by Nick Kent
London hadn’t changed in the time I’d been away from it - it was just as grey and glum-spirited as ever. Glam rock had brought some fleeting colour to its streets and music venues two or three years earlier but now that trend had petered out, all the blokes at gigs and in clubs had gone back to dressing like roadies and the women didn’t look much better. I was still flouncing around in my Beau Brummell phase and was generally mortified by the lack of sartorial flair being exhibited by my pop-picking compatriots that year. But then 1975 was another watershed year in rock and youth culture, and watersheds are generally gloomy places to be stuck in.
It was the last year that old-school rock ’n’ roll values still held the reins over young music-lovers around the world. Throughout the sixties the music itself had grown in structure and complexity in a genuinely forward-thinking fashion, but by the mid-seventies it had become stagnant and far too besotted with its own perceived past. A case in point? John Lennon’s musical output over the two decades. Simply play ‘I Am the Walrus’ from 1967 and then follow it up with ‘Whatever Gets You Thru the Night’ (a US no. 1 hit for him in ’75). The first track is a glorious, mind-boggling sonic lurch into the unknown whilst the second is an unimaginative regurgitation of late-fifties Brill Building popcraft complete with a double-corny sub-King Curtis sax solo. Rock was still hopelessly Yank-fixated, which meant that the vast majority of English acts were still singing with pronounced American accents and name-checking American towns and cities in their songs instead of being true to their real roots and writing about their own experiences and regions. Punk would change that, of course. But punk as we now know it was still a full year away from unleashing its fury.
In its absence, UK-based rock was being hijacked once more by the testosterone brigade - lusty-voiced blues-cliché-spewing lead singers in gonad-constricting loon pants who were always using the medium of music to bray on about their two-fisted manliness and rambunctious hard-loving ways. Ex-Free singer Paul Rodgers - lately a rising star again with Bad Company - was the kingpin of this hirsute studly mob. Legend had it that Rodgers was so manly he could start a show clean-shaven and by the end of the set he’d have grown a full beard before the audience’s very eyes. But a capacity for sudden facial-hair growth is ultimately scant compensation for the lack of musical adventurousness he and his ilk instilled in the mid-seventies rock landscape. I could see it in the rapture-free stares of their London audiences. Everyone looked just as jaded as I still felt. A lot of good music had come out of the early seventies and I’d been there to hear it all. But by mid-decade, inspiration was scarce on the ground. A few gifted mavericks like David Bowie, Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young still released new music of real consequence and artistry but the rest had mostly gotten bogged down in aimlessly parroting whatever they wrong-headedly perceived to be ‘the new contemporary trend’. This was when the musical abomination known as ‘white reggae’ started to materialise. And if rock bands weren’t making complete fools of themselves trying to appropriate rhythms best left to the likes of Toots and the Maytals, they’d be loitering in studios under the influence of too much cocaine attempting to play funk with equally desultory results. What a sorry state contemporary music was in. Two years earlier, I’d returned from the States with my suitcase laden with new records I’d heard whilst there and fallen in love with. When I’d flown back this second time, I hadn’t bothered to take any vinyl whatsoever from my LA sojourn with me. The only piece of music in my luggage had been a master tape James Williamson had made for me of a Stooges gig in Michigan just prior to their final break-up. On it you could hear Iggy being heckled and then physically attacked by a biker gang in the audience. I told James and Iggy I could sell it for them and get them some (much-needed) advance cash in the process, and they’d happily complied. I then flew to Paris and gave it to my pal Marc Zermati, who was the only punk-related person to have his own independent record label - Skydog - at that time. Marc paid them and then received another live Stooges tape by mail from Williamson. The two low-fidelity tapes were sequenced together and released the following year under the title of Metallic KO. The record went on to sell surprisingly well and became a seminal soundtrack for UK punks, who gleefully aped the unruly aggression of the audience response captured within.
Stepping back into NME’s Long Acre office that spring felt strange. Business was booming - the paper was selling more than ever - but morale was low within its ranks. It felt like most of the staff and contributors had suddenly grown detached and cynical about what we were supposed to be doing. Few of us now felt the continued urge to push the envelope and take rock journalism into ever more provocative areas. I was unhappy about this state of affairs and duly vented my spleen on the subject to the guilty parties. And then - just three weeks after waving my unfond farewell to California-I got the sack.
In strict point of fact, I was fired for someone else’s fuck-up. My bosom buddy Pete Erskine was supposed to deliver a cover story one week but missed the deadline because he chose to down a full bottle of cough medicine instead of applying himself to the task at hand. He was so comatose he also neglected to hand in a singles review I’d completed and was counting on him to deliver to one of the editors due down at the printers. This review’s non-appearance was the reason for my sacking. Erskine got off with just a few stern words.
This not unnaturally threw our friendship into a state of some turmoil. I loved Pete dearly - he was my closest friend at the time - but lately he’d become something of a liability. Ever since heroin had come into the picture our relationship had tended to mirror the one later shared by the two protagonists in the film Withnail and I. Pete had left his wife and child and moved into my squalor-ridden Archway retreat (he’d lived there whilst I was off on the West Coast). Suddenly he had no family to keep him in check and got swept up in hard drug use instead. It scared me to see how quickly and how intensely he fell under the lure of heroin. It was like standing next to someone you care about whilst that person is being sucked into quicksand. It hadn’t escaped my attention that I was a bad influence on him: our relationship just ended up bringing out the worst in each other. At first I felt responsible for his worsening state. But then he started screwing up in the workplace and I found myself having to cover for his mistakes. Now I’d been given the boot from the NME over something that was essentially his fault. That’s when I stopped feeling responsible for Pete.
The sacking not only seriously compromised one friendship but also annihilated whatever feelings of camaraderie still lingered within me vis-à-vis the rest of the NME staff. That cherished sense of a shared goal - that ‘all for one and one for all’ high-spiritedness - had left the building back in 1973 or early 1974 at the latest. In its place a mood of divisive complacency had taken over the premises; it increasingly felt like I was one of the only writers who’d stayed committed to upping its level of impact, subject range and journalistic standards. To that end, I was still prepared to risk death, ridicule, deportation and even the wrath of the entire music industry. My colleagues weren’t nearly as gung-ho though. They generally preferred the age-old ‘anything for an easy life’ approach, clocking on and off between 9 and 5 and then stealing away to the comfort zone of their private leisure-worlds outside of pop culture.
Tony Tyler, the paper’s features editor, had basically given up on popular music the day the Beatles broke up and had come to loathe the seventies and its rock musicians with a fierce passion (in the eighties he actually gave vent to this hatred in a slim tome entitled I Hate Rock & Roll). After making it his personal crusade to belittle Bryan Ferry whenever possible in print, he’d turned his disapproving gaze on me. He then persuaded Ian MacDonald that I needed to be put in my place and that the best way to achieve this was to kick me out of the NME. These two then went to Nick Logan and told him I’d become too arrogant and loose-cannon-like and needed to be given my marching orders. This he did - in a short letter he handed me one day in the office. I read it before exiting t
he premises in high dudgeon.
The weeks that followed are grim ones to recall. They took my name off the NME masthead and acted as though I’d just vanished into thin air. Rumours started circulating throughout London that I was unemployable. Back in the seventies rock journalism wasn’t something the daily papers wished to incorporate into their pages, so career alternatives for me meant signing up with one of the lesser music weeklies - something I wasn’t prepared to do. So I did the only thing I knew how to do when placed in extreme, emotionally depleting circumstances. I went back on the smack.
A month passed before I was struck by a rare moment of lucidity. One night I managed to compose a heartfelt letter to Nick Logan protesting my innocence and generally giving my side of the story. Once he’d read it, he got in touch and asked me out to lunch. During the meal he invited me back into the NME fold under somewhat reduced conditions, and I agreed to return. But things were never the same again for me and that paper. Before I’d viewed the NME as ‘us’; now I saw it as strictly ‘them and me’. Any illusions that we were basically all on the same page and fighting the good fight together went straight out of the window.
I had one ace left up my scribbling sleeve - the Brian Wilson story I’d been researching over the past months. I had enough material for a book but decided instead to have the 40,000-word text I was working on serialised over three separate NME issues. More people would read it that way and I’d be able to show the world, his wife and my in-house persecutors who the real ‘man with the plan’ was when it came to extending the paper’s cutting edge. I went to work like a soul possessed, which was handy as I only had a month to turn it around. The first 20,000 words were a dream: I’d sit there and the prose just flowed out onto the page. I could stay focused and scribbling for up to twenty hours at a stretch. But then - halfway through - something snapped inside my mind and I started losing momentum after that. I’d sit for hours struggling over a single sentence. By the end I felt utterly drained. Nowadays I’m inclined to think that this was because of all the heroin running around my brain and bloodstream but at the time I saw it as something more supernaturally catastrophic, a potentially terminal condition.
Real inspiration - particularly in so-called pop culture - almost always comes in notoriously short spurts. Even Bob Dylan enjoyed only three years as a bona fide creative ground-breaker (’63 to ’66). I’d enjoyed three uplifting years too. From ’72 to mid-’75 my writing talent had been on the rise. It reached its peak with the Wilson investigation. After that it went into free fall. I still contributed to the paper but I don’t think anything they printed with my byline attached during the rest of the decade was up to snuff. Partly it was the drugs, partly it was simple burn-out, but a lot of it was because I’d grown to actively despise the way the NME chewed up and then spat out virtually anyone of substance that came into its orbit - contributors and musicians alike. I no longer trusted anyone who worked there and felt little affinity with their tastes and editorial policies.
As soon as my writing talent began to go on the blink, I realised I needed to start investigating new avenues of gainful creative endeavour, if only to help pay for the drugs I was now addicted to. I tried being a DJ for one night at a Camden Town club called Dingwalls but the bloke running the place told me I wasn’t up to the task because I hadn’t played enough disco. There was only one other halfway viable option open from that point on. I needed to get a group of my own together and make my living as a professional musician.
I’d harboured this particular fantasy from even before reaching puberty. As a child, I’d been forced to study classical piano and had actually learned how to sight-read music in the process. Then I’d fumbled through my teens groping to master simple barre-chord shapes and finger-picking techniques on a crappy acoustic guitar with strings like curtain rails I’d somehow inherited. By the time I’d reached nineteen, I could play both instruments - after a fashion. But I didn’t really know how to play what then constituted rock ’n’ roll in any way, shape or form.
Amazingly, this didn’t prevent me from recklessly offering my guitar-playing services to Iggy Pop the first time I met him back in 1972. That was my dream gig back then - to actually play in the Stooges. Thankfully he rejected my offer pretty much on the spot. I say ‘thankfully’ because had he arranged an audition for me in a rehearsal studio I’d have come out looking like a prize oaf: I’d never actually played an electric guitar up to that point in time. Later that same year the Flamin’ Groovies invited me to be their keyboard player even though I don’t recall us ever playing a note of music together. I was tempted but turned them down mainly because I didn’t want to relocate to San Francisco.
The following year I finally got my first electric guitar. Michael Karoli out of Can sold it to me-a flashy-looking Plexiglas affair that he’d picked up over in Japan and soon tired of. I strummed away on that until-a further twelve months later-I acquired the stolen Fender from Steve Jones. By mid-’75 my living quarters had become overtaken by the six-stringed buggers. You couldn’t move without bumping into a fretboard and knocking the thing to the uncarpeted floor. But my attempts to make music specifically for the public arena up until then had been tentative at best. There were a couple of sessions at Brian Eno’s home studio at Maida Vale. I’d also tried to work with a guy called Magic Michael - an acid head with his own unique personal magnetism who sang like Frank Sinatra and often performed in drag or stark naked. You can catch a glimpse of Michael in full deranged performance flow - replete with shrunken genitalia - in Julian Temple’s Glastonbury film. As you can probably imagine, we went nowhere fast. Michael went on to work as Can’s singer for a couple of months and even moved to Cologne for a while, before resurfacing in London and becoming one of the first signings to Stiff Records. He could have been a massive star but just didn’t have the focus and ambition to make the journey.
At one point, the NME started to take an interest in my musical dabblings. In early ’74 Nick Logan offered to set me up with some esteemed Tin Pan Alley Svengali who’d then be employed to groom me as a performer and recording artiste. His one proviso was that I write about the whole experience and then continue turning out copy for the paper even if my pop-star career were to actually take off. It sounded like a sad old caper to me. Pop stardom really wasn’t something I’d ever craved. And when he went on to suggest that my Svengali could well be Jonathan King, I nipped that idea smartly in the bud without further forethought. The idea of being moulded and talked down to by some self-styled pop pimp was not one that I cared to entertain. So what did I go and do in the summer of ’75? Only link up career-wise with another glib-tongued shyster who dreamed of exploiting and then discarding impressionable young boys with stars in the eyes.
It had been eighteen months since I’d first encountered Malcolm McLaren in Paris and in that time I’d come to view him both as a cultural ally and caring friend. In my darkest hours following the Chrissie Hynde bust-up I’d poured my heart out to him and he’d always listened sympathetically and offered sound advice. But we’d spent most of our times together verbally plotting out the revolution we both recognised that rock music needed to undergo in order to be truly relevant again. Looking around sleepy London town in 1974 though we’d quickly concluded there were no authentically wild young stars-in-waiting to heed sedition’s call. So we turned our attentions to America and its two struggling punk-rock forefathers. I’d recently tried - and failed - to persuade the Stooges to regroup. During the same time line McLaren had moved to Manhattan in order to attempt to reverse the down-bound fortunes of his beloved New York Dolls. During the first six months of 1975 he took on the self-appointed role of being their personal style and image consultant. He dressed them in red vinyl costumes designed by him and then sewn up by Vivienne Westwood and also managed to coerce the group’s principals into writing a batch of new songs. But then he took up with the wrong-headed notion of persuading them to embrace Marxism and quote passages from Mao Tse-tung’s littl
e red book during their live sets. Americans throughout the ages have always taken a distinctly dim view of Communist propagandists and certainly weren’t about to tolerate it coming from a down-at-heel group of three-chord-playing cross-dressing drug addicts. Sensing their jig was well and truly up, the quintet splintered apart in the middle of a US club tour, leaving McLaren to pack up his tent and scurry back to London.
The day after his return - it would have been sometime in early June - he and Westwood came to visit me in my soon-to-be-vacated Archway lair (the landlord - distressed at my lack of domestic skills - had found a loophole in our leasing agreement and was booting me off the premises). For several hours he ranted at the expense of the lately departed Dolls. They’d vomited over the clothes he’d had made for them. They’d sniggered at the Marxist manifestos he’d tried to impress upon them. The singer was a social gadfly, the bassist a raging alcoholic and the lead guitarist and drummer were so junked up they were perpetually half-asleep. He’d started out with high hopes but the group had let him down at every turn. They’d run out of ambition and moxie and their individual shortcomings had turned them into failures who deserved to fail. He was well rid of them - or so he kept saying.
Trying to change the subject I asked McLaren if he had any projects or plans now he was back in London. That’s when he told me he’d decided to commit his future energies to shaping and guiding the group that our teenaged reprobate colleagues Steve Jones and Paul Cook - as well as his old shop assistant Glen Matlock - had been struggling to launch. They were young and malleable - unlike the Dolls - and could be counted upon to kick up enough of a storm to rudely awaken the sleeping metropolis from its post-hippie coma. I’d yet to hear them play and so was initially sceptical. But he was already grandly scheming out their fate. He’d even come up with a name for his new wards whilst out in the States. He was going to call them ‘QT Jones and the Sex Pistols’.