Apathy for the Devil: A 1970s Memoir by Nick Kent: review

By Tom Horan Published: 6:15AM GMT 20 Feb 2010

Among the platitudes of the rocknroll era, "never trust a junkie" is right up there with "never trust a hippie". The former NME writer Nick Kent is probably as well known for his heroin addiction as his journalism, so its hard to know how much to believe of his reminiscences of the Seventies music industry. He was, as he describes here in excruciating detail, on drugs for almost the entire decade. But then, in the brutal and often desolate world he documents, so was everyone else.

The son of a one-time sound engineer at Abbey Road studios, Kent first wrote about music for the magazines of Londons motley underground scene in 1972. He admired Americans like Jack Kerouac and Hunter Thompson and set out not simply to tell the stories of the rock stars he met but also to live the way they did to excess. As much as his enthusiasm for bands like Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones, his flamboyantly effeminate dress sense soon marked him out. As he says of his first published work: "The writing itself wasnt particularly outstanding but it had an engagingly naïve and energetic tone… at least you could tell I was keen about what I was addressing."

Well, what exactly did you expect the Pope to say? Brian Eno - interview with the producer of U2s No Line On The Horizon Baftas and Grammys triumph: Being different is what makes us great Elvis Costello interview Beyonc: dream girl

Forty years on, this analysis applies to much of Apathy for the Devil. A kind reading of his prose style would be to say that it perfectly suggests the era that it is describing. The spirit of Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouses spoof DJs Smashie and Nicey pervades its pages. Bands are always "combos"; songs are not written, theyre "penned"; nothing begins, it "commences"; almost everything is "ongoing". But as Kent is astute enough to realise, "rock writing best came to life when the writer was right in the thick of the action. The range of characters was phenomenally rich."

Allied to a simple year-per-chapter chronological structure, this is what drives the book forward and drags from a stew of clichs a fascinating read. Kent was at his most influential in an era when stars allowed favoured journalists not just an hour in some antiseptic hotel room for an interview but days and weeks of "hanging out". Keith Richards, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, the MC5 Kent is there with them backstage, on the private jet, sealed in the hotel bathroom, generally in a fug of groupies and narcotics.

So much, so well trodden: its hardly a revelation that drugs dominated Seventies music, although Kents anecdotes are good value, not least the story of Led Zeps notorious and notoriously fat manager Peter Grant collapsing into a sofa at an Elvis Presley afterparty and accidentally sitting on Elviss father. But as recent memoirs by Patti Smith and Edmund White have shown, what makes the decade compelling is the revolution that occurred between the bloated early years and the transformative arrival of punk. Kents career arc perfectly straddles the period, rising as the Sixties end and collapsing as the Eighties beckon, forming a perfect counterpoint to what is happening in pop culture.

And he didnt just meet the most important band of the Seventies he was in it. As Malcolm McLaren put together the Sex Pistols he briefly invited Kent to play guitar, before McLarens ruthless and manipulative behaviour saw Kent spitting and railing against the "Kings Road fashion ponce". Kent was soon ostracised by the punk scene he had done much to support, to the point that he was beaten, stabbed and at one point whipped with a bike chain by Sid Vicious.

Its here as when a McLaren associate blinds a young girl at a gig that Kent reveals a side to punk that has been given a gloss of glamour down the years: the mindless violence that surrounded it. Perhaps it was Kents clothes that made people hit him. "I may hold the Seventies record for being called a poof the most times in public by complete strangers," he reports at one point. Maybe the extent of his addiction just made him irritating: his life by this stage was "like taking up residence inside a Hieronymous Bosch painting". Whats plain by the end, as Kent finally takes on the addiction that is killing him, is that "the spivs had trounced the fops". And a new breed was about to trounce them in turn, worse than both put together "the yuppies".

Apathy for the Devil: a 1970s Memoir

by Nick Kent

416pp, Faber & Faber, £14.99

Buy now for £12.99 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) 0844 871 1515 or from Telegraph Books