Shagrat played a few shows but in true Took style couldn’t keep it together, and soon Lazza was off to join an early incarnation of UFO.īy 1972, Steve Took had hooked up with ex-T.Rex and The Move manager Tony Secunda, after Secunda promised Took he’d get a stash of royalties from the now king of pop Marc Bolan. In early 1970 three tracks emerged: Peppermint Flickstick, Steel Abortion and Boo, I Said Freeze. Shagrat was the name, named after a middle earth baddie! Shagrat were phenomonal, the ultimate freakbeat band. Having missed out on being invited to join The Pink Fairies – for being too untogether, as mind bogglingly strange as when Lemmy was sacked from Hawkwind for possession of drugs! – Took retreated to Ladbroke Grove and put together his first band with future Pink Fairy and sarf London Hendrix-alike Larry ‘Lazza’ Wallis. It was a promising if disturbing start to a solo career that never was. Firstly, the psychotic singalong with the freaks Three Little Piggies, then on the terrifying worst-trip-ever The Sparrow Sleeps Tonight. (He’d already appeared on Mick Farren’s deeply unhinged Mona – The Carnivorous Circus’ album of the same year in a spoken-word piece recounting his experience of prison.) Took’s songs on Think Pink are possibly the most deranged on a highly deranged album.

Took’s first solo efforts appeared on Twink’s late-1969 psych masterpiece Think Pink. After a disastrous US tour, Steve Peregrin Took was kicked out of Bolan’s duo to spend the rest of his daze in a mandrax and heroin haze in the hungover murk of Ladbroke Grove. If his time behind bars had given Bolan and his manager-squeeze June Child the heebeegeebees, then Took keeping company with fellow heavy heads and troublemakers Mick Farren, Twink (ex of The Pretty Things and Tomorrow) and The Pink Fairies Motorcycle Gang & Drinking Club sealed the deal. While Rex mainman Marc Bolan was savvy enough to always have one steely eye on Woolworth’s, Took was the real deal: the heavies’ heavy head. Despite recording some of his best work on Tyrannosaurus Rex’s genius Unicorn album, Tookie had also done porridge in Ashford Remand Centre. 1969 was not the grooviest of times for Steve Peregrin Took (born Stephen Ross Porter).

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