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Review: Nick Kent - “Apathy For The Devil”

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I was quite surprised with Kent's simple style of writing. At first, judging the book by its cover, it's true, it seemed like a simple rock 'n' roll take, but not so. At least not for the first half of the book anyway.

Kent tells of his life as a child, a teenager and getting smitten with hormones, non-moans and the likes. Gripes. Loves. His first tastes of music. The Beatles. The Rolling Stones. Getting aurally smacked by Led Zeppelin, seeing them in concert, getting backstage due to a mate.

School, moving away from home, starting out with writing about music and then, as the 1970s and Kent's youth really gets going, so does his writing. As stated, it's simple yet nothing's lost by that; it's a bit like Morrissey's lyrics; even though they're simple there is a lot behind it (even though this is actually short-changing Moz).

As Kent moves into writing for NME and getting his paws dirty in private with the likes of Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones plus getting his lingual traits in order, he meets with Lester Bangs and the Creem unit while visiting the USA for the first time. He also contracts STDs and starts doing heavy drugs.

A lot of the writing is about the waves of music during the 1970s; from the folk to the rock to the punk and into his heavy drug-use which inevitably turned him into a pathetic, homeless junkie.

Most of this book is very entertaining, interesting and funny; Kent jabs at himself with swagger as he should; the man is actually the reason why "Metallic KO" came into existing in the first place, and if that wasn't enough he actually was there during a lot of what happened; Iggy's getting into David Bowie, talking with Lester Bangs about interviewing Lou Reed, sticking around the making of "Exile On Main St".

Even though Kent does a good job at staying humble throughout most of the book, there is a bit of grumpy old man in here which doesn't suit the general taste of the book, and reminds me of how he's portrayed - and of how he portrays himself - in Julien Temple's "The Filth And The Fury": a belligerent, pompous person who tries to be somebody he's not. On the other hand: who's not, at some times?

All in all: a lot better than a bunch of autobiographies on music, but quite the way away from the poetic, autobiographic side of books, e.g. Patti Smith's radiant "Just Kids".

Get this and you won't be disappointed. A little quote from one of the funny celebrity-riddled passages of the book:

In her autobiography Backstage Passes his then-wife Angie recalls receiving a barely coherent phone call from her husband that must have taken place shortly after the Iggy session: “˜He was in a house somewhere in LA and three people ““ a Warlock and two witches ““ were holding him for some horrible Satan-related reason. He wanted to get away“¦but the witches wouldn't let him leave.' Flying over from London to help calm her spouse's paranoid fantasies, she ended up consulting a white witch her self about the best way to exorcise demonic spirits from their temporary LA homestead. The real problem, she strongly implied in her text, was that these spirits were nothing more than hallucinations visited upon Bowie due to his grave overdependence on cocaine and a general lack of food and sleep.

I've gone and created a few Spotify playlists of Nick Kent's "Soundtrack For The Seventies", from what's available at Spotify; from this I must tip you especially of "The Kiss" by Judee Sill, which could very well be one of the greatest tracks I've ever heard; it's off "1973":

1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978-1979

Kent himself talks about what he thinks his book is about: