Andrew Stafford

I read a couple of memoirs around about the time or just before I started writing my book.

And one of them was Apathy for the Devil by Nick Kent.

And Nick Kent, a bit like me, actually, had been like a very, very long time between books.

He'd put out a compendium of essays called The Dark Stuff a long time ago.

And Apathy for the Devil came, I think, 15 or 20 years later.

Nick Kent was a great English music writer.

He was sort of in some ways the British equivalent of Lester Bangs.

He had been around during the salad days of rock and roll where there was lots of money around and, you know, he joined the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin on tour.

So obviously, I couldn't compete with that.

But he'd got to see and partake in all kinds of bad behavior firsthand until his habits got the better of him.

And Apathy for the Devil is taken year by year.

It's a memoir of the 1970s.

And it's taken year by year until 1978, 79.

And those two chapters are

are lumped together because he can't remember them, basically.

But Kent was farsighted in the same way that Lester Bangs was.

And we talked about Iggy Pop before being ahead of the curve.

Well, so was Bangs and so was Kent in that way.

They had a sense of where Rock was going.

But the thing that interested me about Kent was that, again, he wasn't so much writing about