Apathy for the Devil

by Nick Kent

  It must have been sometime in October when I found myself walking down Charing Cross Road and suddenly turned to see him sidling up alongside me. There was a spring in his step and gleam in his eyes. He excitedly began telling me that the Pistols were now rehearsing in Denmark Street and had just achieved the seemingly impossible: they’d found the singer who was destined to make them all immortal. ‘He’s this really weird kid . . . looks a bit like a spastic . . . and he’s on acid all the time. But he’s the best thing in the group. He came in the other day with the lyrics to a song he’d just written. The title’s “You’re Only Twenty-Nine - You’ve Got a Lot to Learn”. Absolutely bloody brilliant.’ And we both laughed out loud because indeed it did sound brilliant. The ‘really weird kid’ of course turned out to be John Lydon and it’s fair to say that the Sex Pistols didn’t really become the Sex Pistols until he came into the frame. I’d been involved in a work in progress in other words-a project yet to reach full fruition. I can’t help thinking now of that line uttered near the end of Roddy Doyle’s book The Commitments when the old-timer trumpet player says words to the effect that being in a group is mostly about dull routine but the early days are the ones to cherish - the ones filled with poetry. Well, there wasn’t much poetry in the Sex Pistols’ early days as far as I was aware. A lot of ducking and diving, bad manners and brute force, certainly - but no grace-filled epiphanies or magic moments to wax nostalgic over. It’s funny looking back: none of us knew just what we were unleashing on the world. The rest is history of course - or ‘my story’ as both McLaren and John Lydon egocentrically like to view the 1976 punk-rock explosion throughout Great Britain. I’m just glad I got out when I did. I don’t think my nervous system could have withstood being a Sex Pistol right to the end of the line.

  So poor old Wally Nightingale became their very own Pete Best and I became their Stuart Sutcliffe. That’s one way of looking at it anyway. Of course, Stuart Sutcliffe died shortly after leaving the Beatles. I managed to keep breathing, though with some difficulty. Since the summer I’d become a twenty-four-hours-a-day full-bore junkie. That’s probably another reason why the Sex Pistols no longer wanted me around. When I’d started tentatively using a year earlier, it had transpired in relatively luxurious surroundings - cosy, well-heated, sultrily lit Chelsea apartments, big colour TVs with the volume dimmed, cool sounds wafting from the stereo. Not any more. Now it was a case of taking your life in your hands and stepping into squalor-ridden squats with rats scurrying across the floorboards and an equally scary clump of human debris starting to experience the first pin-pricks of drug withdrawal standing around waiting for the dealer to return with the stuff. I was in the deep end now - sucked out into a sea of screaming bloody madness. I’d tried to stop again and again but each time grew more horrendous until my spirit had been broken. Now I simply couldn’t stop. I’d exhausted the willpower to fight the addiction. It’s a scary sensation to realise your life is going down the toilet and you can’t do a thing about it except to hang on, try to remain breathing and keep feeding that habit.

  The winter of ’75 was a particularly cruel season - bitingly cold and bleak, bleak, bleak. I was holed up in an otherwise empty house awaiting demolition somewhere in Islington that Hermine had found for me, God bless her. And there was a heroin famine in the city: I had to spend practically all my waking hours walking around the metropolis in search of a ready source. But the worst of it was the music I’d always be hearing wherever I went. One song reigned supreme over Britain’s airwaves at year’s end: Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Every home in the British Isles seemed to own a copy. Walk down any street and you could hear it wafting out onto the sidewalk like the smell of bad drains. Pub jukeboxes played nothing else. If anyone dared pick another selection, they’d have probably been ejected. The omnipotence of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ made it official: prog rock was still the opium of the masses. Hearing it echo around me on my daily travels, I felt utterly defeated. Queen’s record shamelessly paraded everything I’d fought against as a rock commentator: it was theatrical, pretentious and meaningless, faux classical music for high-brow poseurs with low-brow attention spans, kitsch masquerading as art. I couldn’t see a way out of it. I was doomed and so was rock ’n’ roll. Heroin was killing me and Freddie Mercury and his fruity chums had just seen off the latter. It was one of those ‘darkest hour before the dawn’ extended moments. I couldn’t conceive then that my recent dancing partners the Sex Pistols would actually ride in like the cavalry and save the day for rock just a few months hence. And I couldn’t - in my wildest imaginings - foresee them stabbing me in the back the way they were about to.

  1976

  Working within the media is rather like being employed as a snake handler. Sooner or later it’s going to bite you back.

  Judge not unless you’re prepared to be judged yourself: the Bible is very clear on this point. Yet journalists instinctively feel compelled to make extravagant judgement calls on their subjects - endlessly measuring their talent, their political and moral agendas, calling into question their public images, belittling their fashion sense. Whilst this approach often results in widely read copy and the promise of a highly paid column in the dailies, it also tends to set those who initiate the process onto the rocky road towards karmic retribution.

  Of course, most news hounds become so gung-ho ambitious and intoxicated by their power-playing status that they conveniently misplace any residue of conscience that may have once lurked within them. Without conscience there can be no awareness of consequences; thus no awareness of the forces of karma. But ignorance doesn’t prevent it from working its own mysterious magic at all times.

  Like Burt Lancaster’s sociopathic columnist in Sweet Smell of Success, the hard-core media breed make their bones taking indelicate pot-shots at the cultural movers and shakers du jour, become - briefly - ersatz celebrities themselves, lose all perspective as a direct result, turn arrogant and lazy and cultivate many high-powered enemies. Then they almost inevitably become the victims of a scandal of their own making and have to suddenly be put out to pasture by their long-suffering bosses, their twilight years eked out in bitter alcoholic reclusion.

  This is karma in full effect - powered by greed, riddled with hubris, ending in drunken recriminations and unholy isolation - and it hits worst when least expected. I was only in my early twenties, with little knowledge of Buddhist theology to back me up, but even I could sense its intricate sway over the very scheme of human existence, if only as a form of divine superstition. People in the seventies talked about karma as though it was as obsolete as the kaftan but I knew I was still somehow under its tricky spell. My charmed life was running out of blind luck. My playhouse was about to get burned down.

  Still, I had no ready clues about how or when my judgement day would manifest itself exactly, though there was always the distinct possibility of having my legs broken by revenge-seeking aggrieved recording artistes who’d fallen foul of my critical faculties. ‘You need to watch what you write, young Kent,’ a disgruntled manager once informed me in a London nightclub. ‘You’re making too many enemies in this business.’ He wasn’t alone in this view. From day one, I’d been actively looking for trouble in one form or another. It was only a matter of time before trouble came looking for me.

  In mid-’73 a tabloid reporter informed me that the Bee Gees were planning to beat me up because of an unflattering review I’d penned of one of their singles. Put yourself in my place: you are suddenly told that the Bee Gees intend to break you limb from limb at an undisclosed place and time in the immediate future. How do you react?

  Well, if you were me, you’d make a point of heading to a nearby record store and studying the sleeve of the trio’s most recent album in order to see exactly what kind of physical shape your opponents might be in. Scanning the cover I quickly surmised that I might be in for a terrible thrashing. Two of the Gibb siblings, Robin and Maurice, were reassuringly pasty-faced but big brother Barry was clearly the one in
the family who’d inherited all the testosterone and muscles. He was also sporting more hairs on his chest than you could count nestling against loud golden medallions at a New Jersey convention for mafia capos. If he and I ever crossed paths, I knew I was wheelchair-bound.

  The NME threw a party in August at the Speakeasy to further trumpet the fact that we’d lately become the biggest-selling music weekly in the known universe, and the Bee Gees’ publicist duly let it be known that the trio would be turning up specifically to extract their pound of flesh. My co-workers at the paper all thought this was tremendous fun and never wasted an opportunity to tweak my paranoia further on the matter. But as the evening progressed in a blur of alcohol and back-slapping bonhomie, it became increasingly apparent that the three Bee Gees would not be gracing us with their six-fisted presence. Only little Maurice put in an appearance and he was so drunk he needed two minders to keep him from falling over.

  At one point, he stood about two yards away from me and attempted to look menacing, but to scant avail. His face was flushed like raw beetroot. His pair of human crutches quickly encircled my would-be tormentor, shepherding him to the exit of the club, and that was the end of that. In the battle between myself and the Bee Gees, I had somehow ended up the victor by default. Still, it was a pyrrhic victory at best. Four years hence, the trio would become one of the biggest-selling and most influential acts of the seventies - experiencing a second coming that even Lazarus might envy. I meanwhile would be occupying the same period of time as a homeless junkie barely staying alive.

  The fates were certainly frowning on me a full year later when I found myself in Island Records’ Basing Street studios in Ladbroke Grove watching Brian Eno record a track for his Taking Tiger Mountain album in the company of John Cale. Cale and I had been consuming cocaine quite liberally just prior to this and so everything in the studio felt like it was somehow alive and humming with diabolic energy.

  Feeling fragile, I went looking for a toilet, hoping it would prove to possess a more soothing atmosphere. I opened the door to a dimly lit room fitted out with a urinal and several separate cubicles and realised that I wasn’t its only occupant. Six or seven strange-looking black guys were standing by the urinal. One of them was holding the largest joint I have ever seen in my entire life. It looked like a smouldering tree limb wrapped in countless rolling papers. An entire pack of Rizlas must have gone into its construction. The guy had to hold the thing aloft with both his hands in order to get a hit off it. He was a wiry arrogant-looking little fellow with angry eyes blazing out of an enormous head topped off by a humongous mass of braided hair, and he and his cohorts were clearly none too happy to see me suddenly in their midst. It was Bob Marley and the Wailers taking a break from recording tracks for their album Natty Dread in the adjacent studio.

  Although I’d briefly lived in a Jamaican community in Ladbroke Grove two years earlier, I’d never seen a fully fledged Rastafarian with ample dreadlocks in the flesh before. Now I was suddenly being confronted with a whole gang of them. I felt like Bob Hope in Son of Paleface, in the scene where the comedian as prissy, citified dentist ‘Painless’ Potter - having ventured west - comes suddenly face to face with a tribe of homicidal tomahawk-wielding Apaches in full warpaint. If I hadn’t been so looped, I would have simply turned on my heels and found an alternative location for the emptying of my bladder. But cocaine has an irksome habit of decimating presence of mind and so I hurried to a cubicle, locking it behind me in shocked surprise.

  The next two minutes were awkward in the extreme. I was so nervous I pissed all over my boots. There was loud derisive laughter coming from the urinals. I steeled myself to make a quick exit but knew I was doomed to experience an impromptu lesson in what happens when different cultures clash in awkward circumstances. As I edged towards the door, Marley started moving towards me, flanked by his grinning accomplices. He had a cut-throat grin on his face. He stood about three inches away and spat out the word ‘Rasclaat’ directly into my worried face. Apparently, it’s Jamaican for ‘scumbag’ or something equally demeaning. I bowed my head and departed in haste. This was my first-hand introduction to Jah Bob’s supposedly all-inclusive ‘one love’ philosophy for mankind and all I could think was, ‘Oh well, at least I didn’t get lynched.’

  In the years that followed, Marley and his media enablers would convincingly fashion a public image of the man as a quasi-mystical deity that millions would unquestioningly buy into, but my brief encounter told me he was as deeply flawed as any other ambitious little man slouching arrogantly around the planet. I’d never written a word on him or the Wailers. He didn’t know me from a hole in the ground. He just took offence because I was dressed flamboyantly and was sporting traces of eye make-up. It was obvious he had a serious problem with men who were unafraid to exhibit their feminine side in public. To Marley’s hard-eyed Rasta-centric mindset spiritual salvation was not attainable to Southern Jessies on hard drugs. He may well have been right too.

  Now fast-forward to eight months later. I’m floating around the Roxy, the music-industry watering hole on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip, when Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham and Richard Cole suddenly decide to hurl their drinks at me and declare - according to the notorious Zeppelin biography Hammer of the Gods - that my life ‘isn’t worth piss’.

  This wasn’t something to be taken lightly. Bonham was a great big brick shithouse of a man who habitually became transformed into a psychopathic farmhand out of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs when over-inebriated, and Cole had the reputation of being able to kill a man or woman with a single karate blow. I got out of there as quickly as possible before any real physical damage could be done.

  The next morning, Peter Grant phoned me - all sweetness, light and profuse apologies: ‘I’ve spoken to both Bonzo and Coley . . . they’re very sorry . . . you’re still our ally.’ To further mend fences, he invited me on the group’s private jet to take in a Zeppelin concert in nearby Oakland later that day. A sobered-up Bonham and Cole were duly apologetic when I arrived at their hotel.

  Later that night - at around 3 a.m. - me, Grant, Bonham and Cole were all in Grant’s suite, snorting yet more cocaine - Jimmy Page was in an adjacent room with a young woman - and listening to a white-label copy of Bad Company’s second album when the large bay windows that opened onto the suite’s fifteenth-floor balcony suddenly burst open and Keith Moon appeared in our midst as if conjured out of thin air. He’d just climbed down the side of the building from the roof of the hotel attached to some sort of mountaineer’s winch and had narrowly escaped falling to his death. His eyes were bulging out of his face like huge mischievous saucers and he wasted no time in making his unruly presence felt in every corner of the room. ‘I tell you what, playmates - that Raquel Welch was on the blower to me again. She won’t bloody leave me alone. It’s always the same old line. “Keith, I need you so desperately. You’re the only man who can fulfil my needs.” I had to tell ’er right there and then, “Raquel, love, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Keith Moon can’t be tied down to just one woman. I’ve got to play the field. Go buy a dog instead. Buy yourself a three-piece suite.”’

  Everyone fell about laughing. And I got to spend several hours in the company of the two greatest drummers in the history of rock ’n’ roll. Bonham absolutely adored Moon, and Moon clearly loved Bonham back. But he didn’t seem to like himself much. His moods shifted chaotically and without due cause. One minute he’d be the life and soul of the party, performing his side-splitting Robert Newton-as-Long John Silver impersonation to everyone’s delight, the next he’d be talking glumly about his aimless life in Hollywood and the difficulties of getting the other three Who members interested in more group activities.

  His face and torso that night were both extensively padded with an unsightly strain of toxic bloat and behind his customary shield of berserk bravado you could catch glimpses of a man struggling to make sense of his own insanity whilst trying to kid himself that it wasn’t somehow all linked in
with his continuing descent into full-blown alcoholism. No wonder he and Bonham were soulmates: they shared the same terminal disease. Moon had only three more years to live, Bonham five.

  The early-seventies rock scene had its share of violent outbursts but that violence was usually ignited only in hotel rooms, backstage facilities or small VIP clubs when too much cocaine and alcohol were mixed together. It rarely spilled over to the public sector. Paying audiences were never targeted for a pummelling. Even the early punk bands didn’t physically abuse those who’d come to see them. They’d abuse themselves instead.

  This became apparent to me when I flew to New York in April ’76 for a forty-eight-hour stopover whilst en route to cover a catastrophe in the making: a tour of the US Midwest being undertaken by UK bubblegum glam rockers the Sweet, who were then trying to pass themselves off as virtuoso hard rockers, a kind of poor man’s Deep Purple with permed hair and shiny jump-suits.

  The three days and nights I got to spend with that sorry bunch are forever etched on my mind. Imagine Spinal Tap without the punchlines. The high-or-low point was reached one morning in the lobby of a Holiday Inn in Cleveland we were checking out of. The jazz legend Count Basie was also in the vicinity and - being a friendly, non-judgemental soul - wandered up to the group members at one point and offered his best wishes for their continued success, even though he obviously didn’t have a clue who they were. ‘Fuck all that, mate,’ tartly responded the Sweet’s Neanderthal singer, who’d evidently mistaken the venerable big-band maestro for a hall porter. ‘Help us load our baggage into those limousines outside the door instead.’

  Returning to New York I felt an immediate urge to get high once more. Richard Hell phoned me out of the blue and offered to set up a meeting with his heroin dealer. I jumped in a yellow cab and hightailed it down to his grungy-looking apartment.