ROLL UP, folks, for the great pop strip
The People, Sunday September 21, 1969, p. 5.
The Deviants rip it up in Hyde Park and in the process get to titilate sunday tabloid readers.
Dave ‘Boss’ Goodman described to Deviants’ biographer, Rich Deakin, the impact of first seeing the band:
From the bottom up, he’s got his Acme cowboy boots on, he’s got his leather trousers on, he’s got his yellow Ben Sherman shirt open to the waist and an enormous great studded belt, and hair that gone completely fucking Hendrix liker . . . and then some. And he just looked . . . you know? . . . this huge broken nose, and he can’t sing a note in tune,, and it was the most fearsome thing the pair of us had ever seen in our lives, and we looked at each other and went, ‘Maaan! What have we let ourselves in for?’
The Deviants have a Secret to Share
The third and final Deviants’ album lacked any track or personnel information on the sleeve and came supplied with a chapbook of sorts.
Accompanying the credits was a short rant from Mick Farren that included a manifesto of a kind:
For the past 13 years Rock & Roll has been the secret language of a generation, despite lapses into gibberish and side-tracks into academic obscurity. Rock & Roll is a secret language that the rulers cannot understand.
Which raises the question of how well kept was that secret?
Scans of the complete text and some background on the album can be found on Richard Morton Jack’s blog, Galactic Ramble . I hope he doesn’t mind me ripping off the three I’ve used.
