Goodbye, Mick Farren, activist, rabble-rousing rocker and NME journalist

If you gotta go, go now… or else you got to stay all night. Mick Farren was a lifelong writer in a full spectrum of disciplines and a former political activist who became a living banner for the psychedelic left, but fundamentally he was a performer at heart. Late in life, he reunited his 60s cult band The Deviants and returned to the stage, as much his true home as the writer's chair he occupied for the previous four decades or so. Only weeks away from what would have been his 70th birthday, he died a true performer's death: on the stage of a crowded club on a Saturday night with applause still ringing in his ears. I almost went to that show. I'm glad I didn't, and was spared seeing a friend for more than forty years die before my eyes.

If Micky had been the singer he wanted to be – Elvis, Gene Vincent, Jim Morrison – or even a "non-singer" whose style captured the listener the way Bob Dylan or John Lydon did, his writing may have remained a sideline, or been confined to the composition of lyrics. As it was, it was Micky's writing – journalism, polemics, criticism, poetry, fiction, autobiography, social history, manifestos and much, much more – that became his voice. And he certainly cut a dashing and charismatic figure in the London underground and rock'n'roll worlds of Ladbroke Grove and the West End from the late 60s until he relocated to the US at the end of the 70s: all leather and denim and silk and studded belts, topped with mirrorshades, an Afro and a spectacularly broken nose. He looked like part biker, part urban guerrilla, part rock'n'roll dandy.

Even at the height of the Summer Of Love, there was nothing "flower power" about Micky: no one could have been further from the stereotype of the mumbling, indolent hippie. Farren represented hippie's militant wing; he was a whirlwind of activity, a cauldron of ideas, some of which actually worked. He became part of the editorial collective of London's fortnightly underground paper International Times (IT for short) and ultimately its editor; he performed with The Deviants (a punk band almost a decade too early); organised demos and gigs (where, if he wasn't performing, he'd nevertheless deliver his inimitable rabble-rousing revolutionary rants); and he co-published the underground comic Nasty Tales. In a less-publicised parallel to the OZ Trial, the latter was prosecuted for obscenity and led to him (successfully) defending himself from an Old Bailey dock.

Above all, Micky was smart and funny, impressively well-read, endlessly fascinated by all aspects of popular and boho culture, a sparkling conversationalist and a world-class raconteur. When the underground press collapsed in the 1970s, it seemed blindingly obvious that Micky should join other former outlaw journalists like me and Nick Kent at the New Musical Express where we'd continue the mission of fun and subversion by other means, only now to a much wider readership. During the second half of the 70s – before, during and after punk – we shared an office (not to mention similar tastes in coiffure, eyewear, music, politics and stimulants of choice). No one could have demanded the universe supply a more congenial and entertaining deskmate.

Inevitably, we lost touch during his US sojourn, when he lived first in Manhattan and later in LA, seeing each other only during his occasional visits to London. He was always a chronic asthmatic, never far from his inhaler, and it was serious health problems that brought him back to live in the UK. He couldn't remotely afford the treatments he needed under the US health care system.

Last year I saw him perform with The Deviants at London's Borderline. Now massively overweight and perched on a bar stool at the stage centre, he seemed sluggish before the old fire returned. But backstage, after the show, he was in a wheelchair with an oxygen mask clamped over his mouth.

For some months, our mutual friend Chris Salewicztried to coordinate a reunion between Micky and our old buddy Wilko Johnson, still rocking the blues in the face of terminal cancer. But their individual schedules and medical needs frustrated his efforts. Now it will never happen. Nevertheless, Micky died, like all good rock'n'roll cowboys, with his boots on. And his shades.