Mick Farren, a Renaissance man of the 1960s British rock ’n’ roll underground — singer and songwriter, rock critic and historian and the author of science fiction novels — died Saturday in London. He was 69.

Farren died after collapsing during a performance by a reconstituted version of the Deviants, the psychedelic band of which he was a member in the ’60s. A friend for many years, Wayne Kramer, a guitarist for the rock band the MC5, said the cause was a heart attack. In addition, Kramer said, Farren had emphysema, “which he treated with alcohol and cigarettes.”

He added: “He wasn’t a singer, per se, but he loved being on stage. He loved performing. He couldn’t have written a better end for himself.”

A product of the counterculture that swept through Britain in the early 1960s, Farren sounded a raucous, anti-establishment voice for a half century. He wrote raw, lecherous, angry lyrics for the Deviants (initially called the Social Deviants). The band, sometimes referred to as proto-punk, sometimes as acid rock, shared an arch, acerbic outlook with the Mothers of Invention and the Fugs and recorded three albums from 1967 to 1969.

In 1970, when talk-show host David Frost interviewed hippie provocateur Jerry Rubin, Farren was among a dozen or more activists who infiltrated the studio audience and seized control of the show with a series of antics. (Among other things, Rubin lit a joint and offered Frost a toke.)

In the early ’70s, Farren and three others were tried on obscenity charges in England after they published a comic book called Nasty Tales, which included overtly sexual material from, among others, the U.S. cartoonist R. Crumb. They were acquitted.

Farren founded the British wing of the White Panthers, a radical anti-racist group, and helped create Phun City, an alternative rock festival organized in 1970 and held near Worthing, England, as a kind of protest against the commercialization of rock, exemplified by the annual Isle of Wight Festival. That festival took place a month later, and with the Hells Angels and other groups, Farren helped lead an assault on it. Protesters tore down enclosures and set up encampments that allowed people without tickets to see the Isle of Wight bands perform.

By then, Farren had earned a reputation as a pugnaciously literate, effusively opinionated writer for International Times, known as IT, a leading counterculture weekly in Britain that he also edited for a time. Later he wrote for the more mainstream British magazine New Music Express, better known as NME, where in 1976 he published perhaps his most famous essay, “The Titanic Sails at Dawn.” The article was a screed against the celebrity culture of rock ’n’ roll that, he argued, had watered down the energy and rebellious spirit of the music. At a time when the first tremors of punk were emanating from New York City, the essay was a timely, even prescient, call to arms for a new uprising.

“If rock becomes safe, it’s all over,” he wrote. “It’s a vibrant, vital music that from its very roots has always been a burst of color and excitement against a background of dullness, hardship or frustration. From the blues onwards, the essential core of the music has been the rough side of humanity. It’s a core of rebellion, sexuality, assertion and even violence. All the things that have always been unacceptable to a ruling establishment. Once that vigorous, horny-handed core is extracted from rock ’n’ roll, you’re left with little more than Muzak. No matter how tastefully played or artfully constructed, if the soul’s gone then it still, in the end, comes down to Muzak.”

Michael Anthony Farren was born in Cheltenham, south of Birmingham, on Sept. 3, 1943. His father was a flier who was killed in World War II over Cologne, Germany. Mick grew up as an angry young man in a home dominated by a stepfather he came to loathe.

He studied at a London art school and aspired, for a time, to work in advertising, but the counterculture ’60s changed his path.

Farren, who after 1980 lived in New York and then Los Angeles, writing for ’zines and alternative newspapers, moved back to England in his last few years and was living in Brighton. He had been married and divorced more than once, had no children and leaves no immediate survivors.

Beyond his work with the Deviants, he put out solo albums, including “Vampires Stole My Lunch Money,” which featured vocals by Chrissie Hynde, who became better known as the lead singer of the Pretenders. He also contributed to recordings by others, including Kramer.

Farren had a prolific literary life. He wrote more than 30 books, including four studies of Elvis Presley, one of his musical heroes; a cultural history of the black leather jacket; a series of vampire novels featuring a nearly 1,000-year-old protagonist named Victor Renquist; and science-fiction fantasies like “The Feelies,” a virtual-reality nightmare story from 1978 whose title invokes both the U.S. punk band, then newly formed, and Aldous Huxley’s sardonic name for movies that engage all a viewer’s senses. (Huxley was appalled by films with speaking, the so-called talkies.) Farren’s energetic 2001 memoir was “Give the Anarchist a Cigarette.”

He was known as a profligate drinker, a world-class storyteller, an attention-grabbing party guest and great company.

“I’m a lousy singer,” he admitted in an interview with The L.A. Weekly in 2001, “but an excellent rock star.”