![]() No, it was miserable – no one wants to get a bike chain wrapped around their skull. It was like that line in Bowie’s Queen Bitch: ‘I can do better than that.’ If Iggy Pop had been there at the Roxy or the 100 Club, or Keith Richards or Mick Jagger, someone would have tried to beat them up, too, because they wanted their name in the gossip columns.ĭo you relish the fact that at least rock had ‘edge’ back then? It was more than just a heritage industry… And I didn’t want that level of, ‘I’m gonna get the police on you.’ But the Londonbased punk scene was like that. When someone you don’t know suddenly hits you with a bike chain bought for you by your exgirlfriend (Chrissie Hynde) – though I’m not saying she bought it just so he could do that with it – I mean, well, talk about karma… I was impaled on the zeitgeist! When Sid Vicious beat me up – that incident was pretty gruesome. Did it feel like you were plugged into the zeitgeist? You hung around with Iggy Pop and the Stones, championed Bowie and Roxy Music, and you were in an early incarnation of Sex Pistols. I thought, ‘That Fellini movie in my head is now real!’ I was at this party for Roy Rogers, the movie cowboy, at his home where his horse Trigger was stuffed, and all these photographers, thought I was one of The Faces because of the way I looked, pushed me together with Roy, his wife Dale and Barry White, of all people, with the stuffed horse behind us, and they started snapping. I never thought I was as big as any rock star but the moment when I thought, ‘This is the big time,’ was in ’75 in America. You were, along with Charles Shaar Murray, the first example from these shores of the rock writer as star – you even signed autographs at gigs. “I’m not an iconic figure,” he decides, gesticulating wildly from behind a plume of smoke. Three decades on, he’s a hero to many, though Kent is less convinced. Cocaine and heroin hastened his demise: he recalls being “so poverty-stricken” he couldn’t afford a tape recorder. I made myself ill, sure…”Īt his early 70s peak, he was churning out definitive articles, thousands of words long, on the likes of Syd Barrett, Nick Drake and Brian Wilson. “Actually, going through drug withdrawals is very uncomfortable but it’s not technically ‘dying’. “I only nearly died once, when I overdosed with Iggy Pop,” corrects Kent. It was a 10-year period that saw Kent’s decline from golden boy to pariah, as well as numerous near-death experiences, either from drugs or at the hands of punk thugs Sid Vicious and Jah Wobble. The latter has yet to read his latest book, Apathy For The Devil, subtitled A 1970s Memoir – basically, the account of his rise, fall, and rise again, with the inevitable focus on the titular decade. These days, Kent lives in Paris with his wife and 17-year-old son. You won’t see me on that programme Grumpy Old Men. “I can’t complain,” he says, still tall, wiry and effusive at 58. Today, following the success of his 1994 collection, The Dark Stuff, and his 2002 award for Godlike Genius, ironically given to him by the NME, Kent’s standing as rock’s greatest ever storyteller has never been higher. I had never, up till then, heard the phrase “the killing floor”, which Kent used to describe his fate, a sad, lonely, pitiful junkie, ignored by his writer peers, who, he said, “wouldn’t even get their dicks out to piss on me.” When I first interviewed him, back in 1992, for an article for the defunct Rock CD about great British music journalists (I also spoke to his NME oppo Charles Shaar Murray, Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons and Paul Morley), he talked candidly and vividly about being effectively squeezed out of the NME in the late 70s after almost singlehandedly rescuing it from likely closure at the turn of the decade and transforming it into the bible of the UK counterculture with over a quarter of a million readers. Kent’s fortunes have improved somewhat in recent years. Not that Kent cares over-much about the rule, so he sparks up anyway. Trouble is, we’re indoors and there has been, since 2007, a nationwide ban on smoking in shops, pubs, and offices. When I reply in the negative, he goes for option two: a cigarette, given to him by a Faber employee. The first thing Nick Kent, ex-NME journalist, author of The Dark Stuff, and a flamboyant, notorious character in the annals of British rock, asks when we meet at the London headquarters of his publishers Faber & Faber is whether I have any spliff.
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