June 2021: Addicted

Books read this month: The Dark Stuff (Nick Kent, Faber, 1994/2017 updated edition); Apathy For The Devil (Nick Kent, Faber, 2010); Sing Backwards And Weep (Mark Lanegan, White Rabbit, 2021).

Imagine having more unread books on your shelf than years left on Earth. That's the situation I found myself in again after a recent trip to Hay-on-Wye. Ever been there? Of course you have. Fancy reading this blog and never having been to book city! All joking aside (though I'm not sure the first line of this blog is a joke or the first line of a play what I should be writing), the older I get the more of an unchecked addiction buying books becomes. Hay's great for picking up second hand gems or a couple of remaindered books that slipped through the net upon release. There's no greater feeling when sniffing through a dusty old book shop than coming across something you've always wanted to read... and then in the next but one shop finding its follow-up. That's what happened with the two Nick Kent books we're focusing on here...

I've always been aware of Nick Kent. When you grow up devouring the music press, you soon realise not many writers fishing downstream from Nick catch anything original. Alongside Greil Marcus and a couple of others, he's one of the few people to dance around architecture with absolute aplomb. His writing somehow manages to leave you relaxed and restless at the same time. How? I'm not sure. I just know that reading thousands of his words on subjects such as Brian Wilson, Iggy Pop, The Rolling Stones and countless others left me breathless. The rub? His gallant paragraphs move at a glacial pace and hover like ever-present icebergs in the distance. The Dark Stuff, a selection of his writings covering the distance travelled between the seventies and the nineties, is what they used to call a real page-turner. The New Musical Express experienced a rebirth (jazz and listings replaced on the cover by beautiful profile shots of the day's songwriting and singing stars) to coincide with Kent's arrival and progression with the paper and the first few chapters here tell you all you need to know about that London-Los Angeles-New York City-obsessed time when publishers and record companies had money to burn. Expenses aren't discussed, flights can always be found and there's more drugs on offer than Sid Vicious had hot dinners. Literally. And that's just for the players on the periphery! Therein lays Kent's true gift: hiding in plain sight while Led Zeppelin, Lou Reed, Miles Davis and Neil Young maraud through the decade like megalodons brought back to life. He writes with enough wit to make you feel like you were there but not that you missed out by not being there. He's lit up enough to paint pictures in your mind that make you feel like you're the one in the eye of a storm. And he's enough of a shit to name names and take no prisoners when it comes to revealing the darker side of his subjects. The price you pay? Well, that comes in the follow-up, 'Apathy For The Devil', published some sixteen years later. Since we left our literary hero at the end of his first book discussing self-destruction and Belle & Sebastian, he's got clean, got married, got a kid and moved to Paris. So, naturally, the second book leans to a more autobiographical style than 'The Dark Stuff'', steering clear of the superb non-fiction, Truman Capote-esque copy Kent became famous for. It's a shame... but doesn't harm the book, really. Unless you read it immediately after, like I did, and expected the same pace. 'Apathy For The Devil'' tells its story walking through each year of the seventies and wraps Kent's trials and tribulations around his memories of the stars and starfuckers he encounters teetering around London's seedy seventies underbelly looking for junk or untamed joy. There's not much of the latter on offer, as Kent disappears into squats, basements and back rooms, finally drawing a straight line between himself and Thomas De Quincey. Fanciful? Absolutely. But you have to go there to come back again.

Mark Lanegan knows the price you pay. The ex-Screaming Trees man has often played a tangential role in rock writings relating to Kurt Cobain or Josh Homme, for example. But his decision to put pen to paper himself and turn the pain of much of his life into prose is an inspired one. This book goes down, down, down, down and down some more in its quest to... tell the truth? Purge the author? Cancel karma in the rear-view mirror? Who knows. But it's a dark and depressing ride that only finds the big light towards the end. "The ultimate rock 'n' roll biography" is the quote from Mancunian musical legend Peter Hook adorning the book's cover and you can't really argue. Sex? Loads of it. Drugs? Please. Rock 'n' roll? Some. But the lifestyle that enables and surrounds human beings who make music for a living is given a thorough thrashing by Lanegan. You won't want your kids to sign a record deal or tour the world after reading it. Records are made to obtain an advance that will feed an addiction. Tours are duties that involve detours into the darkness at the edge of every town you visit looking for a fix. And bandmates, label bosses and tour managers are suckers to suck dry. That glimpse of light alluded to is ever-present in Lanegan's chaste writing and humility. He writes with nobility about dishonour and discharge(s) across every chapter and his descriptions of midnight madness, moody mornings and malevolent meetings shine with the glare of one million suns. Yes, there's gold in the hills for those looking for insight or tidbits into grunge, Seattle, Nirvana and those worlds and people post-Cobain's suicide, but the heart of this book lays on every page the author empties his own on.

addiction: NOUN; the fact or condition of being addicted to a particular substance, thing, or activity. There but for the grace of God go I. Happy reading, Al x