I read this nasty book with an unusual degree of interest. I found it to have a kind of feverish effect. By the end of each chapter I experienced an exhausted, depressed feeling, coupled with a desire to relisten to the music of the subject/artist.
Such, I suppose, is the strange relationship between the repulsive and attractive poles of human beings. I love you, I hate you, you disappoint me, you elevate me.
It needs to be mentioned that Mr Kent has a side to his history as sordid and generally unsavory and sometimes downright hilarious as anyone described in this book.
An unlikely, ungainly figure, well over six feet tall, unsteadily negotiating the sidewalks of London and LA like a great palsied mantis, dressed in the same tattered black-leather and velvet guitar-slinger garb regardless of season or the passing of time, hospital-thin, with a perpetually dripping bright red nose caused by an equally perpetual drug shortage, all brought to life by a wrist-waving, head-flung-back Keith Richards effect, and an abiding interest in all dirt. That’s Nick Kent for you in the seventies and eighties. In short, a true rock’n’roller: someone who cared.
Which brings us to the end. It’s hard to care anymore. The ‘music industry’ is fat and satisfied. They can buy anything, and turn anyone into a spiritual eunuch. That means no balls.
Yet, reading this creepy book, I wanted to hear the music again. I was interested. As for ‘today’s music industry’ and its bed-mate ‘music journalism’, I just don’t care anymore. How could I?
Iggy Pop, November 1993.