Japanese remastered reissue packaged in a limited edition miniature LP sleeve. 2004.
Ptooff!,Deviants,Rock/Pop
Average customer rating:
|
Ptooff!
The Deviants Manufacturer: Alive Records ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD Similar Items:
ASIN: B000001QHL Release Date: 1995-09-27 |
Tracks:
- Opening
- I'm Coming Home
- Child Of The Sky
- Garbage
- Bun
- Nothing Man
- Deviation Street
- Track 8
Amazon.com
An album designed to shake the Empire probably shouldn't be characterized as "charming," but the Deviants' Ptooff!, an artifact from England's freak underground circa 1967, is nothing if not beguiling. After all, most people today are afraid to shake the state much, lest it get an upset stomach and spit up. Or, worse yet, it could fall down on top of them. But then! Then! Well, a group of "anarchist art student teenage asshole[s]" could really put the ol' scare into the fattened-for-slaughter ruling class by combining elements of the Fugs, Charles Mingus, and John Cage into something unfathomably artistic, couldn't they? Well, no. But as Mick Farren's sage bio notes: "You live and learn, don't you?" --Steven StolderAlbum Description
UK psych underground garage classic featuring Mick Farren and future Pink Fairies members. Includes the original cover and notes by John Peel. Alive Records.Customer Reviews:
The Deviants - 'Ptooff' (Alive Records).......2003-12-15
A psychedelic punk classic.......2001-01-15
Ptooff!'s significance lies as much in the manner of its making as in its music. Mick Farren, anarchist, hustler, underground writer and sometime doorman at London's groovy UFO club, puts together a shambolic R&B band called the Social Deviants. By dint of persistence and massive drug ingestion the band overcomes opposition from those among the cognoscenti who like their freakouts on the mellow side, and becomes something of a fixture on the London scene. Eschewing the standard music-biz route to getting a record out, Farren persuades a whacked-out hippie son of a millionaire to put up the cash for an album. Mercifully free of any record company pressure to make "product", and fuelled by even more drugs and the will to attempt radical sonic experiments, the band parlay their technical limitations and studio naïvete into a flawed masterpiece of Zappaesque garage psychedelia.
(The band further challenge established music-biz practice by distributing Ptooff! themselves, even seizing control of the means of packaging by paying street hippies with enough amphetamines to keep them up all night wrapping the disc into its glorious multi-foldout pop-art sleeve.)
This salutary tale - of imagination and do-it-yourself fervour wresting control of a popular art form from the commodifying clutches of the music industry - would in 1977 come to serve as a blueprint for the indie tendencies of punk. Its ramifications continue to this day: that obscure techno/dance outfit working out of the basement of the café round the corner from your apartment, making CDs and artwork on primitive MIDI lashups and pirated software, can trace its lineage back to Ptooff! and the Deviants.
Enough of the sociology lecture, already - what's the music like? Imagine early Who and Stones filtered through a musique concrete scrambler and supercoded with oblique hippie satire, and you're getting there.
The band's R&B roots show through most clearly on the first track proper, "I'm Coming Home", an urgent, sinister blues groove, Farren all strangulated lustful menace, building to an explosive climax which recalls uncannily the Ron Asheton fuzz-wah panzer-guitar incursion on the Stooges' 1969. A true case of parallel evolution. Rumour that the Deviants used this song as an extended thrash during their stage shows makes one salivate for a contemporary live bootleg.
"Charlie" is a throwaway jogalong boogie replete with Farren narrative which prefigures some of his later fictional mutated-Wild West themes. The case for the Deviants' "incompetence" comes nearest to being made here. Not that there's anything wrong with it, really - just that, with contemporaries like the Yardbirds, Fleetwood Mac and a hundred others already mining the blues seam, you better be pretty hot instrumentally if you're gonna stand out. The Deviants aren't, and don't.
"Child Of The Sky" is an acoustic ballad with recorder accompaniment, rather cute in its own way but somewhat out of place on this record. So's "Bun", a mock-Tudor instrumental included as a show-off for Cord Rees's solo guitar.
Things start to get seriously interesting on the last three tracks. "Nothing Man" is a collage of multilayered treated percussion, electronic noise and tape loops framing disembodied lyrical snatches, reminiscent of the Velvets' "Murder Mystery" and very close to the kind of stuff Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle would be putting out ten years down the line.
"Garbage" is a real oddity, a stop-start rummage through rock's dustbin of used riffs, more electronic noise, probably the first vomiting ever committed to vinyl (thereby sealing the Deviants' punk credentials!) and harmonica interjections from Mick which must surely rank as the most perfunctory inter-stanza harp on record since Bob Dylan first crawled into a studio. Is it a comment on the disposability of pop? A swipe at the band's detractors?
Finally, "Deviation Street", a mindbending psychedelic variant on the "Louie Louie" riff interspersed with feedback, sinister poetry, Beatlemania screams, a glorious "Speed - speed - speed - speed" hookline (who needs veiled drug allusions when you got the Deviants?) which eventually mutates into a panoramic soundtrack tour through the lower depths of Swinging London, sampling Bo Diddley and Jimi Hendrix en route.
The original sleeve of Ptooff! contained a quote, allegedly from Plato (it ain't in the standard translations) but attributed to Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs: "When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake." The Deviants set up a tremor which was hardly noticed in their own time, but which still resonates down the years.
hard to get a handle on.......2000-03-15
a true underground classic.......2000-02-05
Average customer rating:
|
Ptooff!/Disposable
The Deviants Manufacturer: Mason Music Sweden ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD Similar Items:
ASIN: B000EZ8SBY Release Date: 2006-04-10 |
Tracks:
- Opening
- I'm Coming Home
- Child of the Sky
- Charlie
- Nothing Man
- Garbage
- Bun
- Deviation Street
- Somewhere to Go
- Sparrows and Wires
- Jamies Song
- You've Got to Hold On
- Fire in the City
- Let's Loot the Supermarket
- Pappa-Oo-Mao-Mao
- Slum Lord
- Blind Joe McTurks Last Session
- Normality Jam
- Guaranteed to Bleed
- Sidney B. Goode
- Last Man
Customer Reviews:
Deviants - 'Ptooff! / Disposable' (Mason Music) 2-CD.......2006-10-16
Average customer rating: |
Ptooff!
Manufacturer: Dark Matter Distribution ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD ASIN: B00031YBHE Release Date: 2006-08-01 |
Album Description
Japanese remastered reissue packaged in a limited edition miniature LP sleeve. 2004.
Average customer rating: |
PTOOFF
DEVIANTS Manufacturer: DROP OUT RECORDS ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD ASIN: B000N3405A |
Product Description
AUDIO CD
Average customer rating:
|
Ptooff!
The Deviants Manufacturer: Diablo Records UK ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD ASIN: B00002DGOR Release Date: 1999-06-22 |
Tracks:
- Opening/I'm Coming Home
- Child of the Sky
- Garbage
- Bun
- Nothing Man
- Charlie
- Deviation Street
Customer Reviews:
monstruosidad imprescindible.......2001-09-21
Formados en 1966 como Social Deviants -liderados por una de las mayores figuras del "underground" londinense, Mick Farren, el primer inglés en vestirse con pieles-, éstos nacieron como un colectivo de postura absolutamente anárquica y destructiva. Por lo mismo, su música -consiguiendo ser en algunos momentos altamente irritante para el oyente- era un disparatado cúmulo de frenesí, disparate y desvergüenza sonora-- Los Deviants no enfrentaban sus discos, o al menos así parecía, con la intención de crear obras comedidas y resueltas de forma convencional. Al contrario, el resultado y satisfacción logrados en sus álbumes fue en directa proporción de la incongruencia, sarcasmo y espontaneidad inmejorable que Farren y los suyos ostentaron. En Ptoff! podemos escuchar los más claros antecedentes de los Stooges, en I'm coming home; extraños ejercicios acústicos en "Children of the Sky; percusiones lunáticas en Nothing Man; mofas al esnobismo psicodélico en "Deviation Street", entre guitarras líquidas, ácidas y vocalizaciones enfermizas. "Ptoff" es una muestra exquisita del lado oscuro de la música británica de los sesenta, pero no por esto menos encomiable. Increíble
Rock Music:
- Riot Radio [CD-single] [Import]
- Rise & Fall [Import]
- Road to Freedom [Import]
- Room Service [Import]
- Singles-Gold Disc [Import]
- Slipknot [Import]
- Small Town England
- Songbook: The Singles, Vol. 1 [Explicit Lyrics] [Limited Edition] [Import]
- Songs in the Attic [Enhanced] [Import] [Limited Edition] [Live] [Original recording remastered]
- Splash!
