Lucifer (British band)

Lucifer was a British solo rock project active in the early 1970s, the alias of Denys Irving. Howard Marks clearly states in his autobiography Mr Nice (Secker and Warburg, 1996), that Lucifer was the solo work of Denys Irving. This admission by Marks went unnoticed for years, so the identity of Lucifer was often falsely attributed to Peter Walker of The Purple Gang, due to the fact Walker started calling himself Lucifer in the late sixties. There are also references to Lucifer and Denys (spelt Dennis) Irving in the biography Howard Marks, His Life and High Times (Unwin Hyman, 1988) by David Leigh, and the e-book Rogue Males: Richard Burton, Howard Marks and Sir Richard Burton (2010) by Rob Walters. Denys Irving is also mentioned (in relation to film making) in the book A history of artists' film and video in Britain, 1897–2004, (British Film Institute Publishing, 2006) by David Curtis. The records were only available via mail order through adverts in papers such as Oz magazine (issue numbers 41/42), Record Mirror, New Musical Express and International Times (it or IT, issue numbers 126/127 & 128).