It’s hard to tell if Brian Matthew was trying to be informative, or dripping contempt, when he introduced his next guests on Saturday Club, on the BBC’s Light Programme, in October 1964. “Next on the show here in London, a group of lads who’ve all adopted the fairly fashionable shoulder-length hairstyle, and their music is exclusively the commercialised, British form of rhythm and blues, as you’ll hear in this number called Big Boss Man, from the Pretty Things.”
Later on, Matthew asked the band if indeed they felt their hair was in fact the longest in the business, occasioning nearly a minute of earnest discussion about situations in which their hair might be inappropriate. Such was to be the fate of the Pretty Things in the mid-60s: to be a band who embodied all that was a threat to bourgeois values, to an extent that rather overshadowed the music they were making. The biggest threat of all was Viv Prince, the band’s drummer, whose death at 84 was announced on Instagram on Friday by, fittingly, Jack White.
After his sacking he joined the Hells Angels, and was duly thrown out for bad behaviour
“Viv was an incredible drummer, wild and full of abandon,” White wrote. “He played for the band the Pretty Things, and he influenced many other musicians like Keith Moon. I was lucky enough to meet Viv some years ago who was working on his farm in Portugal at the time. He was an inspired and eccentric rock and roller and maybe I’ll have to put together a team to work on a documentary about this man one day.”
Indeed, so wild was Prince that he lasted barely 18 months before the wildest band in Britain could no longer cope with him. You get a taste from his response to reports in the New Zealand press about the group’s appalling behaviour touring the country in 1965. Returning to the UK, he went through the allegations one by one with Record Mirror’s Norman Jopling.
Did they break chairs? “One chair.” Light fires. “Complete lie.” Abuse officials? “We had a go at them because they didn’t make any attempt whatsoever to stop the kids coming through the stage door and into our dressing room.” Ruin heartthrob Eden Kane’s act by laying carpet onstage while he performed? “Everyone was digging it.” Do the same to Sandie Shaw’s act? “I was cleaning up from our act when she came on early.” Drink meths? “We’ve got a great big bottle of water we carry around labelled ‘meths’. It’s a private joke.”
The list continued until Jopling reached “the incident at the airport”, about which he offered no detail. “Those bits about the crayfish running around the airport lounge that were printed. The fish were dead when we bought them. They always are. How on EARTH can dead fish run around? And when I was turned off the plane … The captain said straight away, ‘There’ll be no liquor on my plane. You pop groups have been on my plane before.’ As I sat down, a bottle of bourbon I was carrying dropped out. Instantly everyone appeared from nowhere and were upon me, and threw me out of the plane.”
Eat your heart out, Spinal Tap.
The Pretty Things in 1964 … from left: John Stax, Dick Taylor, Brian Pendelton, Phil May and Viv Prince. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy
Before the Pretty Things, Prince’s career reads like an exemplar of the British musician as rock’n’roll established its own commercial and artistic identity, and the young musicians who had picked up instruments in the 1950s tried to work out their place in it. Just look at the names of Prince’s groups – one can almost see the faded photos in one’s mind from reading them: the Viv Prince Skiffle Group, Brian Woolley’s Jazzmen, Lennie Baldwin’s Dauphin Street Six, the Trevor Jones Jazzmen, Carter-Lewis and the Southerners, the Jazz Cardinals.
He had joined the last of those in Copenhagen, but then “had to leave Denmark in a hurry”. Back in London he played sessions, and songwriter Jimmy Duncan recommended him to the Pretty Things, who were looking for a new drummer.
Prince played only on the first two Pretty Things albums – The Pretty Things and Get the Picture? – but those were the records that established the group as the hardest of the British R&B bands: their debut single, Rosalyn, was wilder than anything the Stones or the Yardbirds were doing at the same time.
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Nevertheless, as was so often the case at that time, the records only tell half the story. The full craziness of the Pretty Things was only revealed live. Often, there is no way to verify those claims, but with the Pretty Things there is. There’s a 15-minute clip of the band performing in 1965, and they are unhinged. Viv Prince is the most unhinged of all.
The second song is You Don’t Love Me, You Don’t Care, and with the crowd in front of them a seething mass, having to be restrained by men in suits who try to put barriers in place, the band bring the song down to a break of just guitar and harmonica. Which should calm things down, except Prince has come out from behind his kit and is crawling around the stage, drumming on his bandmates, on the ground, turning everything into a circus. It’s wild and thrilling and violent.
Prince’s musical career after the Pretty Things didn’t amount to a great deal, but his life took a while to calm down: after his sacking he apparently joined the Hells Angels, and was duly thrown out for bad behaviour. For 18 or months or so, though, the drummer of a moderately successful R&B band from the home counties was the greatest rock star in the world.