Apathy for the Devil

by Nick Kent

  In early October I moved in to a dormitory overlooking Regent’s Park, where Bedford College was actually located. The single room I occupied there became my new living quarters and my first home away from my parents’ hearth. A month earlier I’d had my heart broken for the very first time: Joanne had chucked me. My first reaction was to feel like a victim in some maudlin country song about small-town cheating hearts but fortunately I didn’t have the time or circumstances to mope too much. After all, I was one of maybe only three males living in a building with twenty-seven females, many of whom were soon inviting me into their rooms to get better acquainted.

  That’s when I experienced first-hand the hold Cat Stevens then had on young middle-class women throughout the British Isles. Practically all my female fellow students were head-over-heels in love with the guy and played his albums as though their lives depended on it. They were mostly nice girls from the provinces with lank hair and long skirts who were adjusting to their arrival in wicked old London by immersing themselves day and night in Cat Stevens’s soothing airy-fairy blather until his discs became their own personal comfort zones. Sometimes their record-listening habits would stretch to superior musings like Joni Mitchell’s ‘River’ or anything by Leonard Cohen but they’d always return to the Cat-man piously proclaiming morning had broken. I couldn’t stand it. His music was so drippy and saccharine it made my teeth ache. I quickly developed an irrational hatred of the man, which only intensified the following year when I started knowing several bona fide rock groupies in the biblical sense and all these women turned out to be dating Cat Stevens at the same time. One of them even phoned him up when we were together to tell him what she was up to. Now, of course, Cat Stevens is internationally known as a devout Muslim who left the lust-filled music industry to dedicate his life to his strict religious beliefs but back in the day the Tea for the Tillerman man was getting more pussy than Frank Sinatra.

  Talking of pussy, I actually lost my virginity at the end of my first week there. Before that, I’d engaged in what can only be described as tentative oral sex but I’d never been inside a woman. I seem to recall being worried about actual penetration because so many of my school-going cronies had gotten their girlfriends pregnant and been prematurely forced into matrimony and a dead-end provincial job. But I’d finally escaped that sorry fate and was now free to make up for lost time and fumbled opportunities. A pretty, moon-faced Welsh girl named Ann - one of my student co-tenants at the dorm - latched on to me and wasted no time in inviting me to share her bed. God bless you, Ann, if you happen to read this. You set me free to roam freely in the world of adult pleasure and promiscuity-a great place to take up squatter’s rights in when you’re still only nineteen. I received a better life education from being in your carnal caress than I ever did from attending any lectures.

  The only problem I had as a student was the actual course I’d enrolled in: linguistics, or the study of the English language. For some reason I’d envisioned reading and discussing mostly modern literature and so was deeply underwhelmed when I discovered I had to decipher the original texts of Geoffrey Chaucer instead. Chaucer is rightly renowned as one of England’s first book-writers but that doesn’t automatically mean he’s one of the best too. His original Canterbury Tales is like a bad Carry On script written by a halfwit and having to translate it into a modern-language idiom was a task I couldn’t work up the remotest inkling of a desire to pursue. When we weren’t focusing on Chaucer’s silly texts, we were getting bombarded by lecturers hopelessly in thrall to the ancient words and thoughts of my old pal John Milton. One old biddy who taught us would even occasionally break down and weep when discussing his timeless magnificence. Meanwhile, I was weeping invisible tears of utter stultifying boredom.

  Soon enough I stopped turning up to these lectures altogether and spent my time instead furtively exploring current London-based culture. The city had some great live venues like Finsbury Park’s Rainbow Theatre and Camden Town’s Roundhouse: Sunday afternoons at the latter were a real poseur’s paradise. The artsy cinemas had special late-night showings that were always instructive to attend and the hip bookshops regularly put on literary happenings and poetry readings: I saw Patti Smith boldly reciting some early texts of hers without the aid of musical accompaniment - her first-ever public performance in Europe, I believe - that winter to an audience of no more than fifteen people. I knew there and then she’d go on to become one of the decade’s creative players. I’d already been impressed by her work because her poetry had lately been published in a Michigan-based periodical called Creem which you could only buy here in the UK from one source: Camden Town’s Compendium bookshop. One issue I bought that year featured a review by staff writer Dave Marsh of a Question Mark and the Mysterians reunion concert in which the term ‘punk rock’ was first coined. A new genre was making its first tottering baby steps courtesy of the international rock press.

  Meanwhile, Creem’s rival Rolling Stone was going from strength to strength - like its namesakes, the journal enjoyed its all-time creative peak throughout 1971. That year, Hunter S. Thompson’s seminal gonzo screed Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas got published in its pages, months before it appeared in book form. John Lennon laid his soul bare to editor Jann Wenner in an extraordinary two-part interview. A freelancer named Grover Lewis - assigned to cover the Allman Bros. on a draining US tour - almost got beaten up by the group and retaliated by writing a wonderfully observed warts-and-all exposé of their charmless lives and nasty habits. And another freelancer, Tom Nolan, turned in a mesmerising extra-length feature on Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, the first article ever to pull back the curtain on the madness and dysfunctionalism that reigned behind their rugged all-American image. This was new journalism at its very best. The writers weren’t blandly observing their subjects from a respectful distance any more, they were right there in the scrum as wilful participants soaking up the essence and then channelling it into an art form of their own. That’s exactly where I wanted to be. That’s exactly what I wanted to do.

  It wouldn’t be long now. I could feel it in my bones. Being back in London had started a fire in me. The city was mine again - and it owed me a living. Destiny would take care of the rest.

  1972

  It was in January of 1972 that my future destiny as the Zeitgeist-surfing dark prince of seventies rock journalism actually started to experience lift-off. The year began inauspiciously enough. I returned to my student digs in Regent’s Park in readiness for a new term at university only to discover I’d arrived several days too soon and everything was still boarded up. I decided to hitch-hike up to scenic Barnsley deep in the northernmost bowels of England on the off-chance that I’d encounter two friends, Nigel Good and Chris Roddick, who’d lately moved up there to work on an underground paper called - if memory serves - Styng. At 8 a.m. one grey January morning I stood at the North London entrance to the M1 motorway with my thumb outstretched. Five hours later, a large articulated lorry and its obliging driver had deposited me in Barnsley town centre. There was only one drawback: I had no address or phone number for the people I was searching for. Not to worry, though: long-haired youths were few and far between in this neck of the woods so I just had to describe their appearance to some locals congregated in a market square and they gave me exact directions. ‘Try the nearest pub’ was their advice, and of course they were right. It was a joyous reunion. My pals couldn’t believe I’d temporarily abandoned swinging London to spend time in their sleepy little backwater. And I was just happy to not be spending the night alone sleeping in a bus shelter.

  In due course they took me back to their communal homestead - a two-storey house with minimal furniture and no central heating - and I got to meet the rest of the Barnsley counter-culture. There were only five conscripts at this juncture - Nigel, Chris, a fellow called Roger Hutchinson who was very much the man in charge, his pal, a bespectacled youth whose name now escapes me, and his pal’s girlfriend - so it was hardly a thriving commu
nity; but they approached their role as rabble-rousers to the drowsy North with great zeal and commitment. Partly, this commitment involved publishing from time to time new issues of their broadsheet stuffed with features detailing the latest conspiracy theories and calling for a full-blown social revolution. Mostly, though, it involved sitting around a smouldering log fire, smoking copious amounts of pot and passionately voicing their drug-drenched dreams for the future. In this regard, we were very much kindred spirits. Well-read, streetwise druggies with a vague work ethic were my kind of people, I was quickly discovering.

  I only spent some forty-eight hours in their midst but those hours would prove to be deeply significant ones for me personally. I got to take speed for the first time-a black bomber - and felt my brain suddenly rushing through my skull like a locomotive train ablaze with thought. Twenty-four eye-popping hours later, the comedown began, leaving me distinctly drained and disorientated, and yet I had no regrets. The drug had freed up something in my cerebellum and offered me a more intense way of perceiving the world. It was an experience I was determined to try again at the earliest opportunity.

  On my last night there, I managed to broach with Roger Hutchinson - Styng’s nominal editor - the subject of maybe writing some articles of my own for his periodical. Not about politics per se, but about music. He appeared enthusiastic but duly noted that - as I was then resident in London - I’d be better off contributing to that city’s more prolific underground network. Roger then mentioned that he was in contact with Frendz magazine, a fortnightly journal based in Ladbroke Grove that he claimed was often in need of new writers. He encouraged me to visit its Portobello Road premises upon my return. ‘Speak to either Rosie Boycott or John May. Tell them Roger Hutchinson sent you.’ With these words still ringing in my ears, I hitch-hiked back from the North just in time to reconvene with the rest of my fellow students for the unveiling of London University’s spring 1972 term.

  A few underwhelming days after my return to academia, I actually got up the nerve to travel by tube to the address I’d been given back in Barnsley. I stepped out of Ladbroke Grove tube station on an overcast weekday afternoon and made the short walk under the motorway to where the butt-end of Portobello Road intersected.

  Standing before me as I reached the street was a young man clearly in an advanced state of chemical refreshment. I recognised him almost instantly: it was Paul Kossoff, the guitarist from Free. Eighteen months earlier I’d been one of over half a million attendees at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival and had witnessed Kossoff on stage there coaxing forth a series of barn-burning guitar solos out of a battered Les Paul alongside his three colleagues and being greeted with a mass standing ovation for his efforts. Free were at their absolute peak right at that very instant - their anthem ‘All Right Now’ had recently made no. 1 in the UK singles charts - and they were also Britain’s best-loved up-and-coming outfit of the epoch.

  They were also incredibly young. Kossoff and the others had been professional musicians since 1968 and yet he was only one year older than me. I’d just turned twenty and he was twenty-one years old when our ships briefly passed on Portobello Road. That’s a frightening age to suddenly be designated a has-been. I didn’t know it then but he was already well on his way to becoming one of the new decade’s more prominent casualties. Free had recently broken up as a direct consequence of his drug problems. The group would be in mid-performance only to discover their guitarist had fallen asleep against his amplifier. Given his marching orders in late ’71, Kossoff had quickly drowned his sorrows by moving into Ladbroke Grove’s druggy nexus and drenching his senses in a haze of Class A narcotics and tranquillisers. As we edged around each other on the street that day, I locked eyes with him for a second and he shot me a quick mischievous little smile, the kind of look you’d get from a naughty schoolboy who’d just been suspended for getting caught smoking behind the bike sheds. If I’d known more about his ongoing situation, maybe I would have taken his presence before me as some grim portent, a warning of things to come, but those kind of reflections are only triggered by hindsight. I was too busy finding my own way in the world - or at the very least the elusive address I’d been given - to focus further on his sorry fate.

  Finally, I found it - 305 Portobello Road. A hippie couple with strange black sores around their mouths were running a health-food shop on the ground floor and told me to ring the bell at the side door and then go up to the first floor, where Frendz had its office. This I did, only to find myself in a dimly lit room festooned with dilapidated furniture, sundry battered typewriters and filing cabinets and several beanbags masquerading as makeshift sofas. Hardly anyone was present apart from a young woman seated at a desk nearest the large window overlooking Portobello Road and typing away furiously. ‘Are you by any chance Rosie Boycott?’ I recall stammering out. She answered with a nod and smile that emboldened me to go straight into my pitch. I was a friend of Roger Hutchinson and he’d advised me to present myself here and offer my fledgling writerly services to your journal. I was interested in writing reviews and doing interviews with musicians rather than talking up the latest bomb-detonating activities of the odious Angry Brigade (some of whom had actually been part of Frendz’s editorial caucus in the not-so-distant past). Did she see an outlet for me here?

  Amazingly, she replied ‘Yes, of course’ and urged me to write something at the earliest opportunity and bring it to the office for further perusal. I never encountered Ms Boycott again - though we briefly spoke on the phone in the early nineties just after she’d been made the editor of UK Esquire, the upmarket men’s magazine - but have always held her in high esteem, mainly because her kindness and encouragement that day made me feel instantly accepted in this potentially daunting new world I was trying to break into. If she’d told me to piss off I would have probably junked all my career ambitions as a writer right there and then.

  Drawing on my student grant I next purchased three records that had just been released that very week. One was a mediocre album by San Francisco’s Quicksilver Messenger Service called simply Quicksilver and another was Gonna Take a Miracle, a soul-stirring collection of rhythm ’n’ blues covers performed by the gifted Italian-American singer/songwriter Laura Nyro. I’ve forgotten what the third disc was. Burning the midnight oil in my student garret, I scribbled out in longhand my impressions of the music contained within until I’d fashioned three coherent reviews. The following day I returned to Frendz with my dog-eared pages of handwritten text only to find that Rosie Boycott had promptly quit the paper for unexplained reasons. Her place at the main desk had been taken by a thin young man with impressively long Pre-Raphaelite hair called John May. I repeated my basic pitch and then handed him the sheets containing my prose. He read them and told me they were very good and that almost certainly they’d be published in the next issue. I was over the fucking moon.

  For the next week or so, I shied away from the office and waited with baited, hash-stained breath for the publication of the next Frendz issue. Then one weekend I saw a fresh pile being sold in Compendium bookshop on the high street in Camden Town and approached with tingling trepidation. As I leafed furiously through the journal I couldn’t find a trace of what I’d written but then on the last but one page there they all were - my three reviews and my name printed prominently underneath them.

  It is always a magical empowering moment when a writer sees his or her considered words typeset and available for public consumption for the very first time, and I was certainly no exception. The writing itself wasn’t particularly outstanding but the three efforts had an engagingly naive and energetic tone, which is just another way of saying they weren’t very good but at least you could tell I was keen about what I was addressing. They worked like a charm anyway. When I returned to Frendz, I was greeted like a conquering hero and promptly offered the job of official music editor for the princely sum of £4 a month and all the freebies I could siphon out of the record companies. I felt like I’d just won the lotte
ry. Suddenly I was a burgeoning force to be reckoned with in the freak-flag-flying enclaves of the London underground. Little did I know that its days were already sorely numbered. By the end of the year it would be virtually extinct.

  By early 1972 London’s various alternative press outlets were all struggling to survive in the face of ever-conflicting shifts in editorial direction and generally dwindling sales. Oz - the most notorious periodical of its ilk - had enjoyed a hearty sales boost in 1970 and briefly became a fully fledged cultural cause célèbre that same year when its three instigators were tried at the Old Bailey on charges of conspiring to pervert the morals of young children. But after being exonerated, Richard Neville, the magazine’s key motivator, had left the enterprise to concentrate on writing books, as did their most interesting writer Germaine Greer, and Oz had quickly degenerated into an unattractive fusion of empty ‘subversive’ ranting and hard-core pornography. International Times, its sister publication, was struggling on, still baying for revolution, still trying to stick it to the man - but fewer and fewer hirsute young Brits were laying down their hard-come-by shillings and pence to hearken to the call.

  The same was true of Frendz. It had begun life in 1969 as Friends of Rolling Stone - a London-based outgrowth of the seminal San Francisco fortnightly - but then Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone’s editor and owner, had quickly grown dissatisfied with their efforts and cut off all funding; finding new backers, the original editorial team persevered into the seventies, retitling their project Frendz and throwing open their doors to any drug-diminished dissident or street-dwelling nutcase who wished to contribute. As a result, the journal had a short turbulent history that’s best evoked in the printed reminiscences of those who manned the staff, edited together in the final section of Jonathon Green’s illuminating oral history of the sixties counter-culture Days in the Life. In the book there’s an unforgettable description of a female acid casualty who haunted the office whilst dragging an old mattress behind her. She’d vanished by the time I turned up, I’m happy to say. I couldn’t have handled her: there were already more than enough LSD-impaired individuals flocking around the premises for me to contend with. Syd Barrett even appeared one day - his last group Stars was possibly going to be managed by Frendz’s ersatz accountant, a fellow in a grimy white denim suit and satanic goatee called Dick - and stared like a lost dog at anyone attempting to communicate with him. He looked in a bad way - but frankly no worse than any of the other space-cases littering the room.