“This is British amphetamine psychosis music and if you don’t like it you can fuck off and listen to your Iron Butterfly albums.” So speaks Worthing’s home-grown street fighting man, International Times editor and leader of The Deviants Mick Farren. It’s just one of the many and frequent fraught moments recounted in this hugely colourful tale of the anarchic pilled-up trail blazed by The Deviants, their brothers-in-arms the Pink Fairies and fellow spirits The Pretty Things, Hawkwind, Tyrannosaurus Rex and the Edgar Broughton Band.
Deakin traces The Social Deviants’ formation in 1967, their chaotic stop-start career, Mick Farren’s sacking from his own band during a disastrous sojourn in Toronto in 1970 and the numerous short-lived Pink Fairies reunions, culminating in their last stand on the road with Motörhead in 1988. In doing so, he vividly captures the spirit of the times, detailing the UK’s emerging counterculture and the underground scene centred on Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove, the halcyon daze of free festivals and benefit concerts, spinning a tale that spans the heydays of rock’n’roll, psychedelia, punk and beyond. Initial copies come with a CD of live and previously unreleased material from The Pink Fairies.
