Nick Kent's tall tales of degradation and excess

Nick Kent,

in case you were wondering, was one of the great writers on rock music during the 1970s—or any other era. He was the

NME

’s in-house rock star, back in the days when the

NME

was the world’s most successful music weekly. He was a tall, louche, leather-clad itinerant fop with kohl-blackened eyes and fabulous bone structure. He was a man once described as a “great palsied mantis” by friend and fellow degenerate Iggy Pop, and who so impressed David Bowie on first meeting, the erstwhile Thin White Duke exclaimed, “So you’re Nick Kent! Aren’t you pretty!”

More importantly he was exceptionally talented, a journalist who excelled in Gonzo-esque reportage with seemingly limitless connections and an ability to get under the skins of even the most elusive rock gods. And it’s all here in his new

Apathy for the Devil

(Da Capo Press)—tearing around London in Keith Richards’ Ferrari, watching the Stooges invent punk, playing in an embryonic version of the Sex Pistols, dating Chrissie Hynde pre-Pretenders, and getting hopelessly, near-suicidally addicted to hard drugs in the process.

Apathy

is a picaresque memoir in which Kent’s rise and fall as a writing star and subsequent junkie closely mirrors the hopes, dreams, and eventual nightmares of the ‘70s music world. The early chapters are somewhat and surprisingly hampered by cliché, but once the decade takes off, Kent kicks into gear, and the revelations come thick and fast, frequently disturbing, occasionally depressing, never less than entertaining—and all told with a rare degree of flair, acerbic insight, and a not-inconsiderable measure of panache. Just remember kids—don’t try this at home.

City Paper

caught up with Kent by phone from his home in Paris.

City Paper

:

You come across in the book as something of a Zelig-like figure—one minute you're touring with the Stones, the next minute you're getting the Stooges' Metallic KO released, or giving Malcolm McLaren some career advice.

Nick Kent:

Yeah, but that’s just how it was. The music business wasn’t as guarded, the press was more powerful, I was embedded with groups, I lived it more than any other writer I know. Plus, I was a freelancer at the

NME

—I was never staff. The other writers had to be in the office every day, unless they were on assignment, whereas I’d sleep, get up, and just wander around London. It was wonderful—at first anyway—just floating around looking for stories and drugs.

Plus you gotta remember, I knew these people. Hollywood’s fucking tiny, London’s small, as far as the scene goes, Manhattan’s the same—it all revolved around the same handful of clubs and bars that you could cover in an evening and you could see everyone that mattered, and it was enjoyable. . . . I was given carte blanche to sink into that world, and why not?

But these days, I mean, how d’you embed yourself with the likes of the Arcade Fire? I mean, take Radiohead. I’m actually a big fan, I think they’re decent people, and four years ago they invited me to tour America with them. And I had to very politely decline because it would just be a lot of time sitting around backstage, and everything’s very efficient and organized. As opposed to the days when I toured with Led Zeppelin, where, when they were touring, particularly in the Southern states of the U.S., it really was like going into the wild West. Peter Grant, their manager, would have to go backstage and physically confront these dodgy promoters for the money they were owed. When Radiohead tours, everything’s done, it’s organized. I mean there’s no real sense of danger anymore, and I always just wanted to capture the spirit of the times and the music.

CP:

A constant theme in both

Apathy

and your last book,

The Dark Stuff

, is that to make it as a star, you have to be, at best, a deeply flawed individual—if not an out-and-out mercenary, morally bankrupt bastard.

NK:

Well sure, it helps, particularly back in the ’70s where it really was a case of “No more Mr. Nice Guy.” There were and are exceptions—Neil Young’s an impressive, strong, decent human being. But yeah, there were arseholes. The most fucked-up encounter, the most fucked-up situation I remember was with, of all people, Ace Frehley from KISS. Just awful. He was lying on his bed in his hotel room next to a fridge full of booze and he phones up his personal roadie, who was in another hotel over a mile away, and commands him to come to his hotel in order to open the fridge for him. Seriously. That just out-Spinal Tapped anything I’d ever seen. . . . He waited half an hour for his personal roadie to open his fucking fridge! I could have done it for him! My God, what an absolute tosser.

All the bands that I really liked in the ’70s—the Stones, the Stooges, the New York Dolls—they were playing this cutthroat style of music and they felt they had to assert their nasty side. But when you actually met them and sat down to talk to them, and they relaxed and took the mask off, they could be very nice people. Iggy Pop’s a great example. He can be a really nice, decent guy when he wants to be. There’s a nice guy in there. But he’s also capable of being utterly ruthless, a cold, mean-eyed, extremely nasty guy. It’s human nature to an extent, though; it depends what situation you put these people in .

And that’s what’s always fascinated me as a writer—what is it that makes these guys tick? And the ones who managed to survive and thrive were always the big thinkers, the ones who were able to stand apart, and stay away from the petty rivalry that was rife back then.

CP :

One of the best parts of the book is the collection of your favorite albums of the decade, year by year—it's an eclectic mix that reminds you of the sheer diversity of the decade.

NK:

One of the reasons I wrote this book was that there’s been this whole punk revisionist thing, this old assumption that the early ’70s were dead, nothing was happening, and that’s just a load of fucking crap, basically. These people will drag up the image of ELP or the Bay City Rollers and contend that that’s all there was between ’70 and ’76. That’s utter shit—there were the Stooges, the Stones, Bowie, Bolan, Roxy Music, the Faces, Can, Neil Young at his best, Joni Mitchell at her best, Al Green, the Philly scene, early disco, Big Star—I mean, I could go on all night.

It annoys me that, for a lot of people, the ’70s started with “Anarchy in the U.K.,” but they weren’t there so they don’t really know.

CP:

Was the '70s rock journalism's "Golden Age"?

NK:

Maybe, but only in so much as there was so much more to write about. I actually think the standards of music writing today have improved. If you look back at the

NME

during the ’70s, there was a lot of pretty ropey writing—very enthusiastic and interesting because of the subject matter, but a lot of the writing was just not that good. . . . There’s a better level of criticism these days, although I think there’s less to write about. I mean, there’s decent acts out there worth writing about, but no real unifying scene.

CP:

Endless press junkets, flights to Los Angeles, freedom to write 6,000 word epics on Brian Wilson's mental state whilst very publicly addicted to hard drugs—that's not going to happen now, is it?

NK:

Nope, absolutely not. No chance. Apart from anything else, the money’s not there anymore, the press is less powerful, the music business is going down the toilet, print media’s dying, everything’s more controlled . . . plus there’s no longer that level of shared sensibility there was. Everything’s more fragmented, thanks largely to technology. Anyone can start a blog now, anyone can write reviews.

CP:

Surely that's pretty punk in itself, the whole DIY ethos made good?

NK:

Well, there’s a good side and a bad side. On the one hand, there’s true self-empowerment, the level of self-empowerment that people talked about in the ’60s and ’70s, which is good. Trouble is, when everyone can do it, you’re inevitably going to get an avalanche of mediocrity. And there’s so much mediocrity out there, it’s hard to sift out the really good writers and critics.

CP:

Any advice for fledgling rock journos out there?

NK:

Yeah—diversify. I don’t think you can make a living in music journalism, so get writing about movies, architecture, whatever. Add another string to your bow. Oh—and don’t try and do what I did, which would be like diving off a particularly high cliff into one foot of water. Not advisable at all.