Garbage Deviants

GARBAGE (The Deviants)

Many critics have noted the amateurish, even sloppy nature of the remarkable album by the Deviants called Ptooff!, and I suppose they have a point; but the album easily transcends any such limitations: The music is earnest and compelling, and the jams always cook. For instance, “Garbage” is structured like a series of gonzo radio or TV commercial jingles, with the product offered always being “garbage”; it opens: “We got garbage . . . we got garbage . . . we got garbage . . won’t you buy, buy some garbage . . . .” Another one goes: “Garbage is so good for you, just the thing that you should do.” Again: “Garbage can make you feel so good, makes you feel like you think you should, garbage can make you feel so large, put two cars in your garage” – and then after that one, the band immediately launches into a vulgar call-and-response: “Why can’t you feel it (why don’t you pick it up), why can’t you feel it (why don’t you hold it your hand), why can’t you feel it (why don’t you fondle it), why can’t you feel it (why don’t you stroke it), why can’t you feel it (why don’t you s--k it) . . .”

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Allmusic states the musical and historical importance of Ptooff! well in their entry by Dave Thompson: “Talk today about Britain’s psychedelic psyxties, and it’s the light whimsy of Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, the gentle introspection of the Village Green Kinks, Sgt. Pepper, and ‘My White Bicycle’ [by Tomorrow] which hog the headlines. People have forgotten there was an underbelly as well, a seething mass of discontent and rancor which would eventually produce the likes of Hawkwind, the Pink Fairies, and the Edgar Broughton Band. . . .

“But the deranged psilocybic rewrite of ‘Gloria’ which opens the album, ‘I’m Coming Home’, still sets a frightening scene, a world in which Top 40 pop itself is horribly skewed, and the sound of the Deviants grinding out their misshapen R&B classics is the last sound you will hear. Move on to ‘Garbage’, and though the Deviants’ debt to both period [Frank] Zappa and [the] Fugs is unmistakable, still there’s a purity to the paranoia.

“Ptooff! was conceived at a time when there genuinely was a generation gap, and hippies were a legitimate target for any right-wing bully boy with a policeman’s hat and a truncheon. IT and Oz, the two underground magazines which did most to support the Deviants ([Mick] Farren wrote for both), were both publicly busted during the band’s lifespan, and that fear permeates this disc; fear, and vicious defiance.”

(March 2014/1)