Pop and rockObituaryMick Farren obituary
Music journalist, singer and novelist who incarnated the spirit of rock'n'rollMick Farren did not invent the punk rock movement, but he certainly sounded the alarm with a June 1976 essay in the New Musical Express. Under the headline The Titanic Sails at Dawn, borrowed from the lyric of Bob Dylan's Desolation Row, he examined a growing disaffection among the paper's readership with the increasing complacency of a rock scene grown fat on the proceeds of the 60s boom.
Farren, who has died aged 69, excoriated a generation of stars and their lackeys whose remoteness from their public was exemplified by the increasing number of tightly controlled gigs, the sort of events that, in his view, squeezed the essential spontaneity and revolutionary fervour out of music. "Has rock'n'roll become another mindless consumer product that plays footsie with jet set and royalty," he asked, "while the kids who make up its roots and energy queue up in the rain to watch it from 200 yards away?"
The answer, of course, was yes. Later Farren would point out that a reaction was already under way that summer, soon to emerge in the shape of the Sex Pistols, the Damned and the Clash. In the US, the New York Dolls, the Ramones and others had been paving the way. "I was being a little disingenuous in calling for something that was already happening," he wrote when the piece was republished earlier this year in a collection of his work titled Elvis Died for Somebody's Sins But Not Mine. Nevertheless, his words reached out to a generation of fans existing outside the metropolitan elite, who found an echo of their unformed yearnings in his clarion call, which has entered history as a sort of punk-rock Gettysburg address.
Throughout his life as a writer, musician (with his band, the Deviants) and provocateur, Farren did his best to incarnate the qualities he saw as vital ingredients of the rock'n'roll spirit. By the time of that celebrated NME piece he had spent a decade as a prominent member of the London counterculture. In the words of his friend, the publisher Felix Dennis, he was a "doorman, editor, journalist, rock star, rabble rouser, critic and commentator, charlatan, jester, impresario, gunslinging cross-dresser, icon, author, songwriter, poet".
With his gigantic white-boy Afro, his studded belt, his leather jacket and his aviator shades, Farren certainly looked like the man who had led the White Panthers UK, a branch of the organisation which had been set up in Chicago by his friend and fellow agitator John Sinclair as a brothers-in-arms counterpart to the Black Panthers. The only impact made by the UK offshoot, during its brief and ill-defined existence, came as part of the unholy alliance of Hell's Angels, Young Liberals and student radicals from France, Germany and Holland who tore down the 9ft corrugated iron walls surrounding the 1970 Isle of Wight festival.
Born in Cheltenham, Farren went to school and art college in Worthing, West Sussex. By the early 60s he was in London, and making himself part of the scene. When Bob Dylan played the Albert Hall in 1966, Farren was there, and left the concert – at which Dylan unveiled his new electric music, enraging his folkie fans while enrapturing others – pondering the emergence of "a new breed of freaks". The following year he joined the staff of the International Times, the underground weekly paper known to its devotees as IT.
To the coterie of former beatniks, proto-hippies, literary avant-gardists, anarchists and revolutionaries who formed its staff, he brought something different. "For him, the underground was a logical extension of the original rock'n'roll rebellion," wrote Barry Miles, one of IT's founders. "He cared passionately about Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent and all the original rockers, and quite rightly thought they should belong in the pantheon along with Buckminster Fuller, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. He saw the Hell's Angels and mods and rockers as part of the same energetic thrust to change society as the Beat generation or Che Guevara."
By that time Farren was also occupied as the lead singer of a band originally called the Social Deviants, the name under which they played at Alexandra Palace in April 1967 as part of the celebrated 14-Hour Technicolour Dream, opening a bill that also included Pink Floyd and the Soft Machine. Not the most technically accomplished of the era's bands, borrowing much of the scabrous wit of Frank Zappa but little of the finesse, they performed a kind of rough and ready garage rock, preserved on their three albums: PTOOFF! (1967), Disposable (1968) and Deviants 3 (1969).
Farren was present at the anti-Vietnam war demonstration in Grosvenor Square in March 1968. Two years later he set up Phun City, a pioneering free pop festival at Ecclesden Common in Worthing, featuring the MC5, the White Panther band from Detroit, alongside Edgar Broughton, Mighty Baby and Mungo Jerry. The following month, he was among the 600,000 congregants at the Isle of Wight, irritating the festival's promoters by publishing a White Panther newsletter and helping his friends Hawkwind and Pink Fairies (formed from the ashes of the Deviants) to play in an inflatable tent.
Eventually he was made IT's editor, responsible for shoring up a declining circulation; his response was to shift the tone to reflect his own sensibility, pitched somewhere between the head shops of Portobello Road and the fleshpots of Wardour Street. When the paper folded in 1973, he spent some time writing captions for soft-porn magazines before accepting an offer to join the NME, along with several colleagues from the underground press, notably Charles Shaar Murray (already notorious as a contributor to the Schoolkids' OZ) and Nick Kent. Together they would form the shock troops of the paper's assault on the pre-eminence of its principal rival, the Melody Maker.
Once Farren and his pals had come to terms with the idea of working for an establishment organisation like IPC, they succeeded brilliantly in reviving the weekly's coverage. "What the paper needed to complete the team," he wrote of his own role, "was a gonzo alcoholic who knew the Bukowski-Thompson opening tactic of starting a story by describing the hangover". Among his most memorable pieces was an interview with a formidably unco-operative Chuck Berry, one of his earliest heroes, during which illusions were gradually and painfully stripped away.
Nick Logan, the paper's editor, invited Farren to run a section called Thrills, into which he could pour anything that took his fancy, including the work of two cartoonists, his friend and former IT co-editor Edward Barker – with whom he had been acquitted at the Old Bailey after the Obscene Publications Squad seized copies of Nasty Tales, their anthology of strips from the underground comics by the likes of Robert Crumb and Rick Griffin – and the coruscatingly brilliant Ray Lowry. A new recruit, the 17-year-old Julie Burchill, sharpened her teeth in its columns.
Soon the circulation was soaring above 200,000, leaving the MM in its wake. The relationship between the staffs of the two papers was often characterised by disdain on the one side and suspicion on the other, but Farren's combination of convivial warmth and hard-bitten charisma made him impossible to dislike.
In 1980 he moved to the US, first to New York and then to Los Angeles. In addition to his non-fiction (including several works on Presley and histories of amphetamine and the black leather jacket), he began a new career as a writer of fiction, producing 23 novels in a style containing elements of Michael Moorcock, JG Ballard and Jim Thompson, their titles including The Renquist Quartet and Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife. In 2001 he published Give the Anarchist a Cigarette, an entertaining memoir of his picaresque life and high times in London.
As a musician, he had made two solo albums after the demise of the Deviants, Mona – The Carnivorous Circus (1970) and Vampires Stole My Lunch Money (1978), and recorded with the MC5's Wayne Kramer. Over the last 20 years the Deviants reformed and recorded on various occasions, and in some quarters their music has been favourably reassessed. He returned to the UK, for health reasons, three years ago. He was married three times.
The blurb for the recent anthology of Farren's writing declared: "That he has survived so long may be a miracle." He died on Saturday night, having collapsed on stage while performing with a new assortment of Deviants at the Borderline Club in London, during the Atomic Sunshine one-day festival.
Michael Anthony Farren, writer, editor and singer, born 3 September 1943; died 27 July 2013
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