Apathy for the Devil

by Nick Kent

  Did anything good happen for me in 1977? Well, I managed to obtain a pre-release tape of Television’s Marquee Moon album sometime in spring and played it incessantly on the crummy little cassette player I took with me on my travels around London’s smack shacks. I quickly concluded that I hadn’t heard new music this compelling in years and wrote a long review to the effect that ended up netting the New York quartet their first NME cover. This exposure actually gave Television a handy springboard for instant recognition in a country where no one had yet heard them play a note. Upon its release, Marquee Moon penetrated the lower echelons of the UK album top 30 and even the notoriously prickly Tom Verlaine thanked me later for having aided its commercial momentum. At least it indicated to me that whilst my own writing might have become stilted and flawed of late, my instincts for recognising other people’s talent were still safe and sound.

  The only other worthwhile assignment I pulled off for the NME that year was to instigate the first interview the paper ever ran with Elvis Costello. I’d known his manager Andrew Jakeman, aka Jake Riviera, for more than three years and had watched him formulate and then boldly put into practice an independent record label he’d called Stiff, which began releasing singles in ’77. I’d also steered the Damned onto his management roster a year earlier. Jake started out pinning his main hopes on developing Nick Lowe from the underrated pub-rock stalwarts Brinsley Schwarz as a hit-making singer/songwriter and record producer but secretly lusted to find his very own Bob Dylan to play Albert Grossman alongside. When a former roadie of Lowe’s old group sent in a demo tape to Stiff, he sensed he’d struck gold dust. There was a compelling urgency in Declan MacManus’s beseeching voice and an eloquence and trickiness to the lyrics of all his self-penned compositions that were astonishing to hear from one so young. The twenty-year-old MacManus had lately been gaining experience as a struggling UK Bruce Springsteen clone with a group named Flip City but was now ready to assume a musical identity of his own. Riviera renamed him Elvis Costello but MacManus was otherwise firmly in control of his own destiny.

  The newly rechristened Costello was as young as any of the other punk upstarts making merry that year and could instinctively relate to their rage and youthful audacity. But his music drew from a deeper well than the one containing just the Stooges and a bit of reggae. He’d already digested the works of the real masters of pop songcraft - Burt Bacharach, Brian Wilson, Lennon and McCartney, Bob Dylan and Randy Newman - and was determined to create songs of his own that stood up to their exacting standards. He was a big talent and big thinker blessed with a canny knack for self-packaging. ‘The only motivating points for me writing songs are revenge and guilt,’ he’d seethed at me during our first encounter. It was a great line that was destined to appear many times hence in banner headlines over other articles on the guy. He knew it and I knew it too. He was using me to construct his very own media profile for future exploitation.

  But he was still very young and not a little drunk and so when he slipped out of his Mr Angry routines and started to reveal a sweeter, more playful nature, I warmed to him. He ended up paying me two of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received. The first was something he told me in an alcoholic semi-stupor. Just before making music his full-time profession, Costello had been working in the office of a company engaged in the creation and upkeep of early computers. On his last day there, he went to clean out his desk and found my old Brian Wilson articles from 1975 lurking at the bottom.

  And he wrote part of his song ‘Waiting for the End of the World’ about seeing me almost get attacked by fellow passengers on a tube ride out towards Middlesex. I’m the guy in the first verse - or at least that’s what its composer told me. I don’t mean to brag but I’ve been the subject matter of several tunes penned by the great, the good and the indifferent. Chrissie Hynde lyrically re-enacted our ugly break-up in a dirgey ballad the Pretenders released in 1994 called ‘977’. Adam and his wretched Ants wrote and recorded a sneer-driven early B-side called ‘Press Darlings’ that featured the refrain ‘Nick Kent - he’s the best-dressed man in the town’. And Morrissey’s supposed to have penned a particularly vituperative attack on my person that I’ve never bothered to listen to-a song called ‘Reader Meet Author’ that appeared on 1996’s Southpaw Grammar. Being a ‘rock muse’ may be the secret dream of many but believe me, hearing your name and likeness sullied in song isn’t all it’s supposedly cracked up to be. I could’ve certainly done without the exposure. But I always liked the Elvis song and hearing him play it live that year with his Attractions was always a moment to cherish. It told me that even in my current shabby state, I was somehow still having an impact on the way rock culture was developing.

  But the best thing that happened to me in 1977 occurred in late autumn, when I finally succeeded in becoming a registered drug addict at an NHS-sponsored facility in Westbourne Grove. It was actually just a small wooden hut that had been recently constructed on the grounds of the local hospital to deal with the growing heroin epidemic in the region. A young doctor and a nurse were in charge. Their job was to determine whether anyone who came through the door seeking their aid was a real addict or some joker trying to feign dependency in order to ponce off the system. If - after countless urine samples - you’d proven to them that you were one of the former breed, then they’d prescribe you daily dosages of a drug called methadone - almost exclusively taken orally in liquid form - which you could then pick up legally and free of charge from an obliging chemist’s.

  I liked methadone. A lot. It gave me the same warm inner glow and skewed sense of dreamy invulnerability that heroin had provided at the beginning. In fact, there didn’t seem to be much difference between the two drugs - they were equally addictive on a purely physical level and interacted pleasingly with the same parts of the brain once they’d invaded the bloodstream. Ultimately I was just substituting one bad form of chemical dependency with another.

  But there were still immediate upsides aplenty for me to gloat over. First and foremost, it broke the spell smack had me under for the past four years. This was a miraculous occurrence in itself: another few months of struggling through the life I’d been living of late and I’d have ended up a corpse decomposing inside a condemned building. Everyone I’d started out using heroin with was now dead, near death or facing jail time. We all should have known better. We’d all read the stories. Heroin is bad karma in powder form and it killed loads of jazz musicians so what chance did the flakier rock generation stand under its influence? We were all like sheep being led to the slaughterhouse. But then just as I reached the killing floor, salvation - in the form of a methadone script - plucked me away from death’s merciless blade. I had a lot to be thankful for. I was now getting high daily on a drug that was both legal and free. That was my definition back then of heaven on earth.

  And I no longer had to spend 80 per cent of my waking hours wasting time in increasingly dangerous hot spots looking to score a drug that was sucking up 100 per cent of my income. For the first time in ages, I had money in my pockets again. That winter I moved into a hotel in Kilburn and rented a cheap room there throughout the next twelve months. I started bathing regularly and taking better care of my physical appearance. Let’s just say that personal hygiene hadn’t been too high on my list of priorities during those hard-core junkie years. I started eating again too. Before that, I’d been subsisting on a daily diet of bread and soup. When I could afford it, I’d sometimes buy a can of baked beans to tide my intestinal juices over, but now the prospect of eating from a plate full of warm, solid, nutritious food was a luxury I could once more afford. I must have felt like I was back in the high life again even though I was really still just chicken-scratching around in the outer margins of abject poverty.

  If you’d been living in or even commuting to London during 1977, you’d have more than likely seen me promenading through its streets. Every postal code in the metropolis had its pathways stained by my shadow that year. I was always on the move, s
currying from one dilemma to the next. My presence often provoked verbal abuse from other passers-by-I may hold the seventies record for being called a poof the most times in public by complete strangers - but at least it had never escalated into the realm of actual bodily attacks.

  But then in mid-December I found myself strolling alone through King’s Cross late one evening when I suddenly felt a sharp pain in the back of my neck. I turned slightly and realised someone was directly behind me holding a knife. As this sank in, three more individuals surrounded me, pointing their knives at my face.

  There was a sort of open field next to where we were all standing - a dismal-looking patch of parched grass and brown rainy mud. They propelled me onto this stretch and began beating and slashing my skin with their weapons. They were more punk wannabes who wanted to do what Sid did. I’d never seen them before in my life. But boy, did they leave a lasting impression. They had this ritual of first cutting me and then kicking me in the same place their knives had just been. My face was such a bloody pulp from the attack after three minutes I could barely see in front of me and strongly sensed I was about to be stabbed to death. Somehow I struggled to my feet at one point and screamed at them ‘Just kill me. Get it over with’ over and over again. It seemed to stun them momentarily. Then I felt a boot connect with the left side of my lower torso and, as I started to fall to the ground again, another boot drove into my skull, effectively knocking me unconscious.

  When I came to, my assailants had vanished into the night, leaving me spreadeagled like a piece of human debris in the drizzling rain. For a while I didn’t have the strength to pick myself up off the ground. But at the same time I could feel my blood seeping into the mud around me and I knew that if I didn’t get back on my feet there and then I’d never ever be getting up again.

  I managed to negotiate the several streets needed in order to collapse in a nearby drug house of recent acquaintance. A junkie girl living there bathed my wounds with a damp cloth whilst her boyfriend fed me with lashings of Valium, pain pills and reefer. An hour later, I was blissfully high and laughing out loud at some inane spectacle playing itself out on the tiny black-and-white TV they had in their room. A very, very bad thing had just befallen me but I’d not been left traumatised by its occurrence. This moment would stay with me because it was the moment I realised that whatever vile circumstances fate might still have in store for me, I’d somehow find a way to survive them all. Over the past two years, I’d been beaten by chains, stabbed with knives and had my very lifeblood drained by drugs and homelessness. All I needed now was to be visited by a plague of locusts and an outbreak of boils and I could have set myself up quite credibly as a seventies fop son of Job figure. But my recent travails had left me stronger in spirit than I’d first imagined. I’d become battle-tested.

  I was just counting the days now until 1977 reached its expiration date. I couldn’t wait to be shot of it. Rastafarians had put forth the theory that the year would be one of mighty, life-altering mystical portent. When the two sevens clashed - so they preached - an apocalypse would be ignited. Either that or some momentous messianic visitation-I was never quite sure which. But of course nothing remotely like that actually came to pass.

  On the white side of the tracks, though, the grim reaper had been hard at work. By year’s end, the obituary lists were overflowing. There was Elvis checking out on the commode and Marc Bolan the fatal victim in the passenger seat of a car that crashed into a tree. ‘Who’s dead this week then?’ Mick Jagger had asked me that summer over lunch in a Soho-based Chinese restaurant. ‘Hard to tell these days innit. Pop stars! They’re dropping like flies. Droppin’ all over the place, mate.’ He was being flippant but the point was still clear. That dark vortex he and his henchmen had helped open up in the Zeitgeist of a dawning decade was now reaching critical mass and getting darker and more omnivorous with every ticking second. Anyone who tells you 1977 was a bright and bountiful year wasn’t really living in the belly of the beast. Those of us who were deserve a medal for simply having stayed the course. Meanwhile, 1978 lay ahead, grinning like a lazy crocodile. Old Blighty was about to get royally pussy-whipped by Mrs T and her political enablers. To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Macbeth - what fresh hell was all this going to set into motion?

  1978-1979

  I’m stringing these last two years into one hold-all chapter because that’s the way I see them now - as one big hazy splurge of time. For me all the seminal seventies stuff occurred in the six-year period between the birth of Ziggy Stardust and the death of the Sex Pistols. What came afterwards was really just a prelude to the eighties.

  1978 and 1979 were most emphatically ‘changing of the guard’ kind of years in Great Britain. Labour were slain by Margaret Thatcher whilst punk choked on its own vomit and new wave became its less menacing pall-bearer. The spivs had trounced the fops midway through the decade but now the spivs were being sidelined by a new breed - the yuppies. Yuppie rock was what tickled the public’s fancy all of a sudden. It had a little of the primal ‘short sharp shock’ dynamism of early punk but buttered things up with more sophisticated chord progressions, real singing and superior musicianship. The people who played it gave cursory lip-service to the so-called punk aesthetic but were generally more interested in upward mobility rather than dead-end-kid authenticity.

  The Police were only one of many bandwagon-jumping outfits to make a big impact during this time frame. The trio was composed of musicians who’d been playing music separately long before 1976. The guitarist had worked with Eric Burdon’s Animals and the Soft Machine in the late sixties, the drummer in a bush-league seventies prog-rock act called Curved Air and the singing bassist in a fusion-jazz combo working out of his native Newcastle. But they’d all managed to stay relatively youthful-looking with the help of a shared bottle of platinum-blond hair dye and were still clued-in enough to comprehend that a big pay day could result from upgrading punk’s root ingredients with steroid-like injections of a higher musical proficiency.

  Their lucky break came when the drummer turned the bassist on to reggae. When punk bands tried their hand at aping the rhythms of Jamaica, it was usually a disaster, but the Police brought something new to the white reggae synthesis by making the ‘on’ beats generally more fluid, supple and rock-friendly. And the singer - nicknamed Sting - had it all: Aryan good looks, an instantly recognisable multi-octave-range voice, an eclectic songwriting talent and a limitless sense of personal ambition.

  I interviewed him in early ’79 in between a couple of his group’s many arduous club tours of America. The money hadn’t started rolling in yet and he was still making ends meet in a dingy basement flat somewhere in London with his then-wife, the actress Frances Tomelty. Upon arriving at their address, it became apparent that all was not well with their relationship. Tomelty only stayed five minutes but made it abundantly clear in those minutes that she was seriously vexed at her husband, who sat forlornly in the living room like a scolded infant. I believe the couple broke up not long after this.

  Sting was at a crossroads in his life anyway. Mega-success was suddenly there within his grasp after years of struggle and dreary straight jobs, and from the way he spoke, I sensed he wasn’t about to miss out on any of its many perks. He reminded me of another Geordie go-getter - Bryan Ferry. There must be something about having once been poor and resident in Tyneside that really stimulates a status-seeking gene in some men. And yet Ferry was an oddity: he craved public adulation whilst feeling noticeably ill at ease whenever bathed in a spotlight. By contrast, Sting was an old-fashioned trouper who took to the spotlight like a swan to a lake. In this sense, he was far more of a Paul McCartney-styled old-school ‘beloved entertainer’ than a thorny new-school ranter like Lydon and Strummer. In fact, you could go so far as to call him the anti-Lydon of the late seventies. One was ugly and - relatively - shiftless, the other was an industrious pretty boy bent on self-improvement and self-empowerment. Charter members of the Bromley contingent all wanted to cho
p off Sting’s peroxide-soaked head and burn his band-mates like witches but the Police’s singles during this period were still a tonic for the times - infectious and upbeat without being air-headed and crass. They helped fill the post-punk void with a certain panache. But these guys certainly weren’t threatening anyone or anything like the punks had. Rock at decade’s end would become a much tamer place to eke a living from.

  All the wind had gone out of the punk movement’s sails in mid-January of 1978, when the Sex Pistols had splintered apart in San Francisco. Lydon had weathered the ensuing media storm by promptly moving into NME’s Manhattan office, which also doubled as the apartment of Joe Stevens, the paper’s photographer and a trusted amigo of the singer. Lydon apparently had no other choice - McLaren had just abandoned him in America with no money for a hotel. The Pistols were dead, punk was dead and Lydon’s career was dead too - at least for the moment.

  It would come alive again later in the year once he’d recruited two old mates of his as well as an eager young drummer. The two mates he chose to provide stringed accompaniment raised many eyebrows in the London community. The bassist - Jah Wobble - was known far and wide throughout the region for his sudden outbursts of violence whilst the guitarist Keith Levene was equally notorious for being an unreliable hard-to-work-with junkie. It’s like Lydon went purposefully looking to replace Sid Vicious in his affections by hiring the only two people he knew who were even more potentially disastrous to form a group with. The Lydon-Levene-Wobble axis managed to record two albums and perform a few iffy concerts but never quite managed to summon up the required get-up-and-go to really promote their cause. From what I’ve read, it seems like Lydon was plagued by an undiagnosed case of chronic ennui after the Pistols split that left him gloomy and withdrawn for the rest of the decade. The music he released during that time certainly seems to bear this out.