Biography
Nick Kent ranked among Britain’s most celebrated and occasionally notorious rock critics throughout the 1970s, when he contributed regularly to New Musical Express. He began his professional career in 1971 at nineteen, writing first for the underground paper Frendz before joining NME the next year. Kent embraced the rock-and-roll high life so completely that he once flew unannounced to Michigan, walked into Creem’s offices, and asked Lester Bangs for personal instruction in the craft of rock journalism. Shortly afterward NME revised its editorial direction toward a sharper, more contemporary outlook, giving Kent license to pursue demanding and provocative topics. He gravitated especially toward rock’s most tormented and drug-ravaged figures, producing one of the earliest major profiles of Syd Barrett and extended pieces on Lou Reed, Roky Erickson, the New York Dolls, Brian Wilson, Elvis Costello, and the Rolling Stones that seldom flattered their subjects. Controversy, excess, and theatricality seemed to attract him, or at least he possessed a talent for coaxing those qualities into the open during interviews. Material from his NME years, together with later contributions from the 1980s and 1990s, was collected in the anthology The Dark Stuff, his debut book and, as of the late 1990s, his only one. By the mid-1970s Kent’s immersion in the same milieu had led to serious hard-drug difficulties that began to impair both his writing and his professional standing. Around the same period he played a peripheral part in the rise of the Sex Pistols. He met their manager Malcolm McLaren in 1974 and shared with him an education in music history; he also introduced the band to pre-punk acts such as the Stooges and Modern Lovers, steering them away from the Small Faces and 1960s pop. At one Pistols show Sid Vicious assaulted Kent with a bike chain, leaving him bloodied. Punk historian Jon Savage later suggested that the Sex Pistols’ “I Wanna Be Me” referred to Kent. Around 1974 Kent also had a brief relationship with Chrissie Hynde, then an NME staffer and employee at McLaren’s boutique rather than a performer. In Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming, Hynde recalled that Kent, suspecting her of seeing someone else, entered the shop and struck her with his belt—an episode that prompted McLaren to dismiss her and led directly to her hurried relocation to Paris. Although his reputation rests chiefly on the NME period, Kent wrote throughout the 1980s and 1990s for The Face, Spin, and Details as well. In 1988 he settled in Paris, where he worked in television while continuing to contribute to magazines and newspapers.
Albums
Singles
