Apathy for the Devil

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) we 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 week – 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:

3rd March – Q & A, reading and signing at free Rough Trade East event

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

Dear Morrissey,

In the hope that you might consider bringing your much-rumoured memoir to The House of Eliot, I am posting this letter on the Faber website. Forlorn as this hope may be, I can only fantasise that at least you might read my letter through and consider the pleasures and prestige of being an author at Faber, the last great family-owned independent publishing house in the western hemisphere.

I have been trying to persuade you of the virtues and wisdom of this for some years now. You probably won’t remember. We even corresponded at one point via a friend of yours, an author of mine, most famous for his biography of Roxy Music which ends just as the band are getting together. You see, we love the perverse and the contrary at Faber. And we also like to think we are the custodians of twentieth-century Modernist poetry. In fact we are. Our shelves groan and bulge and spill over under the weight of Ezra, Larkin, Hughes and Heaney. And that’s just the surface; deep as it may seem. We feel very strongly that you belong in this company. To me (and to many of my colleagues) you are already in this company. It would be the fulfilment of my most pressing and persistent publishing dream to see that ‘ff’ sewn into the spine of your Life. Just any other publisher won’t do. You deserve Faber and the love we can give you. History demands it; destiny commands it.

I did receive a fax from you once to my invitation. And you responded with interest. I don’t know if at that stage you had embarked on your project but I have recently heard again that ‘it is on’.

Morrissey, the doors of our Georgian Bloomsbury-based publishing house are open to you wherever you may be: Rome, LA, Manchester. We recently published a book of Kevin Cummins’ photographs of Manchester pop which you may have seen. If you read this and would like a copy I will gladly send one to you. Perhaps it could mark the start of a beautiful friendship.

With warm wishes,

Lee Brackstone

Last weekend we made our annual pilgrimage to The Hague (and for the first time, Antwerp) for the pioneering festival dedicated to Music and Literature, Crossing Border. This year Loops hosted a series of events, readings and performances. Wild Beasts played a predictably brilliant set, confirming their burgeoning reputation as one of the most stimulating British bands since The Smiths. Check out one of the great albums of the year here.

Richard Milward at Crossing Border

Elsewhere Graham Massey of 808 State provided a unique soundtrack to preface Kevin Cummins’ conversation with Paul Morley about Manchester’s pop iconography and James Yorkston played an intimate and memorable set.

The highlight, for me, was Richard Milward’s classic meeting and interview with psychedelic legend, Sonic Boom, of Spectrum and Spacemen 3. An interview in the true gonzo spirit of Hunter Thompson, Milward was largely unfazed by Sonic’s benign reticence and Louis Behre, founder of Crossing Border, was impressed enough to proclaim the performance one of his personal highlights of the festival’s 15 years.

Richard Milward & Sonic Boom

A joy to behold! Steve Earle, Stephen Malkmus, Natalie Merchant, Monsters of Folk, The Low Anthem, Mumford and Sons, Jay McInnerney, James Kelman, and the editorial presence of the most vital journal of the day, The Believer – yet again Crossing Border confirmed its reputation for quality, innovation and passionate commitment to music and spoken-word performance.

Nick Kent & Faber's Lee Brackstone

It has now become commonplace at festivals like Latitude, Camp Bestival and Green Man to mix music with literary performance in the same space; Crossing Border was the original and still the best. No mud or tents either. What’s not to like?

www.loopsjournal.com – Issue Two out in March 2010.