Apathy for the Devil: A Seventies Memoir

Nick Kent was never meant to survive the 1970s. He was a walking chemical spill masquerading as a journalist, a spectacularly damaged young man who crashed into the heart of London's music press just as the hippie dream was turning necrotic. You look at the photographs from that era, the sunken cheeks and the leather trousers hanging off a frame so emaciated it looked like a stiff breeze could shatter his pelvis, and you wonder how he managed to type a single sentence. Kent did more than type. He bled onto the pages of the New Musical Express. His words were a physical assault.

London in the mid-1970s was a damp, miserable toilet. The post-war economic boom had choked to death, leaving behind rolling blackouts, rotting garbage in the streets, and a generation of teenagers who had precisely nothing to look forward to. The music press before Kent, Charles Shaar Murray, and Ian MacDonald arrived was a sterile wasteland of PR fluff. Teen magazines masquerading as serious critical publications. Kent changed the rules. He despised the sanitized pop coverage that treated musicians like pristine deities descending from Olympus. He wanted the dirt. He craved the filth. He lived for the absolute worst impulses of the human spirit disguised as rock and roll.

Growing up as a somewhat virginal, middle-class teenager, Kent possessed an obsessive, almost pathological devotion to the electric guitar and the doomed romanticism of rock music. He didn't just want to listen to Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. He wanted to inhabit their skin. This dangerous level of empathy made him an unparalleled critic, a writer who could dissect a record with surgical precision while simultaneously vomiting in the studio bathroom. His prose was venomous. It crackled with a vicious, amphetamine-fueled energy that made reading a record review feel like witnessing a street fight. The first five interviews he ever conducted were with the MC5, Captain Beefheart, the Grateful Dead, the Stooges, and Lou Reed. That is not a resume. That is a suicide note.

The Morality Play of the Damned

When he published Apathy for the Devil: A Seventies Memoir in 2010, the music world braced itself for a sanitized victory lap. Memoirs by aging rock critics usually reek of self-congratulation. Kent gave us a horror story instead. The book strips away the glamorous mythology of the 1970s rock scene, exposing a decade built on predatory management, chronic substance abuse, and a terrifying lack of basic human decency. He was right in the middle of the carnage. He dated Chrissie Hynde before she formed the Pretenders, a volatile relationship that ended in heartbreak and mutual self-destruction. He hung out with the Rolling Stones during their most decadent, morally bankrupt period.

Music criticism at the NME was an ideological warzone. Writers routinely sabotaged each other, driven by colossal egos and a desperate need to be the smartest person in the room. Kent thrived in this toxic environment until the toxicity inevitably poisoned him. He became the story. His descent into heroin addiction wasn't a tragic accident. It was a calculated occupational hazard. He pushed his body to the absolute limit in pursuit of the ultimate rock and roll truth, only to discover that the truth usually involves staring at a dirty ceiling while sweating through withdrawal.

The legendary incident at the 100 Club in June 1976 perfectly encapsulates his precarious position. There he was, the hotshot NME scribe, standing in the crowd watching the Sex Pistols. He had actually played guitar in an early, chaotic iteration of the band before being unceremoniously dumped. Enter Sid Vicious. High on speed and desperate to prove his punk credentials, Vicious swung a bicycle chain at Kent’s head. Blood everywhere. A fractured skull. Vicious wasn't even in the band yet; he was just a violent hanger-on trying to impress Malcolm McLaren. No police were called. No charges were pressed. You simply wiped the blood out of your eyes and went back to the bar. That was the reality of the scene.

A Masterclass in Cynicism

Reading Apathy for the Devil feels like scraping your face against a brick wall. It hurts. Kent refuses to spare anyone, least of all himself, painting a grotesque portrait of an industry entirely decoupled from reality. The core theme of the book is not musical triumph. It is absolute moral decay. It is the story of how art is consumed by commerce and how human beings are consumed by narcotics.

We are dragged through endless, claustrophobic hotel rooms and recording studios that smell of stale sweat and burnt spoons. Kent's encounters with Led Zeppelin's terrifying manager, Peter Grant, read like scenes from a mafia movie. Grant was a colossal, intimidating brute who ruled the band’s empire through physical intimidation and psychological warfare. Kent documents this thuggery without flinching. He exposes the ugly mechanics of how superstar bands were protected, how the press was bullied, and how the music business operated as a sophisticated protection racket.

His relationship with Iggy Pop provides some of the most harrowing passages. The Godfather of Punk was not a cartoon character in 1974. He was a desperate, self-mutilating addict spiraling toward the gutter, and Kent was right there beside him, taking notes while sharing the needle. Kent doesn't romanticize the addiction. He describes the itching, the paranoia, the overwhelming physical sickness with a sickening clarity. You can practically smell the despair radiating off the pages. It is a bleak, uncompromising look at what happens when the music stops and the body starts demanding its payment.

Malcolm McLaren emerges as the ultimate villain of the piece. The architect of the Sex Pistols is depicted not as a visionary provocateur, but as a cynical, manipulative sociopath who viewed human beings as disposable commodities. Kent's hatred for McLaren burns white-hot. He dismantled Kent's brief tenure in the Sex Pistols with a wave of his hand, realizing that a competent musician with actual critical faculties was a threat to his chaotic masterplan. McLaren wanted puppets. Kent was too smart, too opinionated, and far too damaged to play along.

The book functions as an extended autopsy of the 1970s. Kent meticulously details how the initial burst of creative energy that birthed punk rock was rapidly co-opted, packaged, and sold back to the kids at a premium. The initial punk explosion was supposed to be a corrective strike against the bloated, corporate rock dinosaurs like Pink Floyd and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Kent watched in real-time as the punks became just as corrupt, just as greedy, and significantly more violent.

Consider the tragedy of Sid Vicious. Kent knew him when he was just John Simon Ritchie, a confused, aggressive teenager looking for an identity. The book chronicles his horrific transformation into a cartoon punk mascot, a sacrificial lamb offered up on the altar of McLaren's ego. Kent’s prose is razor-sharp when dissecting the hypocrisy of the scene. The beautiful and the damned were mostly just damned.

Through it all, Kent’s own addiction serves as the grim metronome ticking away in the background. His transition from an eager, perceptive critic to a burnt-out casualty is agonizing to witness. He burned bridges with editors, alienated his friends, and squandered his immense talent for the sake of the next fix. The memoir is a raw confession. He admits to stealing, lying, and manipulating everyone around him just to keep the sickness at bay. He spares us the redemptive, Hollywood ending. Recovery is presented as a grueling, joyless slog, a desperate clawing back to a baseline of miserable sobriety. It took him years to learn how to write a simple sentence without a chemical crutch.

The Ghost of the NME

Legacy is a complicated concept for a man who spent a decade trying to erase his own memory. Apathy for the Devil stands alongside his essential essay collection, The Dark Stuff, as a monument to a specific, unrepeatable era of music journalism. You cannot understand the 1970s rock press without understanding Nick Kent. He was the patient zero of gonzo music criticism in the UK.

Critics at the time of the book's release in 2010 were divided on its tone. The Guardian called it a "morality play," praising its fearless prose while noting that Kent was a "cosmically flawed man." Other outlets, such as The Independent, were less forgiving. They took issue with the clumsy opening chapters where Kent attempts to psychoanalyze his younger, virginal self. Some reviewers questioned the absolute veracity of his memories. Can you trust the meticulous recollections of a man who spent five years consuming enough heroin to kill a horse? You probably shouldn't.

The controversy surrounding the book largely stems from its unrepentant cruelty. Kent settles scores with the precision of a sniper. He eviscerates former colleagues, musicians who slighted him, and industry figures who left him out in the cold. It is a deeply bitter text. Readers looking for a warm, nostalgic trip down memory lane are violently rebuffed. Kent makes it perfectly clear that the good old days were actually a nightmare of exploitation, rampant venereal disease, and severe chemical dependence.

His impact on modern music writing cannot be overstated. Before Kent, music writers were polite observers. After Kent, they were participants. He destroyed the line between the subject and the journalist. Every modern critic who injects themselves into the narrative, who prioritizes attitude over objective analysis, owes a massive debt to the blueprint Kent established at the NME. He made the writer as important as the rock star. In many cases, his writing was infinitely more compelling than the records he was reviewing.

Yet, Apathy for the Devil also serves as a stark warning. The rock critic as a tragic anti-hero is a seductive myth, but the reality involves fractured skulls at the 100 Club and waking up in strange beds with no pulse. The music industry has sanitized itself since the 1970s. PR machines control the narrative. Access is strictly regulated by armies of publicists. We will never see another figure like Nick Kent because the ecosystem that birthed him has been paved over and turned into a corporate parking lot. Today's journalists sip sparkling water and ask approved questions. Kent drank battery acid and asked for a light.

He survived. That alone is a statistical anomaly. The book exists as a raw, bleeding transmission from a lost world. It is a terrifying reminder of what happens when you treat rock and roll not as entertainment, but as a blood sport. The casualties pile up. The records keep spinning. Nobody learns a damn thing.

"He was substituting neat whiskey for baby milk." — The Guardian

The Personnel

• Nick Kent: The bruised narrator, NME legend, and self-confessed casualty of the 1970s.
• Iggy Pop: Desperate addict and proto-punk icon dragging Kent through the gutter.
• Malcolm McLaren: Cynical sociopath who manufactured the Sex Pistols for a quick buck.
• Sid Vicious: Tragic, violent hanger-on who wielded a bicycle chain at the 100 Club.
• Peter Grant: Led Zeppelin's hulking enforcer who ran the music business like a mafia cartel.
• Chrissie Hynde: Pre-Pretenders girlfriend caught in the crossfire of mutual self-destruction.

Essential Discography

• Apathy for the Devil: A Seventies Memoir (2010) - The brutal survival horror text.
• The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music (1994) - The definitive collection of Kent's venomous NME journalism.