You have to hand it to Nick Kent on a couple of levels: first, anyone who can write a memoir that includes folks like David Bowie, Chrissie Hynde, Lou Reed, and Keith Richards and never comes off as a name-dropper must be telling a pretty good story, wouldn’t you say?
Secondly, the fact that Kent – in the process of documenting an unbelievable decade of living – never cuts himself a whole lot of slack nor tries to hide behind excuses for his behavior makes the man even more readable.
And I suppose we should throw a third item in there: that he didn’t die during said decade is nothing short of an absolute miracle. I mean, when Iggy Pop – and we’re talking the 1975 post-Stooges-and-about-to-go-into-the-nervous-hospital version of Iggy – has to slap and shake you out of a heroin overdose, then you’re pretty effed up.
Kent tells enough of his early years (his first exposure to live music was at the age of 12 – the frigging Stones, whose dressing room he ended up in) and his later years (true love and good health was finally found) to map out the journey, but the focus of Apathy For The Devil is the 1970s. During that time, Kent was not only the consummate elegantly-wasted-but-still-making-his-deadlines rock journalist (a star scribe at New Musical Express), but the live-in boyfriend of the aforementioned Ms. Hynde, a guitarist (for a very short time) for the then-incubating Sex Pistols, an occasional junk buddy of the aforementioned Mr. Richards, sometimes homeless, and sometimes unemployed (when he was no longer star scribe at NME).
Let the man speak for himself: “And the worst of it was – I mostly had only myself to blame. Do you want to know what the essential problem with the seventies really was? Too many flaky people. I should know. I ended up one of them.”
Kent’s tale is chock full of the music of the time – from the black-eyelinered days of glam rock to the hock-and-spit beginnings of the punk movement and the juggernaut rock of Led Zeppelin. It would be a good read as a novel – although you’d probably question it constantly: “No way … oh, come on. Who’d be able to do all that and live through it?”
