by Mick Farren
By the time PTOOFF! was released, the band had temporarily stabilised itself. Russell continued behind the drums, Sid Bishop was on guitar, while Sandy and a newcomer, Michael MacDonnell (‘Mac’), exchanged the chores of bass, second guitar and, at times, two thundering basses. The double-bass idea was all mine, and a very bad one. On full amplification, they could replicate an atonal B52 in a power dive and were far from pleasant, but, right then, I had little patience with ‘pleasant’.
In addition to the musicians, we also acquired a road crew – Tony Wigens, the driver, and Dave ‘Boss’ Goodman, who started off as Tony’s part-time helper, but would play a major part in all our lives for years to come. As time passed, and the road grew more inevitable, the personalities that made up the band started to gel and solidify. Russell worked on being the band’s resident black wind of negativity. The drummer we both needed and deserved could be insightful, incredibly funny and a fund of bright ideas when he wanted. He was also willing to take just about every drug known to man, if offered. He was a double-edged sword, however, and a nettle to be constantly grasped. All too often the dark side would take control and he would turn into the bane of my life. One of his favourite depressing irritants was the knack of sleeping all the way to a date, and then, as the truck crested the proverbial hill with our destination spread out in front of us, waking scratching himself and announcing, ‘This is going to be a really terrible gig.’
Fortunately Russell was better as a drummer and chemical explorer than as a soothsayer, because sometimes the gig was indeed terrible, but at other times it could be inspired. He just loved to create his personal black cloud and share it with the rest of us. Later, as times grew more convoluted and the pressure increased, his on-route wake-ups grew into full-blown dramas. He’d demand that we stop the truck, right there on the motorway, and let him out because he couldn’t stand it any more. The one time that Tony called his bluff, Russell actually scrambled out of the truck and began jogging back down the M1, causing us to institute dangerous emergency driving measures in order to reel him back in. Even when supposedly hanging out peacefully at the flat, he’d climb onto the balustrade of the sixth-floor balcony and hop insanely from one foot to the other, threatening to plunge to his death on the pavement below at any ill-considered second. The natural assumption would have been that our drummer was suicidal, but then he’d grin and let it be known that the game was conducted expressly to upset me. Russell seemingly had no fear of heights, while I came close to suffering from morbid vertigo. Amazingly, Russell survived – all the way through the Deviants, all the way through the subsequent Pink Fairies – and thrives still today, amusing himself by umpiring cricket matches. Our clashes have long since been put behind us.
Far less complex than Russell, Sandy seemed to exist in a world of his own, apparently content with the natural goals of women, intoxication and rock & roll, coupled with a quiet Monty Python humour and a psychedelic philosophy that frequently made sense only to him. He had been recruited into the band mainly because he was there and willing, which seemed to be the way a lot of things happened to Sandy. He didn’t create too many scenes or deliberately precipitate too many crises. One time, when the band was in funds after the deal on the third album, his request for a new bass had been passed over, so he borrowed a tactic from Russell. In a sudden display of totally uncharacteristic, violent Pete Townshend showmanship, he smashed the old bass to matchwood in the final number of a set at Sussex University. Fait accompli. The new bass had to be acquired. Sandy, like Russell, would endure throughout the Deviants and on into the Pink Fairies.
Sid Bishop would not remain. He’d go in the band’s second Stalinist purge – the one before the purge that took me out. I was always pretty happy with Sid. He was an anchor of unflappability, who seemed to be able to keep his head when all around were routinely losing theirs.
Mac also wouldn’t stay. He was a man of unfulfilled ambitions, who seemed to feel that the world owed him a measure of fame and was frustrated at how slowly it came. Both Mac and I had stubborn tempers and we fought constantly. The dynamics of a band’s rivalries usually stem from who’s getting the lion’s share of the public attention, and in the claustrophobic boredom of travelling it can become almost obsessional. The stupidity is that there’s no way it can be solved. A focal member of a band, in my case the singer, can’t back off from the performance because of jealousy from upstage.
If we’re talking band dynamics, though, the increasingly important figure was Boss Goodman. Boss was, and is, a big guy; a bluff King Hal figure, although even his solid exterior concealed a few unsuspected demons. Boss rapidly assumed the role of an emotional rock against which the rest of us could try and dash ourselves, but come to no harm. The platoon sergeant or team coach, Boss had considerable experience of dealing with the deranged. Both he and driver Tony (the Handsome Roadie) had been denizens of a notorious house at 32 Goodmayes Lane, which was known to most of the dope fiends in the Ilford area, and to the local drug squad, as ‘Big Pig’. Steve Sparks describes it thus: ‘You couldn’t touch anything in Goodman’s house or you’d trip. You’d open the fridge and there’d be bottles and bottles of acid. There’d be more acid than food and Boss likes his food.’ In the straight world, he’d been the night manager of a supermarket, but had been busted for giving free meat to hippies. With the acid business starting to become too risky, a career move to roadie for the Deviants seemed an acceptable change of pace.
Surrounded by this cast of characters, I found myself attempting to inspire and entertain a youth movement that was growing increasingly political in an all too conventional sense. Where the hippies had smiled in idiot bliss, teeth were now being clenched and a Marxist bray had crept into the dialogue. In May 1968 France started to come thrillingly unglued. Students from Nanterre took over the Sorbonne, and eventually the entire Parisian Latin Quarter. Romantic images flickered from the TV as student rebels burned cars and hurled cobblestones, armoured riot police responded with CS gas, and rumour had it that wild, abandoned Gallic free love was practised between bouts of violence. One of the leaders, Jacques Tarnero, declared, ‘We are not children at play but people who continuously reject their social conditions. We have shown in the streets and on the barricades that our revolt is effective. This is not a dream.’
Unfortunately this was a dream, and the revolution was not effective. Locked into factionalism and dialectical infighting, the French students dissipated their initial energy, and a frightened bourgeoisie swept de Gaulle back to power with the tacit aid of the French communist party. The student revolt fell apart, but still made enough waves to send colleges all across Europe reeling into romantic, fist-waving confusion. England was by no means exempt. Seats of higher learning fell to strikes and sit-ins like a row of dominoes – Hornsey Art School, the London School of Economics, Essex and Warwick Universities – and this set the Deviants off on an entirely new career course, creating a whole new set of problems.
We were a rock band, and we worked in the now. We had no Five-Year Plan or Ten-Point Programme. We could do very little beyond rouse the rabble and traffic in illusions. The citadel was stormed in hallucination, in flashes of dash and passion and visions of utopian possibilities. At best we could be propagandists, turning keys, opening minds. Sadly, from 1968 on, far too many minds started closing again, using the templates of Marxist-Leninism or the thoughts of Chairman Mao as an intellectual lifebelt when thinking for oneself became too hard. Much has been made of the role of the New Left, and although, throughout the late Sixties, I clenched my fist and promoted power-to-the-people with the leeriest and loudest, much of the New Left was just the Old Left in blue jeans, with the same Victorian perspectives and bickering ideological subdivisions.
We learned this the hard way playing to students during the 1968 upheaval. Colleges have always been the meal ticket of the middle-league rock band. They have a young, bored and captive audience, and they pay much better than clubs. With the colleges in turm
oil, however, the meal ticket was – at least in part – cancelled, and that part was unfortunately the one that ensured our subsistence. We weren’t supposed to complain. I mean, it was the revolution, wasn’t it? Withering glances began to come from Russell and Sandy when I started acting too much like the Leon Trotsky of rock & roll, and the question of how the hell we were going to get paid on Friday frequently remained unanswered. Band finances were a disaster, and the question of cash created its own relentless flow of stress. Booze and amphetamines were now in the picture on a daily basis, which meant that the arguments over money could become downright bizarre. The new motto seemed to be that we didn’t want to get fucked up, we wanted to get fucked up all the time. In addition to acquiring drink and drugs – that always seemed to happen, whatever shape we were in – we had to cover petrol, repairs, rehearsals, sticks and strings, and still have a tidy sum left over to meet each individual’s domestic expenses, rent and the like, which meant that the wives and girlfriends also became involved and tossed in their nine cents’ worth of recrimination.
In theory, the Deviants were a democratic, egalitarian unit; all for one and one for all; all the lads created equal. Unfortunately that only extended to the fun stuff. In matters of money, I was suddenly the scapegoat again. Tony and Boss may have physically picked up the cash from the promoter, social secretary or club owner, but I was the one forced into the patriarchal role of telling everyone how we couldn’t have this because we had to give priority to that, and listening to the whining and complaining that ensued. And all I could really do was grit my teeth and curse a revolution that gave so little consideration to the survival of its troops.
Let’s Loot the Refectory
‘Did you bring any food?’
Tony Wigens looked at the students with total incomprehension. ‘What?’
‘Food, did you bring any food?’
‘Food?’
‘We don’t have any food.’
‘We’re the fucking band. Why should we bring food, for fuck’s sake?’
Boss, who was much faster on the uptake where food was concerned, was starting to glower. ‘What do you mean you don’t have any food?’
The students at Essex University were sitting-in. I wasn’t clear what specifically they were protesting about, but in 1968 there were plenty of grudges to go round. It had started as a regular gig, booked through the students’ union, but when the rebels took over, we received a call asking us if we’d come anyway as an act of solidarity. The original contract got us through the cordon of police and campus security that surrounded the place, but once in, we found that we’d entered a logistical disaster area. The survival skills of this revolutionary cadre were effectively non-existent, and they seemed to have been living on smuggled sausage rolls and jam tarts for days on end.
Boss was shaking his head, confounded that the supposed cream of British revolutionary youth could fuck up something so elementary. ‘No food?’
The only good news was that beer had been infiltrated into the dressing room, as per contract rider, although I understood there had been some discussion as to whether providing the band with beer and a dressing room was counter-revolutionary pandering to bourgeois elitism. These items mollified the Deviants sufficiently that we went ahead and readied ourselves to rock and, when drunk enough, we gave them enough rousing rama-lama and Fourth International, up-against-the-wall-motherfucker rhetoric to convince the local Red Guards that we’d earned our ale and privacy. These ungrateful commissars probably didn’t deserve all the energy we lavished upon them, but sitting-in was a tedious form of protest, made even worse by an involuntary hunger strike.
Needless to say, once through with the noise and foolishness, and out of our sweaty stage shirts, the band decided that it too was hungry. The Deviants could always be counted on to be difficult. If there’d been any food, we probably wouldn’t have wanted it. As thoroughgoing speedfreaks, we boasted about forgoing food and sleep for days on end. But difficult is as difficult does and, faced with this localised famine, we wanted something to eat so badly that it bordered on an obsession.
‘This is a fucking college. There’s got to be food.’
True guerrillas forage. That’s what Fidel did in the Sierra Maestra. With the diminutive but determined Sid Bishop taking the lead, we foraged like bastards and, by the simple strategy of following the signs, arrived at the refectory and its attendant kitchens, discovering that they came equipped with a large padlocked door, beyond which was clearly a store room. A rock band travels with a full set of tools, and a door isn’t much of an obstacle to a heavy screwdriver and the application of Boss Goodman’s famous hammer. The store contained enough food to feed the entire student body for a week or more, right down to a freezer full of ice cream. We immediately took a fancy to the ice cream and, as we served looted strawberry and vanilla to allcomers, the students scampered away clutching entire sides of bacon, huge slabs of processed cheese and industrial-sized cans of Heinz tomato soup. They had finally bridged the divide between liberation and larceny, and we couldn’t have felt happier for them. With our mission accomplished, we made our getaway with our own looted cheese and found ourselves a transport café in the real world, where they’d serve us a hot fry-up. What sometimes troubles me, here in the twenty-first century, is that many of these wannabe world leaders, who couldn’t organise themselves a hot meal without the help of a bunch of hungry and bad-tempered rockers, are the backbone of New Labour.
Kill, Zeppelin, Kill, Kill
They hated us. Oh yes, they really hated us. The only thing they hated worse than us was Led Zeppelin and Robert Plant – especially Robert Plant. They were a knot of fifty or sixty burly farmboys, red-faced and sweating, checked shirts, drape jackets and jeans with big turn-ups. They probably would have been an anachronism in the late Fifties; now they merely spelled trouble. They had marched in, full of rustic piss, vinegar and Watney’s Red Barrel, expecting to find a Saturday-night dance, and had quickly realised that neither Led Zeppelin nor the Deviants played music for muck spreaders. The gig was in the West Country, of that there was no doubt. As the years passed some controversy has arisen over the exact location. I always believed it was at Exeter Town Hall, but Russell seemed to think that it was somewhere in Bristol, while others have put forward Yeovil and Plymouth as contenders. I suppose I could go back and check, but why destroy a perfectly good – if also totally pointless – running debate? Besides, I’m certain it was Exeter and I’m the one writing this tale. And I’m not recounting the story as a pivotal piece of rock history, but as an illustration of how even supposedly regular gigs regularly departed from what might be considered normality.
We’d opened for Led Zeppelin a few weeks earlier at the Roundhouse, with John Lee Hooker topping the bill. The Roundhouse was sufficiently spread out so that I couldn’t claim we exactly hung out either with LZ or the formidable Hooker. In Exeter (or wherever), on the other hand, cowering in fear in a dressing room for a number of hours, we got to know Plant, Page, Bonham and the other one reasonably well. We’d also met Plant a number of times previously when we’d worked with his earlier group, Robert Plant’s Band of Joy, and they’d been opening for us. This was the time when the entire music industry was watching to see whether LZ was actually going to take off, and promoters were hedging their bets and printing the words ‘ex-Yardbirds’ on the posters and press advertisements almost as large as the name of the band.
In Exeter (or wherever) the crowd was sizeable, but the place was far from packed. When we came on stage, the mood was fairly tepid, and we could either work really hard to get something going or just coast through, get the money and split. We opted to give it a shot, mainly because a knot of girls had convened at the front of the stage. They were dressed to the nines, in fair imitation of London groupies, and were checking us out. (Why is that the girls in the provinces were so much more instinctively hip than the boys?) I have to admit that both Sid and I hoped we might be on to a good thing and be
gan seriously showing off. At this point the farmboys made their entrance, first stopping at the bar, then advancing to the foot of the stage with pint-pots clutched in their horny fists.
I confess: I was the one who set the spark that would kindle the violence. The farmboys’ first ploy, aside from a few misdirected homophobic remarks, was to start coming on to the girls; demanding why they were so taken with a bunch of poofs like us, when manly farm labourers were right there for the asking. When the girls told them to fuck off, they further demonstrated their manhood by placing their drinks in a row along the front of the stage, which was about chest height for them and could easily serve as a bar. Unfortunately I was in the kind of mood to decide that no rustic clod was going to use my fucking stage as a bar, okay?
Mincing like Mick Jagger, and without missing a beat, I sashayed lightly along the edge of the apron, deftly kicking their glasses of beer onto the floor. The girls thought this was hilarious, but the yokels knew a mortal insult when they saw one. The first glass they threw went harmlessly over Russell’s head, like some kind of warning shot. The second came right at me, but I managed to duck. A bottle just missed Sid and bounced off his speaker stack. This made him uncharacteristically and territorially angry. He stooped down, picked up a glass and hurled it with all the force he could muster, hitting his target and, I think, drawing blood. In the next three and a half seconds, all hell broke loose. The farmboys were coming at us in force, up and onto the stage, bent on doing actual (if not grievous) bodily harm. Sandy had his bass unplugged and was already on his way to the wings. Russell picked up his snare on its stand, plus a couple of cymbals, and followed him. Boss, who wasn’t exactly averse to a brawl, got stuck in, while Tony whisked off the rest of the drums as best he could. I swung blindly with a mike stand, and also ran. Courage is not in contention when you are outnumbered ten to one by drunken farmhands.