Read Online Apathy for the Devil by Nick Kent - Free Book Online
Authors: Nick Kent
Tags: Non-Fiction
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encouraged me to visit its Portobello Road premises upon my return. ‘Speak to either Rosie Boycott or John May. Tell them Roger Hutchinson sent you.’ With these words still ringing in my ears, I hitch-hiked back from the North just in time to reconvene with the rest of my fellow students for the unveiling of London University’s spring 1972 term.
A few underwhelming days after my return to academia, I actually got up the nerve to travel by tube to the address I’d been given back in Barnsley. I stepped out of Ladbroke Grove tube station on an overcast weekday afternoon and made the short walk under the motorway to where the butt-end of Portobello Road intersected.
Standing before me as I reached the street was a young man clearly in an advanced state of chemical refreshment. I recognised him almost instantly: it was Paul Kossoff, the guitarist from Free. Eighteen months earlier I’d been one of over half a million attendees at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival and had witnessed Kossoff on stage there coaxing forth a series of barn-burning guitar solos out of a battered Les Paul alongside his three colleagues and being greeted with a mass standing ovation for his efforts. Free were at their absolute peak right at that very instant - their anthem ‘All Right Now’ had recently made no. 1 in the UK
singles charts - and they were also Britain’s best-loved up-and-coming outfit of the epoch.
They were also incredibly young. Kossoff and the others had been professional musicians since 1968 and yet he was only one year older than me. I’d just turned twenty and he was twenty-one years old when our ships briefly passed on Portobello Road. That’s a frightening age to suddenly be designated a has-been. I didn’t know it then but he was already well on his way to becoming one of the new decade’s more prominent casualties. Free had recently broken up as a direct consequence of his drug problems. The group would be in mid-performance only to discover their guitarist had fallen asleep against his amplifier. Given his marching orders in late ’71, Kossoff had quickly drowned his sorrows by moving into Ladbroke Grove’s druggy nexus and drenching his senses in a haze of Class A narcotics and tranquillisers. As we edged around each other on the street that day, I locked eyes with him for a second and he shot me a quick mischievous little smile, the kind of look you’d get from a naughty schoolboy who’d just been suspended for getting caught smoking behind the bike sheds. If I’d known more about his ongoing situation, maybe I would have taken his presence before me as some grim portent, a warning of things to come, but those kind of reflections are only triggered by hindsight. I was too busy finding my own way in the world - or at the very least the elusive address I’d been given - to focus further on his sorry fate.
Finally, I found it - 305 Portobello Road. A hippie couple with strange black sores around their mouths were running a health-food shop on the ground floor and told me to ring the bell at the side door and then go up to the first floor, where Frendz had its office. This I did, only to find myself in a dimly lit room festooned
with dilapidated furniture, sundry battered typewriters and filing cabinets and several beanbags masquerading as makeshift sofas. Hardly anyone was present apart from a young woman seated at a desk nearest the large window overlooking Portobello Road and typing away furiously. ‘Are you by any chance Rosie Boycott?’ I recall stammering out. She answered with a nod and smile that emboldened me to go straight into my pitch. I was a friend of Roger Hutchinson and he’d advised me to present myself here and offer my fledgling writerly services to your journal. I was interested in writing reviews and doing interviews with musicians rather than talking up the latest bomb-detonating activities of the odious Angry Brigade (some of whom had actually been part of Frendz ’s editorial
A few underwhelming days after my return to academia, I actually got up the nerve to travel by tube to the address I’d been given back in Barnsley. I stepped out of Ladbroke Grove tube station on an overcast weekday afternoon and made the short walk under the motorway to where the butt-end of Portobello Road intersected.
Standing before me as I reached the street was a young man clearly in an advanced state of chemical refreshment. I recognised him almost instantly: it was Paul Kossoff, the guitarist from Free. Eighteen months earlier I’d been one of over half a million attendees at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival and had witnessed Kossoff on stage there coaxing forth a series of barn-burning guitar solos out of a battered Les Paul alongside his three colleagues and being greeted with a mass standing ovation for his efforts. Free were at their absolute peak right at that very instant - their anthem ‘All Right Now’ had recently made no. 1 in the UK
singles charts - and they were also Britain’s best-loved up-and-coming outfit of the epoch.
They were also incredibly young. Kossoff and the others had been professional musicians since 1968 and yet he was only one year older than me. I’d just turned twenty and he was twenty-one years old when our ships briefly passed on Portobello Road. That’s a frightening age to suddenly be designated a has-been. I didn’t know it then but he was already well on his way to becoming one of the new decade’s more prominent casualties. Free had recently broken up as a direct consequence of his drug problems. The group would be in mid-performance only to discover their guitarist had fallen asleep against his amplifier. Given his marching orders in late ’71, Kossoff had quickly drowned his sorrows by moving into Ladbroke Grove’s druggy nexus and drenching his senses in a haze of Class A narcotics and tranquillisers. As we edged around each other on the street that day, I locked eyes with him for a second and he shot me a quick mischievous little smile, the kind of look you’d get from a naughty schoolboy who’d just been suspended for getting caught smoking behind the bike sheds. If I’d known more about his ongoing situation, maybe I would have taken his presence before me as some grim portent, a warning of things to come, but those kind of reflections are only triggered by hindsight. I was too busy finding my own way in the world - or at the very least the elusive address I’d been given - to focus further on his sorry fate.
Finally, I found it - 305 Portobello Road. A hippie couple with strange black sores around their mouths were running a health-food shop on the ground floor and told me to ring the bell at the side door and then go up to the first floor, where Frendz had its office. This I did, only to find myself in a dimly lit room festooned
with dilapidated furniture, sundry battered typewriters and filing cabinets and several beanbags masquerading as makeshift sofas. Hardly anyone was present apart from a young woman seated at a desk nearest the large window overlooking Portobello Road and typing away furiously. ‘Are you by any chance Rosie Boycott?’ I recall stammering out. She answered with a nod and smile that emboldened me to go straight into my pitch. I was a friend of Roger Hutchinson and he’d advised me to present myself here and offer my fledgling writerly services to your journal. I was interested in writing reviews and doing interviews with musicians rather than talking up the latest bomb-detonating activities of the odious Angry Brigade (some of whom had actually been part of Frendz ’s editorial
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