The Deviants – Ptooff!
The debut album from The Deviants, Mick Farren’s agitprop upstarts, is, for the most part, a short, sharp blast of sub-psychedelic rabble-rousing, fitting of the counterculture journalist, activist and wannabe rockstar.
Released in 1967, Ptooff! bursts from the Ladbroke Grove underground scene – home to, among others, the Edgar Broughton Band and Hawkwind – sounding like a wire brush antithesis to the dancing pixies and free love fare peddled in other quarters and so beloved of the petal-chewing hippy contingent.
Sporting a punk attitude ten years prior to that particular scene hitting the mainstream, Ptooff! only partially demonstrates the raw aggression that made the band such an unpalatable prospect to the flower children espousing the ethics of peace and love. It mixes psychedelia, American blues influences and even some Tyrannosaurus Rex-style hippy folk into one uneven pot that’s both exhilarating and frustrating in turns.
Following a brief spoken intro the album kicks off with the sexually charged, slightly sinister ‘I’m Coming Home’, which of the eight tracks is probably the most complete, as it descends into a heavily fuzzed maelstrom of psychedelic white-noise. From then on things get patchy.
‘Child of the Sky’ is the aforementioned hippy folk track, a pleasant enough psychedelic excursion whose leftfield take on traditional new age feyness makes for a splendid juxtaposition of lyrics and melody, even if I’ve no idea what it is he’s going on about. Unfortunately the same can’t be said of ‘Charlie’, a blues track that’s just plain dull, and though ‘Nothing Man’ is brimming in musical ideas, it does all sound rather like a Situationist-inspired performing arts project put on by a gaggle of students in the last throes of rebellion before their trust funds mature.
‘Garbage’ ventures into the arena of rhythm & blues that the likes of The Rolling Stones sold back to the US, with psychedelic extremes injected for good measure, before the instrumental ‘Bun’ takes us into the rip-snorting closer, ‘Deviation Street’ – a social nightmare played out against a menacing assault upon the senses of distorted guitar, finger-bleeding bass and skull-splitting drums. Absolutely stark raving mad.
Which provides a fitting epitaph for this review. The Deviants hawked a brand of disaffection, anti-authoritarianism and sedition-fuelled rhetoric while all around them were kissing chrysanthemums. Ptooff! isn’t always successful in conveying this, and often sounds as though the foot has been purposely left off of the pedal, making for quite the bumpy road. Still, as a barbed respite from the more whimsical excesses of psychedelic rock and pop, it’s definitely worth a listen.
Ptooff! by The Deviants is available to buy from Amazon.co.uk
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