My girlfriend called Nick Kent ‘The Giraffe’ because of his height – he always seemed to be standing in front of us at gigs – and due to his strange dancing style. With hands in pockets, he did this quirky bobbing backwards and forwards move, which involved quite a lot of violent action from his upper body, whilst his legs remained motionless.
On reflection, and with the benefit of thirty five years of hindsight, I acknowledge that giraffes may not have pockets, and possibly don’t dance whilst bobbing back and forth, but this was the 1970s and the lifestyles of our giraffe brothers were less well documented.
Nick Kent was a significant figure in music writing in the 70s. Working for the New Musical Express, he paved the way for a new, influential style of composition. Often spending several days, or weeks, with his subject, Kent was less deferential than his predecessors, relying less on journalistic skills, and the use of press releases, and allowing the reader a deeper understanding of what it was really like to be on tour with The Stones or David Bowie. Often his pieces ran to several thousand words, and would be featured over the centre of the paper, accompanied by the striking photography of Pennie Smith.
Sometimes it was difficult to link the Nick Kent producing these essays, with the 6’ 3” stick like figure that roamed London looking to score drugs from whatever source he could find. At the time, in person, he seemed remote, detached and a little ‘holier than thou’; although in a different mental time zone, location and planet.
This is noteworthy in the context the denouement of Nick Kent’s ‘Apathy For The Devil’, his recently published memoir of the 1970s.
I didn’t know Nick well at all. It turns out that nobody did really.
I feel I should place a caveat here and acknowledge that it is dancing across a metaphorical minefield to pick up, or even comment, on another writer’s style. It takes the door of criticism off its hinges and sets one up for a hefty batch of responses that will point out your own scribbling shortcomings, and the potential for egg on face is as great as that when participating in the traditional ‘Throwing Egg At Your Face’ competitions held throughout the land on high holidays.
Yet, and, as they say, however...
‘Apathy For The Devil’ is for 360 of its 371 pages, a distinctly disappointing read. The unusual word ‘zeitgeist’ is used 7 times in those 371 pages (to save mathematicians the trouble, that’s a wince inducing once every 53 pages), which indicates that the book was not written contemporaneously, but drafted in segments, and thus this eye-watering over-indulgence with our zeitgeist friend was forgotten as each new section was added. It is a further clue to the almost certain absence of editing, which for a publisher with the solid reputation of Faber & Faber, is odd.
I note this with something of a heavy and regretful heart, as I don’t remember Nick’s NME prose being as throwaway as this.
Throughout the book, noun modifying adjectives are deployed in lurching train wreck phrases. Lou Reed is the ‘Velvet Underground songsmith’; Nico is described as the ‘German born former chanteuse of the Velvet Underground’ and his hero Bob Dylan, ‘the wiry little troubadour with the sage brush facial hair’.
Verbs are adorned with conjoined twin adverbs; a sound is ‘deeply infectious’; an album is ‘hotly anticipated’.
When seeking to avoid using a noun too often, and like a drowning man reaching for a lifebelt of alternatives, in an ocean of thesauri, Kent grabs the first potential substitute, and gratefully throws it onboard. Thus, England is ‘Limey-land’; Detroit? Yes, the ‘Motor City’; Los Angeles, ‘the City of Angels’.
There is, I suppose, no statutory prison sentence for ending so many sentences with a preposition, but Nick an art form turns it into.
OK, now I hear you yelling, “But what’s actually in this book by the beret wearing, mega-thin beanpole?”
There is a spirited honesty sprinkled like discarded white powder throughout. Nick acknowledges that he threw it all away due to his heroin addiction (there are twenty references to his drug use in the index). He reached that meltdown point of addiction where (literally) nothing else matters. Partner, job, home, self respect – all become secondary, and eventually all leave him adrift, as the pursuit of heroin becomes the only occupation of each day. Perhaps because of this, and his own extremely close encounters with expiration, he writes well on the background to the early deaths of Nick Drake and Ian Curtis.
In amongst some of the sillier name calling and bitterness, there is a very honest appraisal of his decline, and how he threw away so many chances that came his way. He acknowledges, readily, that his writing and commitment drained away, along with his money, belongings, relationships, home, self-esteem, everything.
There are anecdotes and stories of his time hanging out with The Stooges (he still places Iggy Pop way too high in the rock canon of influence), Led Zeppelin and David Bowie.
Kent’s encounters with the rock royalty of the day are nearly all written about in the context of his reliance on class A drugs, and consequently are related as within a haze. For example, Nick takes drugs with Keith Richards, and then writes about it for the NME whilst pursuing more drugs.
There is an overwhelming fog of paranoia about Kent at this time. It is possible he over-rates his standing or importance in this era, as he writes about his life being under threat due to his appearance, or because of words printed in the New Musical Express. Not often have the accused stood in the dock at the Old Bailey charged with murder after reacting to an unfavourable album review.
There is a quirky encounter with Bob Marley (worth bearing in mind the ‘dreadlocked bedecked Rastafarian songster’ was a good foot shorter than Kent) in a toilet at Island Records. Marley had “a cut throat grin on his face”, and is dismissed as an “ambitious little man slouching arrogantly around the planet.”
In 1973, he’s tipped off that the (wait for this) Bee Gees are going to beat him up after an unflattering review, and at a later brief encounter, he troubles himself that a Gibb may turn on him. Unsurprisingly, Robin and his brothers had no such intentions and so Nick claims himself “the victor by default”.
The fogginess that envelopes Kent’s memories place him at the forefront of the birth of punk. Whilst undoubtedly ‘around’ at the time that Malcolm McLaren, Bernard Rhodes and the Sex Pistols stumbled onto their winning format, I don’t recall Nick being quite the influential figure he considers himself to have been.
However, it was at this stage that he met Chrissie Hynde, and herein lies the biggest clue to Nick’s troubles.
There is a surprising twist at the end of ‘Apathy For The Devil’. Having scrambled our way through the misty memories of scoring drugs and overinflated dreams of influence, we find eleven pages of ‘aftermath’.
These eleven pages place everything written before in their context.
Nick has a spiritual encounter, he finds a partner who rescues him (and due to her well paid work in television he is able to become a John Lennon style house husband), and most crucially, he makes a sort of peace with Chrissie Hynde.
This latter relationship is the most prominent example of what was almost certainly troubling Nick through all those years. He wasn’t being aloof, remote and detached. He was (perhaps we all are) searching to give and receive love, and he didn’t know how to go about it.
He has a mantra now; “I’ve got a beautiful son. I’ve got a beautiful wife. I’ve got a beautiful life.”
In 2010, Nick Kent is a soldier of love.
Terence Dackombe, June 2010
