Writing Rock's glory days

As a writer for music paper NME in the 1970s, Nick Kent toured, and partied, with the biggest bands. He writes about the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll in his autobiography

NICK KENT belongs to a species of the Fourth Estate that is fast becoming extinct. A music writer, he’s living through the last gasp of music writing and criticism, or at least that’s how he sees it.

"I was writing a weekly column in the French newspaper, Liberation," says Kent, a phlegmatic, charming man of lugubrious wit, who is approaching his 60th year, "where I wrote about that week's new music. I did it up until the summer of 2007, and frankly by the time I finished I'd become depressed about the music I was listening to. Every now and then something would come along, but generally speaking I was pretty underwhelmed by what I was hearing. When I was writing in the 1970s about music, at least there was a scene; bands were releasing one album per year, pretty much. Nowadays, you can count on the fingers of two hands the worthwhile things that are happening in new music, so there is a far narrower range of topics to address. For me the golden era is from the start of Elvis Presley to the end of the 1970s. There is still good music coming out, but in terms of writing about it and viewing it as a scene unto itself, well, it's kind of over, really, isn't it?"

Kent is plugging his new memoir, Apathy for the Devil, a typically sharp warts'n'all autobiography that covers his halcyon days as a rock journalist for NME(then one of the best selling music papers in the world), his times with Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop, the Sex Pistols and others, his conflict with his former NMEcolleagues (when a once-healthy competitive edge turned to fear and loathing), his love life (he loved and lost a pre-Pretenders Chrissie Hynde) and his hard drug abuse (he floundered for more years than he cares to recall).

It’s a ripping yarn, with elements of narcissism, astute rock commentary,and self-aggrandisement (he kick-started punk rock, apparently), some notable sarcastic asides about various people (including cultural prankster Paul Morley: “Britain’s most pretentious man”) and a rather caustic overview of the 1970s (“kindness and basic human dignity were mighty thin on the ground”).

But the book is also about a radically changed music industry and the music writer’s role within it. Kent staunchly maintains that he was more than a music critic. This is a justifiable position, considering that the industry in the 1970s was still unguarded enough to allow journalists to hang out with bands for days on end.

Yes, Kent argues, the music had to be placed in its context, “but if you go on the road with Led Zeppelin or embed yourself with the Sex Pistols for a period of time, you’re not just going to write about the music, are you? There’s a bigger picture that needs to be painted. The music criticism side could be captured in several sentences. I was more interested in the rhythm of these people’s lives and what their lifestyle was doing with them – the actual consequences of suddenly having skyrocket success. Or even just of being on the road.”

Such Triple A (Access All Areas) privileges have long since disappeared for all but the most advantageously placed music writer or publication. These days, Kent vacillates between nostalgia and pragmatism. “There are certain music eras I prefer over others,” he says. “For most people, the music that affected them during the teenage years resonates with them into all areas of adulthood. The pop music of the 1960s is the music that I probably feel most warm towards: ­ beat groups, Tamla Motown, the Byrds, the Rolling Stones, Burt Bacharach, Phil Spector, the Beach Boys — all that kind of stuff. While I can hear that it’s not as great as I thought it was, at the same time it reminds me of a more naive time in my life, when I was forming my personality. That’s what I have a creeping nostalgia for in my personal life.

“The main business in music writing these days, at least in England and possibly in America, is to write about the past. The magazines in this day and age seem to be more interested in writing about The Beatles than anything new. It’s a retrospective medium now, and I don’t particularly feel the need to become involved in that. I don’t want to repeat the past for the kids, you know what I mean?” He doesn’t want to sound like a gnarly old music fan trotting out the line about how things were so much better in his day. “That’s not going to do anyone any good, least of all the person saying it, because it marks them down as an old fart. It’s easy to get jaded about music. It can easily happen if you’re being bombarded with music all the time. I just had to step back from it for a while.” This he did, albeit with the yoke of heroin addiction around his scrawny neck. “People don’t take drugs for just one reason; there were various reasons for me, but the main one was just to get high. I wanted that. When I started taking heroin it was the one drug that really worked for me. It was stupid, very stupid indeed, and I was very lucky. It took me 14 years to get rid of my addiction, but I was lucky in that the experience didn’t break me, it didn’t damage me that much.

“A lot of people I’ve known that have become drug casualties to a certain extent allowed themselves to become victims. It’s not their fault that they became drug addicts? That’s rubbish. Unless you were tied down and forced into taking them, then it’s your choice.

“If it’s your choice then you have to deal with the consequences, and that’s how I always viewed it. I don’t know what might have happened if I’d not got into hard drugs.

"I could have continued, of course, being a success in journalism. Maybe I'd have ended up as the wine correspondent for the Daily Telegraph."

Perhaps, inevitably, Apathy for the Devilends on a redemptive note: Kent successfully weans himself off drugs, gets healthier, finds love, moves to Paris and starts a family. His writings continue to appear in the British and French media, he moves into television as a director, and he embarks on a career as a novelist (the fruits of which will be published next year).

“How the person redeems themselves is up to their circumstances, really, isn’t it? I don’t know if it’s available to everyone ­ maybe it depends on how immoral you’ve been in the past. The difference between me and most other people who have been through that drug process and written about it, is that I see drug addiction and alcoholism as a weakness and not as a disease. I see it as something that a human being has to rise above.” All he wants to do from now on, he says, is write books. “I still want to be challenged. I don’t want to be just hacking it out. I have a style and approach to writing that is mine, and I want to develop that further.

“Besides, in my opinion it’s not a good time to be a music writer. I mean, what on earth would I write about?”

Apathy for the Devilis published by Faber Faber, £12.99