Apathy for the Devil

by Nick Kent

  Anyway, one night in early spring I was over at their Chelsea Embankment luxury basement flat. Chrissie and I had just had a major spat back in Clapham South and I was seeking temporary refuge elsewhere. Marty and Tony laid out three lines of heroin and offered me one. And that’s when it truly hit me - the drug, I mean. Suddenly I felt all my burdens melting from my shoulders, all that bad static in my brain - banished. And in their place - plugged into every atom of my being - utter serenity. Total palpable bliss.

  Charlie Parker called it ‘the cool world’. Once you’ve been there it’s hard to rid it from your thoughts. It’s like discovering an enchanted island you can suddenly escape to where everything is safe and serene, where no pain can find you. Your conscious mind keeps telling you that you’re stepping over a dangerous line here and messing with the forbidden but your subconscious keeps replaying the ecstasy of that moment when heroin first revealed its full power within you. You can already tell what was about to happen, can’t you, dear reader? All the ingredients for impending disaster were stacking up around me.

  And yet 1974 still managed to bring the best out of me to date as a writer. In March of that year I set out on a personal crusade I’d wanted to instigate since my mid-teens: to research and then write an article that would finally explain to the world what had actually happened to Syd Barrett. The Madcap now has apparently more than 30,000 fan websites devoted to his memory but back in ’74 interest in the man was scant at best. Several NMEites were openly dismissive of the project at the outset. ‘Barrett is a has-been and has-beens have no place in the pages of the NME’ was one rationale I recall being confronted with. But I knew better. His old group had just had a worldwide no. 1 album, The Dark Side of the Moon, that was partly a concept album about madness. And Syd - from everything I’d been informed - had gone completely mad himself. It was high time his tale be fully told.

  Here at last was a subject I could totally sink my teeth into. In 1967, the impish-eyed Barrett had been the world’s most beautiful man - the golden boy of psychedelia. By 1974 he’d become a scary-eyed balding recluse whom former acquaintances couldn’t even recognise any more. He lived alone in a flat in Chelsea Cloisters where he spent all his time watching a large colour television and eating meat he kept in a giant freezer in the kitchen. I thought about approaching him directly-I had the address - but was told he probably wouldn’t answer the door. I spoke to at least two people who’d recently crossed paths with him and they claimed it was now impossible to have a coherent conversation with him. He rarely went out, never searched out old acquaintances and hadn’t made music in two years. Everything was closing in around him and so it seemed more humane to just leave him alone and let others document what happened to him. In the end his absence worked to the piece’s advantage because it further enhanced his mystique, made him even more distantly compelling as subject matter.

  Almost everyone I interrogated about Syd openly bore the psychic scars of having witnessed his unforgettable deterioration. Several came close to tears as they recalled the way his wreckless use of LSD had fractured first his potential and then his every mental process. Others expressed the view that - as gifted as he was - he was too young and undisciplined, too over-indulged and too good-looking, and simply lacked the mental focus and spartan nervous system required to successfully sustain a career for himself as a rock star.

  The Pink Floyd somehow got wind of what I was preparing and Dave Gilmour - whom I’d never met before - phoned me up out of the blue at home in Clapham South. He offered to do an interview on the subject of Syd because he wanted to put the record straight about his friend and hopefully counterbalance any misinformation I might have picked up along the way. I was scheduled to deliver the finished text - which eventually ran to over 6,000 words - to the NME on the Friday morning of the first week in April. But I couldn’t start writing it until I’d finished my chinwag with Gilmour, which ended up taking place in a Long Acre pub on Thursday evening. It was worth the added deadline stress because Gilmour gave me by far the most revealing account of Syd’s rise and fall, and I’m eternally grateful that he saw fit to entrust me with his often intimate recollections. To him, his friend’s breakdown wasn’t simply triggered by drug abuse; the roots of it stretched back to Barrett’s pampered childhood and his doting mother. His testimony proved to be the last crucial piece of the puzzle I had to conjure up in prose.

  I left Gilmour at close to 10.00 p.m. and taxied back to Clapham South. When I’d interviewed Barrett’s former co-manager Peter Jenner some weeks earlier at his office, he’d taken me down to the basement once my tape recorder had been turned off. The floor was damp and in one corner he located a large black plastic bag covered in grime and mildew. Inside were the blow-ups and contact sheets of practically every photograph ever taken of Barrett since the Pink Floyd’s first formation. He then handed the package to me. ‘You can keep them,’ he said, ‘I can’t imagine anyone else being interested in them.’

  It was these photographs that I placed all around the room just prior to putting pen to paper. The story I had to tell was all there in the eyes I saw staring back at me. In the early shots, Syd’s eyes sparkled like sapphires but by late ’67 those same eyes had turned full of foreboding. Then, in the photos taken to promote his later solo career, they looked hopelessly lost and uncomprehending. That was the trajectory I had to capture in the next twelve hours. I started scribbling away frantically and never stopped. No drugs, no coffee - just pure obsession. The story ended up telling itself, but by the time I’d finished, I knew I’d written something that was going to resonate. Logan and MacDonald gave me a hard time for handing it in three hours after the appointed deadline but then they read the thing and realised its potential.

  Four days later, it appeared spread over the four middle pages of the NME’s April 13th issue, with an evocative wind-blown shot of Syd gracing the cover. It was the first time an English music weekly had ever run such a long piece. The response was immediate and deeply gratifying.

  But there was also a serious downside. Suddenly I was inundated with correspondence and phone calls from every acid-damaged NME reader in the world. They only wanted to help Syd, they all informed me with scary self-assurance, and needed to be given his personal address immediately so that they could go down and comfort him. I thought I’d left these kinds of nutjobs behind when I’d absconded from the underground press. And Ladbroke Grove. No such luck. Everyone suddenly seemed to think I had some sort of personal access to the man, that I was a kind of intermediary between him and the outside world.

  The Pink Floyd’s reaction was more guarded. Gilmour let it be known that though he’d quite liked the piece, he also felt it occasionally dipped into the realm of ‘sensationalism’. And Roger Waters apparently didn’t like it at all. Still, it must have left an impact because - partly as a response - he wrote the song ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ soon afterwards.

  And Syd himself - how did it all register with him? Well, his mystique certainly benefited from the renewed exposure. He was suddenly a hot topic again. Peter Jenner called up to ask for the prompt return of all those photographs he’d ‘given’ me. And EMI, who’d recently deleted Barrett’s two solo albums from their catalogue, promptly decided to re-release them as a special double package. Hoping to feature a new photograph of the man on the cover design, they’d then dispatched two former Cambridge pals of Barrett’s, Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell, down to Chelsea Cloisters armed with a camera. They told me later that they’d knocked on his door for several minutes without success. He wouldn’t let them in. Still, they had a conversation - of sorts - through the letter box. At one point, one of them asked him, ‘So, Syd - did you see that big piece on you in NME?’ Barrett - with some hesitation - replied, ‘Yes . . . No.’ ‘What did you think of it then?’ asked Thorgerson. ‘It was OK,’ Barrett’s voice came back drowsily, ‘but I didn’t read it.’ That was Syd sure enough. Unfathomable to the end.

  The only person to
give me any serious grief about the Syd piece was Chrissie Hynde. ‘Where do you get off thinking you have the right to invade the lives of mentally unstable people?’ she once exploded at me. ‘You’re not a registered psychiatrist.’ It was a moot point but the way she broached it smacked of professional jealousy. She even started giving me a hard time about working with the Rolling Stones. ‘Those old guys are just trying to exploit you’ became one of her oft-repeated scornful diatribes aimed at my ears only. In retrospect, this was pretty damn rich, particularly when you consider that thirty years later she and her group would be blithely supporting the senior-citizen Stones for negligible financial reward on one of their gargantuan moneysiphoning American tours.

  Things were just going from bad to worse between us. I should have moved out then but I was still too love-struck to make the break. I kept holding on blindly to the deluded notion that the bad period we were traversing would suddenly evaporate and we’d magically return to the idyllic times we’d shared back in the beginning. I was about to learn a very important lesson in life: there’s ultimately not that much difference between being a hopeless romantic and a feckless sap.

  In May we agreed to a two-week trial separation and I used the opportunity to go off with a friend of mine, a New York-born, smart-alec photographer named Joe Stevens, to France on a much-needed holiday. We took the Paris night train down to St Tropez - what a sleazy, overpriced dump that turned out to be. I went there armed with the mad hope of somehow encountering Brigitte Bardot, a well-known resident of the tiny beach town, and ended up having to hide away from a fleet of drunken sailors who were overrunning the area and who took great exception to my pallid form and foppish attire.

  Joe and I escaped to Cannes - only to discover that their annual film festival had ended just a week earlier and the streets were deserted apart from heaping piles of torn film posters. So we headed back to Paris. Springtime in Paris agreed with me. I felt suddenly light-headed again. But then temptation reared its sordid head - and with it came dire consequences. I started screwing around and, unbeknownst to me at the time, one of my conquests gave me a special going-away present: gonorrhoea.

  Do you really need to know the rest? Yes, I suppose you do. June was hell on earth for Chrissie and me. We fought, we cursed. Then one night she got ill and experienced the same crippling stomach cramps that I’d seen her suffering from the first time I’d met her. I held her that night like I’d done the other time and tried to comfort her. It was the last truly tender moment we ever got to share. The next morning an ambulance came and took her to the hospital. She stayed there for three days. Meanwhile, I was starting to experience an unpleasant burning sensation whenever I took a piss. The doctors then told Chrissie that her gynaecological problems were caused by her having lately contracted a sexually transmissible disease. From that point on, she didn’t really want to have anything more to do with me.

  I moved out to a dingy two-room flat in Archway that I first had to have fumigated by the local pest-control. During my first evening there, I got an unexpected call from Chrissie. Her voice sounded less icy than of late, gentler and more forgiving. She told me she still loved me and that our living apart would only make our relationship stronger. She asked me to meet her the next day at McLaren’s shop near closing time. We’d go out together. It would be a new beginning.

  This was music to my ears. For the next twenty hours I was back floating on air. But then I turned up at the appointed time and walked into yet another nightmare scenario. Chrissie was not happy to see me. Her eyes were like poison darts. ‘Go fuck yourself! ’ was her opening greeting. I reminded her about what she’d said the night before. ‘Well, I’ve changed my mind,’ she countered coldly. ‘I met this guy and I’m going out with him now.’

  That’s when I saw red. I attacked her right there in the shop. McLaren was also present and he was so scared he ran off and hid under a table. I was about to hit her with my belt when a strange bloke who just happened to be on the premises - one of McLaren’s mad brood - stepped forward and punched me in the face so hard my whole body almost flew through the shop window onto the pavement outside. Exit Chrissie. Meanwhile, I’m splayed out on the floor, pathetic and bleeding profusely from the mouth. That was the final scene in our great love affair. Everything changed from that moment on. Farewell charmed life - hello cruel fate. A bad moon was presently rising over Chelsea Embankment and now it had turned its ruinous glow on me too. Where did our love go? That’s what I wanted to know. All my life I’d been told that love was the answer, that it was what made the world go round, that it conquered all adversity and soothed the savage within. But the love I’d just lived through had been neither soothing nor strengthening and it had left me with more questions than answers. It had also left me with a dull, aching pain and a vastly diminished sense of personal self-esteem.

  For a while there I became a very gloomy fellow indeed. I’d still socialise but my acquaintances soon became weary of my glum discourses on the treacherous lie that is romantic infatuation and told me so in no uncertain terms. Some offered a solution to my woes: a comforting line of heroin. At that point in time I saw little difference in being a lovesick fool and full-blown drug addict so I continually accepted their offer. At first I only indulged one evening a month. Then it quickly grew to once a week. Then it was every three days. By the end of the year it had become a daily habit.

  I’d abandoned myself. It was partly due to my raging self-disgust. However much I tried to believe otherwise, it was me who’d been the weak link in our love-chain. I’d been too arrogant, too stifling, too immature. And yet I couldn’t get around the lurking suspicion that I’d been used by her, that she’d glommed on to me to further her profile in London and then basically taken my initial kindness for cuntishness and dropped me like a bad debt once she’d established herself as someone of consequence in the city’s music circles.

  ‘The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage’ - the great Smokey Robinson and the Miracles heartbreaker - was on constant rotation in my lonely Archway pad that year. It spoke to my inner condition, my ongoing dilemma. All this time I’d been like a needy child craving the love of the loveless. But everyone just used everybody else in this world - that was the name of the game when it came to fundamental human interaction. Musicians were using me for their publicity whilst I was using them as subject matter and source material. The NME was using me to sell more copies and I was using them to extend my writing abilities and personal profile. And where was the love in all of this? Nowhere. It seemed to me there was no love. It didn’t really exist. So - bring on the darkness. At least - as Spinal Tap once so eloquently put it - you know where you stand in a hellhole. The dark world tends to get a bad rap but it has much to recommend it - particularly if you’re one of the broken-hearted. Faster women. Harder drugs. Drunker wine. When you’re twenty-two years old, you don’t think about the consequences. You just swan-dive in.

  And what became of Chrissie? Well, McLaren sacked her shortly after our violent parting of the ways in his shop and she stuck around London for another month or two before decamping to Paris. She first shared a flat there with a transsexual guy who ran a local cabaret act. Then she started living with the junkie bass player for a local glam-rock act called the Frenchies. In due course, she became their singer. But the line-up splintered apart in early ’75, and she returned to her native Akron.

  I tried twice during that time to persuade her to return to me. Even flew to Paris once just to plead my case. Not a chance. I was just a bad memory to her. She wanted to move on. She returned to her new social circle and I went back to my drug buddies. I only realised it recently but our love affair turned out to be the very first proven casualty of the NME in the seventies. There would be others.

  But enough of my dreary, milksop blatherings - at least for now. What was transpiring in the ongoing pop-culture Zeitgeist as summer turned to autumn and autumn turned to winter? I still had a ringside seat and continued to monitor t
he situation for my NME paymasters with due dedication. David Bowie - now an American resident - had lately gone disco, a move that utterly bewildered his UK fan base when they first read about it. Bryan Ferry meanwhile had stolen his thunder in England: Roxy Music were unstoppable even without Brian Eno. Wherever I went that year - to clubs or people’s apartments - someone would always be playing a Steely Dan record. Or Al Green. Whenever I hear ‘Let’s Stay Together’ or ‘Do It Again’ these days, the essence of 1974 is instantly re-evoked in my mind. I’m lurking around some dimly lit smoky club in a state of stoned semi-consciousness, scoping out the dead-eyed fellow revellers as though we’ve all just been shanghaied onto the set of a bad Peter Sellers movie.

  The London pubs meanwhile had pub rock to keep their customers entertained whilst hoisting pints. The genre had lately been greatly boosted by the arrival of the one group that would actually go on to enjoy mainstream success in the coming months: a rough-and-ready R & B quartet from Canvey Island called Dr. Feelgood. The group didn’t make it on looks alone. In point of fact, they were the seediest-looking bunch that ever stood on a stage in the seventies.

  The singer had all the physical grace of a homicidal plumber, the guitarist with the pudding-bowl haircut was a bizarre black-suited blur, darting around the stage ceaselessly as though his legs had just been set alight, and the rhythm section resembled a couple of small-time penny-arcade pimps. They played strictly retro rock - mostly old R & B material with a few originals written in the same spirit - but virtually everyone who saw them live that year came away excited by what they’d seen and heard. Their music hasn’t really lasted the test of time but they were still important because they heralded an important sea change in UK rock. Before them, the fops had ruled the roost. But the Feelgoods’ ascension marked the pivotal moment when the spivs started creeping back into the big picture. Malcolm McLaren could often be espied side-stage at their shows taking mental notes.