Flamin' Groovies – Teenage Grease 1972

Ugly Things #71 (April 2026)

My 16 page account of the Flamin’ Groovies in Britain in 1972 is now published in what must be one of Mike Stax’s best ever issues of Ugly Things. Alongside my piece you’ll find the final part of the real Dave Laing’s monumental and utterly brilliant history of The Saints and Frank Uhle’s stupendous interview with the one and only Danny Fields. Laurent Bigot & Phillippe Migrenne’s story of les Lou’s is equally wonderful. There’s a whole lot more to dive into, so, as Mick Farren would have said, ‘get some’.

Amphetamine Academia – Ugly Things Review by Dave Laing

I’ve been a regular reader of Ugly Things since 1994, issue 14 when The Birds were the cover stars, so it feels a bit strange and kinda wonderful to find myself in #60 spread across 4 pages. Dave Laing reviewed Pin-Ups 1972 and interviewed me.

Momentous . . . an academic treatise that reads with the manic energy of an early Lester Bangs . . . Opposing views of authenticity, the underground’s clash with the mainstream and art’s clash with artifice and commerce, these are things that went into shaping the music, and Stanfield explores them with an addictive enthusiasm. . . Pin-Ups 1972 will leave you breathless from the number of different ways it comes at the music and reeling from the sheer number of points it makes.  Together with Stanfield’s A Band With Built-In Hate, it presents what I consider to be a new way of writing – amphetamine academia – about what is some of the most exciting music ever made. I can’t recommend it enough.

Dave Laing

These days with inflated shipping charges, Ugly Things is often hard to find here in the UK, but recently I’ve been getting mine from Juno (here). The mag’s home site is here