In due course they took me back to their communal homestead - a two-storey house with minimal furniture and no central heating - and I got to meet the rest of the Barnsley counter-culture. There were only five conscripts at this juncture - Nigel, Chris, a fellow called Roger Hutchinson who was very much the man in charge, his pal, a bespectacled youth whose name now escapes me, and his pal’s girlfriend - so it was hardly a thriving community; but they approached their role as rabble-rousers to the drowsy North with great zeal and commitment. Partly, this commitment involved publishing from time to time new issues of their broadsheet stuffed with features detailing the latest conspiracy theories and calling for a full-blown social revolution. Mostly, though, it involved sitting around a smouldering log fire, smoking copious amounts of pot and passionately voicing their drug-drenched dreams for the future. In this regard, we were very much kindred spirits. Well-read, streetwise druggies with a vague work ethic were my kind of people, I was quickly discovering.

I only spent some forty-eight hours in their midst but those hours would prove to be deeply significant ones for me personally. I got to take speed for the first time-a black bomber - and felt my brain suddenly rushing through my skull like a locomotive train ablaze with thought. Twenty-four eye-popping hours later, the comedown began, leaving me distinctly drained and disorientated, and yet I had no regrets. The drug had freed up something in my cerebellum and offered me a more intense way of perceiving the world. It was an experience I was determined to try again at the earliest opportunity.

On my last night there, I managed to broach with Roger Hutchinson - Styng’s nominal editor - the subject of maybe writing some articles of my own for his periodical. Not about politics per se, but about music. He appeared enthusiastic but duly noted that - as I was then resident in London - I’d be better off contributing to that city’s more prolific underground network. Roger then mentioned that he was in contact with Frendz magazine, a fortnightly journal based in Ladbroke Grove that he claimed was often in need of new writers. He 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 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 empty ‘subversive’ ranting and hard-core pornography. International Times, its sister publication, was struggling on, still baying for revolution, still trying to stick it to the man - but fewer and fewer hirsute young Brits were laying down their hard-come-by shillings and pence to hearken to the call.

The same was true of Frendz. It had begun life in 1969 as Friends of Rolling Stone - a London-based outgrowth of the seminal San Francisco fortnightly - but then Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone’s editor and owner, had quickly grown dissatisfied with their efforts and cut off all funding; finding new backers, the original editorial team persevered into the seventies, retitling their project Frendz and throwing open their doors to any drug-diminished dissident or street-dwelling nutcase who wished to contribute. As a result, the journal had a short turbulent history that’s best evoked in the printed reminiscences of those who manned the staff, edited together in the final section of Jonathon Green’s illuminating oral history of the sixties counter-culture Days in the Life. In the book there’s an unforgettable description of a female acid casualty who haunted the office whilst dragging an old mattress behind her. She’d vanished by the time I turned up, I’m happy to say. I couldn’t have handled her: there were already more than enough LSD-impaired individuals flocking around the premises for me to contend with. Syd Barrett even appeared one day - his last group Stars was possibly going to be managed by Frendz’s ersatz accountant, a fellow in a grimy white denim suit and satanic goatee called Dick - and stared like a lost dog at anyone attempting to communicate with him. He looked in a bad way - but frankly no worse than any of the other space-cases littering the room.

Frendz had one big trump card at this precise epoch: the unquestioning support and unstinting patronage of Hawkwind. The Ladbroke Grove-based self-styled space rockers had lately been promoted to the lofty position of resident Pied Pipers for the district’s great unwashed. You’d see them everywhere - under the Westway on top of a mud-caked pick-up truck bashing out one of their endless space jams for free to a gaggle of saucer-eyed onlookers or striding around the streets purposefully in a swirl of hair, denim and cheap rococo jewellery. Most of all, I’d see them in the office of Frendz as they tended to use the premises for their own haphazard business purposes. Whenever they had a gig to play - which was practically every evening - they’d congregate there throughout the afternoon and the room would duly become transformed into an ongoing scene from a Cheech and Chong movie with pot-smoke billowing from every corner and high-spirited badinage spouting forth from every pair of parched lips in the immediate vicinity.

As a musical collective, Hawkwind were closer in sound and spirit to a small army of psychedelic buskers than anything that you could conceivably refer to as ‘virtuoso-driven’. In fact, several of the original members had actually started out as buskers or street entertainers and evidently hadn’t felt the urge to improve on their instrumental techniques when they chose to go electric. This made them a somewhat unpredictable commodity. You never knew exactly what would happen when you booked the band for a show. I’d first seen them in a club in Crawley in mid-1971; only three members had turned up to perform. The audience that night were treated to Hawkwind’s very own stripped-down version of ‘Jazz Odyssey’. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall backstage when they tried to get their fee from the promoter afterwards. But by early 1972 they’d grown to twice that number and seemed to be adding new recruits by the month.

Dave Brock was their guitarist, tune-smith and - sort of - leader; he seemed somewhat older and grumpier than his colleagues and suffered from an acute haemorrhoid condition that the rest of the group never tired of lampooning - though never directly to his face. (Eventually he’d get his revenge by trade-marking the band’s name and sacking everyone from the classic early-seventies incarnation, becoming Hawkwind’s sole trustee.) Nik Turner - his second-in-command - was never going to cause Ornette Coleman any sleepless nights with his saxophone playing but he had a lot of natural style and even a hint of charisma and was also the only man I’ve ever witnessed who could convincingly sport eye make-up with a full beard and still not look completely ridiculous. They’d recently brought on board a vocalist /lyricist named Robert Calvert who was a real, bona fide nutcase. He had occasional flashes of illumination but suffered from a particularly severe chemical imbalance in his cerebral faculties that often compelled him to seek temporary solace in various ‘rest homes’ dotted around the British Isles. Also along for the ride were two ‘electronics experts’ - Dikmik and Del Dettmar - who were really just a couple of former pot dealers who’d fallen into music-making by pure happenstance. The rhythm section was actually the key ingredient to Hawkwind’s growing appeal. Drummer Simon King and bassist ‘Lemmy’ Kilmister - both newly recruited - were able to create a solid rumbling groove for the others to play over and it was this cohesive piledriving contribution - hard, primitive, metronome-like - that ultimately made the group so prized around the country as purveyors of proto-stoner rock.

Their gigs in London and out in the suburbs quickly became homes away from home for the nation’s young drug-dabblers, not unlike ‘raves’ in the late eighties except with a bunch of hairy biker types playing electrified instruments in place of an anorak-sporting DJ gurning over the turntables. Every day was a new adventure for Hawkwind and those who happened to find themselves in its giddy orbit. No one at this juncture was in it for the money or nurturing any kind of fame-seeking agenda. If the group were offered the choice of playing for free in a field somewhere or performing at a paying venue, they would almost always go for the cash-free option. Hawkwind played numerous impromptu benefit shows for Frendz and were ready to show up for virtually any alternative community cause you could throw at them. In this respect, they were more authentic ambassadors of Ladbroke Grove’s bohemian demographic than the Clash, who in the late seventies used the Westway as nothing more than a handy photo-op backdrop for their own further self-glorification.

If Hawkwind had one shortcoming at this time it resided in the undeniable fact that their music - live or on record - invariably didn’t sound too good without the listener first partaking in some form of further chemical assistance. This was made further manifest when the group invited me and some other Frendz contributors to accompany them to a concert being held in one of London’s college venues in early February. The act performing that evening were label-mates of Hawkwind’s - both were signed to United Artists records - and based in Germany. That’s how I got to see Can playing their debut show in England. Tago Mago had just been completed and would soon become available, so the group-a quintet with Japanese vocalist Damo Suzuki very much in the foreground - spent the set further exploring the themes and grooves they’d recently developed in the recording studio. From the moment they began playing, you could tell that these guys were in a different class as instrumentalists. Three of them were master musicians who’d studied in conservatories and who now wanted to liberate themselves from the constraints of academia by playing free-form fusion jams on electrified instruments to stoned hippies. The music had obvious druggy connotations but you didn’t need to be ‘on drugs’ to appreciate it. The spell they cast together was bigger than that.

Over the next two years, I’d come to know the members of Can quite well and can tell you from first-hand experience that they were scholarly types who also liked nothing more than to indulge in magic rituals and take drugs. But there was clearly some method to their collective madness because whatever they were doing simply seeped into the music itself, to the point where it seemed to glisten before the listener like a snake hypnotising its prey as it coiled its way around the room. Miles Davis had been exploring similar other-worldly musical terrains of late on albums like Bitches Brew and Live-Evil but Miles’s new music had quickly proven itself too radical and abrasive-sounding for the UK prog bands and jazz-rock-fusion combos still in vogue to attempt to copy; only the German ‘underground rock’ bands of the late sixties had been affected by it, and from out of their ranks only Can had been able to take the basic ingredients-a James Brown funk rhythm and plenty of spacey dissonance from the keyboards and electric guitar - and create something genuinely awe-inspiring. What they were doing back then was never going to trouble the mainstream, but thirty-five years later Can’s musical influence on what passes today for contemporary rock is far easier to pinpoint than the paltry legacies left by Jethro Tull and Yes, that era’s most popular platinum-selling ‘cerebral rock’ entities. In this respect, the Cologne-based outfit played a similar role in the early seventies to the one the Velvet Underground played in the late sixties. When they were both actually in existence, only a few people bought their records or saw them live, but those same few were sufficiently moved by what they’d heard and seen to start their own groups as a direct consequence.

Still, Can’s arrival on the London live music scene was something of a well-kept secret, attended by only a small smattering of ticket-holders and freeloaders and garnering little press coverage. All eyes were fixed instead on another act then working the same circuit to riotous acclaim. David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars project was going through the roof. The record wasn’t even out yet but the hype was everywhere in the press and on billboards, and Bowie was causing havoc throughout the country with his new live show.

These days, when people talk about the end of the sixties they like to say that the decade didn’t actually die until 1974 or even 1976. They’re wrong: the seventies came into full effect in January of 1972 when David Bowie reinvented himself as Ziggy Stardust. The role made him an instant megastar and gave him the momentum to stamp his personality across the new decade in the all-imposing way the Beatles had managed in the sixties. He’d spent years marooned in the backwaters of the music industry but now - royally abetted by a cigar-chomping mega-manager named Tony Defries who modelled himself obsessively on Elvis Presley’s mentor Colonel Tom Parker and a pushy Yank wife named Angie - Bowie suddenly held the keys to the superhighway.

It had started in early January when he appeared with freshly cropped red hair on the cover of Melody Maker trumpeting his bisexuality and generally being outrageous. A few short days after the paper’s publication, Bowie had performed his London debut concert as Ziggy Stardust, a show I managed to attend. As he and the Spiders from Mars were about to play their first song, the equipment malfunctioned and there was a sudden agonising silence that was instantly felt throughout the hall. If Bowie hadn’t reacted promptly, he would most likely have been laughed off the stage that night and Ziggy Stardust’s fate would have been seriously compromised. But - being a born trouper - he’d risen to the occasion by injecting just the right hint of self-mockery, pointing to each flamboyant article of clothing he was adorned in and reciting the name of its designer in an exaggerated camp falsetto.

Then the power came back on and he and his co-workers - guitarist Mick Ronson, bassist Trevor Bolder and drummer Woody Woodmansey - immediately went to work. What they unveiled that night was a more upmarket, cerebrally involving strain of glam rock than the fizzy pop/rock then being made by Marc Bolan’s T.Rex or America’s Alice Cooper. Bolan was mainly for the teeny-boppers anyway, whilst Cooper appealed specifically to shock-rock aficionados, but Bowie’s new approach had unlimited commercial range. Teenagers struggling with their sexual identities were able to instantly relate, whilst bookish students and young adults could obsessively sift through the lyrics and unravel subtle references to Nietzschean philosophy. Suddenly he’d struck the mother lode, becoming the era’s most adored teen idol, sex symbol, rock star and Dylanesque pop sage in one fell swoop.

I wanted Bowie to be my first in-depth interview for Frendz but his management and press officer were always erecting obstacles; ‘I’m sorry - David’s at the dentist’s all this week’ was one line they kept using on me. What they were really saying was that their client was already way too high and mighty to waste valuable time explaining himself to some small-circulation rag. But then a call came through to Frendz headquarters that the MC₅ had freshly debarked from their native Michigan to take up residence in London and try their luck on British shores. Ronan O’Rahilly - an Irish-born would-be cultural provocateur who’d been a prime mover behind the UK pirate-radio boom of the mid-sixties - had bankrolled the move and was now busy contacting the underground press offering access to the group. I ended up doing my first-ever interview with them at their press officer’s ground-floor Chelsea flat in early February.

The MC5 had been a big noise back in early 1969 when their debut album Kick Out the Jams - a rambunctious audio vérité capturing of a typical live performance - was released. A biker named J. C. Crawford opens proceedings with the most unforgettable blast of verbal rabble-rousing ever committed to audiotape. ‘Brothers and sisters, you have five seconds to decide whether you are going to be the problem or the solution,’ he intones mesmerisingly in a hellfire preacher’s resonant baritone. Then the group hit their first chord and you can hear the room they’re playing in being suddenly rent asunder by the sheer volume and intensity of their evolving performance.

The 5 were a truly phenomenal live act - the only white US band who could potentially upstage the Rolling Stones in a concert hall - but they also liked to cultivate a rough and ready image of themselves as ‘anything goes’ political revolutionaries that quickly backfired on them in the marketplace. Elektra, their record label, let them go shortly after Kick Out the Jams’ release because their soulmates in Michigan’s White Panther Party had alienated a leading record-selling outlet with a controversial advert campaign in the local Motor City media. Shortly after that, White Panther kingpin John Sinclair - also the group’s manager - was jailed on drug charges and the 5 were suddenly cast adrift from their social circumstances. They signed to the Atlantic label and made a couple of studio albums but never seemed to find a solid supportive fan base outside the Midwest. It was at this point that heroin started finding its way into the less affluent areas of Michigan state and various group members began falling under its spell. Moving to England then was partly a way of distancing the group from bad acquaintances and the dangerous places they tended to frequent more and more whilst still resident in their old home stretch.

The group looked like they’d been dragged through a bush backwards when I met them. They still talked a lot about starting a revolution but this time it was a less specific revolution of the mind, not one involving ‘drugs, loud music and fucking in the streets’ - their oft-quoted manifesto of yore. Their former evangelical, new-world-conquering ardour was now seriously tempered by an old-world, ever-increasing bitterness about not being more successful in the music business. Their luck had run dry and everyone was suddenly busy being reborn under a bad sign.

The general tone for the MC₅’s 1972 sojourn in the UK was set shortly after our meeting, when the group were billed to headline a small charity gig in the Ladbroke Grove area. They turned up late and had their set rudely curtailed after two numbers by an enforced power cut. From that point on, bad luck, calamity and public indifference called all the shots on their attempted progress. They were next scheduled to perform a week-long residency at a newly opened West End club called Bumpers. I turned up on the first night to find only two other punters standing around the dance floor in anticipation of the group’s appearance. One was Viv Prince, the Pretty Things’ legendary ex-drummer, generally regarded by those who knew him back in the day as the closest thing to Sid Vicious that the sixties ever managed to vomit forth. The other was a local Hells Angel crony of Prince’s with his left leg wrapped in a cast and a large canine by his side. The MC5 that night quite literally played to three men and a dog. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so bloody tragic. England just didn’t know what it was missing. The country’s concert-goers were still hypnotised by the spectacle of musicians sporting mutton-chop side-whiskers and standing like trees in the wind as they noodled their way into the mists of mediocrity. The MC5’s high-energy approach was simply too dynamic for sleepy London town and its neighbouring precincts to comfortably relate to. It was a criminal oversight on their part because - despite the ongoing problems - the MC₅ were still firing on all cylinders as a live combo. That Bumpers show - notwithstanding the complete absence of a paying audience - was one of the most thrilling and memorable live showcases I’ve ever witnessed. A masterclass in how to create rock ’n’ roll as a living, breathing art form instead of some corny abstraction.

Being around the MC5 also brought me into contact with my future collaborator, the photographer Pennie Smith. We were introduced at one of their shows. John May had told me about her talents and so I approached her about taking photos to accompany my interviews. She looked at me a bit dubiously at first - but later in the evening she became friendlier and even tentatively agreed to bring her camera along to my next rock-star chinwag.

Getting in Pennie as my creative partner quickly became the smartest move I ever made as a fledgling journalist. Apart from being a brilliant and innovative capturer of photographic images, she filled every room she entered with an air of beauty and mystery, and musicians invariably found themselves irresistibly drawn to her, particularly the old-school late-sixties blues-rock breed who tended to regard me with extreme suspicion. You’d see it when they first clapped eyes on me. Who is this skinny hermaphrodite and what on earth does he have to say about music to me? Then they’d see Pennie hovering enigmatically in the background and their icy expressions would instantly thaw. But at the same time he knows this deeply enchanting woman so he must be doing something right. The dynamic between the two of us was strong and mutually beneficial, plus you couldn’t ask for a better friend than Pennie, a genuine paragon of virtue in an all-too-imperfect world: calm, giving, insightful, non-judgemental, devoid of ego and tantrum-inciting. Never took drugs. Didn’t sleep around. A lot of people thought we were having an affair but it was always strictly platonic love between me and her. For as long as I’ve known her, she’s been happily married to the same man - Tony Veseley - another dear friend of mine.

Pennie was there at my side when I got to do my second actual interview. David Bowie was still playing hard to get but his place had been taken this time by an even more auspicious entity: Captain Beefheart right at the top of his deeply wacky game.

Beefheart - alias Don Van Vliet - had been a teenage bosom buddy of Frank Zappa’s and had first come to prominence on the mid-sixties music scene of his native California by fronting a relatively conventional Rolling Stones-styled mop-haired rhythm ’n’ blues combo. But something deeply life-altering had befallen him during this period. Van Vliet’s cousin would later confide that ‘Don was a pretty normal guy’ until one evening he found himself trapped in a drive-in cinema watching The Incredible Shrinking Man on acid. After that, his perceptions were never the same. He started talking to trees and believing he possessed supernatural powers. In 1967 he released a potent debut album of psychedelic blues entitled Safe as Milk with a stunning guitarist - Ry Cooder, still a teenager - in his back-up ensemble, the first Magic Band. But Cooder quickly abandoned ship when Beefheart experienced an LSD-impacted meltdown during a live performance at the outset of the Summer of Love. No matter: Beefheart simply replaced him with someone almost as good and recorded a second album, Strictly Personal, that got released sometime in 1968. Both efforts were roundly ignored over in America but in England John Peel became bedazzled by them, playing tracks unceasingly on his Radio One Top Gear show every Sunday afternoon. Hearing Beefheart’s demented lupine growl blaring out of your little transistor briefly became as common a sonic manifestation of the late-sixties quiet UK Sunday as pealing church bells.

But then in 1969 Beefheart went into a whole new orbit of otherness. He replaced his old band members with some teenaged acid casualties and brainwashed them Charles Manson-style into doing whatever he told them to. He bashed out some music on a piano - an instrument he couldn’t play - and then browbeat his new charges into replicating every nuance of these ‘compositions’ on guitars, bass and drums. Amazingly, they succeeded - though it took more than six months and almost all their remaining sanity to do so. Beefheart next alerted Frank Zappa, who took them to his studio and engineered two sessions, one for the backing tracks, miraculously captured in a single three-hour session, and a later one for Beefheart’s vocals. When it came time to do the latter, the singer made a point of not wearing headphones so he couldn’t actually hear the music as he was vocalising over it.

By all standards of conventional logic, it should have sounded like caterwauling cacophony but the resulting album, Trout Mask Replica, was inspired cacophony at the very least and a completely unique musical statement to boot. Beefheart still did his Howlin’ Wolf-abducted-by-aliens vocal routine but his band had somehow struck out on a whole new musical hybrid: Delta blues in a surreal head-on collision with free jazz. You’d listen to it with your mouth agape, trying to locate a conventional beat or groove, being accosted instead by a succession of fractured rhythms that seemed to have been designed for a ballroom full of one-legged patrons. It positively defied you to dance along to it. Nor was it something you’d want to throw on the turntable to set up a romantic mood - unless you were deeply disturbed in the head. I recall reading a Kurt Cobain interview once when he claimed he and wife Courtney Love had enjoyed ‘great sex’ whilst listening to Trout Mask Replica. I knew then that their relationship was doomed.

Beefheart and his new Magic Band had recorded and released two more albums by the time our paths crossed. They were still largely unknown quantities in the States but John Peel’s unstinting patronage via the UK radio waves had provided them with a healthy cult following throughout England, and so they chose February and March of 1972 to undertake their first-ever tour of the country (Beefheart had actually played the same circuit once before but with a different Magic Band). Old Blighty would never know what hit it.

My father once told me a story about Citizen Kane’s illustrious director Orson Welles. Either he or a colleague had to follow Welles around some picturesque Irish village in the early sixties and record his every spontaneous utterance as he wove his way uncertainly from pub to pub. Welles’s glory years were far behind him at this juncture and he’d become reduced to living off his legend by talking whimsical blarney for travelogue TV shows. Yet his reduced circumstances had no visible effect on his self-image. Everyone he encountered that day he’d regale with the same priceless piece of information: ‘I’m a genius.’ He said it countless times - to his long-suffering co-workers, to uncomprehending barmen and waitresses, in fact to anyone he came directly into contact with. I only mention this because Captain Beefheart was exactly the same, utterly smitten with himself.

The world at large might have been blissfully ignorant of his accomplishments to date but Captain Beefheart was still 110 per cent convinced of his own artistic pre-eminence. He told me he was a genius at least twice within the first five minutes of our interview. Another five minutes passed and he started telling me that he was so in advance of all other living artists - be they painters, sculptors, poets or composers - that ‘I’m going to have to create a whole new art form just to express myself in for the future.’ He believed in himself with the same nutcase totality that propelled him to believe that he could converse meaningfully with shrubbery and insects. Again like Welles, he was that infuriating combination: part authentic creative visionary, part outrageous bullshitter. Still, I couldn’t help but find his self-besotted boasting deeply entertaining and, more important, he warmed to me - enough anyway to extend an invitation the following day to travel with him and his band on their rented tour bus up to Brighton, where they were booked to play a concert at the Dome.

I arrived in the early afternoon to find Beefheart and his co-workers already dressed up as if about to take the stage. They were all wearing such retina-scorching colours and fabrics it was hard to look at them seated before me on the bus without getting dizzy. As soon as the vehicle started moving, Beefheart sat down next to me and began talking virtually non-stop. Several subjects were clearly transfixed in his mind. One was Frank Zappa: he couldn’t abide the man and called him a ‘charlatan’ and an arch-manipulator. This was a bit rich when you consider that Zappa had been the childhood friend of Van Vliet’s who’d actually invented the whole Captain Beefheart moniker for his young pal and then bankrolled the creation of Trout Mask Replica. But Beefheart was unimpressed by this largesse. He was on the warpath against his old colleague because Zappa had dared to release an album by a mentally ill street singer called Wild Man Fischer on the same label - suitably named Bizarre - that he’d released Trout Mask on. Beefheart found this unpardonable: ‘He was trying to market me as a goddamned freak! The gall of the man!’ he kept repeating. At one point, his attack on Zappa became so vitriolic that his new bassist, a quiet Mexican named Roy Estrada who’d played with Zappa on all the Mothers of Invention’s late-sixties albums, tried to intercede on his former boss’s behalf. ‘Aw - c’mon, Don,’ he offered meekly, ‘Frank’s OK.’ ‘Frank’s OK?!’ Beefheart parroted back with a thunderstruck expression on his face. ‘Frank’s OK?! Listen to yourself, Estrada. He’s got you brainwashed too.’

The other subject that got him all hot under the collar was drugs. He couldn’t tolerate the perception that his music was - in any way - drug-related. ‘Look around you - none of my band takes drugs. We don’t make music high on LSD or anything else. That’s all just vicious misinformation.’ I looked around and immediately noticed the eerie thousand-yard stares beaming out of the eye sockets of his Magic Band accomplices. Collectively speaking, they made a singularly unconvincing advertisement for drug-free living. Years later I’d read a biography on Beefheart and discover that certain members had imported PCP-a mind-befuddling tranquilliser used to stun farm animals - into the country to smoke during their leisure time on this tour.

The bus they’d hired to transport us started malfunctioning as we approached Brighton itself and completely gave up the ghost just as we started coasting along the seafront. This meant that everyone had to suddenly disembark and walk the half-mile distance to the venue itself. I suddenly found myself in a brand-new role - that of Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band’s resident shepherd. I felt like I’d been abducted into an episode of The Twilight Zone. Everywhere we walked, fellow pedestrians would stare at us open-mouthed as if we’d just landed from some far-away galaxy. Beefheart was dressed up like some Las Vegas nightclub conjurer complete with flowing cape. I kept expecting him to produce a couple of white doves from out of his sleeves at any given moment. And no one had even the remotest sense of earthly direction. I had to keep checking that one of the Magic Band hadn’t strayed off and gotten himself hopelessly lost.

Finally, we reached the concert hall just as dusk was starting to settle in the sky. In due course, the ensemble walked out on stage and plugged in, whilst the drummer - whose real name was Art Tripp III - seated himself behind possibly the smallest kit ever commandeered for a live performance-a single bass and snare drum alongside one cymbal. Beefheart - in full evening dress - then entered to much acclaim from the audience and gruffly counted in the first song. As soon as the first notes were struck, time stood still. Music like this had never been heard before - or since. The group performed most of ‘The Spotlight Kid’ and a couple of selections from Trout Mask Replica but the studio recordings barely hinted at the mind-scrambling majesty of their live renditions. Like Thelonious Monk, Beefheart had a totally unique ‘out-there’ aesthetic sensibility and the scary strength of personality to project it directly onto not only his band but also his paying public. There was a genuinely superhuman power coming out of the PA system. People just sat there slack-jawed and pinched themselves to see whether they’d fallen asleep into some alternative dream dimension. None of us could believe we were hearing music this visceral and dementedly alive. You could practically see the electricity coursing through their instruments and taste the phlegm bubbling in Beefheart’s larynx. He wasn’t kidding when he called them the Magic Band.

Another ‘magic’ band from America’s West Coast who’d adopted LSD as a means to break down existing musical barriers and create a more wide-open sonic sensibility were San Francisco’s Grateful Dead. Ever since 1967 they’d been fondly recognised as psychedelic-rock pioneers and all-purpose community-minded righteous hippie dudes by John Peel’s lank-haired listeners throughout the British Isles, but they’d only ever managed to play one concert in England to date, at a festival in Staffordshire in the early summer of 1970. In early ’72, though, the group and their record company Warner Bros. bankrolled an extended gig-playing trek through Europe that included a short tour of England. In late March, they and their extremely large ‘extended family’ moved into a swanky Kensington hotel in anticipation of the shows and duly became my third interviewees.

In stark contrast to their reputation as championship-level LSD-gobblers, they seemed a pretty down-to-earth bunch when confronted one-on-one. They dressed like rodeo cowboys and talked like mature overseas students checking out foreign culture. The drugs had yet to bend their brains into some inexplicable agenda like Beefheart’s bunch. Their music may have been further fuelled by a healthy desire to embrace utter weirdness but none of them was weird per se. Jerry Garcia in particular was totally exasperated by their image and reputation and the way it constantly impinged on his privacy. Every acid casualty in Christendom wanted to corral him into some ‘deeply meaningful’ conversation and he’d simply had enough of indulging all these damaged people. Hippies the world over looked up to him as though he were some deity or oracle but Garcia was really just an intelligent, well-read druggie with a deeply cynical streak who felt increasingly ill at ease with the role he’d been straitjacketed into by late-sixties bohemian culture. In time it would get so intolerable that he would withdraw from society in general by compulsively smoking high-grade Persian heroin. This in turn would prove fatal: after twenty years of addiction, the drug would end up hastening his death in 1995.

At the same time, he was one of the most singularly gifted musicians of the latter half of the twentieth century. The Grateful Dead were an odd bunch in that they were always being called a rock band but they couldn’t play straight-ahead rock ’n’ roll to save their lives. They’d started out instead as a jug band before branching out into folk and electric blues and playing long jazz-influenced jams whenever the mood struck. By the end of the sixties they’d even morphed into a credible country-and-western outfit. By 1972 they meandered between these various musical genres, performing sets that rarely ran for less than three hours in length; there were - inevitably - valleys and peaks. You’d sit there for what seemed like an eternity watching them noodle away on stage silently praying that they’d actually finish the song and put it out of its misery. But then - all of a sudden - the group would take off into the psychedelic stratosphere and Garcia would step forward to the lip of the stage and begin navigating his way to that enchanted region where the sagebrush meets the stars. Cosmic American music: Gram Parsons coined the phrase but it was the Grateful Dead who best embodied the concept even though - after 1972 - they began slipping into a long befuddling decline.

Both Beefheart and the Dead turned up to play at a three-day festival held in the Northern town of Bickershaw during the first weekend in May ’72. The event’s shady promoters had envisaged it as a grand unveiling of the whole West Coast live rock experience to the John Peel demographic but it soon degenerated into a sort of mud-caked psychedelic concentration camp filled with miserable-looking young people on dodgy hallucinogenics being lashed by torrential wind and rain and sold inedible food. Beefheart and the Dead performed splendidly, the former delivering a sudden earth-shaking a cappella version of Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Evil’ that struck terror into the hearts and minds of several acid casualties at the lip of the stage who reacted as if suddenly struck by lightning - but there was no getting around the fact that the whole ugly debacle was destined to be acid rock’s last hurrah here in the British Isles. A relentless downpouring of bad weather, bad facilities, bad drugs and (mostly) bad music: it had worked like a charm three years ago at Woodstock but it wasn’t working any more.

Mind you, I had a great time. A bunch of Frendz collaborators had hired a large van we could all sleep in and had succeeded in getting VIP passes, so we were always close to the action and safe from the inclement storms raging over the bedraggled spectators. I remember on the first night standing at the side of the stage smoking a joint and watching some underwhelming folk singer braying into a microphone when a rotund, Afro-headed figure dressed head to foot in frayed blue denim suddenly approached me. ‘Are you Nick Kent?’ the figure enquired; he seemed to be on speed and was also suffering from one of the most pungent outbreaks of body odour my nose had ever encountered. When I replied in the affirmative, he added, ‘Well, if you write any better than what I’ve read of yours lately, I’m going to seriously have to consider breaking your hands.’ This was my first-ever conversation with Charles Shaar Murray, my soon-to-be collaborator at the New Musical Express.

But I’m getting slightly ahead of the actual flow of events in early 1972. Sometime in late February I’d managed to meet Iggy Pop, an encounter that had a cataclysmic effect on me personally. During one of my fruitless attempts to snag a David Bowie interview, an employer at his management firm Mainman had let slip that Iggy had lately become one of their clients too and had just moved from the States to take up temporary residence in a house in London’s Maida Vale. He even gave me the address. At first I was too scared to make direct contact, having read all about the singer’s unpredictable ways whilst fronting the early Stooges, but then I became friendly with a girl called Debbie Boushell, who’d recently left her native Michigan to immerse herself in swinging London. Back in the day she’d known both the MC₅ and the Stooges personally, and when she heard that I knew Iggy’s exact whereabouts in England she eagerly suggested we visit his premises together at the earliest opportunity.

One sunny afternoon we actually made the trek, walking for ages along streets rimmed with elegantly cropped hedgerows and exquisitely maintained gardens until we came to the Stooges’ UK headquarters. I rang the bell, half-expecting a naked wild man to suddenly materialise and wrestle me to the ground. But instead the door was opened by a slender young person dressed in a woman’s sleeveless smock and a pair of circulation-constrictingly tight silver leather trousers. I’d always imagined Iggy Pop to be a bull-in-a-china-shop kind of guy-a walking sea of turbulence - but the fellow facing me - for it was he - was the epitome of charm and well-mannered cordiality.

In point of fact, I didn’t really meet Iggy Pop that day. I was treated to an encounter with his alter ego, Jim Osterberg, instead. This was most fortuitous: Jim can be a genuinely nice human being to spend time with, Iggy less so. He was attempting to lead a chemical-free existence at this precise moment and Iggy only came out to play back then when the drugs started kicking in. I couldn’t get over how polite and intelligent he was. He had exquisite manners and spoke penetratingly about Gore Vidal’s novels and avant-garde European cinema. He was trying to assimilate English culture and I remember we watched an episode of Steptoe and Son on his black-and-white television, me attempting to explain the rag-and-bone back-story behind its plot line. As per usual, Albert and Harold Steptoe were constantly at each other’s throats over some petty infraction, shouting comic insults at each other across the scrapyard. Iggy turned to his guitarist James Williamson, who was sharing the Maida Vale digs with him. ‘That’ll be you and me in a couple of weeks’ time.’

He and Williamson couldn’t get over the fact that television in Great Britain during 1972 tended to cease broadcasting after 10.30 in the evening. Back in Michigan, the Stooges had bonded over after-midnight reruns of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead flickering in the old homestead. Now all they had to while away the witching hours was a test pattern. The pair were both acquainted with the Rolling Stones’ song ‘Street Fighting Man’ and its refrain about sleepy London town, and now they were discovering for themselves the reality of its sentiments. London simply wasn’t swinging any more. Everything closed down too early and the only places that stayed open after midnight seemed to be hosting a perpetual gloomy wake for the sixties.

At first Iggy tried to make sense of his new surroundings, to check out the English way at close quarters. I saw him a lot during the next few months. He could often be espied walking around the city alone, mapping out the London terrain street by street until he’d covered every postal district on foot. Like Napoleon, he was busy working up his own plan of attack on the metropolis. He’d sometimes turn up to a gig alone and lurk in the audience, scoping out the competition. He spoke highly of a T.Rex concert he’d witnessed at Wembley - the same show that was filmed by Ringo Starr for the Born to Boogie film. Iggy was quite a fan of Bolan’s back in the day - he’d even managed to get hold of a pre-release white-label acetate of The Slider album and played it a lot at the Stooges’ London headquarters. He seemed to hold Bolan in higher esteem than his new pal Bowie - at least on a musical level.

Iggy and Bowie may have been linked by management and general word of mouth but their individual agendas were poles apart. Bowie was a culture-vulture tourist, a magpie chameleon furiously ransacking all manner of cutting-edge influences in order to create a sophisticated multi-layered pop consciousness for himself and his audience to share in. Iggy meanwhile was a fervent purist intent on rechannelling the bedrock blues aesthetic - two or three chords and a hypnotic groove - through the whole white bohemian stream-of-consciousness mindset mixed in with some performance art. Put simply, Ziggy Stardust was ‘show business’ whilst the Stooges were ‘soul business’. The first was deeply glamorous and alluring to behold, the latter less attractive but potentially more life-changing to be exposed to.

Some might now see it as the difference between art and artifice but that would be a wrong-headed claim to make. Bowie’s Ziggy-era music was certainly artfully conceived and he had a far more sophisticated and varied approach to basic songcraft than Iggy. Bowie understood what was happening in the cultural Zeitgeist and was able to play on its various ongoing obsessions - the sci-fi-inspired future, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four scenario, androgyny, Clockwork Orange, Warholesque superstardom - to his own inspired purposes. Iggy by contrast was a musical primitive not unlike John Lee Hooker and proud to be so. They could only enjoy a meaningful creative and personal relationship when Bowie finally elected to leave all his personality-transforming masks back in the closet, which he did in the mid-seventies when the pair moved to Berlin together. During the early seventies, though, they were often at cross-purposes. Bowie adored Iggy but was less enamoured by the Stooges’ input, feeling the singer would be better served with a more conventionally proficient back-up ensemble. Iggy meanwhile had his own private reservations about Bowie’s effetely theatrical live shows as well as the Bromley alien’s unfortunate tendency to hire mime artists to share the stage with him. One was fated to levitate to the very toppermost of the global poppermost over the next two years, whilst the other was doomed to lay destitute in its outer margins during the same period of time. Partly this was due to their manager Tony Defries, who focused ruthlessly on Bowie’s career throughout 1972, keeping Iggy and the Stooges out on the sidelines and unemployed, save for the recording of one album and a single live performance. But mostly it was due to the fact that the world was still not ready to accept what the Stooges had to offer it.

Their one and only European show took place on July 21st 1972 on a Saturday night at London’s King’s Cross Cinema (later known as the Scala), just across the road from the train station. The night before, Lou Reed had made his UK live debut at the same venue and the fledgling glitterati du jour had all come out in force to feast their eyes and ears on the revered former Velvet Underground kingpin’s latest musical venture. Members of a fascinating new English act known as Roxy Music were amongst the gauchely attired attendees seated up in the balcony. The Stooges were there too, scoping out the competition with their customary snake-eyed nonchalance. Backstage I caught a glimpse of Reed before he went on. Slumped in a corner of his makeshift dressing room, his whole body was shaking uncontrollably and his facial expression was that of a man awaiting his own execution. His performance that night quickly degenerated into a fiasco. The backing band he’d hired - and christened the Tots - managed only to transform his old Velvets repertoire from edgy art rock to feckless-sounding bubblegum pop. And Reed’s stage fright was so palpable his voice kept cancelling out on him because his vocal cords and neck muscles had become rigid with fear. He was also seriously overweight, a condition not helped by his choice of apparel - a rhinestone-encrusted black velvet suit several sizes too small for his portly girth. After four songs, his trousers burst their seams, his zipper broke and the waistband began to slowly descend, billowing around his thighs. Iggy and James Williamson - standing at the front of the stage - found this spectacle particularly amusing and began pointing at the falling strides with suitably contemptuous facial expressions.

There were no such wardrobe malfunctions when the Stooges took the same stage just twenty-four hours later. But there was only a fraction of the audience that had turned out for Reed. No celebrity onlookers could be found in the building - no Roxy, Reed or Bowie, although the latter pair had been photographed arm in arm with Iggy that very afternoon during a joint press conference at a London hotel. No more than 200 people were present for the show and at least half of them were only there because it was a cheaply priced all-night event that provided warmth and shelter to cushion the hours before London’s tube trains began operating again at 6 a.m. Many in the balcony were already fast asleep when the Stooges began playing at 2 in the morning. They didn’t stay that way for long. From the opening notes, the big room was suddenly sucked into a world rife with menace and malevolence.

The songs the Stooges chose to perform that night had never been heard outside of the group’s rehearsal studio - and they never would be again. Nothing was reprised from their previous two Elektra albums and nothing they played would be later immortalised on Raw Power. Instead, they performed a jolting succession of primitive works in progress. ‘This next selection is entitled “Penetration”,’ Iggy would inform the genuinely terrified crowd. But the song they performed had absolutely nothing in common with the hypnotic track of the same name that would appear eight months later on the Stooges’ third album. ‘Thank you,’ Iggy then announced. ‘This next selection is called “Penetration” too.’ And off they’d go again bashing out this scary, Neanderthal jungle music that no one present had ever heard the likes of before this night.

Iggy meanwhile gave one of the most superhuman physical displays ever seen in public. Every nuance of his performance is still engraved in my memory - his absolute fearlessness, his Nijinsky-like body language and the mind-boggling way he seemed able to defy even the laws of gravity. At one point he placed his mike stand right at the lip of the stage, bent backward until his head touched the ground and then threw his whole body forward onto it. As he and the stand descended into the audience pit, he managed to execute a full somersault on it whilst still in mid-air. Landing on the floor in a deft pirouette, he then proceeded to crawl around the crowd’s feet on his chest like a reptile.

No one had ever witnessed anything like this in England before. The Who had been loud, anarchic-sounding and genuinely shocking as a live attraction once upon a time but they’d never physically confronted their audiences in such an alarming fashion. Four years hence, UK crowds would become totally entranced by just this sort of spectacle but in 1972 it was way too much way too soon. The audience at the Stooges show looked genuinely traumatised by the end. As soon as Iggy had leapt off the stage and into the crowd, people generally scattered backwards and stood close to the exit doors, peering nervously at the action and praying that the singer wouldn’t come over and start tormenting them. At the same time, they couldn’t keep their eyes off him so it made for an interesting dynamic in the room, to say the least. John Lydon has always claimed he was one of those present in the audience that night and that he was left unimpressed by the Stooges’ performance, but that is quite frankly impossible to believe. For what Iggy and co. achieved that night was to provide the basic blueprint for what the Sex Pistols attempted three and a half years later: short sharp shock rock that mesmerised whilst at the same time scaring its audience witless. Take it from one who was actually there and saw the whole process slowly developing throughout the early seventies: Iggy and the Stooges invented punk just like James Brown and the Famous Flames created funk. They were the first and they were the best. Many self-styled punk experts have since come forward to chronicle the genre in lofty tomes but unless you were one of those 200 jittery punters watching the Stooges’ only European show in the summer of ’72, you weren’t there at the real beginning and don’t really know what you’re talking about. End of sermon.

The performance had a profound effect on me, anyway. It offered me a definitive glimpse into the decade’s real future - the new wild frontier of Western pop culture - as well as providing the catalyst for more gainful employment. A week or so later, I got an unexpected phone call from a gentleman I’d never spoken to before named Nick Logan, who claimed to be the assistant editor of the New Musical Express. He told me the paper was looking to run an article on Iggy and the Stooges but that they’d been unable to secure any kind of interview via their management. As I’d already encountered the group and had recently seen them perform, would I be at all interested in penning a short article on the subject for their next issue? He then spoke the magic words: fifteen quid would be paid for every thousand words I could come up with. I said ‘yes’ on the spot and agreed to visit the paper’s offices in Long Acre in order to discuss further projects.

The NME and I already had one thing in common: the broadsheet publication first appeared in 1951, the year of my birth. Its premier issue featured my dad’s pal Vera Lynn - the former ‘forces’ favourite’ - as its cover star. But the weekly periodical’s initial focus on fifties crooners and light-entertainment flavours of the month soon changed to embrace a younger demographic when Elvis Presley exploded over in America leading the way for home-grown imitators like Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard to beguile Britain’s post-war youth.

By the early sixties the journal was on a circulation ascendant as the country’s pre-eminent pop sheet. Beatles fans bought it religiously each week in order to find out all the latest info about their mop-haired saviours. Its golden era to date had been the so-called British invasion beat group years but it started to come seriously unstuck during the second half of the decade when rock went counter-cultural and pop was suddenly viewed as music for morons.

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.

Five minutes after they’d finished playing, Fallon - or ‘Beep’ as everyone called him - ushered Pennie and me through the stage door and led us into a cramped space directly behind the stage. Shortly afterwards, Jimmy Page - still perspiring from his onstage exertions - joined us. He seemed very paranoid and ill at ease and began demanding pointedly if and when I’d seen Zeppelin play live before. When I recalled the Bath Festival performance, he seemed to relax a little but then began a heated rant about ‘the last bloody interviewer’ he’d been confronted with, who - it turned out - had only seen the group via their one-song inclusion in the film Supershow. As he was speaking, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham all entered the room and sat down, nursing alcoholic beverages and mischievous expressions. They’d been out under the spotlight all evening providing entertainment for the people. Now it was their turn to be entertained and it didn’t take me long to realise that it was going to be at my expense. They sniggered whenever I opened my mouth to phrase a sentence. At least once, I heard the word ‘wanker’ being aimed in my direction.

Meanwhile, my ‘interview’ with Page was growing increasingly confrontational. He seemed to be wilfully misinterpreting my questions - hearing implied criticisms where there were only innocent enquiries - and reacting as though I was the Spanish Inquisition. At one point, I mentioned innocently that no American band had ever managed to convincingly duplicate the four-piece heavy-rock formula that English rock quartets from Zep to Free had been so successful at, but Page somehow interpreted this harmless comment as a criticism too and went off on a petulant put-down of the ‘aimless jamming’ of ‘overrated American bands like the Grateful Dead’. His three band members’ smirking asides reached a raucous crescendo at this juncture. It was then that I impulsively decided to retaliate by bringing up the thorny subject of all those Zep lyrics that were in reality straight lifts from old blues numbers. Big mistake. The four members promptly walked out with disgusted looks on their faces and the next sound I heard was that of Peter Grant screaming ear-lacerating obscenities at B. P. Fallon in an adjacent room for having brought me into their world in the first place.

In a tricky situation such as this, it’s always a distinct advantage to have a workmate as charming and alluring as the divine Pennie Smith. The group may have been deeply unimpressed with me but they couldn’t help but be attracted by the mysterious beauty of the now-legendary photographer. As a result, an hour later, we were both invited to a late-night impromptu get-together involving the four members, Grant, Fallon, Richard Cole, their notorious tour manager, and Phil Carson, the head of the UK branch of Atlantic Records.

Compared to what I’d heard and read about Zeppelin’s parties whilst on tour, it was a pretty tame affair. There was a certain amount of cocaine-snorting - but nothing excessive. Alcohol was freely available but nobody was particularly drunk. At one point, someone - not a group member - half-heartedly proposed trying to hire some prostitutes but no one else in the room felt inclined to take him up on his offer. Instead, they just talked, swapping industry gossip and telling funny stories about their past exploits. Jimmy Page regaled everyone with his tales of a teenage Jeff Beck briefly playing guitar in the Tornados, the Joe Meek-directed instrumental ensemble who recorded ‘Telstar’. He seemed a lot more relaxed and even apologised for the way he’d reacted earlier. I became embroiled in a lengthy discussion about music with Robert Plant which soon transformed itself into a heated debate on who was better - the Byrds or the Buffalo Springfield (I stuck by the Byrds; Plant favoured the Springfield). Peter Grant told a hilarious story about wrapping Little Richard in a carpet and bodily carrying him to a gig he was refusing to perform at. At just after 3 a.m., things started to wind down and everyone retired peacefully to their separate hotel rooms.

The next evening, we stuck around for the second show and then set off by car back to London at midnight. As we were pulling out of the backstage area, Peter Grant stalked over to our vehicle and - staring ominously in my direction - bade farewell whilst making it abundantly clear that he wouldn’t be at all happy if anything negative appeared in my write-up.

The big man needn’t have worried. The article I turned in - split into two parts and run in the last couple of NME issues printed that year - was effusive in its praise of their live stature whilst diplomatically playing down any of the discordant moments that had passed between us. They even ran a photo next to the headline of me with kohl-ringed eyes and hair - which I’d cut myself - that was short and prickly on top with long rat’s-tail strands at the back that reached to my shoulders. Looking at it now, I get the uneasy feeling that I may have helped invent the mullet a full ten years before it became the de rigueur hairstyle of the sartorially challenged eighties. I can find no ready excuse for this gross lapse in haircare judgement. But then again, one isn’t really necessary. It was the seventies after all, a time when ‘good taste’ upped sticks and went into an extended hibernation.

Bedford College chose to toss me out of their corridors of learning just as Led Zeppelin and I were first getting acquainted. I got the letter that December. It was bound to happen: I rarely attended lectures and hadn’t even shown up for the end-of-term examinations. I’d already spent too much of my young life in dusty libraries poring over the thoughts and words of long-dead authors. Now John Milton and his ilk could all take a hike.

I only have two negative memories from 1972. The first involved a speed-addled Scottish psychopath who’d sometimes stalk the Frendz office, pushing me against the wall, breaking a broom handle in half and then threatening to force the splintered part into my rectal passage. The second occurred when a rotund Jamaican landlady forcibly ejected me from the room in a musty old All Saints Road building that I was renting from her. I’d let one of the area’s walking wounded - an acid casualty named Smiling Mike - sleep there in my absence and he’d supposedly done something unspeakable on the premises. Smiling Mike died two months after this incident. He fell whilst clambering up a drainpipe trying to break into the third-storey apartment above Frendz’s HQ. Hawkwind dedicated their next studio album to his memory.

Having to deal with situations like these was what ultimately soured me to the whole underground ethos. At this time in my life I had little time to be indulgent with burn-outs. That would only come to pass some years later when I became one myself. There were some focused and vibrant people still on board the counter-culture night train, but most conscripts I encountered that year were incapable of summoning up any kind of genuine work ethic to bolster their actions and rhetoric. That absurd hippie-entitlement - everything should be free, man - was still in the air like the stale scent of patchouli oil. Only now it was festering into a communal sense of frustrated bitterness over the fact that the revolution hadn’t transpired and wasn’t ever going to. The world was turning and they were still up on the hill like Paul McCartney’s fool or King Canute on his throne as the waves surged towards him. What did I learn from this? That dreaming is never enough. Action and interaction are what count if you really want to lead a life of surprises.

When Charlie Murray and I began working for the NME, we both had to withstand our share of catcalls from certain self-styled underground potentates who told us in no uncertain terms that we were selling out by working for ‘the man’. Charlie may have been more affected than me by these taunts as his roots within that community ran deeper.

Personally speaking, I couldn’t have cared less. If ‘selling out’ meant being read by 100,000 people - without editorial interference - instead of 10,000, then bring it on. I’d become a very cocky fellow indeed by the time last orders were being called on 1972. The bashful kid I’d once been was now nowhere to be seen. But I had some cause for self-congratulation for I was now strapped mind, body and soul to the whirling Zeitgeist of cutting-edge popular culture until I could feel the aftershocks puncturing my very bones. Why, David Bowie had even written one of the year’s most memorable songs about me. Not me specifically - but people like me certainly, the new breed come to unshackle the new decade from its now dysfunctional predecessor. ‘All the young dudes carry the news,’ the chorus went. It was an inspirational shout-out to me and all the other freshly empowered human peacocks to keep on defiantly kicking up dust in the face of a deeply uncertain future.

And yet I had to be careful. Glam was starting to run out of steam and I didn’t want to end up some ‘flash in the pan flavour of the month’ type of guy. That could easily happen unless I got really, really good at what I was doing really, really quickly. The more I thought it through, the more the answer to my looming dilemma seemed to lie over in America. Kerouac had traversed its boundaries and come up with a masterpiece as a result of his incessant journeying. Maybe the land of opportunity would have a similarly transformative effect on me. I had the money for a return ticket and a few addresses. What was holding me back?