by Nick Kent
Table of Contents
Praise
Title Page
Dedication
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975
1976
1977
1978-1979
Afterwards
Soundtrack for the Seventies
Acknowledgements
Index
Copyright Page
Praise for Apathy for the Devil
“Fifteen years ago Kent published The Dark Stuff, a collection of his finest music journalism, a book to rank alongside Greil Marcus’ Mystery Train, Nik Cohn’s Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom and Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming; Apathy for the Devil might even be better than that.”
—DYLAN JONES, GQ
“As an eyewitness account of the dangerous excesses of the 1970s rock scene, Apathy for the Devil is in a compulsively readable class of its own. . . . Almost every page contains an anecdotal gem. . . . It’s a miracle, frankly, that Kent survived to tell this tale, but as anybody who romps through Apathy for the Devil will agree, we’re all lucky that he did.”
—ROBERT SANDALL, Sunday Times
“While Apathy for the Devil adds some backstory to his classic interviews, it’s also a ‘my-drug-hell’ tale dispensed with a bleak wit and brutal candour. . . . Full of fabulous rock tittle-tattle but also some uncomfortable home truths, this is a book for anyone that’s ever read a music magazine from cover to cover but still wanted to know more.”
—MARK BLAKE, Q Magazine
“Kent tackles his autobiography, as he does his music writing, throwing himself headlong into it and re-experiencing every minute. . . . The magnetic open-heartedness that drew his subjects close lies at the centre of this work, drawing the reader closer too.”
—LOIS WILSON, Mojo
“This is a terrific read imbued with chaos and nihilism, brilliant insights into the lives of Iggy, Bowie, Keith Richards and Lester Bangs, and a lesser-heard take on the cynical, bully-boy tactics of punk—something Kent suffered at the hands of. And if his hazy memory bends the truth at any stage, it only enhances the dark, dangerous picture he paints.”
—CHRIS PARKIN, Time Out
“A blast for every boy and girl who dreamed of being part of the great bacchanalia.”
—AIDAN SMITH, the Scotsman
“[Kent’s] memory bank of stories is a mile deep. . . . [Apathy for the Devil] is worth getting just for the sections about Lou Reed. . . . Kent’s storytelling gifts are considerable and enviable.”
—JONATHAN O’BRIEN, Sunday Business Post
“Even if you have an ounce of rock ‘n’ roll in your body, you’ll appreciate these you-couldn’t-make-it-up tales of success, excess and burnout.”
—JOHN LONGBOTTOM, Rock Sound
“A tome filled with [Kent’s] untold stories, thousands of them, every one of which a mortal man could dine out on for the rest of his days. But Kent just keeps going, often donating only a single sentence to life-shattering events. It makes his book not just a biography but a thriller; a high-octane chase through a decade’s musical history.”
—SAM WOLFSON, NME
This book is dedicated to the ones I love - Adrian and Margaret, Laurence and Jimmy
1970
When you get right down to it, the human memory is a deceitful organ to have to rely on. Past reality gets confused with wishful fantasy as the years march on and you can never really guarantee that you’re replaying the unvarnished truth back to yourself. I’ve tried to protect my memories, to keep them pristine and authentic, but it’s been easier said than done.
Music remains the only key that can unlock the past for me in a way that I can inherently trust. A song from the old days strikes up and instantly a film is projected in my head, albeit an unedited one without a linear plot line; just random scenes thrown together to appease my reflective mood of the moment. For example, someone just has to play an early Joni Mitchell track or one of David Crosby’s dreamy ocean songs and their chords of enquiry instantly transport me back to the Brighton of 1969 with its Technicolor skies, pebble-strewn beach and jaunty air of sweetly decaying Regency splendour. I am dimple-faced and lanky and wandering lonely as a clod through its backstreets and arcades looking longingly at the other people in my path: the boys enshrouded in ill-fitting greatcoats and sagebrush beards and the bra-less girls in long skirts sporting curtains of unstyled hair to frame their fresh inquisitive faces.
It was at these girls in particular that my longing looks were aimed. Direct contact was simply not an option at this juncture of my life. Staring forlornly at their passing forms was the only alternative. This is what happens when you don’t have a sister and have been sidetracked into single-sex schooling systems since the age of eleven: women start to exert a strange and terrible fascination, one born of sexual and romantic frustrations as well as complete ignorance of their emotional agendas and basic thought processes.
And so it was that - on December 31st 1969 - I found myself glumly ruminating on my destiny to date. I kept returning to its central dilemma: I had just turned eighteen and yet I had never even been kissed passionately by a lady. It was an ongoing bloody tragedy.
But then it suddenly all changed - just as everyone was counting out the final seconds of the sixties and getting ready to welcome in 1970. I was in a pub in Cardiff when a beautiful woman impulsively grabbed me and forced her beer-caked tongue down my throat. She was a student nurse down from the Valleys with her mates to see the new decade in, she told me giddily. She had long brown hair and wore a beige minidress that showed off her buxom physique to bewitching effect. She smiled at me so seductively our bodies just sank into each other. In a room full of inebriated Welsh people, I let my hands wander over her breasts and buttocks. So this was what the poets were talking about when they invoked the phrase ‘all earthly ecstasy’. Suddenly, a door had opened and the sensual world was mine to embrace.
It was only a fleeting fumble. At 12.05 I unwrapped myself from her perfumed embrace for some thirty seconds in order to seek the whereabouts of a male friend who’d brought me there - only to return and find the same woman locked in an amorous clinch with a bearded midget. The door to all earthly pleasure had slammed shut on me almost as soon as it had swung open and yet I left the hostelry still giddy with elation. At last I’d been granted my initiation into fleshy desire. I was no longer on the outside looking in, like that cloying song by Little Anthony & the Imperials. And it had all happened just at the exact moment that the seventies had been ushered in to raucous rejoicing. I sensed right there and then that the new decade and I were made for each other.
On the train back to Paddington the next day - I’d been visiting old friends in Cardiff the night before, catching up on their adventures ever since I’d moved almost two years earlier from there to Horsham in Sussex, a mere thirty-mile whistle-stop from London-I felt further compelled to review my sheltered life thus far. Everywhere around me in the new pop counter-culture of Great Britain and elsewhere, young people were gleefully surrendering themselves to states of chemically induced rapture, growing hair from every conceivable pore of their bodies and cultivating sundry grievances against ‘the man’. And yet I was still stuck at home with my parents, who’d brainwashed me into believing that my adult life would be totally hamstrung without the benefits of a full university education and degree. As a result, most of my time was being spent furtively spoon-feeding ancient knowledge into my cranium until it somehow stuck to the walls.
It wasn’t a particularly easy process. I cared not a fig for Martin Luther or his Diet of Worms. But I had three A levels to sit - English, French and History - in May and had to somehow
cram all the arcane details of each syllabus into my consciousness in order to get winning results. In retrospect, it wasn’t all a pointless procedure. The French I was studying would hold me in good stead when I came to live in Paris in my late thirties. My English A-level studies involved poring briefly over the poetry of both Yeats and T. S. Eliot, and both had a forceful impact on my own burgeoning literary aspirations. But then there’d be long mind-numbing sessions of having to grapple with the lofty moral agenda laid out in the collected works of John Milton.
In Paradise Lost Milton spelt it out to the sinners: ‘temperance - the golden mean’ is what humankind needed to adopt as an all-embracing lifestyle if they truly want to get right with God. Wise words, but somewhat wasted on an eighteen-year-old virgin just counting the days before he can catapult himself over to the wild side of life.
My father was a great admirer of John Milton also. His all-time favourite poem was Milton’s ‘On His Blindness’. He’d often quote the final line: ‘They also serve who only stand and waite.’ It fitted his overall view of an all-inclusive humanity. My father was a thoughtful man who’d had his young life thrown into turmoil first - as a child - by his own father’s bankruptcy and then - in his early twenties - by having to fight overseas throughout most of the Second World War. He returned in 1945 with the after-effects of undiagnosed malaria and severe rheumatoid arthritis partly instigated from falling out of a moving truck and landing flat on his back on a dirt road in North Africa.
He and my mother, an infant-school teacher born and raised in the North of England, had already met two years earlier in a wartime canteen and had begun an ardent correspondence. They married in 1945 at war’s end and moved into a two-storey house in North London’s Mill Hill area that same year. At first they were told by various doctors that my mother would be unable to conceive, but in April of 1951 she discovered she was pregnant. I arrived on Christmas Eve of that year after a long and complicated birth. My parents couldn’t believe their good fortune and - rightly sensing that I would be their only offspring - showered me with affection.
So often these days people tartly evoke Philip Larkin’s damning lines about family ties - ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do’ - as if it sums up the whole parental process in one bitter little sound bite. But my parents never fucked me up. They didn’t beat me or abuse me. They loved me and fed me and encouraged me to think about everything, to develop my own value system and stretch my attention span. Above all else, they introduced me from a very early age to the sensation of having one’s senses engulfed by art. Classical music streamed through our living room constantly. Much of it - particularly Beethoven and Richard Wagner-I found unsettlingly bombastic but the works of Debussy and Ravel were also played often and their enchanted melodies wove into my newly emerging brain-span like aural fairy dust. To this day, Debussy’s music can still stimulate within me a sense of inner well-being more profound than anything else I’ve ever known. It is the sound of all that unconditional love pouring down on me as a little child.
My father liked to lose himself in music. He was often in physical pain and relied on its healing properties to keep him emotionally buoyant. He was a professional sound recordist - one of the best in the business. When Sir Winston Churchill - at the very end of his life - was persuaded to read extracts of his memoirs for recorded posterity, my dad was the one invited to Chequers - Churchill’s stately home - to set up the equipment and tape-record the great man’s every faltering utterance. He told me later that Churchill was in such bad health they had to employ an actor to replicate his gruff tones on certain passages.
At the outset of the fifties he was a staff engineer at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios - George Martin was another new recruit at this juncture - but the pay was so abysmal that when I appeared, he was immediately forced to look for more financially advantageous avenues of employment. This he found in 1952 at Radio Luxembourg, whose London-based recording studios he basically ran for several years. The outlet then required a daily cavalcade of live entertainment to fill its airwaves - its transformation to a DJ-centric pop music format was still some years off - and so my father spent his days setting up the sessions and then recording everyone from George Formby to Vera Lynn.
Vera Lynn and him became first-name pals: she always had a good word for my dad. But he didn’t like her music. In fact, he couldn’t stand his job. He didn’t like ‘light entertainment’ - he found it all offensively simplistic. And as a devout Christian, he was thoroughly appalled by the loose moral conduct he often encountered in the industry: the sexual favours and rampant alcoholism, the fly-by-night agents and managers with their predatory ways, the shrill-voiced, pill-addled post-war prima donnas careening from one private catastrophe to the next. When I’d become a teenager, he told me just how flawed these people were in his eyes. His most unforgettable reminiscence involved a much-loved actress of the era who’d become something of an English institution for her sympathetic, matronly portrayal of a farmer’s wife on a popular radio broadcast. According to him, she’d once bitten a man’s penis off whilst performing oral sex on him when the car they were both travelling in was involved in a sudden head-on collision with a wall. He tried to instil in me early his belief that most popular entertainment was - at best - smoke and mirrors and that behind its bejewelled curtain lurked a tainted and predatory kingdom.
Both my parents viewed what passed for popular culture in the fifties with a ferocious disdain. Elvis Presley they considered like some degenerate hillbilly sex maniac, the musical equivalent of Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear. Frank Sinatra they called a ‘smarmy little gangster’: my father already knew all the insider scuttlebutt (gossip) on his Mafia affiliations and leg-breaking routines. When I suddenly fell under pop’s giddy spell, it was a shock to both of them.
The first time was when I heard Elmer Bernstein’s ‘Theme from The Magnificent Seven’ on the car radio during a family outing when I was nine going on ten. Staccato violins suddenly stabbed out a turbulent mariachi rhythm over which a hauntingly exuberant melody was being articulated and every atom of my being was suddenly activated by its impact on my ears. I’d never before heard or felt anything as thrilling as this. Every detail is still vivid in my mind: my grandmother’s fierce eyes looking at me from the front seat, my father’s aching back as he drove, the rank odour of cheap petrol that permeated the back of the family car. From that moment on, I was plugged into a new form of rapture that my parents could never understand.
The world of pop that I found myself suddenly enthralled with was not one that bristled with danger and raw excitement. The early sixties were a slack time for musical daredevilry. Elvis had been neutered by the army and his hoodlum peers were publicly disgraced and slouching snake-eyed through their wilderness years. Their places had been taken by a markedly less disruptive breed of young entertainer - bland crooners with dimpled cheeks and puppy-dog eyes forever voicing their feelings of undying love to some sulky beehived harpy. It was mostly cloying stuff - musical Brylcreem that left you feeling sticky and light-headed.
But then, in October of 1962, I was listening to popular disc jockey Alan Freeman enthusiastically address the nation’s ‘pop-pickers’ on the kitchen radio one Sunday afternoon when he introduced the debut single by ‘a young combo from down Liverpool way’ that he referred to as the Beatles. The song itself, ‘Love Me Do’, wasn’t particularly groundbreaking - the harmonica refrain dominating the arrangement had been clearly inspired by Bruce Channel’s recent mega-hit ‘Hey! Baby’ - but the robust blend of plaintive guitar strumming and playful Scouser vocalising made it infectiously easy on the ear nonetheless. No one could sense in that innocent moment that a musical and cultural revolution was about to blow up and that the Beatles would be its central motivating core, its leaders and all-purpose Pied Pipers.
How sweet it was to be ten years old when they kicked off: my whole teenaged experience was illuminated by their output and very existence.
They never disappointed and each new musical plateau they ascended to left their audience delirious with a joy so contagious that it came to define the very spirit of the decade itself. The better world their songs aspired to was a universe that everyone was welcome to inhabit, one where notions of class and racial disharmony simply melted away, where being kind was infinitely more virtuous a pursuit than simply being cool and where the sophistication of high art could effortlessly be fused with the visceral impact of lowbrow pop. It was them and Dylan who kicked open the door that had formerly kept twentieth-century bohemian culture trapped in suffocatingly smoky nightclubs on the outskirts of town and let it come pouring into the high streets where young people were gathering to define a new sort of commercial mainstream for their own consumer urges.
Not forgetting the Rolling Stones of course. You can never overestimate their role in detonating the rebel instincts of my bright-eyed baby boomer generation. I should know. I was there in the front row when the deal went down. I felt the explosion full in the face. The force of it hot-wired my imagination, invaded my dreams and taught me everything I needed to know about the realities of youthful self-empowerment.
In 1959, my father - always on the lookout for better-paying employment - was offered a senior position in a fledgling TV company known as Harlech that was then poised to become the Welsh branch of the ITV network. He took the job even though it involved immediately uprooting his family from our relatively blissful North London home and hearth and relocating in Llandaff, a sleepy little village on the outskirts of Cardiff that was remarkable only for its lofty-spired cathedral, one of the largest centres of worship in all of the British Isles. I would come to know its interior well: my parents were weekly attendees and they obliged me to accompany them every Sunday morning until I reached the age of fourteen.