The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music

I bought this when it came out in 1994, but it fell apart ages ago, so I was pleased to come across a copy of the original edition - it was later expanded- in one of Edinburgh’s ever-excellent charity bookshops. There are countless stories about Nick Kent, not all of them disseminated by him, and some of them actually true: Kent throwing up over Keith Richard’s ‘welcome’ mat; fronting an embryonic version of the Sex Pistols; and being assaulted by a bike chain wielding Sid Vicious in the 100 Club. When he met Brian Wilson, the corpulent genius said: ‘Maybe I should interview you. You look more like a rock star than me.’

Kent was one of the enfants terribles on the New Musical Express in its iconoclastic 1970s heyday. A show more dandified, ridiculously tall and worryingly skeletal figure, a cross between Beau Brummell and Keith Richards, he became as famous as the rock stars he wrote about and hung out with (at least to music obsessed adolescents like myself who pored over his every word in the inky pages of the NME). As this book makes clear he embraced what was euphemistically referred to as the ‘lifestyle’ as enthusiastically as any of them.

This is essentially Nick Kent’s greatest hits. Many of the pieces first appeared in the ‘70s and ‘80s in the NME, The Face and other journals of record, but most of them have been remixed or extended. A cursory glance at the contents page tells you it isn’t called The Dark Stuff for nothing: Iggy Pop, Brian Jones, Syd Barrett, Sid Vicious, Lou Reed, Jerry Lee Lewis, Shane McGowan, the New York Dolls, Brian Wilson: a veritable Who’s Who of rock music’s mad, bad and dangerous to know. Kent’s ‘shtick’, to use a word much favoured by rock journos back then, was decadence, excessive behaviour and reckless abandon - the whole ‘live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse’ routine. Whether this collection constitutes a celebration of that ethos or a set of cautionary tales is a moot point. Given that the rock culture depicted here is now firmly consigned to the past we might as well regard it as cultural history, albeit with a strong mythic streak, and leave it at that.

Still, there is an alarming amount of serious drug and alcohol abuse going on between these covers. Readers of a sensitive disposition, however, will be relieved to hear that Mr Kent writes about other things as well: early death, mindless violence, relentless self-destruction, narcissism and megalomania, psychological disintegration, and crass stupidity in all its wondrously diverse forms. Stuff like that. Was he a fearless exposer of the tawdry reality beneath the shiny carapace of pop? Or an unashamed scandalmonger who recognised a good sensational story when he stumbled over one? A bit of both, probably, but there is no denying that he could write. (By the way, despite my use of the past tense, I’m happy to report that Nick Kent is still very much alive and living in Paris. As far as I’m aware he no longer writes about rock music.) His prose has been described as ‘baroque’, which might be a nice way of saying over the top, but he writes with considerable panache in a full throttle style which exudes a sort of disgusted relish for his often unsavoury subject matter.

This is much better than Kent’s autobiography which was scuppered by a narrative tone which combined self-justifying egotism with whinging self-pity to singularly unappealing effect. The Dark Stuff, by way of contrast, is a compelling Dionysian evocation - by turns scarifying, exhilarating and, let’s be honest, hilarious - of a time when nothing succeeded like excess. show less

Liked Neil Young bit the best.