Book description
Through a long and chequered career, Mick Farren has functioned as a
writer, poet, rock star, recording artist, rabble-rouser, critic and
commentator, and even won a protracted obscenity trial at the Old
Bailey. After resisting the idea for a long time, he has finally written
his own highly personal and insightful account of the British
counterculture in the 1960s and '70s, from the perspective of one who
was right there in the thick of it. With a continuing and unashamed
commitment to the tradition of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, he recounts
a rollercoaster odyssey - sometimes violent and often hilarious - from
early beatnik adventures in Ladbroke Grove, through the flowering
hippies to the snarl of punk. He gives a firsthand, insider's account of
the chaos, disorder and raging excess of those two highly excessive
decades. At the centre of the book is Farren's career in the
underground, as the man on the door at the UFO club, driving spirit at
IT and, of course, lead singer with the Social Deviants. He describes
his encounters with the celebrated and the notorious, who range from
Jimi Hendrix and Germaine Greer to Julie Burchill and Sid Vicious, and
concludes that the pop history of bohemian culture does not neatly
divide itself into easy decades, but continues to this day, perhaps in
different guises, but frequently with the same goals and motivations.
Now in his early fifties, Mick Farren currently lives in Los Angeles.
With some twenty books to his credit, plus a number of film and TV
scripts and a wealth of journalism, his written output remains
prodigious. He also still records and performs, and a recent tour of
Japan with his band, the Deviants, culminated in the live CD Barbarian
Princess. His most recent novel, Jim Morrison's Adventures in the
Afterlife, was published in the US in 2000.
