When I first started writing professionally, right at the end of 1971—I was nineteen going on twenty—it was as if the whole London scene I’d inherited was still in the last sorry stages of denial that the ’60s had really ended. I began penning stuff for a self-styled “underground” journal called Frendz—I just walked in off the rainy Portobello Old Street and offered my services. To my eternal gratitude, the young man seated on a beanbag with what appeared to be herpes sores on his upper lip told me I could join up there and then. The place turned out to be a breeding ground for ’60s dreamers who couldn’t wake up to the fact that the dream really was dead—to the point that it was starting to kill them one by one. One guy—who was like the journal’s pet mascot—fell from a section of drainage suspended along the third floor of the paper’s offices one night while his judgment was impaired from too many tranquilizers. I met Syd Barrett there too. Less than five years earlier, Fd stood transfixed, watching him in all his retina-scorching, dandified splendor as he’d performed with his group the Pink Floyd, silently praying that one day I might be just like him. Now, as he stood before me with his haunted eyes and fractured countenance, I was having second thoughts. I asked him about his current musical project (a short-lived trio called Stars, briefly managed by Frendz’s accountant) as his eyes quietly burned a hole through one of the four walls surrounding us with a stare so ominous it could strip the paint off the bonnet of a brand new car. “I had eggs and bacon for breakfast,” he then intoned solemnly, as if reciting a distantly remembered mantra. I repeated my original question quizzically. “I’m sorry! I don’t speak French,” he finally replied.
That encounter helped crystallize in my mind the fixations I’d return to over and over throughout my decades of writing about musicians. As a teenager—moving around the country at the behest of my father’s work locations, feeling shy and awkward and experiencing few solid friendships along the way—I developed fantasy relationships with my favorite rock and pop stars of the time. I’d read all the fan magazines and music comics of the day and came to cherish the most mundane details about my faves, crap that I still remember for God’s sake even now, though I’ve forgotten most of the names and details of that era’s day-to-day realities. I used to imagine their lives were perfect in every way. Then I rubbed up against the likes of Syd Barrett and realized that these were people who’d gotten what they wanted, only to find out that it was the last thing on earth they actually needed (adulation, creative lift-off) to maintain their own mental equilibrium. This meant something. I quickly realized these were the stories that needed to be addressed.
I was aided considerably in focusing on this often disturbing area of pop life by meeting the late rock writer Lester Bangs in early 1973. By that time I’d managed to get myself booted out of two of the world’s most upstanding universities (Oxford and London) in slightly less than a year, a fact I’m still immaturely proud of. The English music weekly New Musical Express had offered me work during the early summer of 1972 and I was having a fantastic time interviewing everyone from Little Richard to Led Zeppelin, but I also knew in my heart that what I was writing wasn’t good enough yet, that I was too young and inexperienced and needed to get better very quickly. So I made enough money to fly off to Detroit where Creem magazine, the best rock mag in the world at the time, was located. The night I got in, I took a taxi to the address in Birmingham, Michigan I’d been given. Fuck, I didn’t even phone in advance, that’s how on fire I was. It was after midnight when Creem’s resident “star” writers, Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, and Ben Edmonds, let me in. I didn’t make things easy for myself by taking two Quaaludes beforehand, so it’s no small credit to the warmth of his enormous heart that when I mush-mouthedly asked Lester if, as the greatest writer of his day, he could, if not teach me, then at least indicate to me how to achieve some vague approximation of his creative intensity, he good-naturedly replied, “Sure.” For the following two months, I’d follow him around, but—most importantly—I listened intently to everything he had to say. With Lester, it was all about penetration, breaking on through to the other side. He was always questioning everything: “So you like this music? Why? What do you mean, it’s got a nice middle-eight and the cow-bell sounds cute on the finale? That’s not good enough. What are these guys really trying to sell us here? What does this music say to your soul? Do these guys sound like they even have souls to you? What’s really going on here? What’s going on behind the masks?” The whole concept of punk rock was his too, even if Marsh actually came up with the phrase. The other thing he insisted upon was that in rock’n’roll it wasn’t the winners but the losers who made for the most compelling stories. I soaked up everything he shared with me and returned to London in the spring of 1973 ready for practically anything fate could throw at me.
By this time, the NME was in the throes of a creative and commercial renaissance of its own. Back in the ’50s it had been a respectful, cheery, reactionary pop sheet, featuring lots of “exclusive chats” with Perry Como, much speculating on whether Glenn Miller and his unfortunate band were still alive, and inane editorials about whether or not Elvis Presley’s “wild” gyrations were harmful to youth.
This approach carried into the ’60s when the NME latched onto the beat boom while its chief competitor Melody Maker ill-advisedly preferred to concentrate on the dreary old traditional jazz craze still holding sway throughout Great Britain. Instead of Perry Como, now there was Tom Jones or maybe Englebert Humperdinck, always talking exclusively about his new record, his new stage clothes, his new car. There’d be exclusive chat sessions with the Beatles, most of them in fact written by the group’s publicists. The few staff writers they had back then seemed a funny lot in that they tended to judge a group’s general worth not on the quality of their music but by the number of drinks members would stand for them in any given swinging London club.
The NME sold close to a quarter million copies a week during most of the ’60s. However, this was not to last. Progressive rock was on the rise and suddenly young music-loving people everywhere wanted to read endless interviews with ego-besotted guitarists staring intently at the hash burns in their loon pants and talking a load of bollocks about “cosmic harmony” and “musical oneness.” Melody Maker, who’d been such dummies for sticking with their tired old “trad” jazz bores while the Beatles and Stones were first happening, were determined not to lose out again. Suddenly you could read interviews—with the likes of Alvin Lee, Leslie West, and even that idiot who shot himself from the group Chicago—that went on even longer than their guitar solos. The NME simply couldn’t tackle this sort of stuff effectively—particularly when they printed reviews such as the one for the first Pink Floyd album where the group’s bass player was referred to as Muddy, instead of Roger, Waters.
Finally at the outset of 1972, after sales had plummeted to 60,000 and a review of guitar instrumentalist Duane Eddy had been printed which began with the immortal words “On this, his 35th album, we find Duane in as good voice as ever,” the NME had been told to rethink its policies or die on the vine. The former was successfully attempted mostly at the instigation of assistant editor Nick Logan (he’d joined the paper at seventeen back in 1967 as cub reporter), who picked a number of young writers who’d been published only in England’s self-styled “underground” magazines like Oz, International Times, and Frendz. That’s where he found me, anyway, along with a rotund frizzy-haired fellow who looked just like Rob Tyner of the MC5 named Charles Shaar Murray, and an owl-faced Cambridge graduate named Ian McDonald. Together we managed to double sales figures over a period of six months, trebling them by the beginning of 1973. The cozy superficial approach of former times was left in the dust. Writers were instead encouraged to speak out, criticize, make some noise—just don’t be boring.
For a while there, it just kept getting bigger and bigger until, by 1974, we were the ones with the edge over everyone else in the radical-international-youth-mag sweepstakes. Creem had taken the torch from Rolling Stone as the essential rock read at the beginning of the 70s and it was still doing great work. But the NME had the power to tap into Creem’s best writers while cultivating their own champions. Julie Burchill, Chrissie Hynde, and Bob Geldof all got their start working for the paper during this time. Lester Bangs quickly became a considerable presence. Even the letters pages regularly harbored the names of future icons such as Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant and one “Steve” Morrissey, an obsessive New York Dolls fan later to front the Smiths.
As for me, well, I was right there in the thick of it all, propelled by an ultimately disastrous mixture of almost obscene arrogance and reckless intensity. Hard drugs were playing an increasingly important part in my day-to-day existence and people who knew me then often indicate the period of my working with the Rolling Stones in late 73 as the point at which I started to “go wrong.” They will insinuate that the group somehow corrupted me. This is bullshit. Some men are born with an overwhelming desire to don women’s clothing; my destiny impelled me just as irresistibly to use heroin and cocaine. Not a good idea. I was well and truly strung out by 1975, and it practically ruined my talent as a writer.
That’s when I worked with the Sex Pistols, by the way. Maybe you’ll wonder—like several journalists interviewing me last year did—why I’ve kept from documenting my own experiences with the band in a special chapter. Fuck it, they were all absolute bastards. What else do you need to know? At first, they’d been known as the Swankers and had played old Small Faces songs alongside such un-punk and insipid old ’60s pop numbers as “Build Me Up Buttercup” and “Everlasting Love.” I changed all that and got them into the Stooges and Modern Lovers. The leader was eighteen-year-old Steve Jones, a remarkable young cat burglar and all-purpose criminal. Steve lived at home with his mum and her fancy man—a retired boxer—but now, after years of being beaten up as a kid by this ersatz stepfather, Steve could beat him up, which he did often. Also—and this was one of the reasons he was so obsessive about his thieving—he prided himself on having all the good gear in the house stashed in his room. He had a big color telly in his bedroom while his mum and her prick boyfriend made do with a little portable black-and-white monstrosity. Another thing about Steve: He could neither read nor write. I’m telling you this so you’ll understand where the real essence of the Sex Pistols stemmed from. It didn’t stem from Malcolm McLaren’s crackpot art-college concepts. At heart, it was really the sound of Steve Jones finally expressing himself, annihilating his horrible stepdad with guitar riffs that struck home like pummeling fists to a winded gut.
John Lydon was the other key ingredient, of course. Far more so than poor old Sid. There’s a chapter on Sid in this book that will endear few to his memory, and with hindsight, I’m almost willing to voice a tinge of regret over the extreme terms in which I’ve portrayed him. But by the same token, he went to those extremes and died because of them. He had his charm, though. Sid’s problems—in my view—boiled down to his mother’s life style and the fact that she’d been an intravenous drug user during his pre-natal period. He wasn’t retarded exactly, but he wasn’t all there mentally, and drugs made him even more stupid. Everyone recognized that Sid was too stupid to live too long. McLaren exploited it for better or worse, just as he was the one who coaxed Sid into attacking me with a rusty old bike chain while the future “Jah” Wobble held a knife three inches from my face. People talk to me about the liberating force of ’76-’77 UK punk rock sometimes and I feel like I’ve been living on another planet. After the aforementioned knife-chain-Sid incident I became an ongoing victim of mindless punk brutality throughout 1977.1 was stabbed repeatedly one night in an open field close by London’s King Cross by four youths clearly overwhelmed by the liberating force of punk rock and their ardent desire to ape anything Sid did. Another time I was attacked in the toilets of the fabled Roxy by a guy with a knife. Fortunately, that time no real physical harm was done, but I can still distinctly remember staggering out of that privy with a great gash in my coat sleeve, wondering to myself: Did Dave Marsh ever get to experience this kind of shit from associating with Bruce Springsteen? Did Greil Marcus get to find himself in such life-or-death situations when out reviewing Randy Newman?
By the end of the ’70s, sad to say, the NME had lost most of its creative momentum. It was never the same after Nick Logan left as editor. It was lucky for me that Nick went on to found and edit The Face, a youth-oriented monthly. During the ’80s he encouraged me to write again, and among the results are several pieces included herein. In 1988 I finally managed to turn my back on drug addiction for good, moved to Paris, and began working for television while still writing for an array of magazines and daily journals. Penguin Books in England wanted me to compile a “best of” all my published articles, a concept that appealed to me until I actually began reading through my old features. So much of what I’d written grated on me now: the over-abundant stylistic flourishes, the endless unwieldy sentences, the over-emphasis on now redundant “hip” jargon. And yet—lurking beneath the stylistic debris—I still recognized the fact that compelling stories were being told.
Through an arduous process of editing and rewriting I finally arrived at the contents of this book. On its most basic level, The Dark Stuff is nineteen profiles of musicians about whom I’ve been asked the question “What’s he really like?” over and over again. This is my way of answering them as elaborately as I can. But there’s something more going on in this book. Some people will tell you The Dark Stuff is all about rock stars taking too many drugs. They’re wrong. It’s all about character—more specifically, the breed of person who gets marked out to play the big, bad, mad, and dangerous-to-know “rock’n’roll star” in his day-to-day life. It’s partly about the childhood experiences that formed these stars, but it’s also about the terrible triumvirate of ego, drug abuse, and self-absorption that preys so relentlessly on the creative mind. Time and again, you’ll find gifted individuals tormenting themselves with the question “Am I really good at what I do or am I just lucky?” The Dark Stuff starts with a portrayal of encroaching madness and segues through some truly hellish scenarios before finding a sort of redemptive force in the final tales of those who’ve spent a few seasons in hell themselves but who’ve survived with some real wisdom to offer the world. I conceived it as a warts-and-all celebration of the driving essence that is rock’n’roll. I only hope it moves you in all the right ways.
Nick Kent, April 1995