Apathy for the Devil

It is unfair to judge Nick Kent against an ideal that exists only in my head – although his Apathy for the Devil is, amongst other things, an attempt to square the writer’s artistic ambitions against his critical discipline. Effectively a contemporary morality tale disguised as a memoir of 1970s’ rock’n’roll, Apathy is a catchy, compulsive reflection on a life dedicated not to making art but writing about it.

The critical autobiography is a logic step for the post-modern novel: it doesn’t allude to influences, rather names and analyses them, and weaves Kent’s life around the music and musicians that dominated his career on NME. And while he can be generous – his attitude towards Bob Dylan’s Christian conversion is temperate and respectful, and his descriptions of Bowie, Iggy Pop and Keith Richards stop just on the right side of awe – he is unsparing in nailing his own weaknesses and those whom he feels went beyond an artistic rebellion into sociopathy. If the final entries – a discography – tend to the sentimental, Kent is willing to attack undeserved reputations and point at the void, identifying the eyes that stare back and shaming them. Sid Vicious gets a well-deserved doing.

The tension in Apathy is between Kent’s realisation that the music he loved came from a crapsack world of vacuity, and that his heroes rarely lived up to their self-importance. Kent never makes it explicit, but the irony remains: he might reject Jagger and all his works, but without his ilk, his own role as critic is pointless. That’s the pain I recognise, and why I admire his attempt to critique from within an autobiographical context.

There are some odd failings – when he claims to have studied linguistics, he calls the course “the study of English language” (which it isn’t), before describing a course that sounds like English Literature. Whether he is setting himself up early as an unreliable narrator, or was on a course with an identity crisis is never clear: he does have a tendency to insist on his interpretations as accurate (Malcolm McLaren as an opportunist not a situationist, Vicious as a thug, Chrissie Hynde rewriting their early relationship), and even claims objectivity for his writing. Then again, he nails Jimmy Pursey (hooligan rocker deluding journalists that he has a hot-line to a notional group called “The Kids”) and his ability to trace punks emergence from earlier rock lineages is impressive.

Apathy for the Devil is a resource for the critic. Not so much for the portraits of the great, good and gibbous of the 1970s – Tony Parsons is not that interesting, and even Robert Plant seems to be little more than a generic rock decadent – but for his attempt to escape the dry limitations of the critic as reviewer. He presents a life rich in experience and examines the impact of art on his existence. It’s a shame that so much of the music has less ambition or integrity than Kent’s own work – frankly, Ted Nugent’s albums will never rescue him from being a Republican bigot – and it is a relief that Kent found his moment of spiritual redemption. He deserved it far more than Sid Vicious deserved his hagiography. And maybe this is a map towards the ideals I cherish – Radical Subjectivity and the Critical Art.