I’ve been crossing paths with The Pretties’ Viv Prince lately, he makes a cameo in Nick Kent’s The Unstable Boys, a model of sorts for the band’s drummer as Phil May was for the singer. I thought of him while reading Nik Cohn’s story of lives lived on Broadway, The Heart of the World, where he says that Russian street gangs named themselves after British beat groups:
Wimp suburbanites chose the Beatles and Rolling Stones; inner-city stylists preferred the Yardbirds or Them. On Novokuz, which must always be the hippest of all, prime icons included John’s Children, the Action, the Troggs.
Sasha himself had been a Fruit Eating Bear, but they were fragile goods and shattered at first contact with Pretty Things who were neighbourhood kingpins. The Things had the deadliest weapons, the sharpest clothes; they looked the most Western. Only the Hi-Numbers dared challenge them.
Viv had a big role to play in Pretties manager Bryan Morrison’s posthumously published memoir, and frankly the only reason to read what is a otherwise a superficial account of his time as one of the sixties music scene’s prime movers, but it did tip me off to a feature on the band in a 1964 edition of The Sunday Times Magazine, which I found for a pittance on eBay. That’s Viv in the porkpie hat.
He could do Bo Diddley’s ‘a shave and a hair cut, two bits’ better than any other London sticksman and he gave his instrument a prominence unmatched until Keith Moon appeared, but he also gave to the Pretties’ image a much needed element of menace. Without him they just seem placable, unremarkable even. Regardless of Phil May’s long locks, without Prince mixing things up it’s Dick Taylor’s jazz beard that dominates. It’s as if a woodwork teacher had formed a band with a bunch of willing sixth formers .
Here’s The Pretty Things without Viv Prince, this Dutch 45 picture sleeve featuring his predecessor Viv Andrews
And here’s what you get when Prince takes up a pose
Until Lee Brilleaux and Johnny Rotten picked over his style book, Viv Prince stood alone in making a sheepskin coat the coolest look on London’s streets. About as anti-Carnaby Street as you could get
How a sheepskin should be worn, Morlands advert October 1966