Apathy for the Devil (11 page)

The
NME
at first simply couldn’t grasp this new state of affairs and stumbled on cluelessly trying to incorporate the two conflicting strains - hairy ‘underground sounds’ and fly-by-night chartbusters - into their ink-stained pages whilst its rival publication
Melody Maker
- formerly a bastion for trad jazzers - quadrupled its own circulation figures by throwing its full editorial might behind the rising prog regime; by the outset of 1972, the latter was notching up weekly sales of close to 200,000 copies whilst the
NME
’s readership had fallen to less than 60,000. Their parent company IPC duly took note of the situation and in late spring told those responsible for the
NME
that it had only twelve issues left to turn around its dwindling demographic or cease existing. IPC would inject extra money into these issues and conjure up a nationwide publicity campaign to hopefully draw more attention to them, but they stressed the editors had to speedily come up with some kind of new direction in order to keep it from becoming extinct.

With little time to waste, the paper’s two principals - Logan and first-in-command editor Alan Lewis - began frantically recruiting young music-driven writers from the London underground network. Charles Shaar Murray had been the first approached and the first to sign up as a staff member for the new
enterprise. Ian MacDonald and I were headhunted shortly afterwards. MacDonald was a Cambridge graduate only two or three years older than me with long receding hair and a forehead so large you could have landed a plane on it. Behind that oft-furrowed mega-brow of his lurked a brain that was even larger - an all-devouring intellect that had few equals anywhere else in the world. By midsummer the three of us had formed our own subversive little nucleus within the journal. We weren’t particularly thrilled to be there initially. The
NME
’s recent track record as a viable youth-based periodical had been utterly dismal, to put it kindly. But we were young and keen and arrogant enough to think we could make a decisive difference to its fortunes whilst simultaneously upgrading its actual contents.

The existing staff members could have reacted badly to our arrival but instead welcomed us into their midst with surprisingly good grace. The most approachable of the old-school breed was a bloke named Tony Tyler, a Liverpudlian Ichabod Crane lookalike who’d known the Beatles back in their Hamburg days and had roadied for Bob Dylan and the Hawks in 1966. The most instantly unforgettable was Roy Carr, a short, barrel-shaped Sancho Panza from the North of England with a strange hair-weave and porndirector goatee who sometimes turned up to the office dressed in an alarmingly flamboyant suede bolero jacket festooned with a fringe that extended to the floor. He told us all proudly this sartorial relic from Woodstock Nation was a personal gift from the singer of Blood, Sweat and Tears. Like Tyler, Carr had played in beat groups during the sixties and claimed to have been sexually propositioned by practically every female vocal talent of the era. Like Tyler, he adopted the role of benevolent uncle to us callow young scribes, and both gave us their collected insights on how
to stay afloat in the murky waters of Tin Pan Alleydom.

Their advice was as follows: don’t say nasty things about Elvis Presley in print because his fans were mostly psychopaths who thought nothing of personally stalking and then beating up anyone who knocked their hillbilly deity. And don’t ever write anything uncomplimentary about any act managed by Don Arden. We saw the wisdom of their second suggestion early in the autumn of 1972 when Arden and two of his burly henchmen paid an impromptu visit to the
NME
offices with the firm intention of hanging an older staff member out of a third-storey window by his feet. The luckless journo had penned a live review of Arden’s pet project the Electric Light Orchestra. It had been a mostly positive write-up and he’d only mentioned in passing that the drum solo had gone on a bit too long, but this was enough for the most feared man in Tin Pan Alley to turn seriously bloodthirsty and leap into attack mode.

Apart from those pearls of wisdom, we were left to our own devices. Lewis and Logan never tried to rein us in. We were given carte blanche to pretty much run wild through the early-seventies pop/rock spectrum and whatever we scribbled would be printed unedited. Sales suddenly improved dramatically; we were a winning team at this point and none of us failed to grasp the heady realisation that we were in exactly the right place at the right time.

A new decade was actually starting to define itself and anyone with even a hint of talent and personal magnetism stood a fighting chance of making their mark on it provided they had the right instincts. The
NME
became the ideal periodical to reflect what was about to transpire because it was fighting for its own future too and was prepared to go to unorthodox extremes in
order to stay in circulation. Why else would they have even considered employing someone as potentially trouble-prone as me? I couldn’t even type my own copy. I’d turn up literally three hours before a deadline was due, drink twenty-seven cups of coffee and then scribble furiously onto a series of sheets of paper, each one getting instantly shuffled over to some long-suffering secretary who then had to make sense of my haphazard longhand and turn it into coherent typewritten text. Unlike Murray and MacDonald, I’d chosen not to become an actual staff member. In all the years I worked for the paper, I was always employed as a freelancer. I never wanted to be chained to a desk or trapped within some dull office routine. I wanted to always be where the real action was.

Glam rock was at its popularity peak throughout these months and it was a trend I found easy to exploit, mainly because I looked like a lanky girl. My choice of clothing became more ostentatious and I began wearing clumsily applied black eyeliner. Thus the
NME
tended to assign me to doorstep the genre’s leading practitioners. Alice Cooper was having a bumper year, with ‘School’s Out’ blaring from every jukebox throughout the British Isles. He and his group were all staunch heterosexuals who’d nonetheless anticipated the whole androgynous cross-dressing fashion in rock in order to stand out in their local LA club scene at the end of the sixties. They’d started out making hard-on-the-ear art rock under the patronage of Frank Zappa but subsequent exposure to the Stooges’ more anarchic allure and a lucky encounter with a savvy young Canadian producer named Bob Ezrin inspired them to record a spate of risqué but still reassuringly commercial-sounding hit singles starting in 1971 with the teen-alienation anthem ‘I’m Eighteen’.

From that point on they became showbiz interlopers shifting units whilst crassly upsetting the sensibilities of the world’s self-elected fuddy-duddy moral crusaders. Once the shock wore off, though, the game was up for them. By the middle of the decade, Alice Cooper had shrunk from a quintet to a solo act. The singer kept the name and has continued to prevail as a wizened rock icon over the decades that followed. This makes sense as he was the only real professional in the entire set-up and also the only genuinely nice guy.

The same couldn’t be said of Lou Reed. He had dead Peter Lorre eyes and a cold inhospitable manner that evening in autumn when I first interviewed him over a meal at a Kensington restaurant. The London glitterati may have been ceaselessly singing his praises that year but it had evidently done little to bolster his brittle, sullen mood. He spent most of our conversation bitterly itemising all the rip-offs he - as composer and instigator of the Velvet Underground - had been the victim of over the years. The Beatles, Stones and Dylan had been amongst the culprits, so he claimed. It was all grumpy, petulant ego-babble. Behind his mask of mummified disdain, Reed seemed seriously adrift. He’d just finished recording a second solo album called
Transformer
that David Bowie had produced, but its self-consciously decadent lyrical agenda and dainty hi-gloss-production sound seemed jarringly shallow when played next to his Velvet Underground recordings. Old Velvets fans - all five of them - were aghast at the change in direction, but Reed’s studio dalliance with Bowie that year would still manage to provide him with the only two major hit singles of his entire career - ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ and ‘Perfect Day’.

Of all the glam acts, only Roxy Music seemed prepared to give
Bowie a real run for his money. I met them that summer for the first time in their managers’ Chelsea office and they were already a pretty haughty and self-possessed bunch, a sort of ex-art-school Lord Snooty and his pals in lurex. This was just when ‘Virginia Plain’ - their first big hit single - was about to be released and Brian Eno was still very much in their midst. Indeed, the flaxen-haired synth boffin with the perfect cheekbones was the group’s most image-friendly asset at this point in time, fulfilling a picturesque but musically limited role similar to Brian Jones in the Rolling Stones. His arch hermaphroditic presence blended well with singer Bryan Ferry’s more conventional handsomeness in concert and helped UK youth become quickly enthralled with a music that - as their debut album still readily attests - was often far from commercially accessible.

Roxy Music in 1972 presented the world with a camp, Buck Rogers take on the prevailing middle-class art-rock aesthetic that was both shockingly idiosyncratic and deeply tongue-in-cheek. Their songwriter Bryan Ferry wrote madly sophisticated lyrics packed with hip cross-references to other avenues of then-contemporary art and then wedded them to music he’d clumsily bash out crab-handedly on a piano utilising only the black notes of the keyboard. He’d sing the results with a deliciously sleazy quaver to his voice, like a gigolo with a knife blade held to his throat. At first exposure you couldn’t help wondering if he - and his co-workers - were actually a comedy act merrily taking the piss. But Ferry was anything but self-mocking about his work and self-image. A Geordie milkman’s son who’d been transformed by higher education and who privately dreamed of becoming a real-life clone of Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, he took his career and growing renown very, very seriously indeed. Just how seriously
was duly brought home to all onlookers some twelve months later when he sacked Eno from the line-up and started to subtly demote the rest of the band to backing-group status.

Talking of glam rock, the
NME
got me to interview one of the form’s key spiritual forebears, Liberace, that autumn. He gurgled when he laughed out loud and was as reassuringly camp as the proverbial row of tents. A week later, they sent me out to talk to Johnny Cash, who spoke from deep in his boots and looked like he’d been carved out of granite. Never let it be said that the journal didn’t introduce me to the full gamut of celebrity manliness.

But I knew I’d really hit the big time when the editors invited me to accompany Led Zeppelin - then the world’s brashestsounding and biggest-selling rock act - on selected dates of an end-of-the-year UK tour. Actually I really have B. P. Fallon to thank for the assignment. A peculiar but not charmless little man who looked like a glam-rock leprechaun and spoke like an effete Irish hobbit, he’d lately taken on the task of drumming up press coverage for the group after their drummer John Bonham had shredded the clothes of their previous publicist-a long-suffering Tin Pan Alley stalwart named Bill Harry - during a drunken altercation in a London pub earlier in the year. He told me in advance that the group held journalists in generally low esteem and that entering their world could be something of a ‘Daniel in the lion’s den’ experience - at least at first - but that if I could brass it out and not say or do anything to truly warrant their wrath, then perhaps a mutually beneficial relationship could be struck up.

These words would prove prophetic the night we actually intersected. It happened on December 12th 1972 in Cardiff - my old stomping ground - when Zeppelin were booked to play the Capitol Cinema. I knew the venue well; I’d been temporarily
deafened there six years before by Bob Dylan and the Hawks. I’d arrived by train from London in time to be whisked into the back of the house by Fallon just as the quartet were beginning their first number. What followed for almost two and a half hours was a musical masterclass in big rock dynamics, ‘bottle’ and bravado.

I’d seen them once before at the 1970 Bath Festival. At Bath, they’d quite simply blown every other act on the bill right off the stage - indeed, their manager Peter Grant had quite literally pushed one band called the Flock off the stage with his gargantuan girth when their set threatened to clash with his boys’ designated time-slot.

But this was now two and a half years later and the quartet had become even more adept at weaving their singular ‘tension and release’/‘light and shade’-driven hard-rock magic act to transfix live audiences. Plus they had two more albums’ worth of new songs to add to their repertoire, with four selections from Led Zep IV illuminating the set and five exclusive tracks from the as-yet-unreleased
Houses of the Holy
also being performed. As a result, the show that night sailed from one giddy climax to another. Robert Plant preened and screamed out blood-curdling notes that seemed capable of suddenly sending the venue’s aged architecture crashing down around us all in a heap of rubble like Joshua’s trumpet destroying the walls of Jericho. Jimmy Page danced around a lot - even attempting a sliding manoeuvre with his feet that James Brown had first perfected in the early sixties - whilst at the same time leaving his fingers free to conjure forth a truly devastating multiplicity of guitar riffs and lead solos. But equally impressive were John Paul Jones and John Bonham, who - whenever they locked in together on bass and drums - made the whole room shake ecstatically with the intensity of their playing.
As a foursome, they were unbeatable: no other group in the world - not even the Who at their peak - could compete with them when they were fully focused and firing on all cylinders as was the case with this Cardiff show. At the end of the performance they even stormed into a brief rendition of ‘Louie Louie’ that sounded like the four horsemen of the apocalypse inventing the concept of testosterone-driven punk rock.