The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music
By Nick KentDa Capo Press, $17.50
Generally, rock journalists can’t be mistaken for rock stars. Their writing can’t fill stadiums, and they look decidedly less sexy than their subjects. But the rules don’t apply to Nick Kent. Iggy Pop called the British writer “a great palsied mantis”; Lou Reed, “the Judy Garland of rock journalism.” David Bowie grinned, “So you’re Nick Kent? My, aren’t you pretty!” Sid Vicious merely whipped him with a bicycle chain.
None of which would matter if Kent couldn’t write. But the decades he’s spent hanging out with bands like the Rolling Stones (sometimes seeming like a colony of Keith Richards) give his articles and interviews the authentic perspective of a sharply precise, insightful fly on the piss-stained wall of rock & roll.
As a 1970s staff writer for London’s New Musical Express, Kent developed a specialty for writing about mainstream artists on the fringe, musicians who stared into the abyss. There are no interviews with Wings here. Instead we get Brian Wilson, the ruined king of surf. Keith Richards, a thin body full of dope. Lou Reed, a charmless, profane genius.
The rock world hasn’t run out of train wrecks; this new edition contains recent writing on Axl Rose, Johnny Cash, Prince and Eminem, and older interviews, like Kent’s late-1980s discussion with the Pogues’ 200-proof leader, Shane MacGowan, who mumbles: “I don’t take drugs to torture myself. I’ve already got life to do that for me!”
Kent gets to the heart of things. He waits patiently for Roky Erickson to recall where (and, indeed, who) he is, and he gets screamed at by a demented Jerry Lee Lewis. He coldly dissects the lonesome deaths of Sid and Nancy, their junk-filled bodies decomposing over hours rather than days, with a disgusted elegy, concluding: “Let them rot.”
These are exciting, terrifying stories, avoiding rock & roll fun for grim fairy tales about lives going wrong. It’s not all dark stuff — but the dark stuff is the best.
—David Quantick
