...Mick Farren, 1943-2013. I still have two of his vinyl albums, Mona, which he made after the Deviants split up, and Ptoof! the first, under the original name of the Social Deviants. They're shelved in an alcove and the cats love to sit on them. At Kent University, we once persuaded the university radio station to play one of the tracks from Mona, an incoherent monologue by a hapless young man in prison whose punch line, 'all they give you to eat, man, is potatoes,' became something of a catch phrase among our set.
His musical-cum-political journalism was the point; I tried, under the tutelage of Big Mick Carver, to like his fiction, mostly sub-Moorcockian fantasy, but found it hard going. His writing for the NME, though, was the reason we would forgo food, drink and even drugs to find the money for a weekly copy.