KEEP IT TOGETHER!

When it comes to legends of hipi-era bohemia, the story of Brit "people's bands" the Deviants and the Pink Fairies has everything you could want: massive lysergic, amphetamine, and narcotic indulgence; run-ins with the law; gigs at riots and demonstrations; insidious internecine intrigue. In the fullness of time,
it's become clear that the Devies, led by Oz/International Times agitprop weirdo Mick Farren, were more of a punk precursor than an example of period psychedelia, as their original guitarist Sid Bishop points out, while the Pink Fairies -- into which the Deviants morphed after shitcanning Farren while on tour in America and appropriating the name from a gig-crashing gang of despoilers he'd formed with pals from the Pretty Things and Tyrannosaurus Rex – were a good old rock 'n' roll band that became known for playing free concerts outside seemingly every UK festival of the early '70s (most famously the Isle of Wight and Glastonbury) and somehow maintained cred into the punk era and beyond.
Deniz Tek, enroute from Ann Arbor to Australia in '71, caught the Fairies at the Roundhouse in London and, years later, remembered them as being "better than the Stooges" – high praise indeed from one who Knows.

Keep It Together! is an Uberfan's labor of love, the work of Rich Deakin, who's long scribed for the Funtopia Farren site.
It's a well-researched tome, rich in detail, taking advantage of its author's direct access to all the living "primary sources" – including not just the voluble Farren, but also Deviants manager Jamie Mandelkau (who at least set the stage for Farren's ouster from the band, if not engineering it outright) and the enterprising/opportunistic (depending whose side you take) sometime-drummer, ex-Pretty Thing John "Twink" Alder – resulting in the most "fair and balanced" picture imaginable, displaying a level of scholarship devoted to this kind of thing that, these days, seems the almost exclusive province of Mike Stax's Ugly Things.
Where gaps exist, Deakin makes use of published sources (especially Farren's autobiography Give the Anarchist a Cigarette – a particular favorite of the Barman's -- and Jonathan Green's Days In the Life: Voices from the English Underground 1961-1971), weaving his properly attributed borrowings into the story seamlessly. It also helps that Deakin's an engaging prose stylist, whose narrative flows in a readable fashion.
Deakin chronicles his subjects' odyssey from their 'umble origins in the squats of Ladbrooke Grove (whence the Clash would spring a decade or so later); to the gig in Trafalgar Square, before a crowd of 35,000, where the Deviants came close to murdering themselves and a portion of the crowd with homemade pyrotechnics; to the Devies' one American tour, where they wound up stranded in San Francisco, cadging garbanzo beans off commune-dwelling hipis to avoid starvation; to the first Glastonbury festival, where the Fairies performed while peaking on acid (the book takes its title from Paul Rudolph's end-of-set admonition, probably directed to his tripping bandmates as much as the crowd); to the band's appearance at the first-ever punk festival in 1976 and its several reformations, which continue until this very day (the last one, scheduled for December 2007, had to be cancelled when Larry Wallis – who, it turns out, isn't American like I thought he was! -- suffered a back injury).
Keep It Together! is far from a litany of mega-successes; rather, it's the story of a mob of reprobates that made every mistake imaginable (in their heyday, f'rinstance, promoters would seize upon their policy of playing free gigs as an excuse not to pay them) and seemed destined for self-immolation but somehow, against all odds, keep coming back for one more try – putting me in mind of something Patti Smith wrote, in another context: "Just as we seem to repeat our follies, we also abide." A classic rock 'n' roll saga, well told. - Ken Shimamot

This Book is listed in our Good Stuff at Amazon.co.uk Page - Check It Out.

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A virtual Bar and e-zine bringing you Rock Action from Sydney, Australia,via The Bowery and the Motor City

KEEP IT TOGETHER!: COSMIC BOOGIE WITH THE DEVIANTS AND THE PINK FAIRIES by Rich Deakin (HeadPress)