Mick Farren’s counter-culture credentials are impeccable: editor of International Times and comics compendium Nasty Tales (for which he was tried for obscenity in the spring of 1971), sci-fi novelist, lead singer with biker rockers The (Social) Deviants, doorman at the UFO club and organiser of the Phun City festival in Worthing, which featured the MC5, Free, The Pretty Things, and The Edgar Broughton Band, as well as readings by William S. Burroughs and Alexander Trocchi. In 1970 Farren was involved with the staging of a prankish coup along with Richard Neville, John Hopkins and various members of the underground press and revolutionary hippy group the Yippies – the Youth International Party – to gatecrash the prime-time Saturday night David Frost Show. Farren was perfect for the NME’s subversive agenda, as editor Nick Logan raided the underground to reinvent the paper in the early 1970s. In June 1976, dismayed at the excesses of the current rock scene, Farren wrote the famous ‘Titanic Sails At Dawn’ editorial, which called for a back-to-basics rock’n'roll movement prefiguring punk.
His memoir Give The Anarchist a Cigarette is an essential read for anyone interested in British counter-culture from the 1960s onwards and deals with his time at NME in great detail. I spoke to him on the phone from his home in Brighton.
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