Apathy for the Devil

by Nick Kent

  Of all the glam acts, only Roxy Music seemed prepared to give Bowie a real run for his money. I met them that summer for the first time in their managers’ Chelsea office and they were already a pretty haughty and self-possessed bunch, a sort of ex-art-school Lord Snooty and his pals in lurex. This was just when ‘Virginia Plain’ - their first big hit single - was about to be released and Brian Eno was still very much in their midst. Indeed, the flaxen-haired synth boffin with the perfect cheekbones was the group’s most image-friendly asset at this point in time, fulfilling a picturesque but musically limited role similar to Brian Jones in the Rolling Stones. His arch hermaphroditic presence blended well with singer Bryan Ferry’s more conventional handsomeness in concert and helped UK youth become quickly enthralled with a music that - as their debut album still readily attests - was often far from commercially accessible.

  Roxy Music in 1972 presented the world with a camp, Buck Rogers take on the prevailing middle-class art-rock aesthetic that was both shockingly idiosyncratic and deeply tongue-in-cheek. Their songwriter Bryan Ferry wrote madly sophisticated lyrics packed with hip cross-references to other avenues of then-contemporary art and then wedded them to music he’d clumsily bash out crab-handedly on a piano utilising only the black notes of the keyboard. He’d sing the results with a deliciously sleazy quaver to his voice, like a gigolo with a knife blade held to his throat. At first exposure you couldn’t help wondering if he - and his co-workers - were actually a comedy act merrily taking the piss. But Ferry was anything but self-mocking about his work and self-image. A Geordie milkman’s son who’d been transformed by higher education and who privately dreamed of becoming a real-life clone of Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, he took his career and growing renown very, very seriously indeed. Just how seriously was duly brought home to all onlookers some twelve months later when he sacked Eno from the line-up and started to subtly demote the rest of the band to backing-group status.

  Talking of glam rock, the NME got me to interview one of the form’s key spiritual forebears, Liberace, that autumn. He gurgled when he laughed out loud and was as reassuringly camp as the proverbial row of tents. A week later, they sent me out to talk to Johnny Cash, who spoke from deep in his boots and looked like he’d been carved out of granite. Never let it be said that the journal didn’t introduce me to the full gamut of celebrity manliness.

  But I knew I’d really hit the big time when the editors invited me to accompany Led Zeppelin - then the world’s brashestsounding and biggest-selling rock act - on selected dates of an end-of-the-year UK tour. Actually I really have B. P. Fallon to thank for the assignment. A peculiar but not charmless little man who looked like a glam-rock leprechaun and spoke like an effete Irish hobbit, he’d lately taken on the task of drumming up press coverage for the group after their drummer John Bonham had shredded the clothes of their previous publicist-a long-suffering Tin Pan Alley stalwart named Bill Harry - during a drunken altercation in a London pub earlier in the year. He told me in advance that the group held journalists in generally low esteem and that entering their world could be something of a ‘Daniel in the lion’s den’ experience - at least at first - but that if I could brass it out and not say or do anything to truly warrant their wrath, then perhaps a mutually beneficial relationship could be struck up.

  These words would prove prophetic the night we actually intersected. It happened on December 12th 1972 in Cardiff - my old stomping ground - when Zeppelin were booked to play the Capitol Cinema. I knew the venue well; I’d been temporarily deafened there six years before by Bob Dylan and the Hawks. I’d arrived by train from London in time to be whisked into the back of the house by Fallon just as the quartet were beginning their first number. What followed for almost two and a half hours was a musical masterclass in big rock dynamics, ‘bottle’ and bravado.

  I’d seen them once before at the 1970 Bath Festival. At Bath, they’d quite simply blown every other act on the bill right off the stage - indeed, their manager Peter Grant had quite literally pushed one band called the Flock off the stage with his gargantuan girth when their set threatened to clash with his boys’ designated time-slot.

  But this was now two and a half years later and the quartet had become even more adept at weaving their singular ‘tension and release’/‘light and shade’-driven hard-rock magic act to transfix live audiences. Plus they had two more albums’ worth of new songs to add to their repertoire, with four selections from Led Zep IV illuminating the set and five exclusive tracks from the as-yet-unreleased Houses of the Holy also being performed. As a result, the show that night sailed from one giddy climax to another. Robert Plant preened and screamed out blood-curdling notes that seemed capable of suddenly sending the venue’s aged architecture crashing down around us all in a heap of rubble like Joshua’s trumpet destroying the walls of Jericho. Jimmy Page danced around a lot - even attempting a sliding manoeuvre with his feet that James Brown had first perfected in the early sixties - whilst at the same time leaving his fingers free to conjure forth a truly devastating multiplicity of guitar riffs and lead solos. But equally impressive were John Paul Jones and John Bonham, who - whenever they locked in together on bass and drums - made the whole room shake ecstatically with the intensity of their playing. As a foursome, they were unbeatable: no other group in the world - not even the Who at their peak - could compete with them when they were fully focused and firing on all cylinders as was the case with this Cardiff show. At the end of the performance they even stormed into a brief rendition of ‘Louie Louie’ that sounded like the four horsemen of the apocalypse inventing the concept of testosterone-driven punk rock.

  Five minutes after they’d finished playing, Fallon - or ‘Beep’ as everyone called him - ushered Pennie and me through the stage door and led us into a cramped space directly behind the stage. Shortly afterwards, Jimmy Page - still perspiring from his onstage exertions - joined us. He seemed very paranoid and ill at ease and began demanding pointedly if and when I’d seen Zeppelin play live before. When I recalled the Bath Festival performance, he seemed to relax a little but then began a heated rant about ‘the last bloody interviewer’ he’d been confronted with, who - it turned out - had only seen the group via their one-song inclusion in the film Supershow. As he was speaking, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham all entered the room and sat down, nursing alcoholic beverages and mischievous expressions. They’d been out under the spotlight all evening providing entertainment for the people. Now it was their turn to be entertained and it didn’t take me long to realise that it was going to be at my expense. They sniggered whenever I opened my mouth to phrase a sentence. At least once, I heard the word ‘wanker’ being aimed in my direction.

  Meanwhile, my ‘interview’ with Page was growing increasingly confrontational. He seemed to be wilfully misinterpreting my questions - hearing implied criticisms where there were only innocent enquiries - and reacting as though I was the Spanish Inquisition. At one point, I mentioned innocently that no American band had ever managed to convincingly duplicate the four-piece heavy-rock formula that English rock quartets from Zep to Free had been so successful at, but Page somehow interpreted this harmless comment as a criticism too and went off on a petulant put-down of the ‘aimless jamming’ of ‘overrated American bands like the Grateful Dead’. His three band members’ smirking asides reached a raucous crescendo at this juncture. It was then that I impulsively decided to retaliate by bringing up the thorny subject of all those Zep lyrics that were in reality straight lifts from old blues numbers. Big mistake. The four members promptly walked out with disgusted looks on their faces and the next sound I heard was that of Peter Grant screaming ear-lacerating obscenities at B. P. Fallon in an adjacent room for having brought me into their world in the first place.

  In a tricky situation such as this, it’s always a distinct advantage to have a workmate as charming and alluring as the divine Pennie Smith. The group may have been deeply unimpressed with me but they couldn’t help but be attrac
ted by the mysterious beauty of the now-legendary photographer. As a result, an hour later, we were both invited to a late-night impromptu get-together involving the four members, Grant, Fallon, Richard Cole, their notorious tour manager, and Phil Carson, the head of the UK branch of Atlantic Records.

  Compared to what I’d heard and read about Zeppelin’s parties whilst on tour, it was a pretty tame affair. There was a certain amount of cocaine-snorting - but nothing excessive. Alcohol was freely available but nobody was particularly drunk. At one point, someone - not a group member - half-heartedly proposed trying to hire some prostitutes but no one else in the room felt inclined to take him up on his offer. Instead, they just talked, swapping industry gossip and telling funny stories about their past exploits. Jimmy Page regaled everyone with his tales of a teenage Jeff Beck briefly playing guitar in the Tornados, the Joe Meek-directed instrumental ensemble who recorded ‘Telstar’. He seemed a lot more relaxed and even apologised for the way he’d reacted earlier. I became embroiled in a lengthy discussion about music with Robert Plant which soon transformed itself into a heated debate on who was better - the Byrds or the Buffalo Springfield (I stuck by the Byrds; Plant favoured the Springfield). Peter Grant told a hilarious story about wrapping Little Richard in a carpet and bodily carrying him to a gig he was refusing to perform at. At just after 3 a.m., things started to wind down and everyone retired peacefully to their separate hotel rooms.

  The next evening, we stuck around for the second show and then set off by car back to London at midnight. As we were pulling out of the backstage area, Peter Grant stalked over to our vehicle and - staring ominously in my direction - bade farewell whilst making it abundantly clear that he wouldn’t be at all happy if anything negative appeared in my write-up.

  The big man needn’t have worried. The article I turned in - split into two parts and run in the last couple of NME issues printed that year - was effusive in its praise of their live stature whilst diplomatically playing down any of the discordant moments that had passed between us. They even ran a photo next to the headline of me with kohl-ringed eyes and hair - which I’d cut myself - that was short and prickly on top with long rat’s-tail strands at the back that reached to my shoulders. Looking at it now, I get the uneasy feeling that I may have helped invent the mullet a full ten years before it became the de rigueur hairstyle of the sartorially challenged eighties. I can find no ready excuse for this gross lapse in haircare judgement. But then again, one isn’t really necessary. It was the seventies after all, a time when ‘good taste’ upped sticks and went into an extended hibernation.

  Bedford College chose to toss me out of their corridors of learning just as Led Zeppelin and I were first getting acquainted. I got the letter that December. It was bound to happen: I rarely attended lectures and hadn’t even shown up for the end-of-term examinations. I’d already spent too much of my young life in dusty libraries poring over the thoughts and words of long-dead authors. Now John Milton and his ilk could all take a hike.

  I only have two negative memories from 1972. The first involved a speed-addled Scottish psychopath who’d sometimes stalk the Frendz office, pushing me against the wall, breaking a broom handle in half and then threatening to force the splintered part into my rectal passage. The second occurred when a rotund Jamaican landlady forcibly ejected me from the room in a musty old All Saints Road building that I was renting from her. I’d let one of the area’s walking wounded - an acid casualty named Smiling Mike - sleep there in my absence and he’d supposedly done something unspeakable on the premises. Smiling Mike died two months after this incident. He fell whilst clambering up a drainpipe trying to break into the third-storey apartment above Frendz’s HQ. Hawkwind dedicated their next studio album to his memory.

  Having to deal with situations like these was what ultimately soured me to the whole underground ethos. At this time in my life I had little time to be indulgent with burn-outs. That would only come to pass some years later when I became one myself. There were some focused and vibrant people still on board the counter-culture night train, but most conscripts I encountered that year were incapable of summoning up any kind of genuine work ethic to bolster their actions and rhetoric. That absurd hippie-entitlement - everything should be free, man - was still in the air like the stale scent of patchouli oil. Only now it was festering into a communal sense of frustrated bitterness over the fact that the revolution hadn’t transpired and wasn’t ever going to. The world was turning and they were still up on the hill like Paul McCartney’s fool or King Canute on his throne as the waves surged towards him. What did I learn from this? That dreaming is never enough. Action and interaction are what count if you really want to lead a life of surprises.

  When Charlie Murray and I began working for the NME, we both had to withstand our share of catcalls from certain self-styled underground potentates who told us in no uncertain terms that we were selling out by working for ‘the man’. Charlie may have been more affected than me by these taunts as his roots within that community ran deeper.

  Personally speaking, I couldn’t have cared less. If ‘selling out’ meant being read by 100,000 people - without editorial interference - instead of 10,000, then bring it on. I’d become a very cocky fellow indeed by the time last orders were being called on 1972. The bashful kid I’d once been was now nowhere to be seen. But I had some cause for self-congratulation for I was now strapped mind, body and soul to the whirling Zeitgeist of cutting-edge popular culture until I could feel the aftershocks puncturing my very bones. Why, David Bowie had even written one of the year’s most memorable songs about me. Not me specifically - but people like me certainly, the new breed come to unshackle the new decade from its now dysfunctional predecessor. ‘All the young dudes carry the news,’ the chorus went. It was an inspirational shout-out to me and all the other freshly empowered human peacocks to keep on defiantly kicking up dust in the face of a deeply uncertain future.

  And yet I had to be careful. Glam was starting to run out of steam and I didn’t want to end up some ‘flash in the pan flavour of the month’ type of guy. That could easily happen unless I got really, really good at what I was doing really, really quickly. The more I thought it through, the more the answer to my looming dilemma seemed to lie over in America. Kerouac had traversed its boundaries and come up with a masterpiece as a result of his incessant journeying. Maybe the land of opportunity would have a similarly transformative effect on me. I had the money for a return ticket and a few addresses. What was holding me back?

  1973

  In the last dying days of 1972 I was stricken with a nasty flu virus that had been circulating around London and hastily retreated to the comfort of my parents’ home in Horsham in order to recuperate for the new year’s dawning. Bedridden for the best part of a week, I had ample time to soberly reflect upon my sudden change in circumstances and the way it had affected my life and personality. Two contrasting self-images of relatively recent vintage continually danced inside my head. Just eighteen months earlier, I’d been a gangly, girlish figure in a school blazer dreamily skulking through the clean, unthreatening streets of suburbia - just another middle-class grammar-school-going geek trapped in the provinces. Flash forward to just three weeks ago though, and I’d suddenly gotten all brash and extrovert, dressed up like a glam-rock Christmas tree and snorting cocaine with Led Zeppelin at 3 o’clock in the morning in some four-star hotel. Two very different people in two very, very different universes.

  But I don’t recall ever feeling in any way daunted by the new pastures that fate had lately leapfrogged me into. Leave all that self-questioning introspection - all that ‘do I really belong here?’ uncertainty - to Cat Stevens and his lank-haired pallies. When you’re caught up in the tidal wave of a career surge that has already extended way beyond the realm of your wildest expectations, it’s best to just hang on to basic survival instincts and take each moment as it comes. With this thought uppermost in mind, I rejoined Led Zeppelin’s tour of Europe on the 12th
of January, when they were scheduled to set the heather ablaze throughout Bonnie Scotland.

  This time around the group were more tolerant and accommodating vis-à-vis my presence in their ranks. My Daniel in the lion’s den experience with them a month earlier was not repeated. I’d passed their audition and could now wander freely in their midst without fear of Peter Grant suddenly reading the riot act to me in his creepy East London lisp and then hurling me out of some third-storey window with a flick of his meaty wrist. This more congenial atmosphere immediately opened up a greater window of opportunity to study them up close and learn more about the group’s peculiar human chemistry.

  In Scotland, the first thing that struck me was how small the operation actually was, particularly when it toured Europe. Jimmy Page had his own guitar roadie, John Bonham had a mate of his named Mick Hinton to set up his drum kit, there was a sound mixer, whilst two other guys were employed to make sure the amps were in place and fully functioning, all under the fierce supervision of tour manager Richard Cole. From what I could tell, these six people made up the entire travelling road crew of the world’s most successful band in early 1973. There were no big limousines outside the hotels and no bodyguards to protect the four musicians. With both Cole and Grant on board, there was no need for extra muscle. Imagine the entire Russian Mafia melted down to just two human forms and you’ll have a fair idea of the effect that this pair had on any room they entered. People in hotel bars would just scatter when Grant and Cole sidled in together. One evil look from either of them could provoke rank strangers to defecate on the spot.