Krishna Krishna Hare Hare Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare

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Viv is a wild-eyed character with greasy bleached-blond hair to his shoulders. He has a drink in one hand and a large spliff in the other - the king of his domain and oblivious to the illegalities of such behavior. Viv is in a band, The Bunch of Fives, a really psychedelic group of nuts and also has a gig as manager of Knuckles, a small basement club beneath an Italian restaurant in Soho.  The poorly lit basement has a stone floor and plain brick walls. There is no stage, so the band is set up at one end of the room, cramped together in front of Moe's drums. We conclude the song and Viv steps up and addresses the room as if it's a packed showcase gig. 'The Misunderstood from California! Let's fuckin' hear it for 'em! Yeah! The Misunderstood!' Viv leaves the stage area and music comes up over the PA system ... 'Eight Miles High' by Barbie Beatles copycats and Dylan wannabees, The Byrds. I wander after Viv while the rest of the band continues to pack away the gear.
'Good set, man! You can play here anytime, man, we get a pretty good crowd in.' Jeez, I'm looking around the room, which has emptied out even further in the last few minutes. 'Well, on a weekend, like! Thursday's always a bit of a slow night.'
Dave nudges Mick. 'Viv, today's Saturday. It is the fuckin' weekend, mate!'
Viv takes another big hit on the spliff. He appears to be making some complicated mental calculations. Finally he exhales loudly, sending a huge cloud of smoke across the table. 'Nah! Thursday, mate. Definitely.'
Dave tells me, 'Viv hasn't slept since Wednesday night; so by his calculations that means it must still be Thursday.'

royal pimps and headless men and naked Ministers in masks

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It was appropriate that the most blatant rebellion against law and order in 1964 should be merely the day-long unauthorised broadcasting of pop records from a rusty hulk moored ten miles off the coast. Throughout the month of April, the country waited in mounting suspense to see what the Government would do to terminate such unauthorised invasion of the airwaves. The Post Office cut off Caroline's ship-to-shore telephone. The Customs Officials did as much as possible to hinder intercourse with the ship. The Foreign Office lodged a protest with the Government of Panama, where the Caroline was registered. Four days later, when Radio Atlanta also began transmission, the prospect of a whole armada of pirates massed round Britain's shores elevated the problem briefly into major political importance. As May drew to a close, 'Screaming Lord Sutch', a pop singer from North London, set sail with a trawlerful of leopard-skinned acolytes, took possession of a disused army fort on Shivering Sands in the Thames Estuary and announced a round-the-clock service of Sutch classics, spiced with readings from Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Each of the Pink Fairies arrived bearing the head of a dead pig on a pole

 

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Other staunch allies in combating the mod/skinhead problem were a motley bunch of Jewish East Londoners known as the Firm. The Firm were ex-mods themselves, but of the earlier, stylish variety whose twin dedications were music and creating mayhem and chaos wherever they went. Led by the dire duo of Peter Shertser and Ian Sippen, the Firm had taken a bunch of acid, but managed to retain a highly mutated version of the traditional mod obsession with making and spending money. They’d grown their hair and now dressed in sharp, custom-tailored suits of the most outrageous fabrics they could find. These bespoke monsters were made by an elderly tailor in the East End to whom they would present lengths of William Morris curtain material and demand that he sew it according to the same pattern as a three-button Tonik. At UFO, the Firm’s capacity for confusion and disorder reached inspired peaks. They spiked a number of people, attacked the more disorientated hippies with water pistols and let off an assortment of fireworks right on the dance floor.

'How can anyone live happily in Enfield?' I demanded.

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'They want to be reassured that their culture is the best that has ever existed in the entire history of the world. And what that means is coming up with one-hundred and one reasons as to why Coldplay are musically superior to James Brown. It doesn't matter what I do or don't like, it's a matter of telling the kids what they want to hear and thereby ensuring that they come back for more. The opinions we profess are market led, but these might not in fact be our real opinions …' 
'What else are you proposing to teach?'
'The usual, European modernist film, the novels of Colin Macinnes, folk rock from Bert Jansch to the present, the life and times of Benny Hill, the work ...'

If the Stones based their early sound on Chuck Berry, then the Pretty Things copped their musical style from Bo Diddley, while simultaneously succeeding in making the man who inspired them sound unbelievably sophisticated.

'Well, what did you think of it?'

'It sounds like a weak version of a lot of the music I like. It was okay, but it didn't rock like Nirvana.'

'Without the Pretty Things there wouldn't have been a Nirvana or Oasis.'

'What about Coldplay?'

'I don't think you can blame that particular aberration on Dick Taylor and Phil May.'

black music played by white, working class, bad skin bastards

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People might say, "Well, there's no more Knickerbockers, there's no more Count Five and there's no more Hombres, and there's no more Standells out there." Yeah, but there may be a bunch of people who can give you the same emotional feeling if you spent the time on a Tuesday night to go to the clubs and hear music, you'll see. It's still out there. You have to find it again, because you can only recycle these stories so many times; you can only reissue these songs so many times, and eventually everybody's gonna have these records in their homes. You're going to have all the versions of all this stuff on bootlegs and tape and vinyl. After a while though, you're kid's gonna eat them, you're dog's gonna shit on them and your second wife will throw them out. So why don't you guys go form your own bands, or why don't you go find some and then you'll find some dirty bitches and get laid and you'll have a good time.

a middle-class boy from Cheltenham, with some nasty ways

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In the early days, Phil May heard stories of Brian’s treatment by Oldham and the Stones, but if he raised the subject with Brian, ‘he would pooh-pooh it . . . He didn’t even want me to mention it.’ Brian found it easy to chat to May about all the subjects that interested him – French films, art openings – but essentially it all came back to music. The more friendly Brian became with the Pretty Things, though, the more guilty he felt about being disloyal to his own band. One night he vented his frustrations by melting a stack of Pretty Things records on the stove, hanging them on the wall and writing ‘Fuck Off Pretty Things’ in shaving foam on the mirrors. The Pretty Things had their own crazed inter-band relations – ‘I remember one time I had Brian [Pendleton] up against the wall there,’ says May, ‘trying to strangle him’ – but some of the Stones’ internecine rivalries went well beyond that.

Times don’t change, but haircuts do, same old bullshit for me or you

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It didn’t take long for Russell to find his way around the capital’s hip and happening scenes, gravitating towards clubs like Tiles, Whiskey-A-Go-Go, and the Flamingo, where Geno Washington and other soul music was played. The Flamingo was particularly notorious as a pill den, probably a hangover from its reputation during the mod heyday.

It was reasonably easy to get pills in many clubs. Russell mentions one seedy club that used to be accessed through a car park round the back of Piccadilly: “If you wanted to go in the club you gave them five shillings and if you wanted drugs you gave them a ten shilling note. It was well accepted that if you gave them a ten shilling note then they’d give you four blues and you didn’t go into the club. It was a desolate, bomb site car park and there were the remains of an old building, the cellar of which had been propped up and turned into a club.”

But the club scene was changing, and the mod scene was fast fading with the emergence of psychedelia. By the autumn of 1966 Russell discovered a club called UFO, situated in the basement of an Irish dance hall in the Tottenham Court Road called the Blarney Club. It was here that Russell would meet up with Mick Farren and become, in 1967, a Social Deviant.

pill-head addicts in Soho’s disruptive teenage wasteland

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The tension erupted almost immediately, as the band came on and tore into the Bo Diddley scorcher, ‘Roadrunner’, turning the song on its head, with Phil May’s inarticulate vocal and screaming harmonica pushing the number into accelerated chaos. Phil May was characteristically dressed all in white, a white crew-neck jumper, white hipster jeans, white socks and white slip-ons. The two guitarists, Dick Taylor and John Povey, the bassist, Skip Allan, and the confrontationally wired drummer, Viv Prince, were dressed respectively in blue, pink, burnt-orange and scarlet ruffled shirts, typically from John Stephen’s Carnaby Street shops, with the dandified, mouthy drummer wearing a dark-blue, silk-banded pork pie, a cigarette posted at an angle in his mouth. The band meant trouble from the first moment, and stormed into their hit single, ‘Don’t Bring Me Down.’ The Face was so pulled into the music’s raw power that he temporarily forgot all about the ugly incident out in the yard involving Terry, and felt his stomach tighten as the band broke into ‘She’s Fine She’s Mine’, with the drummer, Viv Prince, suddenly deserting his kit to crawl across the stage, unlit cigarette in his mouth, to request a light from the front row. Only he stayed there, on all fours, fixing the crowd with his demented look, and holding out his hat like he was begging for money. The band ignored the drummer’s pathologically aberrant behaviour, and kept on playing without him at his stack, with May executing a backwards somersault, while keeping perfect timing.