Ptooff! – THE DEVIANTS**

I’m Coming Home/Child Of The Sky/Charlie/Nothing Man/Garbage/Bun/Deviation Street

Ptooff! was the debut album from the British underground band The Deviants. Their music can be categorised as proto punk combined with freak out style experimentalism.

“Pretty damn weird. Quite dated - but also quite ahead of it's time. Proto-punk, but not quite the colossal freak out I expected, but certainly a medium-sized one. If anything detracts from potential freak out territory, it's that it's obvious that they're being very silly.”

“Largely derided at the time for being talentless. Musically it's largely rather poor blues jams spiced with some minor experiments in noise. Definitely worth investigating for fans of the era, but I think the interest lies largely in the ideas rather than the execution.”

“Psychedelic blues garage rock, I hear all of those things. There's a bit of a classic, vintage feel to this one, but this record tries too hard to be original, and I end feeling I've heard it all before elsewhere. There's subject matter a la Zappa and noise experimentation a la Velvet Underground, but the musicians and compositions simply aren't good enough to make this into anything great.”

“Good psychedelia that recalls Zappa's anti-commercial mid 60s records. Sometimes fun, sometimes dead serious, sometimes just freak out collage music.”

“Some people aren't going to dig this. There are a lot of experimental songs. I'm Coming Home is basically an aggressive, Stooges style blues riff, with a great fuzzed out mind scramble guitar riff during the climax. Child Of The Sky is a pretty, idealistic track - it's not all just sneer and rage. Nothing Man is basically a rant over weird rhythms about plastic society. Garbage is about all the disposable materiality that just isn't that important. Deviation Street is a crazy mix of a song, part sound collage, part screaming, part rant, part the soundtrack to anarchy and awakening.”

“Although this 1967 work is widely hailed as a prototype British punk album, it has its experimental/progressive moments too. Unusually for a British band, The Deviants dwelt in roughly the same abrasive 'primitivist' territory as '60s American psych/agit-punk pioneers like The MC5 and The Stooges.”