Apathy for the Devil

by Nick Kent

  Iggy and Bowie may have been linked by management and general word of mouth but their individual agendas were poles apart. Bowie was a culture-vulture tourist, a magpie chameleon furiously ransacking all manner of cutting-edge influences in order to create a sophisticated multi-layered pop consciousness for himself and his audience to share in. Iggy meanwhile was a fervent purist intent on rechannelling the bedrock blues aesthetic - two or three chords and a hypnotic groove - through the whole white bohemian stream-of-consciousness mindset mixed in with some performance art. Put simply, Ziggy Stardust was ‘show business’ whilst the Stooges were ‘soul business’. The first was deeply glamorous and alluring to behold, the latter less attractive but potentially more life-changing to be exposed to.

  Some might now see it as the difference between art and artifice but that would be a wrong-headed claim to make. Bowie’s Ziggy-era music was certainly artfully conceived and he had a far more sophisticated and varied approach to basic songcraft than Iggy. Bowie understood what was happening in the cultural Zeitgeist and was able to play on its various ongoing obsessions - the sci-fi-inspired future, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four scenario, androgyny, Clockwork Orange, Warholesque superstardom - to his own inspired purposes. Iggy by contrast was a musical primitive not unlike John Lee Hooker and proud to be so. They could only enjoy a meaningful creative and personal relationship when Bowie finally elected to leave all his personality-transforming masks back in the closet, which he did in the mid-seventies when the pair moved to Berlin together. During the early seventies, though, they were often at cross-purposes. Bowie adored Iggy but was less enamoured by the Stooges’ input, feeling the singer would be better served with a more conventionally proficient back-up ensemble. Iggy meanwhile had his own private reservations about Bowie’s effetely theatrical live shows as well as the Bromley alien’s unfortunate tendency to hire mime artists to share the stage with him. One was fated to levitate to the very toppermost of the global poppermost over the next two years, whilst the other was doomed to lay destitute in its outer margins during the same period of time. Partly this was due to their manager Tony Defries, who focused ruthlessly on Bowie’s career throughout 1972, keeping Iggy and the Stooges out on the sidelines and unemployed, save for the recording of one album and a single live performance. But mostly it was due to the fact that the world was still not ready to accept what the Stooges had to offer it.

  Their one and only European show took place on July 21st 1972 on a Saturday night at London’s King’s Cross Cinema (later known as the Scala), just across the road from the train station. The night before, Lou Reed had made his UK live debut at the same venue and the fledgling glitterati du jour had all come out in force to feast their eyes and ears on the revered former Velvet Underground kingpin’s latest musical venture. Members of a fascinating new English act known as Roxy Music were amongst the gauchely attired attendees seated up in the balcony. The Stooges were there too, scoping out the competition with their customary snake-eyed nonchalance. Backstage I caught a glimpse of Reed before he went on. Slumped in a corner of his makeshift dressing room, his whole body was shaking uncontrollably and his facial expression was that of a man awaiting his own execution. His performance that night quickly degenerated into a fiasco. The backing band he’d hired - and christened the Tots - managed only to transform his old Velvets repertoire from edgy art rock to feckless-sounding bubblegum pop. And Reed’s stage fright was so palpable his voice kept cancelling out on him because his vocal cords and neck muscles had become rigid with fear. He was also seriously overweight, a condition not helped by his choice of apparel - a rhinestone-encrusted black velvet suit several sizes too small for his portly girth. After four songs, his trousers burst their seams, his zipper broke and the waistband began to slowly descend, billowing around his thighs. Iggy and James Williamson - standing at the front of the stage - found this spectacle particularly amusing and began pointing at the falling strides with suitably contemptuous facial expressions.

  There were no such wardrobe malfunctions when the Stooges took the same stage just twenty-four hours later. But there was only a fraction of the audience that had turned out for Reed. No celebrity onlookers could be found in the building - no Roxy, Reed or Bowie, although the latter pair had been photographed arm in arm with Iggy that very afternoon during a joint press conference at a London hotel. No more than 200 people were present for the show and at least half of them were only there because it was a cheaply priced all-night event that provided warmth and shelter to cushion the hours before London’s tube trains began operating again at 6 a.m. Many in the balcony were already fast asleep when the Stooges began playing at 2 in the morning. They didn’t stay that way for long. From the opening notes, the big room was suddenly sucked into a world rife with menace and malevolence.

  The songs the Stooges chose to perform that night had never been heard outside of the group’s rehearsal studio - and they never would be again. Nothing was reprised from their previous two Elektra albums and nothing they played would be later immortalised on Raw Power. Instead, they performed a jolting succession of primitive works in progress. ‘This next selection is entitled “Penetration”,’ Iggy would inform the genuinely terrified crowd. But the song they performed had absolutely nothing in common with the hypnotic track of the same name that would appear eight months later on the Stooges’ third album. ‘Thank you,’ Iggy then announced. ‘This next selection is called “Penetration” too.’ And off they’d go again bashing out this scary, Neanderthal jungle music that no one present had ever heard the likes of before this night.

  Iggy meanwhile gave one of the most superhuman physical displays ever seen in public. Every nuance of his performance is still engraved in my memory - his absolute fearlessness, his Nijinsky-like body language and the mind-boggling way he seemed able to defy even the laws of gravity. At one point he placed his mike stand right at the lip of the stage, bent backward until his head touched the ground and then threw his whole body forward onto it. As he and the stand descended into the audience pit, he managed to execute a full somersault on it whilst still in mid-air. Landing on the floor in a deft pirouette, he then proceeded to crawl around the crowd’s feet on his chest like a reptile.

  No one had ever witnessed anything like this in England before. The Who had been loud, anarchic-sounding and genuinely shocking as a live attraction once upon a time but they’d never physically confronted their audiences in such an alarming fashion. Four years hence, UK crowds would become totally entranced by just this sort of spectacle but in 1972 it was way too much way too soon. The audience at the Stooges show looked genuinely traumatised by the end. As soon as Iggy had leapt off the stage and into the crowd, people generally scattered backwards and stood close to the exit doors, peering nervously at the action and praying that the singer wouldn’t come over and start tormenting them. At the same time, they couldn’t keep their eyes off him so it made for an interesting dynamic in the room, to say the least. John Lydon has always claimed he was one of those present in the audience that night and that he was left unimpressed by the Stooges’ performance, but that is quite frankly impossible to believe. For what Iggy and co. achieved that night was to provide the basic blueprint for what the Sex Pistols attempted three and a half years later: short sharp shock rock that mesmerised whilst at the same time scaring its audience witless. Take it from one who was actually there and saw the whole process slowly developing throughout the early seventies: Iggy and the Stooges invented punk just like James Brown and the Famous Flames created funk. They were the first and they were the best. Many self-styled punk experts have since come forward to chronicle the genre in lofty tomes but unless you were one of those 200 jittery punters watching the Stooges’ only European show in the summer of ’72, you weren’t there at the real beginning and don’t really know what you’re talking about. End of sermon.

  The performance had a profound effect on me, anyway. It offered me a definitive glimpse into the decade’s real future -
the new wild frontier of Western pop culture - as well as providing the catalyst for more gainful employment. A week or so later, I got an unexpected phone call from a gentleman I’d never spoken to before named Nick Logan, who claimed to be the assistant editor of the New Musical Express. He told me the paper was looking to run an article on Iggy and the Stooges but that they’d been unable to secure any kind of interview via their management. As I’d already encountered the group and had recently seen them perform, would I be at all interested in penning a short article on the subject for their next issue? He then spoke the magic words: fifteen quid would be paid for every thousand words I could come up with. I said ‘yes’ on the spot and agreed to visit the paper’s offices in Long Acre in order to discuss further projects.

  The NME and I already had one thing in common: the broadsheet publication first appeared in 1951, the year of my birth. Its premier issue featured my dad’s pal Vera Lynn - the former ‘forces’ favourite’ - as its cover star. But the weekly periodical’s initial focus on fifties crooners and light-entertainment flavours of the month soon changed to embrace a younger demographic when Elvis Presley exploded over in America leading the way for home-grown imitators like Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard to beguile Britain’s post-war youth.

  By the early sixties the journal was on a circulation ascendant as the country’s pre-eminent pop sheet. Beatles fans bought it religiously each week in order to find out all the latest info about their mop-haired saviours. Its golden era to date had been the so-called British invasion beat group years but it started to come seriously unstuck during the second half of the decade when rock went counter-cultural and pop was suddenly viewed as music for morons.

  The NME at first simply couldn’t grasp this new state of affairs and stumbled on cluelessly trying to incorporate the two conflicting strains - hairy ‘underground sounds’ and fly-by-night chartbusters - into their ink-stained pages whilst its rival publication Melody Maker - formerly a bastion for trad jazzers - quadrupled its own circulation figures by throwing its full editorial might behind the rising prog regime; by the outset of 1972, the latter was notching up weekly sales of close to 200,000 copies whilst the NME’s readership had fallen to less than 60,000. Their parent company IPC duly took note of the situation and in late spring told those responsible for the NME that it had only twelve issues left to turn around its dwindling demographic or cease existing. IPC would inject extra money into these issues and conjure up a nationwide publicity campaign to hopefully draw more attention to them, but they stressed the editors had to speedily come up with some kind of new direction in order to keep it from becoming extinct.

  With little time to waste, the paper’s two principals - Logan and first-in-command editor Alan Lewis - began frantically recruiting young music-driven writers from the London underground network. Charles Shaar Murray had been the first approached and the first to sign up as a staff member for the new enterprise. Ian MacDonald and I were headhunted shortly afterwards. MacDonald was a Cambridge graduate only two or three years older than me with long receding hair and a forehead so large you could have landed a plane on it. Behind that oft-furrowed mega-brow of his lurked a brain that was even larger - an all-devouring intellect that had few equals anywhere else in the world. By midsummer the three of us had formed our own subversive little nucleus within the journal. We weren’t particularly thrilled to be there initially. The NME’s recent track record as a viable youth-based periodical had been utterly dismal, to put it kindly. But we were young and keen and arrogant enough to think we could make a decisive difference to its fortunes whilst simultaneously upgrading its actual contents.

  The existing staff members could have reacted badly to our arrival but instead welcomed us into their midst with surprisingly good grace. The most approachable of the old-school breed was a bloke named Tony Tyler, a Liverpudlian Ichabod Crane lookalike who’d known the Beatles back in their Hamburg days and had roadied for Bob Dylan and the Hawks in 1966. The most instantly unforgettable was Roy Carr, a short, barrel-shaped Sancho Panza from the North of England with a strange hair-weave and porndirector goatee who sometimes turned up to the office dressed in an alarmingly flamboyant suede bolero jacket festooned with a fringe that extended to the floor. He told us all proudly this sartorial relic from Woodstock Nation was a personal gift from the singer of Blood, Sweat and Tears. Like Tyler, Carr had played in beat groups during the sixties and claimed to have been sexually propositioned by practically every female vocal talent of the era. Like Tyler, he adopted the role of benevolent uncle to us callow young scribes, and both gave us their collected insights on how to stay afloat in the murky waters of Tin Pan Alleydom.

  Their advice was as follows: don’t say nasty things about Elvis Presley in print because his fans were mostly psychopaths who thought nothing of personally stalking and then beating up anyone who knocked their hillbilly deity. And don’t ever write anything uncomplimentary about any act managed by Don Arden. We saw the wisdom of their second suggestion early in the autumn of 1972 when Arden and two of his burly henchmen paid an impromptu visit to the NME offices with the firm intention of hanging an older staff member out of a third-storey window by his feet. The luckless journo had penned a live review of Arden’s pet project the Electric Light Orchestra. It had been a mostly positive write-up and he’d only mentioned in passing that the drum solo had gone on a bit too long, but this was enough for the most feared man in Tin Pan Alley to turn seriously bloodthirsty and leap into attack mode.

  Apart from those pearls of wisdom, we were left to our own devices. Lewis and Logan never tried to rein us in. We were given carte blanche to pretty much run wild through the early-seventies pop/rock spectrum and whatever we scribbled would be printed unedited. Sales suddenly improved dramatically; we were a winning team at this point and none of us failed to grasp the heady realisation that we were in exactly the right place at the right time.

  A new decade was actually starting to define itself and anyone with even a hint of talent and personal magnetism stood a fighting chance of making their mark on it provided they had the right instincts. The NME became the ideal periodical to reflect what was about to transpire because it was fighting for its own future too and was prepared to go to unorthodox extremes in order to stay in circulation. Why else would they have even considered employing someone as potentially trouble-prone as me? I couldn’t even type my own copy. I’d turn up literally three hours before a deadline was due, drink twenty-seven cups of coffee and then scribble furiously onto a series of sheets of paper, each one getting instantly shuffled over to some long-suffering secretary who then had to make sense of my haphazard longhand and turn it into coherent typewritten text. Unlike Murray and MacDonald, I’d chosen not to become an actual staff member. In all the years I worked for the paper, I was always employed as a freelancer. I never wanted to be chained to a desk or trapped within some dull office routine. I wanted to always be where the real action was.

  Glam rock was at its popularity peak throughout these months and it was a trend I found easy to exploit, mainly because I looked like a lanky girl. My choice of clothing became more ostentatious and I began wearing clumsily applied black eyeliner. Thus the NME tended to assign me to doorstep the genre’s leading practitioners. Alice Cooper was having a bumper year, with ‘School’s Out’ blaring from every jukebox throughout the British Isles. He and his group were all staunch heterosexuals who’d nonetheless anticipated the whole androgynous cross-dressing fashion in rock in order to stand out in their local LA club scene at the end of the sixties. They’d started out making hard-on-the-ear art rock under the patronage of Frank Zappa but subsequent exposure to the Stooges’ more anarchic allure and a lucky encounter with a savvy young Canadian producer named Bob Ezrin inspired them to record a spate of risqué but still reassuringly commercial-sounding hit singles starting in 1971 with the teen-alienation anthem ‘I’m Eighteen’.

  From that point on they became showbiz interlopers shifting units whilst crass
ly upsetting the sensibilities of the world’s self-elected fuddy-duddy moral crusaders. Once the shock wore off, though, the game was up for them. By the middle of the decade, Alice Cooper had shrunk from a quintet to a solo act. The singer kept the name and has continued to prevail as a wizened rock icon over the decades that followed. This makes sense as he was the only real professional in the entire set-up and also the only genuinely nice guy.

  The same couldn’t be said of Lou Reed. He had dead Peter Lorre eyes and a cold inhospitable manner that evening in autumn when I first interviewed him over a meal at a Kensington restaurant. The London glitterati may have been ceaselessly singing his praises that year but it had evidently done little to bolster his brittle, sullen mood. He spent most of our conversation bitterly itemising all the rip-offs he - as composer and instigator of the Velvet Underground - had been the victim of over the years. The Beatles, Stones and Dylan had been amongst the culprits, so he claimed. It was all grumpy, petulant ego-babble. Behind his mask of mummified disdain, Reed seemed seriously adrift. He’d just finished recording a second solo album called Transformer that David Bowie had produced, but its self-consciously decadent lyrical agenda and dainty hi-gloss-production sound seemed jarringly shallow when played next to his Velvet Underground recordings. Old Velvets fans - all five of them - were aghast at the change in direction, but Reed’s studio dalliance with Bowie that year would still manage to provide him with the only two major hit singles of his entire career - ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ and ‘Perfect Day’.