Saint Twink and the Pink Fairies

The Pink Fairies ripping it up live in '71 or '72.

If there is a patron saint for this blog, it would have to be John Charles Alder, aka Twink (and yes, I’m aware that twink in gay slang means a young pretty boy, not sure if Twink himself knew this or if this meaning was even around in the 60’s when he adopted this name).  Twink has spent the better part of the past 40 years making unrepentantly non-commercial music  and was the drummer for a number of seminal 60’s bands, including Tomorrow (widely considered, along with Pink Floyd, to be among the first psychedelic bands) and the Pretty Things.  Tomorrow’s big hit was “My White Bicycle”, one of the first songs (along with “Are You Experienced?” by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, released the same exact month, May 1967) to use backward guitar looping.  “My White Bicycle” is reportedly about a community bike program initiated by the Dutch Provos, a pre-hippie anarchist movement in Amsterdam, which makes the song even cooler in my opinion.   Tomorrow’s one album of studio work is an amazing pastiche of early 60’s clichés (though they weren’t at the time obviously)—sitar and folky sing-alongs side-by-side with raging  feedback-drenched anthems, and is worth a listen for sure.

After leaving Tomorrow in late ’67, Twink joined the Pretty Things, who in their early days were considered “the uglier cousins of the Rolling Stones” (which is saying something).  Their most famous song was the pro-drug song “LSD”, which came out in 1965, far before most folks had heard of this mind-altering drug. 

While still with the Pretty Things in 1969, Twink recorded a solo album with the assistance of a huge group of other influential psychedelic musicians, including Steve Peregrin Took of Tyrannosaurus Rex (which would eventually morph from an acoustic hippie folk band into the premier English electric glam band of the 70’s, T. Rex) and members of another seminal 60’s psychedelic group, the Deviants.  The Deviants, who formed in 1967 as the Social Deviants and later shortened their name,  consisted of Mick Farren on vocals, Paul Rudolph on guitar, Duncan Sanderson on bass, and Russell Hunter on drums, had recently broken up following a disastrous tour of North America.  Upon returning to the U.K., Farren hooked up with Twink and Took and agreed to produce the former’s solo album, entitled “Think Pink”.  “Think Pink” is an astonishing musical document, filled with bizarre songs which range (much like Tomorrow’s one studio album) between contemplative folk and acid-damaged noise.  An outstanding example of the latter is the song from which the title of this blog is taken, “Ten Thousand Words in a Cardboard Box”, which highlights Twink’s brutal drum bashing as well as Paul Rudolph’s acidulous, noodling guitar and is a standout track.

After completing his solo album Pink subsequently formed a new band from the ashes of the Deviants, essentially replacing Mick Farren with himself, even maintaining Russell Hunter as a second drummer.  This band, the Pink Fairies, represents one of the true lost gems among 60’s bands.  Their sound was, unsurprisingly, an outgrowth of everything its members had been moving toward in both their group and solo work, only BIGGER and LOUDER and even more INSANE.  The Fairies embraced wholeheartedly the radical musical and social conventions of the late 60’s and early 70’s; they frequently played free and/or impromptu gigs as well as festivals such as the Glastonbury Fayre, and their shows were frequently drug-fueled orgies of musical sloppiness and excess.  The band members lived in an anarcho-hippie commune in Ladbroke Grove, along with the legendary space rock outfit Hawkwind, who also formed around this time and with whom the Fairies shared much in common both musically and conceptually (the two played many gigs together and swapped members frequently as well).  The Pink Fairies also became the primary U.K. proponent of the White Panther Party, the extreme left-wing political organization founded by MC5 manager John Sinclair, and not surprisingly they also share much in common with this seminal band as well.   Because of their embrace of both musical and political anarchy, the Fairies are often considered to be a firm antecedent to the U.K. punk movement which would arise six years later.

Their biggest “hit” was the anarchist anthem “Do It” (which would be covered two decades later by the Henry Rollins Group).  “Do It” is a wonderful, shambolic  anthem to spontaneity and freedom—the song essentially consists of Twink’s shouted exhortations to “Don’t think about it, DO IT!” juxtaposed with  Paul Rudolph’s shrieking guitar noodling.  “Do It” is a true lost classic of the 70’s underground music and a legitimate predecessor to the 70’s punk movement.

But my FAVORITE Pink Fairies song is actually not an original song, it’s a cover:  “Tomorrow Never Knows” by the Beatles, which the Fairies never recorded in the studio but which they often played live.  The version I have is from the “Golden Years:  1969-1971” album released in 1998 which compiles some demos and unreleased live tracks of dubious recording quality.  This, unfortunately, is one of the problems with obscure music:  there’s often very little of it recorded and what is recorded is often of poor quality, particularly on live tracks.  This version of “Tomorrow Never Knows” is no exception:  it is muddy and dim and sounds as if it were recorded from inside someone’s bong satchel.  But even in this less-than-perfect state, this song is an amazing testimonial to the incredible power of the Fairies live.  It starts with Paul Rudolph’s guitar blasting out the refrain in what must have been a deafening, soul-crunching volume live.  The drums kick in next, thunderingly heavy, followed by the panzer-like roar of Duncan Sanderson’s churning bass.  As this ponderously heavy rhythm section holds down the bottom, Rudolph’s guitar sings and soars in a pre-vocal solo that to me absolutely defines the term “psychedelic”.  To me no guitar work even comes remotely close to capturing the mind-altering, mood enhancing, soaring chaotic beauty and freedom of the 60’s than Rudolph’s work here.  I’m not a big druggie but hearing this song on max volume on my iPod makes me want to gobble a blotter of acid just to see how it affects my interpretation of the music.  I can only imagine how powerful and even frightening this song must have been live, at some free festival in the English countryside, wacked out on hallucinogens, the bass and drums rumbling in your chest, strobe lights and clouds of wind-driven dust turning the very air into a lava lamp as Paul Rudolph touches the Face of God with his mind bending solo.  The other thing I always think of when I hear this song is how far things had come so quickly in the psychedelic movement.  The Beatles first recorded “Tomorrow Never Knows” just a short 4 years prior, and at that time it was considered way out there (written, as it was, by John Lennon while whacked out on LSD and reading Timothy Leary’s interpretation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead), but their version sounds like the Mamas and the Papas compared to the Fairies’ blisteringly tripped-out version.  Alas, this version is not as of January 2011 available on iTunes but I keep hoping; however, iTunes does have a version from a rock festival in Finland in 1971 that, while not quite at the level of the version above, nevertheless still manages to provide a glimpse into the sturm and drang of the Fairies live.  Check it out.


The Pink Fairies recorded three studio albums, one with the "classic" lineup above, after which Twink left, and one with Larry Wallis on guitar after Paul Rudolph left to join Hawkwind (Wallis would play with UFO and eventually form Motorhead with Lemmy following Lemmy's departure from Hawkwind in 1975 for "doing the wrong kind of drugs").  Twink has continued to release music in one form or the other for the better part of the past 40 years.  Anyone interested in the history of the Deviants/Pink Fairies is encouraged to read Rich Deakin's excellent book "Keep It Together!  Cosmic Boogie with the Deviants and the Pink Fairies", which documents the entire late 60's/early 70's Ladbroke Grove scene, and discusses other bands associated with this scene such as the Edgar Broughton Band and the Groundhogs who played a twisted electric blues similar to some of the stuff Zappa and Beefheart were also producing at almost the same time).