Apathy for the Devil

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Apathy for the Devil Page 15

by Nick Kent


  Mercifully, this petty-minded contretemps didn’t put too deep a dent in ongoing office morale. Big changes were afoot in the NME’s Long Acre office space. Editor Alan Lewis chose this period to step down from his duties and hand the reins over to Nick Logan. This was a major step in the right direction. Lewis had been a canny opportunist, but Nick had the ideal mixture of sensibility and creative instinct to take us all to the next level, whatever and wherever that was. His first act as the journal’s captain was most inspired: he persuaded Ian MacDonald to take over his previous post as assistant editor. Ian wasted no time in bringing all his daunting intellect, boundless intensity and unshakeable thirst for excellence to the role he’d been assigned.

  The pair immediately green-lighted a visual make-over for the paper. The first post-strike issue to hit the shops in January ’74 featured an arty full-length photo - of Bryan Ferry - taking up the entire cover. Before that, the paper had unimaginatively run their lead news story of the week in the same space. But now it looked classier, bolder and infinitely more pleasing to the eye. Pennie Smith was really coming into her own as a photographer, and Ian and Nick made sure her contributions were always laid out for maximum visual impact. Likewise, they knew how to get the best out of me and all the other writers on board. Thus began the NME’s true golden age. From that point on, we were truly a force to be reckoned with.

  Of course, ‘new journalistic directions’ invariably require the constant hiring of new writers to keep the pot boiling. So it surprised no one when word came through that two fresh recruits would soon be joining up to bolster our ranks. The first to arrive was a Bert Jansch lookalike called Andrew Tyler-a fine writer and all-round good person. The second choice took me aback somewhat. It was Chrissie. Ian and Nick had socialised with her on several occasions when I’d brought her to the office and Ian in particular felt she had the perfect attitude to become an NME contributor. He basically told her so until he’d convinced her to actually sit down and churn out some text. They evidently liked what she submitted because the next thing I knew she was interviewing Brian Eno for a centre-page spread.

  At first I was happy for her. She could dump her dead-end job at the architects’ office and focus on matters that genuinely interested her for greater financial recompense. Suddenly she had her own profile on the London music scene apart from being my girlfriend. But her recruitment onto the NME masthead also left me distinctly wary. I felt the paper was pushing her into their big spotlight far too soon, that the editors should have allowed her to find her bearings as a music journalist before parading her in front of our readers.

  One consequence of her being showcased so prominently so early in her career was that she always felt a terrible pressure whenever she had to turn out copy and found the whole process both taxing and deeply unenjoyable. That’s unfortunate because she possessed some talent as a burgeoning writer. Over the first six months of 1974 she managed to complete and get published interviews/articles on acts as diverse as Brian Eno, Suzi Quatro, David Cassidy (a teen idol du jour) and Tim Buckley. The best thing she turned in to the NME was a touching write-up of an encounter with one of her heroes, the zen-cool veteran jazzer Mose Allison that took place during a spring residency the piano-playing US singer/songwriter was undertaking at Ronnie Scott’s Soho club. If she’d been given the chance to pen more low-key heartfelt pieces like that, maybe she would have continued longer in the profession than she did. After six months, however, she’d simply had enough and left the NME - and music journalism - to pursue other goals.

  By that time, she’d found another avenue of employment for herself as a shop assistant at Malcolm McLaren’s King’s Road clothes store. Once again I’d first introduced her to McLaren and his clique, never thinking it would amount to much. I’d first noticed him in the spring of ’72. His shop was called ‘Let It Rock’ then and it catered exclusively to a fifties retro crowd: brothel-creeping Teds from the London suburbs with nicknames like ‘Biffo’ and ‘Crazy-Legged John’. He was a real fifties purist back then and I took a generally dim view of those who opt to live single-mindedly in the past.

  But then the New York Dolls returned to London at the end of November ’73 to perform a concert there and promote their critically acclaimed debut album. On a day off, they’d gone shopping and had trooped into Let It Rock together. The moment McLaren saw them, a major man-crush ensued. Suddenly the seventies came alive for him and he began obsessively following them around.

  In December I flew to Paris to see the group play at the prestigious Olympia concert hall. The concert itself was a musical nightmare highlighted by guitarist Johnny Thunders abruptly leaving the stage in mid-performance at least twice to vomit behind the amplifiers. But afterwards there was a celebratory dinner at a ritzy restaurant and I found myself seated at a table with David Johansen and McLaren. The latter was animatedly talking about a pet project of his: a filmed documentary of his hero, the gifted but physically frail UK former rock idol Billy Fury that he was struggling to find financial backing for.

  I’d actually met Fury just a month earlier. Someone had convinced him to make a tentative comeback and so he’d duded himself up in a pink leather suit and Rod Stewart feather cut and started performing a greatest-hits repertoire in a Northern working men’s club. His voice still sounded great, his face remained flawlessly beautiful and he was as thin as a whippet. But he was also far too sweet-natured and trusting, and lacked the gumption and physical stamina needed to sustain a career in the seventies. He also had a serious heart condition. I mentioned all this to McLaren and he was most impressed. It was the start of our very first conversation and it continued long into the night.

  He revealed a lot about himself during that chat. He talked at length about his Jewish upbringing and his childhood living under the influence of a mad meddlesome grandmother who instilled in him the innate belief that he was so special he could achieve absolutely anything in life, no matter what obstacles were placed before him. He also mentioned his many years spent as a mature art-school student during the sixties. He hated that decade with a venom that would have been shocking had it not been so comical to hear about. He became apoplectic when he began railing against the Beatles, hippies and the whole peace and love movement of the time. The very idea of anything even vaguely spiritual and uplifting filtering into youth culture automatically filled him with nausea. At one point I got into a heated argument with him over who had been a more influential force in popular music - Bob Dylan (my choice) or Johnny Kidd and the Pirates (his). Kidd and his cohorts were an early-sixties English rock band of merit with one indisputably seminal recording to their credit - the original version of ‘Shakin’ All Over’. Dylan by contrast had over one hundred timeless songs under his belt and had been a far-reaching creative trailblazer whose name still inspired millions with awe. There really was no contest. But he still waffled on ardently about how Dylan was a talentless fake who’d influenced nothing and no one whilst Johnny Kidd - who’d been killed in a car crash back in 1965 - was someone who’d left a deep and lasting impression on the mindset of twentieth-century youth.

  His own mindset was still hopelessly trapped in the late fifties as far as rock ’n’ roll and pop culture in general were concerned. Gene Vincent - the sweet-voiced hillbilly psychopath - was his ultimate musical reference point, the figure that best summed up his vision of rock as something truly untamed and seditious. But then the New York Dolls walked into his life and he’d instinctively sensed that - behind their tacky transvestite outward appearance - something equally untamed and seditious lurked within them too. It turned out to be his very own ‘road to Damascus’ moment. For one thing, he got to hear that night for the very first time the fateful phrase he’d later claim he single-handedly invented - ‘punk rock’. It either came from my lips or from one of the New York Dolls.

  The upshot of this first encounter was that we stayed in touch back in London and he invited me out one evening in January. I took Chrissie along and
she quickly bonded with McLaren’s girlfriend, a feisty Northern lass called Vivienne Westwood. They shared several pointed character traits. They were both aggressively forthright in voicing their opinions in any given situation, used bad language liberally and liked nothing more than initiating confrontations with complete strangers when not driving their own boyfriends to distraction with their nagging ways. I liked Vivienne - she was a tough old bird who’d lived a tough old life prior to becoming McLaren’s personal Eliza Doolittle - but I was also wary of her because I could detect something unhealthily malicious lurking behind her eyes. That’s probably why McLaren and I grew close. We both shared the same sorry romantic predicament.

  Still, what attracted me most was the guy’s passion, intelligence and daring. He was always thinking outside of the box. Within the first six months of ’74, he completely transformed his shop, changed the clothes he and Westwood were designing and even changed the name. In January it had still been ‘Let It Rock’, but by early summer it became ‘Seditionaries’ and began selling an exclusive range of leather and rubber fetishist clothing whilst all the other London fashion lairs were still stocking up on tacky satin jackets and bell-bottomed loon pants. He was quick-witted and audacious and - because he never took drugs - he also possessed the mental stamina and focus to will his mad ideas into fruition. Meanwhile, the rest of London was still stuck in the aimless pothead purgatory of the late sixties. You could say I was an early supporter of his work as a fashion designer. In the late spring of ’74 I even interviewed him in the NME about his clothes-designing relationship with the New York Dolls and his thoughts on fashion and rock. It was one of his first-ever appearances in the media.

  The most significant aspect of our relationship though was the way I took it upon myself to educate him on what had actually been happening in rock music over the past ten years. As soon as the Beatles arrived in 1963, McLaren had simply turned his back on rock music and buried his head in the ground like an ostrich. He didn’t even know who Jimi Hendrix was until I forced him to attend a late-night screening of Joe Boyd’s film documentary on the guitarist. He sat in that cinema utterly slack-jawed with wonderment. He told me he couldn’t believe what he’d been missing out on.

  I got him to watch Gimme Shelter too and he was deeply affected by its evocation of contemporary rock as a way to still incite blood-drenched mass pandemonium. He loved what he saw because it registered to him in no uncertain terms that rock’s wild anarchic spirit hadn’t died back when Elvis got co-opted into the army, that it was still obscenely alive and capable of raising a nuclear-sized ruckus in whatever social and cultural context you chose to set it loose in. It was great to be around him in those moments because you could see he was receiving major revelations from the screen. It didn’t always work, though. One time I coerced him into sitting through the great D. A. Pennebaker Dylan doc Don’t Look Back and he came out cursing the Bard of Beat with even greater vigour. And the Beatles were always a strictly no-go area. But he loved the Doors and the early Who. In many ways it was just like teaching a bloke who’d been living in a cave for ten years about what had transpired during his absence. But McLaren was a lightning-quick learner. You didn’t have to draw him any maps. He’d just fixate on what became instantly fascinating to him like a magpie and then pilfer it into his own private agenda.

  As my relationship with him intensified so my relationship with Chrissie began to unravel. Our first six months together had been heavenly. But the six months after that - from January 1st 1974 to early summer - became increasingly hellish for both of us. All love affairs have their honeymoon period when two hearts beat as one and joy is unconfined. But then reality descends and suddenly the lovers wake up and start having to grimly confront each other’s shortcomings and personal eccentricities. Chrissie woke up first. I could see it in her eyes. You can always tell when a woman’s truly in love simply by looking directly in her eyes. If she is, then there’s an intangibly luminous glow to her gaze. It’s a wondrous thing to behold. But when love starts to die, those same eyes will turn cold on you and you will see only irritation and unhappiness within them. I’ve seen it happen a number of times since but I learned it first from being with Chrissie.

  The problem was, whilst she was waking up, I was still blissfully comatose inside love’s young dream. Only a moment ago, we’d been giddily talking about getting married. Now she was suddenly pushing for us to live separately. With the aid of hindsight I can now see the merits of her suggestion: we were so glued together at first it was starting to become suffocating. But at the time I reacted to it as an act of colossal rejection on her part. That’s what I mean about still being sixteen emotionally in the old noggin.

  Plus the fact that she was suddenly doing the same job as me didn’t help matters one jot or iota. Though neither of us was aware of it initially, working for the NME back then had a compulsory side effect. It put everyone involved in a position where they were automatically in competition with each other. It wasn’t a soothing or nurturing environment to work in. There was an unhealthily divisive undercurrent to the way writers were pitted against each other. My relationship with Charles Shaar Murray had suffered because of this but at least I didn’t have to live with the guy. When Chrissie started adopting much the same confrontational attitude in our home, however, that’s when major indoor fireworks starting going off. I couldn’t believe it at first. I was still lost in love-land. But I felt the change soon enough. It was like being on a plane when a sudden mid-air explosion occurs. After the initial shock, I started looking around in earnest for some kind of safety parachute to help break the free fall.

  From what I’d observed, most examples of humankind facing imminent heartache tended to pour themselves into a bottle and let the liquor anaesthetise their woes. In fact, poor old John Lennon was busy doing just that over in Hollywood, drinking his way through a lost weekend that lasted through most of 1974 because he couldn’t stand to be separated from Yoko Ono. But immersing oneself in alcohol was never really an option for me. Booze of any grain and potency tended to leave me dizzy and red-faced. I was a died-in-the-wool drug snob anyway.

  But which drug could truly comfort me in my time of sorrow? Not cocaine - it just made me crazier and more fever-headed. Pot couldn’t quell the pain, either. Only one pharmaceutical really possessed what I needed - the power to effect a complete shutdown of all emotional feeling within me. It was called heroin and it was becoming steadily more and more available throughout parts of London - particularly in Chelsea, where many bored young things with too much of daddy’s money had fallen victim to its lure.

  As I’ve already mentioned, I tried it first in Germany at the end of the previous year. But I don’t think the powder I inhaled that night actually was heroin. The effect was altogether too benign. A month later Chrissie and I were at a photographer friend’s Maida Vale flat. We’d been snorting cocaine all night together and we were both seriously wired. I asked the photographer if he had a Valium to counteract the tremors and he said no - but that we’d be less agitated if we both snorted a line of heroin. We were so desperate for any kind of calming antidote that we immediately took him up on his offer. This time it really was heroin. I have a dim recollection of us almost literally crawling our way back to Clapham South just as rush hour was commencing. Chrissie didn’t take it after that for a long long time. I wasn’t so cautious.

  Actually it was my third encounter with the drug that was to prove the most fatal. I was spending a lot of my down time in Chelsea during ’74. You’d often have found me lurking around McLaren’s headquarters but I was also a regular presence at another World’s End clothing emporium just a few doors down; Granny Takes a Trip had been fêted internationally as London’s hippest and most exclusive haberdashers during London’s psychedelic summer of 1967, the year it first opened. The Beatles, Stones and Syd Barrett had all their most flamboyant outfits made up on the premises that season.

  The guy who actually set it all up was
an enterprising young Englishman named Nigel Waymouth, but he soon tired of his creation and sold it to a couple of fashion-besotted young New Yorkers named Marty Breslau and Gene Krell at the end of the sixties. I first got to know these two when I began buying clothes from them in late ’72. ‘Granny’s’ was practically the only clothes shop in London at that time that still sold elegantly cut straight-legged trousers unencumbered by a flare and cool-looking boots without clumpy platform heels and soles, and I was always a stickler for both. Flared trousers should be worn only by those unfortunate people with one leg significantly shorter than the other. And only midgets need to even consider sporting platform heels. Anyone else who adopts their look is committing an abomination against both style and nature.

  But I digress. I actually became friends with Gene and Marty during the Stones’ European tour back in autumn. They’d turned up to several shows on the Continent as Keith Richards’s personal guests. I didn’t know it then but Marty was one of Keith’s many heroin suppliers. He and Spanish Tony Sanchez - Richards’s main drug courier and general enforcer who’d later co-write the scurrilous Up and Down with the Rolling Stones literary exposé - were thick as thieves. Marty was a handsome fellow - he looked like a stoned Warren Beatty with a girlish shag cut - and he’d evidently led something of a charmed life throughout his teens and twenties. But his luck changed dramatically when he met Keith Richards because he fell head-over-heels in love with the guy and - in order to remain in his presence - ended up destroying his career in the fashion world in order to become his drug dealer. It never got better for Marty after that and he ended up dying of an overdose in the early eighties. He wasn’t what you’d call an especially nice guy - too vain, too tricky, too stupid - but I rather liked him all the same. Ditto Spanish Tony.

 

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