Search - Deviants :: Ptooff / Disposable

Great Lost Albums

Laurence Upton | Wilts, UK | 03/20/2008

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Although Mick Farren had quite a high profile in the sixties, his involvement in counter-culture activities, especially his work for the International Times and other alternative presses, overshadowed his role as lead singer for the Deviants (originally the Social Deviants). Independent labels were very much a rarity in the UK in the sixties, not really surfacing until the advent of punk a decade later, although fitting very much with the ethos of the times. One of the reasons why Ptooff! is one of the great lost albums of 1967 is because it was only available on mail order from the underground Underground Impresarios, and never achieved the level of sales necessary to trigger the establishment publicity machine, although an edition of it did reappear on Decca two years later.



Similarly, Disposable appeared the following year on Simon Staple's miniscule Stable label with similar results. The band did have quite a following thanks to their live gigging, and if memory serves, were frequent visitors to Birmingham's Mothers, Mick Farren calling out "We don't care about rules and regulations!" as management turned off the mains power after an over-extended set.



Those that did get Ptooff! through the post found that it came housed in a three-foot wide pop-art poster with PTOOFF! in huge cartoon letters across it, de rigueur home decoration for the anti-establishment hippy. Those that consider 1967 to be the Summer of Love will be surprised at the sneering cynicism throughout the record, especially on tracks like I'm Coming Home, Garbage and the nine-minute tour de force Deviation Street.



While we were listening to the Dead and the Airplane, Mick Farren clearly had the Fugs, the Mothers of Invention, Spirit and the Motor City Five (as they were still called) on his turntable, and came up with a sound that at times pre-figures the Stooges (Iggy Pop and Mick Farren shared a love of Bo Diddley and that shuffling Mona-beat undercurrent is also present on a couple of Ptooff!'s tracks, just as it was on early Stooges records). I'm Coming Home is a fair reflection of the Deviants live, with the line-up of Mick Farren leather-posture vocals, Sid Bishop's psyche-power guitar, Cord Rees anchoring it all on bass, with Russell Hunter's garage drums, but there is a range of styles on the record, none more innovative than on the proto-electronic piece The Nothing Man, realized in collaboration with Jack Henry Moore, who had studied with John Cage. Loops of radio excerpts are collaged with cut-ups, reference tones and percussion as the multiple deficiencies of the said character are snarlingly intoned.



Helping out on the album at Sound Techniques in Autumn 1967 were Jenny Ashworth, Stephen Sparks and Duncan Sanderson, who was to replace Cord Rees in the band for the next album. Ptooff! is unique, a flower with a barb-wire stem, and the message is, "No, let's not go to San Francisco". It could have been heavily influential in 1967 and 1968, if only it had been more widely heard.



In 1968, the year of the Hornsey art school sit-ins, the Paris student revolution and the Beatles' Revolution, the times were chiming more in accord with the Deviants, not that it made much difference to sales of the second album, Disposable (like Garbage, referring to the wastefulness of mass culture and produce), recorded this time in north London's lovely Willesden, in September 1968. From it came a wonderful double-sided single; You've Got To Hold On, a rush of motorcity neurone energy with screaming psychedelic guitar, and the Fugs-inspired Let's Loot The Supermarket, a rail against corporate Tesco-world in a giggling naughty stoned school-kid stylee, but which also, thanks in part to MJ McDonnell's harmonica, seems to parody Bob Dylan's basement tapes. The comic, the cosmic and the theatre of the absurd always bubbled below the surface on Ptooff! but is more apparent on Disposable, with Stephen Sparks' narrated Sparrows And Wires, Blind Joe McTurk's Last Session and the heightened dumbness of Pappa-Oo-Mao-Mao, their homage to the early sixties surf doo-wop of the Rivingtons and the Trashmen. This time the guest list expanded to include the brass section of Dick Heckstall-Smith and Pete Brown, and the keyboards of Dennis Hughes and Tony Ferguson. Critics seem to consider it as a poor second to Ptooff! but with additional key tracks like Somewhere To Go, Slum Lord and Last Man I see it as a worthy companion.



This CD edition contains both albums in full on one disc. The 36" x 24" poster is obviously not included and the front covers of both albums are reduced to 2" thumbnails, but the liner notes by Miles and John Peel are included, along with quotations from, among others, Bob Dylan, Che Guevara, William Burroughs, Buckminster Fuller, Captain Beefheart, Tolstoy, Thoreau, Goethe and Arthur Brown - all the great minds. Unfortunately, track details and composer credits have been left off and album credits for the two albums reversed. That seems appropriate, somehow.



"If you can't trip on garbage, then you can't trip on nothing!!""

Deviants - 'Ptooff! / Disposable' (Mason Music) 2-CD

Mike Reed | USA | 10/16/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"An affordable priced 2-CD import pressing of the UK's notorious Deviant's first album,'Ptooff'('67)-an absolute psych classic and their third and final effort in their initial existence 'Disposable'('69).See my reviews of both titles.If for any reason(s),you never had these two discs before,NOW would be a great time to purchase them.Good price,for a 2-CD import."