Viv Prince, a drummer for the snarling 1960s British rock band the Pretty Things, whose taste for chaos, onstage and off, provided inspiration for fellow stick-wielding loons like Keith Moon of the Who, has died at his home near Faro, Portugal. He was 84.
His death was announced on social media by Jack White, the former frontman of the White Stripes. The announcement did not say when he died or cite a cause.
“Viv was an incredible drummer, wild and full of abandon,” Mr. White wrote, adding that Mr. Prince “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.”
Eccentric, indeed. During his 18-month run with the Pretty Things — a band whose raw, aggressive brand of blues rock has been described as proto-punk — Mr. Prince was considered one of music’s reigning Visigoths. He got as much attention for his unhinged persona as for his scalding performances.
It was no mean feat to be the maniac among maniacs in the Pretty Things, a ferocious outfit that partied incessantly and was generally considered a ruder, cruder version of the Rolling Stones — who themselves were scandalizing buttoned-up British society with their earthy music and impudent behavior. (Dick Taylor, the Pretty Things’ guitarist and founder, had been a member of the Stones before they found stardom).
An appreciation published in The Guardian after his death unearthed a 1965 interview with Mr. Prince from Record Mirror, the British music newspaper, in which he was grilled about his antics with the band during a scorched-earth tour of New Zealand that year.
In the interview, Mr. Prince denied lighting fires onstage but did admit to sabotaging a performance by the teen idol Eden Kane by laying carpet onstage while Mr. Kane was performing. “Everyone was digging it,” Mr. Prince said.
And he addressed news accounts that he had released live crayfish in an airport lounge. “The fish were dead when we bought them,” he said. “They always are. How on earth can dead fish run around?”
The Pretty Things formed in southeast London in 1963, and Mr. Prince joined the next year. He had previously worked as a session drummer and played with various bands, including the Jazz Cardinals and Carter-Lewis & the Southerners, an Everly Brothers-inflected group in which he played alongside Jimmy Page, the future Led Zeppelin guitar god.
With his extensive experience, Mr. Prince was recruited to bring an air of professionalism to the unruly Pretties. That is not the way it unfolded.
“We were sort of novice lunatics, but they suddenly hand us, like, the high priest of lunacy,” Phil May, the group’s lead singer, said in an interview for Richie Unterberger’s book “Urban Spacemen and Wayfaring Strangers: Overlooked Innovators and Eccentric Visionaries of ’60s Rock” (2000).
Mr. Prince’s fiery drumming and wild stage persona turned heads from the start. Mr. May recalled a young Mr. Moon — who, as a member of the Who, would go on to define rock extremity with his gale-force solos and hurricane-level smashing of hotel rooms — taking in Pretty Things gigs and looking mesmerized by Mr. Prince’s explosive fills.
“Before that, playing drums was quite sedentary,” Mr. May said. “Boring. And through Viv, you’d suddenly realized that you could be a drummer, but also an extrovert. You could be a star.”
Vivian Martin Prince was born on Aug. 9, 1941, in Loughborough, a city in Leicestershire, England, northeast of Birmingham.
His father, Harry Prince, led a big band, and Viv soon followed his path into music. As a student at Loughborough Grammar School, he formed the Viv Prince Skiffle Group. (Skiffle, a blend of American folk, blues and jazz with a hillbilly flavor, became a craze among British youth in the 1950s, including a teenage John Lennon.)
Viv soon turned to another musical fad of the era, joining a band that was part of the New Orleans-style revival known as trad jazz. Other groups followed before he left a job at the local tax office to move to London, where he became one of Carter-Lewis’s Southerners and eventually landed with the Pretty Things.
While largely remembered as a cult act, the band had its moments. It notched a string of singles on the British charts, including “Rosalyn,” which settled in at No. 41 in June 1964, followed by “Don’t Bring Me Down,” which rose to No. 10 that October. David Bowie later covered both songs on his 1973 album “Pin Ups.”
“Honey, I Need” made it to No. 13 the following March, and their 1965 debut album, called simply “The Pretty Things,” rose to No. 6. The band was well placed to join the British Invasion, and perhaps to become much bigger stars, but never managed to tour the United States at their mid-1960s peak.
Eventually, Mr. Prince’s untethered personality became too much, even for the Pretty Things. He “was one of the great debauched people of our time, even worse than Keith Moon,” Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones once said. “They’d be playing live and you would suddenly hear the drums crumble and Viv fall off his stool. That used to be quite commonplace, actually.”
He sealed his fate with the group, Mr. Unterberger wrote, when he refused to play a gig because a pub across the street had declined to serve him beforehand; Mr. Prince had apparently forgotten that he and some friends smashed up the place the previous night.
“We had to sack him because he was so bad in the end,” Mr. May told Mr. Unterberger. “We couldn’t finish a concert.”
After his departure, Mr. Prince briefly filled in for an ailing Mr. Moon on tour with the Who (word was that he quickly wore out his welcome, even in that context), ran a club in London, and then returned to his hometown and played with a soul group. He eventually settled in Portugal, where he lived for decades on a farm with a citrus grove.
Information about his survivors was not immediately available.
One story in particular followed Mr. Prince over the years: At some point after his Pretty Things years, he was said to have joined the Hells Angels. He later claimed that he had been thrown out. Apparently, he was too much of a handful even for a notorious biker clan.
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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