Deviated Spectrum: Mick Farren Interviewed - March 17 2013

Ben Graham speaks in-depth to the enormously prolific musician, journalist, novelist and sometime-mistaken-medium about his immense body of work, spanning four and a half decades and close to the entire culture spectrum

At home in a faded “Dan Dare- Pilot of the Future” t-shirt, Mick Farren is casting a rheumy eye over his illustrious past. The occasion is the publication of Elvis Died for Somebody’s Sins But Not Mine (Headpress books) – an impressive, career-spanning anthology of Farren’s writings, from his early anarchist broadsides for 1960s London’s leading underground paper IT (AKA International Times, which Farren also briefly edited), to interviews and editorials for NME in the 1970s, to his current output of fiction, poetry, online articles and more. Attractively illustrated, and with a new introduction and sidebars in which Farren comments on the selections from a contemporary perspective, the volume also includes excerpts from the author’s several books on Elvis Presley, and his many works of original, unhinged science fiction, including 1973’s Texts of Festival, 1978’s eerily prescient The Feelies, and the mind-blowing DNA Cowboys trilogy (which naturally runs to four volumes). It also draws heavily on his columns for LA Citybeat, LA Reader and the Village Voice (Farren moved to the states at the dawn of the 80s, returning to the UK three years ago for health reasons), covering the political nightmare of the Bush years (and the Clinton interlude)in razor sharp, blackly humorous vignettes that invite favourable comparisons between Elvis Died for Somebody’s Sins and Hunter S Thompson’s The Great Shark Hunt. Highlights include Farren’s 1976 NME polemic ‘The Titanic Sails at Dawn,’ one of the few pieces of rock writing to be regularly cited as being of historical….contd: @ http://thequietus.com/articles/11663-mick-farren-interview

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the 1970 abum “Mona – the Carniverous Circus” .. 

Mona – part 1

part 2

below, in “Lunar Malice” 1993 - “Gunfire in the Night” – live lp version:

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above: 7″ single pic sleeve for Lunar Malice “Gunfire in the Night”

………..butlincat