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Authors: Nick Kent
Tags: Non-Fiction
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caucus in the not-so-distant past). Did she see an outlet for me here?
Amazingly, she replied ‘Yes, of course’ and urged me to write something at the earliest opportunity and bring it to the office for further perusal. I never encountered Ms Boycott again - though we briefly spoke on the phone in the early nineties just after she’d been made the editor of UK Esquire , the upmarket men’s magazine - but have always held her in high esteem, mainly because her kindness and encouragement that day made me feel instantly accepted in this potentially daunting new world I was trying to break into. If she’d told me to piss off I would have probably junked all my career ambitions as a writer right there and then.
Drawing on my student grant I next purchased three records that had just been released that very week. One was a mediocre album by San Francisco’s Quicksilver Messenger Service called simply Quicksilver and another was Gonna Take a Miracle , a soul-stirring collection of rhythm ’n’ blues covers performed by the
gifted Italian-American singer/songwriter Laura Nyro. I’ve forgotten what the third disc was. Burning the midnight oil in my student garret, I scribbled out in longhand my impressions of the music contained within until I’d fashioned three coherent reviews. The following day I returned to Frendz with my dog-eared pages of handwritten text only to find that Rosie Boycott had promptly quit the paper for unexplained reasons. Her place at the main desk had been taken by a thin young man with impressively long Pre-Raphaelite hair called John May. I repeated my basic pitch and then handed him the sheets containing my prose. He read them and told me they were very good and that almost certainly they’d be published in the next issue. I was over the fucking moon.
For the next week or so, I shied away from the office and waited with baited, hash-stained breath for the publication of the next Frendz issue. Then one weekend I saw a fresh pile being sold in Compendium bookshop on the high street in Camden Town and approached with tingling trepidation. As I leafed furiously through the journal I couldn’t find a trace of what I’d written but then on the last but one page there they all were - my three reviews and my name printed prominently underneath them.
It is always a magical empowering moment when a writer sees his or her considered words typeset and available for public consumption for the very first time, and I was certainly no exception. The writing itself wasn’t particularly outstanding but the three efforts had an engagingly naive and energetic tone, which is just another way of saying they weren’t very good but at least you could tell I was keen about what I was addressing. They worked like a charm anyway. When I returned to Frendz , I was greeted like a conquering hero and promptly offered the job of official music
editor for the princely sum of £4 a month and all the freebies I could siphon out of the record companies. I felt like I’d just won the lottery. Suddenly I was a burgeoning force to be reckoned with in the freak-flag-flying enclaves of the London underground. Little did I know that its days were already sorely numbered. By the end of the year it would be virtually extinct.
By early 1972 London’s various alternative press outlets were all struggling to survive in the face of ever-conflicting shifts in editorial direction and generally dwindling sales. Oz - the most notorious periodical of its ilk - had enjoyed a hearty sales boost in 1970 and briefly became a fully fledged cultural cause célèbre that same year when its three instigators were tried at the Old Bailey on charges of conspiring to pervert the morals of young children. But after being exonerated, Richard Neville, the magazine’s key motivator, had left the enterprise to concentrate on writing books, as did their most interesting writer Germaine Greer, and Oz had quickly degenerated into an unattractive fusion of
Amazingly, she replied ‘Yes, of course’ and urged me to write something at the earliest opportunity and bring it to the office for further perusal. I never encountered Ms Boycott again - though we briefly spoke on the phone in the early nineties just after she’d been made the editor of UK Esquire , the upmarket men’s magazine - but have always held her in high esteem, mainly because her kindness and encouragement that day made me feel instantly accepted in this potentially daunting new world I was trying to break into. If she’d told me to piss off I would have probably junked all my career ambitions as a writer right there and then.
Drawing on my student grant I next purchased three records that had just been released that very week. One was a mediocre album by San Francisco’s Quicksilver Messenger Service called simply Quicksilver and another was Gonna Take a Miracle , a soul-stirring collection of rhythm ’n’ blues covers performed by the
gifted Italian-American singer/songwriter Laura Nyro. I’ve forgotten what the third disc was. Burning the midnight oil in my student garret, I scribbled out in longhand my impressions of the music contained within until I’d fashioned three coherent reviews. The following day I returned to Frendz with my dog-eared pages of handwritten text only to find that Rosie Boycott had promptly quit the paper for unexplained reasons. Her place at the main desk had been taken by a thin young man with impressively long Pre-Raphaelite hair called John May. I repeated my basic pitch and then handed him the sheets containing my prose. He read them and told me they were very good and that almost certainly they’d be published in the next issue. I was over the fucking moon.
For the next week or so, I shied away from the office and waited with baited, hash-stained breath for the publication of the next Frendz issue. Then one weekend I saw a fresh pile being sold in Compendium bookshop on the high street in Camden Town and approached with tingling trepidation. As I leafed furiously through the journal I couldn’t find a trace of what I’d written but then on the last but one page there they all were - my three reviews and my name printed prominently underneath them.
It is always a magical empowering moment when a writer sees his or her considered words typeset and available for public consumption for the very first time, and I was certainly no exception. The writing itself wasn’t particularly outstanding but the three efforts had an engagingly naive and energetic tone, which is just another way of saying they weren’t very good but at least you could tell I was keen about what I was addressing. They worked like a charm anyway. When I returned to Frendz , I was greeted like a conquering hero and promptly offered the job of official music
editor for the princely sum of £4 a month and all the freebies I could siphon out of the record companies. I felt like I’d just won the lottery. Suddenly I was a burgeoning force to be reckoned with in the freak-flag-flying enclaves of the London underground. Little did I know that its days were already sorely numbered. By the end of the year it would be virtually extinct.
By early 1972 London’s various alternative press outlets were all struggling to survive in the face of ever-conflicting shifts in editorial direction and generally dwindling sales. Oz - the most notorious periodical of its ilk - had enjoyed a hearty sales boost in 1970 and briefly became a fully fledged cultural cause célèbre that same year when its three instigators were tried at the Old Bailey on charges of conspiring to pervert the morals of young children. But after being exonerated, Richard Neville, the magazine’s key motivator, had left the enterprise to concentrate on writing books, as did their most interesting writer Germaine Greer, and Oz had quickly degenerated into an unattractive fusion of
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