan's "Todesfuge". A mythical, truly prophetic power breathes through this song, so far removed from the band's combative image: beware of mistaking the Deviants for mere rank-and-file militants. The languid blues-rock of "Charlie", with Farren aping electric-era Dylan in a tale of everyday urban violence (the closing line "You can't shoot a cop/ Even a Jewish one" is phenomenal), sets the stage for one of the most visionary experiments of the era. A dark toll of mechanical percussion, a hypnotic macumba of rattles, then a Zappa-esque skit over a sacred-music choir, defused into a synthetic nursery rhyme: marrying Nietzsche to Marcuse on the altar of Luigi Russolo, "Nothing Man" ushers in the age of industrial music a full decade ahead of time.

The ruthless pamphlet on the emptiness of the average consumer continues with "Garbage" which, in search of the ultimate death-knell jingle, crashes various bubblegum ditties into a twisted advertising carcass: the missing link between "The Who Sell Out" and Sigue Sigue Sputnik. A spit right between the eyes is countered by another unexpected truce: this time it's the turn of the tender folk watercolour "Bun", whose unreal sweetness can only ever be short-lived.

The last flyer before going underground, "Deviation Street" is their own "Virgin Forest", containing everything and its opposite: acid riffs and "Banana Boat Song", wartime explosions and delirious fans, Hendrix and old blues recordings, irreverent New Age intuitions and snapshots of the London underground. Bands like Crass owe everything to these 9 minutes of pure freak intransigence.

Among the various reissues of "Ptooff!", the 1983 Psycho edition deserves a mention, with a nice gatefold package and liner notes by John Peel. With the toxic resin of their debut now solidified into a sticky garage amber, the Deviants would change lineup several times and release two more LPs between '68 and '69: "Disposable" (yet another reflection on the miseries of the culture industry, veering into the vandalism of "Let's Loot The Supermarket") and "Deviants 3" (with horror-carnivalesque touches worthy of a modern-day Screaming Lord Sutch and a cover punker than punk). The unmanageable frontman would be ousted after a catastrophic American tour, and the survivors would fly off into the less troublesome Pink Fairies, with the complicity of the ubiquitous Twink. Farren himself would go on to produce "Think Pink" (1970), the acclaimed debut of the former Pretty Things/Tomorrow man, who would return the favour that same year by playing on "Mona – The Carnivorous Circus", Farren's amusing prank of a record.

The restless prankster would hang around the English Hells Angels before moving to the United States, where he would focus on writing as a music critic (including for the NME) and as an author of dystopian science fiction. He would devote himself to music only sporadically from then on, through spoken-word work, occasional reunions of the original band, and collaborations with Wayne Kramer and Lemmy. He died on 27 July 2013 during a concert by an apocryphal version of the Deviants, struck down by a heart attack: the final, fatal performance of an outlaw who gave back to the chaos of his times exactly what he got.

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18/07/2021