In honor of the recently deceased Mick Farren,
Kate Simon sent me the above shot of two brilliant minds - arguably the two best rock music writers of the 1970's, Farren and Lester Bangs. Thank you, Kate!
Make sure to read the obituary in the Guardian by Farren's fellow former NME-scribe,
Charles Shaar Murray:
"If you gotta go, go now… or else you got to stay all night. Mick Farren
was a lifelong writer in a full spectrum of disciplines and a former
political activist who became a living banner for the psychedelic left,
but fundamentally he was a performer at heart. Late in life, he reunited
his 60s cult band The Deviants
and returned to the stage, as much his true home as the writer's chair
he occupied for the previous four decades or so. Only weeks away from
what would have been his 70th birthday, he died a true performer's
death: on the stage of a crowded club on a Saturday night with applause
still ringing in his ears. I almost went to that show. I'm glad I
didn't, and was spared seeing a friend for more than forty years die
before my eyes." Continued
here.
And also this one, by
Chris Salewicz, from the Independent:
"It will no doubt serve as a piece of modern
cultural mythology that Mick Farren "died as he would have wanted",
collapsing onstage on Saturday night at London's Borderline, playing a
gig with a reformed version of his 1960s group the Deviants, a concert
that he had been advised not to go ahead with on medical advice. More
accurately, performing the show only underlined Farren's personal
philosophy of unassailable professionalism and a ceaseless work ethic
that led to the publication of 23 novels as well as 11 non-fiction
volumes. Backstage at the Borderline he may have been plugged in to an
oxygen mask, but audience members would be unaware that he was returning
to it between numbers." Continued here.
