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Nick Kent's high octane ride through the 1970s - the rock'n'roll, the sex but mainly the drugs - is a cautionary tale but one that provides some potent anecdotes from London to LA and features a stellar cast - Iggy and Bowie, Led Zep and the Pistols. As NME's star scribe of the day, I read him hungrily. Yet this autobiographical romp is more about content than style: the stories are amazing, the writing slightly less so. For fans of the Kent oeuvre, it is the minutiae that is most intriguing: his highly conventional upbringing, his relationship to the other star scribes of the day - Charles Shaar Murray and Mick Farren, for example - and the fact that he was so young - in his early 20s - by the time he'd almost burnt himself out.

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When I first heard Nick Kent was coming out with a new book on the seventies,
I couldn't wait. I'd read The Dark Stuff when it first came out years ago
and this is even more excitng than that. If ever there was a page turner about
the best rock n' punk acts, it is this one!

Even though I knew a lot of his stories from over the years, there are many
fantastic aspects of his time in the period to discover here. I'm just surprised
he didn't come out with it sooner.

I really didn't want this book to end, cos I knew that when it did, there wouldn't
be anything like it to read after! Will give it 95 out of 100, just as it would
have been interesting to have had some photos of his included. Brilliant book.

Customer Rating: 

Anyone familiar with the inky pages of the NME in the 1970s will know Nick Kent as one of the decade's shock troops of music journalism. Frequently embedded - to use the modern term - with bands like the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, hanging out with Bowie and becoming friends with Iggy Pop.

What's clear from this memoir is that Kent's career choice came at considerable personal expense. Becoming a major league substance abuser, lurching between doomed relationships and on several occasions fearing for his life - most notably when being beaten up by Sid Vicious.

What's perhaps surprising is that as a torch bearer for the punk movement, Kent now feels betrayed by it and has no desire to wax nostalgic.

We now tend to take a rather sanitised view of the '70s music industry. For a sometimes uncomfortable look at its seamier side this is well worth a read.

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I was a big fan of Nick Kent through the '70s, and indeed thereafter, when the NME was received as holy writ in weekly instalments. I remember hugely enjoying his previous book, 'The Dark Stuff' - penetrating analyses of the acts and albums which made the late 60s and early 70s seem an unparalleled interlude of musical creativity and personal freedoms. Maybe I was just a lot younger and more naive then - well, I know I was - for the only phrase in my mind since finishing 'Apathy for the Devil' is 'what a wretched book this is'.

Wretched in its content, which concerns Nick himself more than the acts, revealing what was going on behind the typewriter - for the most part a tireless drag from smack den to smack den, occasionally running into and sharing gear with famous faces of the period - Sid and Nancy, Iggy, Keith and, most damagingly for Nick (though she can hardly be blamed) Chrissie Hynde.

So, grim and desperate times, albeit vividly presented, but actually, this is the book's upside. Far harder to take is its equally wretched style. Did Nick Kent always write so badly - in this terrible, lame, listless, half-baked hipsterese? I can't quite believe that he did, or that he could think it would still function in this millenium. It's shockingly dated, at times almost embarassing to read.

So why three stars? I guess these depend on where you're starting from. I recommend somewhere around page 100, leaving out Nick's phoned-in 'David Copperfield crap'. Start with him joining the NME and you may find it bearable. The names and faces are likely to be enough to carry you along, mixed with the compellingly readable ghastliness of the junkie netherworld. It's still appalling, but it undoubtedly exerts a terrible fascination. But better yet, go back to 'The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993', when Nick Kent really was the leading light of his generation, writing with a vim and a venom that put his competition (on this side of the Atlantic at least) to shame...

Customer Rating: 

In the early seventies the only music magazine worth reading was The NME, The irreverent ramblings of its chief scribes Charles Sharr Murray, Ian MacDonald, and especially Nick Kent were what separated it from the other weeklies. You may not have always agreed with everything they wrote, but they were always sure to provoke and inform. I always remember Nick Kent's comments when discussing a new Album by Melanie saying he would rather suffer a series of electric shocks to his genitals than listen to her warbling again! He would write in such an entertaining way that it would make you investigate the music being critiqued which of course is what a good journo should do, Kent always seems to have lived on the edge and sure some his musings were juvenile, some obscure and verbose but he was definitely there in the midst of it all and major articles on Syd Barratt, Nick Drake and Brian Wilson were memorable in that they exposed the darkness at the heart of much of what was great about the music as well as making you want to re- listen to the albums again.

The first shock about this Book is how accessible it is, time seems to have mellowed Kent, this is not a difficult book, and in fact I was surprised as the prosaicness and chattiness of his prose, It's an easy read but an enthralling one, much of this book is informed by the general debauchery and drug fuelled excesses of the period of which Kent was a more than enthusiastic participant at least in the beginning. His journeys with the Stones. Zeppelin, Iggy Pop have an authentic tone and the pieces on the early days of punk are illuminating as he was definitely `there at the birth!

I'm glad to See Steely Dan get a mention or two, surely one of the 70s Bands who never seem to get referenced in the same way as Bowie, Zeppelin, Gaye etc do and it's also good to see the rehabilitation of Rod Stewart as a rock legend, he seems to have almost been airbrushed out of the history of the period but coupled with the Faces was one of the great live acts, and a writer of some merit. The list at the end of the book of seminal 70s Albums/tracks is generally spot as far as this reviewer is concerned.

The epiphany at the end when Kent sort of discovers God is not expected, but not really surprising after the `my drug hell ` tone of much of the book. Definitely recommended to those who lived through the period and used to enjoy the NME and those who want to get a flavour of what it was like at a time when music seemed genuinely exhilarating and groundbreaking