MUSIC ON VINYL
Way more interesting than their Rolling Stones-lite earlier work, the underground acid rock outfit’s third album was sadly the end of the road for The Deviants. Formed in 1967 by journalist Mick Farren out of the Ladbroke Grove hippy scene, the group were a defiantly shambolic outfit, who, after debut album Ptooff! was picked up by Decca, became relatively more stable. By the time of this album’s release in 1969, the band were squabbling and later split acrimoniously while on tour in the US. Deviants III can best be described as half Pink Floyd psych-out and half proto-punk, and is far better than Farren describes it in his hilariously dry autobiography Give The Anarchist A Cigarette. After the split, Farren briefly continued with the name while the rest of the band transformed into the not entirely dissimilar Pink Fairies.