Nick Kent and I
Faber’s Angus Cargill describes his first encounter with the work of music journalist Nick Kent.
Back in 1998 – while studying at Goldsmiths College – I was desperately trying to earn money for a summer travelling across the South of America. I had a terrible job working for a ‘bar & catering agency’ that involved being sent to the worst pubs you can imagine – usually in the city, or Docklands – to cover the shifts no-one else wanted.
Still, it paid an ok rate and I needed the money, so I stuck it out for the best part of a year, until shortly before I was due to fly to the US. That particular day, I was booked for an eight-hour shift, but when that was done, the manager, one of the least pleasant women I’ve ever met, insisted I was booked for a twelve-hour shift. I pointed out that the only way I could get back from West India Quay to Deptford at midnight was by cab, which would wipe out about half of my day’s earnings. A row followed in front of a busy pub and, in one of those rare moments, I got to stick it to the man (!) and walk out on someone who was being totally unreasonable.
It felt good and empowering. The down-side though was that I didn’t get paid, and two days later I was summoned to the agency’s grim office off Tottenham Court Road and given my marching orders by a pale man called Warren.
But, strangely, one good thing did happen that day … as I grabbed my bag from the depressing staff room I saw lying on the floor a battered copy of a grimly alluring looking paperback, Nick Kent’s The Dark Stuff. Now some might call it stealing, but in that moment, in my aggrieved state of mind, I decided it was wholly reasonable to slip it into my bag and make my escape.
Ten years later and my friend Richard Thomas told me that Penguin had let The Dark Stuff go out of print and that Nick wondered if Faber would want to re-do it. So, with a smart new cover and some extra chapters (Sly Stone, Eminem, Serge Gainsbourg, Johnny Cash) Faber re-issued one of the classic books of rock journalism – the best book I never bought – and once again it was hailed as the seminal work it is. Even better, we contracted Nick’s follow up at the same time, his memoir of the 1970s.
Publishing this month – some 16 years after The Dark Stuff first appeared – Apathy for the Devil is a very different book, a personal, no-holds barred account of Nick’s rise and fall as the most celebrated and attacked music writer of his generation. A fascinating look into a very different musical era, and a genuinely moving portrait of the artist as a troubled young man, it was also more than worth the unpaid eight hours bar work I put in that day.
Catch Nick Kent at the following events:
- 7th April – at the Roundhouse in London
- 9th April – at the Laugharne Festival
- 15th May – at the Brighton Festival
- 31st May – at the Hay Festival
