But I don’t recall ever feeling in any way daunted by the new pastures that fate had lately leapfrogged me into. Leave all that self-questioning introspection - all that ‘do I really belong here?’ uncertainty - to Cat Stevens and his lank-haired pallies. When you’re caught up in the tidal wave of a career surge that has already extended way beyond the realm of your wildest expectations, it’s best to just hang on to basic survival instincts and take each moment as it comes. With this thought uppermost in mind, I rejoined Led Zeppelin’s tour of Europe on the 12th of January, when they were scheduled to set the heather ablaze throughout Bonnie Scotland.

This time around the group were more tolerant and accommodating vis-à-vis my presence in their ranks. My Daniel in the lion’s den experience with them a month earlier was not repeated. I’d passed their audition and could now wander freely in their midst without fear of Peter Grant suddenly reading the riot act to me in his creepy East London lisp and then hurling me out of some third-storey window with a flick of his meaty wrist. This more congenial atmosphere immediately opened up a greater window of opportunity to study them up close and learn more about the group’s peculiar human chemistry.

In Scotland, the first thing that struck me was how small the operation actually was, particularly when it toured Europe. Jimmy Page had his own guitar roadie, John Bonham had a mate of his named Mick Hinton to set up his drum kit, there was a sound mixer, whilst two other guys were employed to make sure the amps were in place and fully functioning, all under the fierce supervision of tour manager Richard Cole. From what I could tell, these six people made up the entire travelling road crew of the world’s most successful band in early 1973. There were no big limousines outside the hotels and no bodyguards to protect the four musicians. With both Cole and Grant on board, there was no need for extra muscle. Imagine the entire Russian Mafia melted down to just two human forms and you’ll have a fair idea of the effect that this pair had on any room they entered. People in hotel bars would just scatter when Grant and Cole sidled in together. One evil look from either of them could provoke rank strangers to defecate on the spot.

Cocooned by this two-Goliath army, the four group members bonded easily over matters involving music but seemed otherwise ill-suited to each other’s basic temperaments. Page was cautious and self-contained, whilst Plant was gregarious and outward-going. Jones was the epitome of utter detachment, whilst Bonham was fiercely emotional and cursed with a notoriously short fuse.

There were deep philosophical differences also. Zeppelin’s singer was at heart a good hippie son of Albion who always felt compelled to inject a light, airy love-generation sensibility into his lyrics and onstage banter. Their guitarist by contrast liked to cultivate himself as an Aleister Crowley-fixated student of the dark side and loved nothing more than to invest his group’s mighty in-concert clout with an added whiff of the demonic. Page actually owned Crowley’s former Scottish lair and after each show would drive back to its apparently haunted premises instead of booking himself into the hotels where everyone else was staying. He liked to shroud himself in a kind of Byronic mystique but was too inherently well-mannered and gentlemanly to be a fully qualified emissary of the ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ brigade. Uninformed people back then talked about Page’s occultist dabbling as though the guitarist spent his leisure hours with his head in a cowl ritually slaughtering various species of livestock and then drinking their blood like some corny apparition in a Dennis Wheatley satanic potboiler. This was pure fiction. He was just another seeker after esoteric knowledge, a collector of old dusty books and committed student of the ‘magical’ information that was supposedly contained within their yellowing pages. And his interests certainly weren’t shared by his fellow players, who viewed their guitarist’s preoccupations with guarded amusement rather than any sense of trepidation. The real darkness looming over Led Zeppelin sprang from another source entirely.

The bullish John Bonham-I duly discovered - was the group’s resident loose cannon, its most unpredictable component and scariest asset. He was a nice bloke when he was sober, but he was rarely sober for long and would often undergo an alcohol-fuelled Jekyll-to-Hyde personality transformation whilst inebriating himself in a way that was more than a little unhealthy to be in the immediate vicinity of. The rest of the group had long tired of witnessing their drummer on his frequent drunken rampages; Page, Plant and Jones simply excused themselves and left the room whenever they saw Bonham after a show downing shots of hard liquor in swift succession, his eyes turning harder and narrower with each gulp. In their absence, Richard Cole happily took on the role of Bonham’s drinking buddy, and you certainly wouldn’t have wanted to bump into those two down some dark alley after midnight. Cole was the real barbarian in Led Zeppelin’s court - most of the deeply lurid tales of wanton cruelty associated with them actually stem from incidents initiated by him. His menacing, piratical personality dovetailed effortlessly with Bonham’s belligerent drunken side; together they were double trouble writ large.

Seven years down the road, of course, Bonham’s out-of-control drinking would drive the decisive final nail into Led Zeppelin’s career coffin, but there was little that the others could have done to temper his thirst. In the seventies no self-respecting musician believed in twelve-step rehab and ‘interventions’. Booze and drugs were just part of the landscape, something to lose yourself in whilst out on the road or in a recording studio. And Led Zeppelin in the early seventies weren’t that excessive on the drug front. Plant and Jones liked to smoke pot, and all four enjoyed the odd line of cocaine, but when touring in Europe their chemical consumption was relatively frugal, particularly in comparison to what the Rolling Stones were getting up to during the same time line. Mind you, that would all change when the group toured America again just four months in the future.

It was in the eighties that some perceptive soul finally coined the ultimate description of cocaine as ‘God’s way of telling you you’re making too much money’. Joe Boyd - in his insightful autobiography White Bicycles - is even more critical of the drug and its debilitating hold over the musical culture of the seventies. ‘I never knew cocaine to improve anything,’ he wrote. ‘When the white lines came out, it was time to call it a night: the music could only get worse. If I joined in, the next day’s playback would provide clear evidence of the deterioration of both the performances and of my critical ability to judge them. I suspect that the surge in cocaine’s popularity explains - at least in part - why so many great sixties artists made such bad records in the following decade.’

Nowadays I concur heartily with these views. But back in the day I was less wise and infinitely more impulsive. The very idea of the drug had me hypnotised like a lemming scrambling towards a clifftop. The hype surrounding cocaine was that it somehow opened up the gateway to thinking brilliant thoughts, but the reality was invariably more brutal: sudden jagged mood swings, dry mouth, scary heart palpitations. The first time I tried it - backstage at a Hawkwind concert in October ’72 - I almost fell down a long flight of stairs when the brain rush actually kicked in. The second time I was with a group called the Flamin’ Groovies a month later and we all got pulled over by the police outside the dealer’s Earls Court house. If someone hadn’t tossed the incriminating packet of powder into a nearby garden, we’d have all been facing criminal prosecution.

God was evidently trying to tell me something, but I steadfastly refused to listen up. By early 1973 I was wasting one or two nights of every week snorting the devil’s dandruff in the company of other young London-based pleasure-seekers. By the time dawn broke through the gaps in the drawn curtains of their basement lairs, I’d be feeling very brittle and twitchy indeed. The simple fact of the matter was that the drug didn’t agree with my central nervous system and made me plain jittery. But I was too much of a schmuck to walk away from its temptation and most of what I consumed was offered to me for free anyway. I duped myself into thinking it would be impolite to refuse and carried on numbing my sinuses whenever the opportunity arose.

At the same time I was getting ready to launch my personal invasion on the land of opportunity. By early February everything was in place: I’d drawn all my funds out of the bank, paid for an open-ended return airline ticket to Michigan and had a special US visa stamped into my passport. In the middle of the month I boarded my flight and some ten hours later was standing on US soil.

At first the customs authorities didn’t want to let me in. ‘Are you a homosexual?’ one of them kept asking me. If I’d said yes, they’d have sent me straight back to Limey-land. But I simply told them the truth until they relented and grudgingly allowed me entry into the Motor City. Soon enough I’d hailed a taxi and was sizing up my new surroundings: a big motorway covered with humongous gas-guzzling automobiles and bordered by huge billboards and head-spinning changes of scenery. At one point we dipped through downtown Detroit and the streets there seemed as menacing as they were congested. But then another strip of highway would open up and the buildings would suddenly look cleaner and the sidewalks a lot less threatening. Continuing seventeen miles north-west of Detroit, we arrived in a well-appointed residential area on the outskirts of Birmingham, Michigan, where Debbie Boushell and her nouveau riche parents dwelt. This would be my home away from home for all of one evening. After that I was on my own.

I’d always envisaged the Motor City as a Mecca for tough-sounding high-quality music but by the time I arrived there, the home-grown musical culture was facing a steep recession. A local heroin epidemic had killed off the MC₅ and forced the Stooges to relocate in Hollywood, thus depriving the state of its two most promising hard-rock bands. Others like Bob Seger and Ted Nugent would still have to wait several years before they could start creating any kind of impact for themselves outside of Michigan. The one exception was Grand Funk Railroad, a shallow, bombastic power trio from Flint, Michigan, who played populist stoner rock specifically aimed at a new and disturbingly prevalent US demographic - teenage barbiturate-gobblers. Their God-awful records always seemed to be shacked up in the highest echelons of the Billboard and Cashbox top ten best-seller listings or polluting the airwaves in the early seventies. Like herpes, you just couldn’t get rid of their feckless racket.

But the most demoralising blow to Michigan’s culture had lately been dealt by Tamla Motown supremo Berry Gordy, the area’s most revered music entrepreneur. In the late sixties the wily, always ahead-of-the-game Gordy had migrated to Hollywood in order to better monitor the career transformation of his beloved princess Diana Ross from singer to movie actress. He’d assured his old Hitsville U.S.A. employees that he’d never shut down Motown’s original Detroit premises, but by 1970 he’d set up a more spacious Los Angeles-based studio and was compelling his most prized recent discoveries - the Jackson 5 - to record only at this new location. After that, the writing was on the wall. By October of 1972 - the month that saw Marvin Gaye reluctantly vacate his Michigan mansion and join the exodus to California - the label’s downtown office had been closed down, its fabled studio - nicknamed the Snakepit - had been stripped of all its functioning recording equipment and its auxiliary session players - known as the Funk Brothers - were suddenly unemployed and not a little bitter about the way they’d suddenly been shunted aside by the big boss.

At least they weren’t alone in their desolation. The whole state grieved alongside them. Motown’s joyful music throughout the sixties had been such a morale-boosting tonic to the huge multiracial community from which it sprang that when the company stole away to supposedly greener pastures, Michigan felt deeply betrayed by the departure, as though their personal beacon of hope had been suddenly savagely extinguished. Motown was no longer a matter of great civic pride, the clarion call for a brighter tomorrow; it was the sound of a dream deferred, a promise unfulfilled. Detroit radio stations still played Motown’s latest LASHAPED waxings but spiritually speaking this new fare had little in common with the cavalcade of uplifting hits that had been concocted at the Snakepit. The Temptations’ ‘Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone’ was the label’s unavoidable smash du jour, the track I recall hearing the most in cars and bars throughout my stay. It was a long gloomy song about betrayal - the singer berating an absent father for deserting his family - and it perfectly nailed the local mood of brooding discontent and abandonment.

My first night in the Motor City is now something of a foggy memory - and perhaps that’s just as well. I recall Debbie and her boyfriend driving me in the evening to a bar where an atrocious live band played the top-40 hits of the day. I recall a biker offering me some PCP which I politely refused. I then recall a tall blonde girl giving me a Quaalude - American Mandrax - and suggesting we both repair to a nearby motel, book a cheaply priced room and partake in sexual congress together. I can even recall entering the motel room with her, surveying its tawdry interior and thinking that Sam Cooke met his end in similar circumstances. Everything after that is a blank. I was suddenly knocked unconscious by the impact of the Quaalude on my already jet-lagged metabolism.

When I awoke many hours later, daylight was streaming through the windows. I was alone in the bed and a bird-faced Hispanic cleaning lady was standing over me ranting in an incomprehensible form of pidgin English. Debbie arrived soon after that - and boy, was she pissed off! The girl I’d accompanied to this godforsaken fuck-pit turned out to be one of her sworn enemies. She’d stormed out soon after I’d passed out, mistaking a drug-induced coma for callous rejection. I’d been in Michigan less than twenty-four hours and already had two of its native daughters on the warpath after me. Time to activate plan B.

Birmingham, Michigan - unlike its plug-ugly namesake in the English Midlands - was an attractive middle-class suburb boasting good schools, high-end property, condos, classy boutiques and chintzy antique stores. But sedition still lurked within its carefully manicured borders: the town had lately begun to play host to Creem magazine and its rowdy editorial staff. The ferociously irreverent monthly had recently upped its national sales to 150,000 per issue and celebrated by splashing out on new office space on the second floor of the Birmingham Theatre building. Publisher Barry Kramer also rented a nearby house - 416 Brown Street - for the magazine’s key employees to share. That’s where I’d be spending my second night in the United States of America and most of my subsequent days and nights in the Midwest.

It had been a dream of mine: to link up with Lester Bangs and learn at the feet of the master of new rock journalism. Now my dream was about to come true. Once again I owe Debbie Boushell a debt of gratitude for helping to make it happen. She was the one who actually phoned Creem’s headquarters and told them about my plight regarding immediate accommodation until they relented and offered me a room for the night. She even drove me to the location. Mind you, we arrived well after midnight and I was - oh dear - once again under the foolhardy influence of the dreaded Quaalude. I may have even consumed two earlier in the evening in order to calm my nerves. I suppose I was looking to attain chemically induced courageousness. What I arrived at instead was mush-mouthed slobbering stupidity.

I remember staggering into a dimly lit living room and being surrounded by three male figures. One was short and bespectacled and introduced himself as Dave Marsh. A second - taller, California-blond and more muscular - answered to the name of Ben Edmonds. And the third was Lester Bangs. I’d never even seen a photograph of him before this night, so it was the first opportunity I ever had to gaze upon the physical reality of the man behind the byline. My first impression: he looked like a rodeo clown without the make-up. Or an auto worker on a beer break. He was a big guy with tousled black hair that was neither long nor short and a full moustache plastered across his manic grinning face. You wouldn’t have called him handsome but he wasn’t ugly either. Right away his basic sweet nature became apparent to me. There was a soulfulness about the guy that was palpable in its outstretched humanity.

Consider the situation for a moment. A complete stranger turns up at your front door after midnight - dressed like a goddam professional ice-skater and visibly fucked up on tranquillisers and God knows what else - in hope of finding shelter for the night. Would you let him into your humble abode, make him welcome and even attempt to converse with him at some length? Of course you wouldn’t.

But Lester wasn’t like most people. He empathised with fuckups because he was often one himself. He gamely sat down and talked with me uncondescendingly for over an hour. He even took me upstairs to his bear-pit of a room and played me his just-received white-label copy of Raw Power. I don’t remember if it was during that hour or the morning after that I asked him to be my teacher. I explained my situation anyway: young university drop-out lucks out at the NME but still needs to find his own voice as a writer in order to make the most of his good fortune. I craved guidance I couldn’t find back in merry old England. Could Lester show me - by example - how to reach my full writing potential? Would he even be interested? ‘Sure - OK then’ was his immediate unblinking reply.

Just thinking about his generosity of spirit still makes my eyes moist. I didn’t know it then but other young would-be rock scribes had already personally contacted him for tips and career guidance. One of them, Cameron Crowe, of course would later go on to write and direct an Oscar-winning film in 2000 called Almost Famous that evocatively transposed his real-life teenaged tutelage at the feet of guru Bangs onto the big screen. But I was the first to have made the trip all the way across the Atlantic in order to seek his indulgence, so maybe that’s partly what sealed the deal. That and the fact that we both liked to get wasted. But mostly it was down to him being such a big-hearted guy.

Two days after linking up with Lester and his Creem co-conspirators - bingo! - I had my first face-to-face encounter with David Bowie. I’d spent a goodly portion of the previous year trying to finagle a meeting with the man - all to no avail. But in Detroit it actually came to pass. Once again I need to thank B. P. Fallon for making it happen. The imp-like Led Zeppelin publicist happened to be passing through the area with a group he was promoting called Silverhead, a London-based glam-rock quintet whose lead singer Michael Des Barres was already a drug buddy of mine. When we met up in downtown Detroit, I happened to mention that Bowie and his Spiders from Mars were playing at the nearby Cobo Hall that very night. Fallon immediately got it into his head that we should go to Bowie’s hotel and make our introductions. This was a mad scheme. Bowie at that stage in his career had purposefully made himself as unapproachable as Greta Garbo. And none of us had ever actually met him before. But ‘Beep’ had once been Marc Bolan’s PR and felt that this prior connection would suffice as a calling card. He was right too. Bowie’s huge black bodyguard stationed at the door of his boss’s imperial suite was handed a written note by Fallon, took it to the singer inside and came out to inform us that ‘David’ would be delighted to make our acquaintance later after tonight’s performance. He advised us to return just after midnight.

The show itself was another mind-boggler. Not for Bowie’s performance per se, which found him boldly previewing his Aladdin Sane material some two months before the record’s actual release. He was great - more self-assured, more self-possessed - but I’d seen him live so often throughout 1972 that I already knew what to expect. No, what left me thunderstruck was the audience.

Back in little old England, Bowie’s concerts had been peppered with young people dressing and behaving outrageously but it was mostly self-conscious silliness, a mickey mouse pose. They wouldn’t have known real decadence if it had come out and bitten them on their bum cheeks. But over in Detroit Bowie’s followers were like something out of Fellini’s Satyricon: full-tilt pleasure-seekers devoid of anything resembling shame, limits, caution and moral scruples. I distinctly remember a local lesbian bike gang riding their bikes into the foyer of the concert hall and revving them loudly just prior to Bowie’s arrival onstage. This had not been pre-arranged between the girls and Bowie’s management. These women just turned up unannounced and were so scary no one dared bar their entrance.

Meanwhile, the toilets were literally crammed with people either having sex or necking pills. The whole building was like some epic porno film brought to twitching life. Back in London’s West End, the best-loved theatrical presentation of the hour was an asinine farce called No Sex Please: We’re British, a title that pretty much summed up the United Kingdom’s awkward embrace of its libidinous potential even during the so-called permissive age. Put that reticence down to a mixture of instilled Catholic guilt, cold showers, single-sex schooling and ‘steady on, old boy’ stoicism. Our young American cousins, however, had no such inhibitions to curb their lust. And with no life-threatening diseases then in evidence to cause further pause for thought, they were up for any kind of carnal and pharmaceutical hanky-panky you could throw at them.

This was not lost on David Bowie, whose new Aladdin Sane songs were clearly part-inspired by their composer coming into direct contact with the Babylonian sexual frenzy of young America in the early seventies. Two hours after he’d left the stage in triumph and had been driven back to his hotel, we gingerly approached his suite in the hope that he was still up for a bit of socialising. His man-mountain bodyguard duly beckoned us into a large room where - seated on an elegant settee - the man himself was. He immediately stood up and daintily shook our hands, welcoming us to his temporary abode. He had pointy carrot-coloured hair, shaved eyebrows, a ton of make-up slapped across his extremely pretty face and a slender androgynous physique - swathed in a red chequered blouse and electric-blue Oxford bags - that moved with the studied poise of a movie starlet from some bygone era just prior to the advent of Technicolor.

At first it felt like he had no fixed sexual identity. His mannerisms were as outrageously camp as those of any self-respecting drag queen but there was a bold streak of jack-the-laddishness immediately apparent in his general demeanour. He’d also chosen to invite several teenage girls who’d been lurking in the hotel corridor into his lair and was eyeing them up and working his charm. By the time we left, he’d already seduced one of them-a black girl. This wouldn’t have been especially noteworthy save for the fact that his wife Angie was also present in the room. But she didn’t appear to mind: she had her own boyfriend-a Detroit-based singer named Scott Richardson - with her anyway. I hadn’t realised it at the time but I’d met her once before at the Stooges’ Barons Court house sometime in the early autumn of 1972. Whilst her husband was busy touring the world as Ziggy Stardust, she’d been occupying her time consorting with Ron Asheton. Clearly she had a serious yen for rough-hewn Midwestern dudes. And even more self-evidently, the Bowies were committed swingers who enjoyed the most open of open marriages.

I can still recall the first words he directed at me. ‘So you’re Nick Kent. Aren’t you pretty! And here I was thinking that all English rock critics looked like Richard Williams.’ (Williams - one of Melody Maker’s most prominent writers during the sixties - was a straight-arrow Welsh clergyman’s son who had been fiercely dismissive of Bowie’s glitzy allure.) He stared at me coquettishly but with a wary glint in his two differently coloured eyes. It was like he had X-ray vision when it came to sizing up strangers. He looked at you and through you at the same instant. On the surface he was all lightness and breezy charm - the host with the most - but that lightning-fast brain of his hiding under the signature dyed-red hair was always in full effect, never giving too much away. He was drinking tentatively from a glass of wine but he and his wife were both very anti-drugs at the time: a girl in the room who started rolling a joint was ejected by a bodyguard at their behest.

Still, he seemed to be having a good time chatting away with other music-industry Brit expats caught in the culture shock of discovering America. I remember he kept playing ‘Virginia Plain’ by Roxy Music on a portable record player he had set up at one end of his suite over and over again. He thought the group was absolutely wonderful, the only other glam-rock act to truly merit his respect. That’s when I realised how smart he really was. Almost anyone else in his position would have felt threatened by the advent of Roxy Music - they were UK chart rivals after all - but Bowie was intelligent enough to embrace and study what they were doing and in time appropriate some of their elements into his own evolving œuvre. That’s why his career has lasted so long. He wasn’t closed-minded like so many of his peers. He was a big thinker and a true professional.

Things went so swimmingly that Bowie - after chatting for a couple of hours - invited us back the next night for an impromptu party following his second show at the Cobo Hall. He told us that he didn’t normally do this kind of thing - that his manager liked to keep him sealed away from all human contact as often as possible - but that his manager wasn’t present on this phase of the tour and he suddenly felt the urge to mingle with the natives. Detroit’s wildest young things then caught wind of this invitation and turned up in hordes to the hotel, determined to party down with their new rock deity.

The previous night we’d only been seven or eight in his suite - an easily containable collective. But now the same space was throbbing with bodies and most of them were conspicuously on some chemical or other. Bowie looked distinctly ill at ease in the centre of it all. Detroit had a well-deserved reputation as the most hard-partying city in the whole USA and even he was clearly more than a little taken aback by his gatecrashing guests’ zeal for self-annihilation.

Meanwhile, outside his quarters and unbeknownst to him, his Mainman-employed touring minions were trying to initiate a series of orgies in their respective rooms with the numerous kids lined up in the hotel corridors waiting to touch their hero. Bowie’s American management enablers during his Ziggy era were some of the sleaziest, most repugnant people I’ve ever had the misfortune to shake hands with. They were all oversexed gossip-crazed fame-seekers who’d spent time in the lower rungs of Andy Warhol’s Manhattan social circle and who carried themselves with a sense of lofty self-entitlement that made the conduct of the royal family seem humble by comparison. They were so caught up in their own lust for personal celebrity that they couldn’t help but resent their employer for being such a rising star himself. Still, it didn’t take long for Bowie to draw much the same conclusion. Twelve months hence, he’d sack them all and initiate legal proceedings to extricate himself from Mainman’s parasitical clutches.

The party wound down somewhere in the early hours of the morning. The hotel’s hallways as I left the establishment looked like a modern-day rendering of a scene from Caligula. Suddenly I was alone and walking the streets of downtown Detroit in a drugged daze just as dawn was breaking. This was pure insanity on my part as the zone was known to be rife with muggers, rapists, killers and other predatory forms of human debris.

After stumbling down two or three streets, I decided to take refuge in the only bar that was open in the area at this ungodly hour. Now take a picture of this: me decked out like Little Lord Fauntleroy entering a run-down juke joint populated exclusively by seriously pissed-off black blue-collar dudes nursing their drinks and thinking criminal-minded thoughts. Nervously I asked the barman if there was a payphone on the premises as I was lost and needed to phone a taxi. He jerked his thumb towards the rear-end of the establishment, wouldn’t even look me in the eyes.

As I was searching my pockets for change to make the call, I suddenly found myself encircled by three Negroes with brick-shithouse physiques and eyes like sleepy snakes. I sensed that I was not long for this world - but then after a nerve-wracking minute of sullen, silent scrutiny, one of them spoke up. ‘Hey, man, you’re English, right? Are you by any chance the guitar player for Elton John?’ ‘The very same,’ I blurted back in a high-pitched nervous lying wail. And they actually believed me, too. Their expressions immediately softened as they told me they were big fans of ‘Elton’s grooves’. They were full of praise for ‘my’ fretboard contribution to ‘Crocodile Rock’ too and one of them even got me to autograph a beer mat for his wife before my taxi arrived and whisked me back to Creem’s headquarters.

This preposterous, potentially life-threatening incident was just one of many that occurred to me during my two-month stay in America. But somehow I always managed to come through unscathed. I honestly believed at the time that I was leading a charmed life and that nothing really bad could befall me. Laughable as it may sound now, being English was the only good-luck charm you needed back then to be instantly accepted in America. Yanks - particularly the womenfolk - had fallen head-over-heels in love with little old Limey-land when the Beatles ‘invaded’ their shores in 1964, and the infatuation was still going strong almost a decade later. They couldn’t get enough of our quaint, wacky accents, bad teeth and bizarre eating habits. You could even talk in the incomprehensible cadences of a Geordie docker and still travel the continent getting laid from coast to coast.

Not surprisingly, my all-American male cronies at Creem were often resentful of all this anglophile ardour running riot throughout their proud nation. ‘You goddam Limey fops!’ Lester Bangs would rail at me. ‘What’s so great about your fucked-up culture anyway? We produce great art like the Velvet Underground, the MC₅ and the Stooges, and you retaliate with David fucking Bowie and his Spiders from Mars. Whoopee! You’re just reselling us Herman’s Hermits for homos.’ I’d retaliate by tartly informing him that unlike him I’d been born in the cradle of civilisation and that we Brits were making timeless art when Americans were still learning how to ride a horse, steal cattle and shoot each other in whore-ridden bar-rooms. That would generally shut him up.

The rest of the time we got on famously. Lester drove everywhere in a garbage-strewn jalopy that was one of his few personal possessions, and I would be there next to him in the passenger seat taking in the landscape and making sure he didn’t suddenly nod out at the wheel. This sometimes occurred late at night after he’d mixed the liquor and pills and was a matter of some consternation amongst his Creem cohorts, who’d all experienced the phenomenon and were genuinely concerned that he’d drive into a wall one night and spend the rest of his life in traction.

These fears had recently intensified because Lester had started dating a young girl named Dori who lived in the Canadian frontier town of Windsor, Ontario, over one hundred miles away from Birmingham. He loved the place: the beer they served was extra-potent and you could buy codeine tablets over the counter at the local pharmacists. As a result, he would make almost-nightly treks there and back throughout my stay, and I would usually accompany him. Those long journeys driving across the muddy Detroit river with him at dead of night were heady experiences for me. Just five years earlier my schoolboy imagination had been seriously enflamed by reading On the Road and now I was actually living the full-tilt Kerouac dream, careening through the nation’s ripped backsides in the company of America’s latest championship-level wild man and literary blowhard.

The conversations we had ranged as far and wide as the country spread outside our speeding vehicle. Being in motion - and under the influence of amphetamines - always opened Lester up and he’d talk for hours, often littering his diatribes with intimate recollections from his mostly troubled past. He spoke emotively about his drunkard father who perished in a fire when Lester - who’d actually been christened ‘Leslie Bangs’ - was only nine and about his infuriating, still-living Jehovah’s Witness mother whom he harboured deeply conflicted feelings for. His mother’s suffocatingly possessive presence throughout his young life had scarred him with regard to developing healthy loving relationships with the opposite sex as an adult. He kept falling madly in love but the female objects of his worshipful desire - after a brief period of courtship - would almost always be put off by his kamikaze drunken mood swings and his intense emotional neediness. This was heartbreaking to behold because under his rowdy exterior lurked the beating heart of an incurable misty-eyed romantic who so desperately craved to share his life with a soulmate that his ongoing loneliness - and the demons it ignited - ended up growing like a malignant cancer within him.

Lester was equally unlucky in his choice of personal role models. One time I walked into the Creem house kitchen and found him in tears. He’d just finished reading a Rolling Stone feature in which Neal Cassady’s long-suffering widow Caroline had spoken candidly for the first time about her life with her sociopathic spouse - the Dean Moriarty character in On the Road - and Jack Kerouac himself. The portrait she painted in words of the latter - Bangs’s most revered literary idol - was far from complimentary. She called attention to Kerouac’s inability to establish a healthy loving relationship with any woman, his terminal alcoholism and his hopeless mother fixation. She implied that he was basically born doomed. It was this revelation that caused Lester to weep so openly. He saw far too much of his own predicament in Kerouac’s death-driven depiction.

He didn’t do himself any favours in his choice of living heroes either. It’s no secret that he idolised Lou Reed to the point of obsession and saw the Velvet Underground songsmith as rock music’s most visionary iconic entity. A week after the aforementioned Bowie shows, Reed was booked to play a concert in Detroit and Lester managed to set up his first actual interview with the man and invited me to accompany him to the affair to act as his cornerman. It turned out to be an ugly spectacle: two drunks railing at each other over the glass-strewn Formica table of a tacky hotel bar. Reed was - relatively - civil to me but stared at Bangs throughout their long over-inebriated conversation as though he was face to face with some mentally challenged country bumpkin who’d just escaped from the local nuthouse.

Lester later wrote up the encounter in a piece for Creem he entitled ‘Deaf Mute in a Telephone Booth’ that’s since been reproduced in one of his two posthumous collections. It’s a vibrant, one-sided account of what happened that day but it neglects to mention at least one pertinent detail. Driving back to the Creem house directly after the interview had concluded, Lester was so distraught he veered into a garage by mistake, smashed into a petrol pump and almost totalled his precious car. For three days afterwards he replayed what he could remember of their meeting of minds and fretted about the contemptuous way Reed had beheld him. I told him that trying to locate anything resembling human warmth, empathy and decency in Reed’s personality was as futile an exercise as trying to get blood from a stone. Then I bid him and the rest of the Creem corps a temporary adieu and boarded a flight direct to Los Angeles. I’d been entranced by visions of the Wild West ever since I’d seen my first Western at age six. Now the time had come to kick up some dust of my own within its untamed borders.

The first thing that left an indelible impression on my mental faculties once I’d debarked in the golden state and headed straight to Hollywood was seeing the profusion of palm trees poking out of the pavement on all the sidewalks. The second occurred when I actually walked around Hollywood on my first full day there and quickly discovered just how small it actually was. I was expecting a sprawling metropolis but the reality was more like being in a relatively opulent, sun-baked little village intersected by big highways.

Promenading down the Sunset Strip was all you needed to do back then if you wanted a one-on-one encounter with the city’s resident music- and movie-makers; within twenty-four hours of being there, I’d passed both Jackson Browne and David Crosby on the street. Two blocks away on Santa Monica Boulevard I found myself queuing one evening alongside four-fifths of the original Byrds outside the Troubadour folk club. Later on, whilst walking down the same street, I heard live music emanating from a shopfront. I peered in the window and saw Carl and Dennis Wilson with members of their current touring band rehearsing songs for a local upcoming Beach Boys show. I must have stood there for an hour staring goggle-eyed as they worked up an arrangement for their latest single ‘Sail On, Sailor’, but that hour was my very own Californian dream come true. As a teenager the Beach Boys’ music had held me spellbound and now I was present in their idyllic stomping ground being treated to a private concert all of my own. Could it get any better than this?

Actually, yes. Four days later I attended the show they’d been preparing for and that ended up being my all-time quintessential golden-state souvenir. I think back to that night and instantly recall being surrounded on all sides by three thousand of the most perfect human specimens imaginable-a moveable Aryan super-race with surfboards instead of swastikas. I seemed to be the only audience member in the building without golden streaming hair and a golden walnut tan. It was like standing in a field of swaying human corn listening to the music of the spheres.

But golden visions aside, there was something deeply rotten putrefying up the state of California in 1973 and nowhere more so than in Hollywood itself: most of the time for me it was like getting to hang out in some biblical place of damnation with people getting stoned on drugs instead of getting stoned to death. The first week, I stayed at the Continental Hyatt House hotel with my Brit pals Silverhead, who were playing a residency at the famed Whisky a Go Go. Both buildings are situated less than half a mile away from each other on the Sunset Strip and most evenings I’d take the fifteen-minute stroll to the venue. Virtually every step of the way I’d be approached by extremely intense young people trying to sell me their home-made jewellery or trying to indoctrinate me into some wacky religious cult.

I’d already been around my share of ‘damaged hippie’ types back in Ladbroke Grove but their American cousins on the West Coast were a far more harrowing bunch. They’d rant on and on about the looming apocalypse until they were literally foaming at the mouth. And their eyes wouldn’t leave you alone, always staring as though they could simply hypnotise you into following their will. Charles Manson was safe behind bars but his many acid-crazed messianic wannabes were still pimping up the streets of Hollywood every evening. People living up in the Hollywood Hills all had fierce guard dogs posted at the front of their properties. They weren’t going to let what happened to Sharon Tate four years earlier happen to them.

Sartorially speaking, young Hollywood men still tended to stick to their end-of-the-sixties Neil Young copycat look: frayed blue denim work-shirt, dilapidated blue jeans, some native Indian jewellery around their necks or wrists if they felt like being flashy. But most of the teenaged creatures in the region were all over the freshly imported glam bandwagon like a rash on a wild dog. There was even a new club in town exclusively devoted to catering to their tastes: the English Discotheque fronted by Rodney Bingenheimer, a sad-eyed West Coast Zelig with no discernible personality of his own but an abundant love of all things English and celebrity-driven. Night after night he’d bludgeon the tiny mirror-walled dance hall with the shiny-sounding glam racket of Sweet, Slade and Suzi Quatro compelling hordes of scantily clad, barely pubescent girls to cavort suggestively whilst trying to stay aloft in their preposterous stack-heeled platform shoes. For jailbait connoisseurs and recruiting local chicken hawks, the place must have been a glimpse of heaven on earth, but it was really more like watching film director Russ Meyer’s hilariously sordid Hollywood pop spoof Beyond the Valley of the Dolls being re-enacted badly by a cast of pill-popping, conniving twelve-year-olds.

I got to know several of these girls during my stay - though not in the biblical sense, you understand. They’d start talking to you and never stop. By the time you got a word in edgeways, you’d been given their entire life history to date. It was always the same: rich divorced parents, no love at home, lecherous stepfather, trouble at school. And they were all blindly convinced they were bound for glory. ‘I’m thirteen now but when I’m sixteen I’ll be as famous as Marilyn Monroe’ was their personal mantra. All they needed was for Andy Warhol to walk into the English Discotheque one night and see them in action and - shazam - they’d be all set for their journey into the stratosphere. They’d fallen hook, line and sinker for that ‘everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes’ crap of Warhol’s to the point where it had become their ditzy, all-consuming religion. The sad reality: they were just lost, damaged little girls like the Jodie Foster character Iris in Taxi Driver - deluded broken blossoms who’d grown up too fast and had all the innocence and wholesomeness fucked out of them at too young an age.

I should point out here that though temptation often came a-knocking at my door whilst in Hollywood, I generally refrained from indulging in full sexual contact. It wasn’t a matter of personal prudishness so much as simple bad luck. Back in Michigan I’d managed to contract a urinary infection and a spectacular case of the crabs just prior to hitting the golden state and didn’t have the simple common sense to go to a nearby pharmacy and buy some lotion to make the two conditions disappear once I’d arrived. Finally I had my pubic hair shaved by a Japanese woman called Flower who’d taken several tranquillisers just prior to groping for the razor: not an incident I’d ever care to repeat. She and her girlfriend let me stay in their Sunset Strip apartment for a couple of nights. They were strippers - serious hard-core girls but kind-hearted nonetheless. Her room-mate was often teary-eyed. Her beloved drug-dealing boyfriend had been offed by the Mafia just two months earlier. Compared to the glam-rock Lolitas in the region, they were generally more level-headed and pragmatic in their dealings with the outside world, but even they had bought into the ludicrous notion that fame would one day be theirs for the taking. Everyone living in Hollywood back then seemed saddled with the same sorry delusion. The poor things.

In the midst of this weird little fame-hungry, sex-crazed town lurked Iggy and the Stooges, who’d moved into a communal house overlooking the Hollywood Hills just three months ago after bidding a not especially fond farewell to London’s more limited nightlife. The Doors had been LA’s most acclaimed musical ambassadors of darkness and dread but now, following Jim Morrison’s untimely death in 1971, they were gone and Iggy had duly decided that he and the Stooges should assume the same creepy mantle. Hollywood really brought out the beast in him: the restrained, thoughtful young man I’d encountered in London throughout 1972 had been replaced by a snake-eyed, cold-hearted, abrasively arrogant trouble magnet.

He’d transformed his look too, dyeing his hair surfer blond and using his considerable leisure time to cultivate a luxuriously bronzed suntan under the relentless California sun. At first glimpse he seemed positively aglow with rude health but the tan and hair dye were really there to mask a darker secret: he was back on the smack. And though it had yet to diminish his physical allure, his re-embrace of heroin had already tainted his personality, making him generally mean-spirited, self-centred and plain loopy. Iggy’s Hollywood persona was captured for posterity in a televised interview he gave in early ’73 to the venerable disc jockey and US TV host Dick Clark. Clark - clearly ill at ease with his subject - kept asking Iggy if he was truly ‘decadent’. The singer grumpily retorted, ‘Decadence is decomposition and I ain’t decomposing. I’m still here.’ But what about moral decadence?, Clark continued earnestly. ‘Are you morally degenerate?’ ‘Oh, I don’t have any morals,’ Iggy chimed back cheerfully. He wasn’t kidding either. Now that’s not something a sane human being would normally want to share with the rest of the world. But Iggy in 1973 wasn’t a sane person. In his mind he may have been voicing his private vision of himself as the American Zarathustra - beyond good and evil, free as a bird in mind, body and will. But the remark also bore the hollow ring of a junkie’s empty brag. Either way, his new amoral approach to life ended up making him few friends in the golden state and elsewhere.

In mid-March the Stooges returned to Michigan in readiness for their first concert on US soil in two years, with Detroit’s Cobo Hall booked for the 23rd of the month. It should have been a triumph - the hooligan Stooges, bloodied but unbowed, returning to the baying hordes who first supported them with a new album, a new label and new high-powered management. But it didn’t quite pan out that way. Iggy pretty much set the tone for what would transpire when he turned up to a live interview for a prominent Midwestern radio outlet a few days prior to the show. He proceeded to perform an impromptu striptease on the air whilst dancing around the room to tracks from Raw Power. The sound of his penis slapping against his lower torso was inadvertently captured on one of the studio microphones and beamed out to radio sets the length and breadth of its waveband.

I flew back to Michigan from LA purely to witness the Stooges’ homecoming show. I remember Bangs, Ben Edmonds and I visiting them at the downtown Detroit hotel they were holed up in the night before the gig for a pep-talk. Iggy’s room was dark - drawn curtains, no lights on - and his mood was darker. Real success was potentially within his grasp once more and yet the prospect seemed to spook him more than stimulate him.

The show itself drew a full house and the crowd was raucous and welcoming. The Stooges played well - most of Raw Power plus two new compositions worked up whilst resident in Hollywood - and Iggy was in pretty good form but the set lasted not much longer than forty minutes. The group left the stage to wild acclaim and were planning to return for an encore but manager Tony Defries - who’d flown in especially for the concert - expressly forbade it. He felt that true stars should always leave their audiences craving more and that encores were beneath his clientele. This kind of thinking may have worked for Bowie but for the Stooges it proved a tragic miscalculation. The hall duly erupted in a cacophony of boos and catcalls when the group refused to return. Bangs nailed the whole scenario best. Shaking his head sadly, he muttered, ‘Once again the Stooges have managed to pluck defeat from the jaws of victory.’

Someone threw a party for the group after the show in a swanky Detroit house that everyone gatecrashed. In the living room, many guests were glued to a large colour TV showing the Oscar ceremonies beamed in live from Hollywood. On screen, a woman no one recognised was dressed up like an Apache squaw and was talking earnestly about the plight of the Native American Indian. Marlon Brando - we later discovered - had sent her in his place to accept a best actor award for his role in The Godfather.

One of those captivated by the spectacle was Tony Defries, who’d commandeered the most throne-like seat in the room and had just lit up yet another jumbo cigar. A guy smoking a joint nearby turned to him at one point and asked, ‘So, Tony, do you think David Bowie will maybe be handing out an Oscar next year?’ ‘No,’ Defries replied with a feigned indifference, ‘David will be accepting an Oscar next year.’

But upstairs trouble was a-brewing. Iggy was stalking the premises with narcotics in his bloodstream and malice in his heart. At one point a drunken girl made the mistake of trying to hug him and he bitch-slapped her away so forcefully she came close to falling backwards down a long flight of stairs. The party wound down soon after that.

What on earth was going on in this guy’s mind to make him behave in such a fashion? It was the drugs pure and simple: Iggy liked them but those same drugs rarely seemed to like him. Heroin curdled his personality and cocaine stimulated instant mental disturbance. Downers left him comatose and uppers sent his mind reeling towards insanity. But still he persevered, believing in his heart of hearts that personal substance abuse and the cerebral disorientation they promoted within him were the key to attaining full Iggyness.

Bangs shared much the same philosophy too: he was an ardent apostle of the school of thought that believed the more you pollute yourself, the closer you get to true artistic illumination. Plus Iggy had bought into the whole Antonin Artaud shtick of the performer only being able to achieve greatness by staging his own madness in the public arena. That’s what he meant by the lines ‘I am dying in a story / I’m only living to sing this song’ that he sang on ‘I Need Somebody’, Raw Power’s penultimate selection. It was a prophecy just waiting to be fulfilled. He and the Stooges were about to be slowly ground into dust for the second time in their short career.

Finally I wound down my American odyssey by spending a week in Manhattan in early April. Like other feckless boho wannabes of the era, I stayed at the Chelsea Hotel - renowned for having played host to Dylan, Leonard Cohen and the beat poets back in the mystic sixties. Unfortunately its vaunted reputation masked a shabby reality: the place was a literal fleapit with cockroaches visible in all the carpeting and grimy sheets, busted mattresses and malfunctioning black-and-white TV sets in every room.

Little wonder then that I spent most of my time outside. The New York Dolls were playing a week-long residency at a local joint known as Kenny’s Castaways. I’d lurk around there most nights. It was like a tiny pub with a stage and room for no more than a hundred bodies to congregate. The group - playing some of their first shows since the death of their original drummer Billy Murcia - really made sense in this kind of low-key close-to-home setting. Whenever I caught them live on bigger stages and outside of New York, they were always a big disappointment. The pressure, unfamiliar locale and lack of easy-to-contact drug dealers would invariably cause them to play like a hard-on-the-ear train wreck in full progress.

But in a nondescript Manhattan watering hole like Kenny’s, their limp-wristed hooligan magic could be summoned to full effect. The guitarists still posed far better than they actually played but their new drummer Jerry Nolan had brought a much-needed dynamism to their formerly clunky grooves and their singer David Johansen was as smart as a whip. His between-songs repartee was always priceless and he sang in a deep lascivious croon like Big Joe Turner sporting nylon stockings and high-heeled slip-ons. He was the brightest, most professional and most ambitious of the bunch, the only one you could imagine going on to enjoy a long-term showbiz career, if not as an inspired Jagger clone then at least as a credible stand-up comic. The others, though, were too fenced in by their own musical limitations. One evening they invited me to be a fly on the wall at a local studio where they intended to demo a new song called ‘Jet Boy’, and it became increasingly apparent as the session progressed that certain players barely knew how to even tune their instruments correctly. This carefree indifference to basic musical convention coupled with a shared state of chemical befuddlement would ultimately prove their undoing in the months to come.

Unless they were otherwise engaged, the Dolls could always be found every midnight doing their usual human-peacock routines at Max’s Kansas City, Manhattan’s most exciting nightspot. On the ground floor was an excellent restaurant and bar, with a private room for the Warhol crowd and other self-styled celebrities. People came mostly to get loaded and socialise but the most enticing part of the establishment for me was the tiny upstairs room where they put on live concerts. In the days I was resident in Manhattan I saw Lowell George’s Little Feat, Tim Buckley and Gram Parsons perform unforgettable shows in a space you’d have been hard-pressed to swing a cat in.

Buckley in particular was a revelation. I’d been a fan of his back when he was attempting a sort of angel-voiced jazz-folk synthesis, but he’d recently jettisoned that approach and hooked up with a straight rock band in order to sell more records. He had a brand-new album out called Greetings from L.A. which I didn’t particularly like and so I attended the show with certain misgivings. As I’d suspected, his back-up unit were nothing to write home about but Buckley was so on fire that night that he didn’t really need any support. I’ve never seen or heard another performer use his or her voice as bewitchingly as he managed to do before or since that performance. The guy was gifted with an extraordinary five-octave range and he could summon any sound from his larynx - from a blue yodel to a jazz trumpet to a police siren. Take it from one who saw both live: his son Jeff was great but Buckley senior was greater. Women were just wilting in front of the stage whenever he sang.

The same couldn’t be said when Gram Parsons followed Buckley’s brief residency some days later. He looked bad-a vision of toxic bloat in ill-fitting cowboy duds and a boozer’s moustache - and his voice was distinctly frail. But inspired by his new partner Emmylou Harris’s rich harmony counterpoint, he slowly rose to the occasion and the pair duetted emotively on a brace of shit-kicker country ballads that normally would have sounded distinctly out of place with the glitzy demi-monde frequenting Max’s. But I looked around and the little room was littered with people who looked like they’d just stumbled out of a bad Lou Reed song, wiping actual tears from their eyes. That was Parsons’s gift: he could still break anyone’s heart with his music, no matter how fucked up he was or they were.

Finally in mid-April my money ran out and I flew back from New York’s LaGuardia Airport to Heathrow. Once through customs, I went looking for a newsagent in order to buy the latest NME, a paper I’d seen little of in the past two months as it wasn’t sold anywhere in America. Leafing through the issue I’d just purchased I came to the centre and found that a long article I’d scribbled and then posted from Michigan about my aforementioned encounters there with David Bowie was taking pride of place.

The first night we met, a young girl present in the room had taken a photo of Bowie and me, and when I bumped into her in a club a few nights later, she gave me the little colour snap she’d had developed. As a joke, I’d sent it along with the article to the paper, never thinking they’d actually be able to print the thing. But there it was - me and the Dame grinning and holding each other like a couple of New Orleans transsexuals during Mardi Gras - taking up a large portion of one whole page. My first reaction on seeing it was one of stark horror: after all, it wasn’t exactly the most manly image to have projected out to the general public. But it certainly got me more noticed. Blokes at gigs would suddenly sidle up and offer me a joint with the inevitable damp cardboard filter. Women in London nightclubs would wink and flirt with a more promiscuous air. Old people would invite me to open their local garden fête and big dogs would nuzzle up and lick my hand whenever I promenaded down the streets. Actually, I’m lying on the last two counts - but still these were heady times and I was twenty-one, unattached and soaking up every second with unabashed glee.

One thing I learned though: ‘Everybody loves a winner’ is an often-quoted truism but it isn’t - strictly - true. When someone attains success rapidly, former acquaintances often tend to experience pangs of excruciating envy that inevitably destabilise the ongoing relationship. You get your face in the papers often enough and rank strangers begin harbouring grudges against you for no clear reason. It’s not all champagne and blow jobs in other words. Things can start to get nasty. You can quickly find yourself the victim of ugly, unfounded rumours. You’ll be in some bar and some drunken oaf will get up in your face, nail you with his spittle and beery breath, call you a wanker and offer to beat you up in the car park. Fame is a double-edged sword in other words. It’s great to wave around but you don’t want to be falling on its blade.

In point of fact, fame and celebritydom have long been the proverbial kiss of death for creative writers. Truman Capote was destroyed by the success of In Cold Blood and his heedless embrace of the American talk-show circuit. Hunter S. Thompson never wrote anything great after Fear and Loathing made him an American stoner icon. More recently, both Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis have seen their talent decrease at the same alarming rate as their global notoriety has increased. It’s elementary, really; writers by the very nature of their work need to stay lurking in the shadows in order to do the job properly. That’s where you can stand back and get the big picture. The more invisible a writer is, the better placed he or she will be to fully penetrate the subject matter. If, however, you get enticed into stepping into the celebrity spotlight yourself, you’re only going to make yourself feel self-conscious, and that self-consciousness will end up paralysing your creative perspective and leaving you bereft of insight.

My employers at the NME shared a different view, however, and missed no opportunity to push their writers further into the pop spotlight. I couldn’t knock it as a form of instant ego-gratification but it always had its share of bad repercussions. Charles Shaar Murray and I started getting unhealthily competitive around this juncture. Back in ’72, he, Ian MacDonald and I had briefly bonded in a Three Musketeers ‘all for one and one for all’ kind of way. I’d crashed at Charlie’s Islington flat from time to time and we’d often shared each other’s hopes and dreams like young men on the cusp of achieving full-blown adulthood are sometimes prone to do. But that open channel we shared soon got dismantled and I’m still not exactly sure why the breakdown and ensuing animosity occurred.

My memory tells me that once I’d returned from the USA our friendship speedily soured. Partly it was to do with his meddlesome girlfriend - who’d gone to the same university as me. I knew her to be trouble and had warned Charlie early in the relationship that she wasn’t ideal ‘wife’ material. But he was too love-stung to see her shortcomings and my remarks may have been misinterpreted as unwarranted interference. That was the start, anyway. All I know is that from then on there was a chilly edge between us and our basic temperaments clashed so much that I sometimes found it hard to physically be in the same room as him. Looking back, I can see it now as a couple of juvenile hot-heads having a never-ending ego stand-off, but at the time I was still too immature, and none of the older, supposedly leveller heads at the paper chose to step in and talk real sense to us.

Maybe they liked the unfolding drama and thought that pitting Charlie against me would be a further sales boost. That was the problem, see: few amongst them - apart from Nick Logan - seemed to behave like real adults. There was an axis at the NME that was like still being stuck back in primary school. I’d sit and listen to them sometimes and close my eyes and it would feel like I was back in the playground again, watching someone get their sweeties stolen. These people were closing in on thirty and yet they were still talking like they were thirteen in the head. I couldn’t fathom this at all because I’d not been long out of school myself and couldn’t wait to catapult myself into the furthest recesses of hard-core X-rated young adulthood. The fucking playground was the last place on earth I wanted to return to.

One striking example of this infantilism that really got my goat was the way certain staff members took such unholy glee in deriding Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry. Tony Tyler - the ringleader - had previously worked at Roxy’s EG management company as Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s press officer and he remembered Ferry often haunting the premises prior to RM’s actual formation. He even once auditioned unsuccessfully to become King Crimson’s resident vocalist. According to Tyler, he’d been a humble, self-effacing Geordie lad back then but recent success had spun his head into another stratosphere and made him haughty and feverishly self-fixated. He may have been right too but his decision to needle Ferry ceaselessly by calling him a series of ever-increasingly silly names in print was a spectacularly wrong-headed way of venting his concern.

This was doubly short-sighted because Roxy were really taking off in the spring of ’73. Their just-released second album For Your Pleasure was all the rage throughout most of Europe and - with Bowie spending most of his time breaking the States - they’d lately become Britain’s best-loved thinking person’s glam ambassadors. The NME needed them to keep expanding their weekly sales base, but Roxy needed the NME too in order to stay in the big media spotlight. That’s where I came in: the group heartily detested my colleagues but were nonetheless amenable to inviting me on tours with them. I’d once dubbed them ‘lounge lizards’ in a review - it was a term my grandfather used to employ to describe the louche gigolo types he’d encountered in his youth - and they’d taken a shine to me from that point on.

On the road, we tended to enjoy each other’s company. They were still snooty and arrogant, but by this time I’d become pretty snooty and arrogant myself, so we were a good fit in that respect. Roxy was still a group at this point but, unbeknownst to the rest of us, Bryan Ferry was getting ready to assert his dominion on the project. That summer he gave Brian Eno his marching orders against the wishes of other group members and installed a young prog-rock-schooled multi-instrumentalist named Eddie Jobson to take his place. It was a potentially suicidal decision on Ferry’s part - Eno, in spite of his instrumental shortcomings, had always been a major asset to the group’s image and personality - but he could no longer bear sharing the acclaim and spotlight with someone as wilfully ambitious as he.

It’s funny for me to think back on it now but Brian Eno and I actually got quite close during that specific period. We’d hang out together a lot in London, visit cinemas and nightclubs and generally swan around, trying to impress the girls with our hermaphroditic allures and fledgling pop-star creds. He was good company then: extremely witty, extremely bright but not pretentious and full of himself like he later became. Still, our budding friendship was doomed to be short-lived as we differed so fundamentally as people. Brian didn’t take drugs and was generally scornful of those who did. As you’ve already probably ascertained, this was not a view I happened to share.

But I had a much bigger problem relating to his concept of ‘what art really is’. To me, art was a deep expression of the human soul, something you needed to struggle with in order to get fully expressed. To Eno, though, the creative process was simply about throwing different things at the wall and whatever ends up actually sticking to the wall - hey, that’s art. I saw this approach executed at close quarters later that year when he recorded his first solo album Here Come the Warm Jets in a tiny recording studio situated somewhere in Clapham. Hawkwind’s drummer and I contributed the anarchic piano part to one of its tracks, a number called ‘Blank Frank’, earning us the credit ‘Nick Kool and the Kool-Aids’ on the vinyl album sleeves as a consequence. But I didn’t really like his music and possibly told him so or wrote something in the NME to that effect-I don’t exactly remember - but from a certain point on we rarely socialised. Understandable, really. We were both on diametrically opposed career and lifestyle paths.

One evening in early summer he and I attended a Gary Glitter concert at the Finsbury Park Rainbow. Two girls approached us in the foyer as we were leaving and invited us to a party they were throwing a few days later. I thought nothing more of the invitation until one of them later phoned me at the NME office to repeat the offer. Having nothing better to do that evening, I went along.

The address was somewhere deep in the bowels of North London: a big house, as I recall. But nothing was really going on to constitute a genuine party atmosphere. The girls were glib and full of small talk and there were no drugs to be had anywhere on the premises. I was getting ready to make my excuses and leave when a tall skinny girl suddenly entered the living room, where everyone was awkwardly mingling. She was dressed from head to foot in blue denim and looked strangely agitated as she paced around. Then she opened her mouth, addressing no one in particular. Her accent was instantly recognisable to me: it sprang from the American Midwest. But it also had something of an unsettlingly whiney edge to it. ‘Oh man,’ she began, ‘my life is just so shitty at the moment.’ And then she proceeded to itemise all her recent personal setbacks in excruciating detail. At first I sat there watching her in a state of quiet alarm. I thought to myself, ‘Who is this badly dressed harridan and why should I be even remotely interested in listening to her sorry lamentation?’

But then all of a sudden she terminated her list of woe by moaning, ‘And the worst thing is, man - someone stole my Stooges albums. Now I’ve really got nothing to live for.’ In that very instant, an invisible bond was forged between us. Stooges fans were so few and far between back then that whenever I met another like-minded apostle, I instantly made a point of getting better acquainted. I told her I actually knew Iggy, and that got her attention. ‘So should I know who you are?’ she asked. ‘Not necessarily, ’ I replied. ‘Well, I’m Chris,’ she continued. ‘Chris Hynde from Akron, Ohio.’

We started chatting away about how Fun House and Raw Power were the two greatest rock albums ever made, but then a drunk bloke - who I later discovered was the manager of a Scottish band called Nazareth - began sexually propositioning her in an extremely blunt fashion. She told the guy to go fuck himself and then invited me to share the fare of a taxi back to her one-room accommodation in Clapham South. I didn’t find her that physically alluring but I could already tell she was intelligent and wanted to continue our conversation, so I tagged along.

When we got to her lodgings, the first thing that struck me was that one of the four walls was covered with photos cut from newspapers of Keith Richards and Iggy Pop. Right away, I could tell the woman was blessed with exquisite taste. Apart from that, the room was pretty bare: no record player, no portable telly, one chair and one single bed and not much else. So we sat down and talked late into the night, and it became quickly evident to both of us that we had much in common. We’d both been to university, she at Kent State, where four protesting students had been shot to death by riot police just three years earlier, an incident that Neil Young immortalised in his song ‘Ohio’. We’d both lost our virginity at age nineteen and then followed it up with extended periods of sexual promiscuity. We both loved great rock music with an all-consuming passion. She’d been turned on to it at the same time I had - just when the Beatles were coming into vogue. She told me that when she first heard their records, it was so overwhelming she literally got down on her knees, placed her hands together and prayed to the radio whence they came.

It was a different story though when she talked about her current situation. She’d arrived in London three months ago and nothing had really worked out for her since. She’d briefly sung with a bar band back in Cleveland and wanted to pursue some kind of musical career here but had yet to find any kindred Limey spirits to share her dream with. In the meantime she’d gotten stuck in a nine-to-five job, making coffee and answering the phones in some architect’s office; her life had lately become somewhat aimless - she readily admitted - and she was starting to feel so depressed she was seriously considering returning to Cleveland.

Then she said something that truly floored me: she said one of the key deciding factors in her coming to London was an article she’d read some months ago in a British music paper about her beloved Iggy Pop. I asked her to describe it further and realised the article in question was one of mine - my first-ever NME feature in point of fact.

A deep connection was starting to form between us but the hour was already late - 3 a.m.-ish - and it was time for counting sheep. She showed me to an adjacent room full of large sculpted gargoyles - the guy whose room it was created these hideous things to act as special effects in horror films - and I promptly fell asleep on the bed propped against one wall. Three hours later, I was rudely awoken. Light was pouring through a tear in the curtain and ‘Chris’ was standing before me in a blouse and knickers. For a split second, I thought that this was some kind of sexual come-on - but it most certainly wasn’t. She was crying - tears running all down her face - and in obvious physical discomfort. She knelt down holding her stomach and started writhing on the bed next to me from the pain she was experiencing. I just lay there holding her and making soothing sounds telling her that it was going to be all right. What else could I do? I offered to take her to a hospital but she didn’t want to go.

After more than an hour, the stabbing pain in her lower abdomen abated enough for her to return to her room. It was almost 8 a.m. and I had work to do, so I bade farewell to ‘Chris’ and strode to Clapham South tube station. I was due to interview Slade at Wembley Stadium in two hours and then had to write the encounter up in just twenty-four hours to make the Monday NME deadline. In other words, I had to focus on matters at hand and think of penetrating questions to ask Noddy Holder and his wacky brood of Black Country fashion victims.

Still, it was difficult to push the girl I’d just met to the back of my mind. I’d never met a young woman before who’d been so cranky and yet so intelligent, so tough-talking and yet so terribly vulnerable. It would be a further two weeks before I’d actually return to her Clapham bedsit and re-establish contact, but our first meeting certainly preyed on my thoughts throughout those fourteen days.

This is my version of how I met Chrissie Hynde. Chrissie’s is different. She claims that after she invited me to her room, I returned the following day with all my worldly possessions in a removal van and simply moved into her room without even asking her in the first place. Her retrospective mind must be playing tricks on her. Her version is untrue and also manages to misrepresent the tenor of our early relationship. From the start, I felt protective towards her and treated her with nothing but tenderness and empathy. I wasn’t trying to use her or exploit her in any way. It was the exact opposite, in fact: I wanted to help her find her place in London, to make her feel cared for and included. In strict point of fact, I didn’t even move in with her until we’d known each other for at least two months and only after she’d openly invited me to do so.

You see, since returning from the States in April, I’d been essentially homeless. I had no bolt-hole in London to call my own and tended to float around, crashing on friends’ sofas when not successfully importuning kind-hearted women for temporary accommodation. Then in either June or July I’d bumped into my pal Lemmy from Hawkwind at the Speakeasy Club. He and I shared much in common, specifically the same birthday and a committed taste for the wild things in life, and so when he mentioned that he’d just moved into a house somewhere between Gloucester Road and Earls Court and that there were other vacant rooms to rent there, I promptly decided to become a tenant too.

He then produced a spare front-door key from one of his many pockets and handed it to me. I thanked him and left him at the bar in order to inspect my new premises. Once I’d located the address and let myself in, it didn’t take me long to work out that the place was in fact a squat. A worryingly thin young woman - the only person present in the house - took me upstairs right to the top floor and showed me the room I’d be inhabiting: it consisted of four walls, a small window and a mattress on the floor with a sheet spread over it. It was late so I disrobed and went to sleep on the mattress, using the sheet as covering. The next morning I awoke with a familiar feeling of deep irritation all around my scrotum. The crabs I’d recently left in Hollywood had come back to play havoc with my genitalia once more and this time I hadn’t even had sex. They’d been lurking in the mattress. What was this godforsaken place that I had lately come to dwell in?

I got my answer as soon as I went downstairs. Lemmy was there with his eyes on fire surrounded by five or six German people who looked like they hadn’t washed themselves since 1965. They were all hard-core speed freaks and they’d just scored some pure amphetamine sulphate powder, which they were furiously chopping into long lines and snorting, letting out wild whooping screams whenever the drug burned into their nasal membranes. Lemmy offered me a taste and I inhaled one tiny line. I didn’t sleep after that for four whole days and nights. Fortunately, I didn’t spend that time awake in Lemmy’s house, otherwise I would probably have been netted in some police bust. I just left and never went back again.

It was after that experience - and a speedy visit to the chemists to once again eliminate body lice - that I mentioned my ongoing home-hunting dilemmas to Chrissie and she gamely suggested I move in with her for the time being. So I did. My worldly possessions at the time amounted to about eighty vinyl albums, a cardboard box filled with well-leafed paperbacks, a record player, an acoustic guitar and two large paper bags containing my flashy clothes. They made the room less empty-looking and generally more homely.

The first night I moved in, she reached out for my guitar and attempted to perform one of her self-penned songs for me. Her voice was strong and her phrasing as clear as a bell but her rendition kept breaking down because it took her a good half-minute to regroup her fingers on the fretboard each time she had to change chords. I could see she still had a lot of work ahead of her if she wanted to become the confident professional musician she dreamed of presenting herself as. But that was OK: she was a human work in progress and so was I. More than that, I saw us as kindred spirits whose fates were mystically intertwined. I was starting to fall in love with the woman.

It was a somewhat gradual process, though, because - to be frank - she wasn’t the easiest person to show emotional warmth to. There was an authentically wild and abrasive side to her personality - a trash-talking biker-girl mindset that she’d suddenly assume whenever the mood would take her - that was often hard to coexist with. She even boasted of having been initiated into the local Cleveland chapter of the Hells Angels just prior to moving to London. She had a name for this loud shameless alter ego of hers too - Bernice - which she had sown onto the back of her regulation denim jacket.

She rarely drank liquor but on the odd occasions that she did, ‘Bernice’ would materialise and cause an almighty ruckus anywhere she happened to find herself. Sometimes I’d look at her mouthing off and trying to start fights and ask myself, ‘What in God’s name are you doing chaperoning this shrill, charmless creature around? Can’t you see she’s a lost cause?’ But then she’d lose the fake bravado and revert back to the more approachable personality that I’d first fallen in love with and that invisible bond we shared would once more reassert itself. I’d never experienced anything like this before in a relationship, but then again I’d never really been in love before - at least not in the adult sense of the word. I was about to find out, though. And so was she.

We kept getting closer until we were practically stuck together like glue. As the room we shared was a bit of a dump, we mostly floated around the night-time streets of London - sometimes going to gigs or taking in a late-night film but otherwise always on the move. The heels on our boots were always looking worn-down because of this restless trait. We seemed to share the same wacky belief that the more you walk around a place, the more it becomes your own personal fiefdom. It was sublime because at that point in time we were totally in sync with each other. It was like having a twin, only better because of the deep romantic attachment growing between us.

Meanwhile, the summer of ’73 came and went without much pomp and circumstance. London was still the centre of the pop universe but there weren’t many interesting new bands turning up on the local grass-roots club circuit. In retaliation, several London pubs began booking live rock acts in order to drum up more customers for their liquor and a new phenomenon was duly sired: pub rock.

Mostly it was the province of ugly blokes who dressed like roadies and played old Chuck Berry songs badly. But there was one band who stood out from the rest as a demented harbinger of things to come and they called themselves Kilburn and the High Roads. Throughout the autumn, Chrissie and I saw them on a succession of dilapidated pub stages, plying their trade to a tiny clique of admirers. The singer and drummer were both physically deformed, another member was a midget and the rest of the line-up looked as though they’d walked out of some fifties Ealing comedy about clueless East End spivs. Their music wasn’t rock so much as a vaguely menacing mélange of cockney music hall and roots reggae, and it was far too wilfully eccentric to ever find favour with mainstream tastes of the hour, but I still wrote a glowing critique of their unique attributes in an NME article that autumn garlanded with the catchy headline ‘Hardened Criminals Plan Big Break-Out’. Many years later and shortly before his death, Ian Dury - the Kilburns’ crippled singer and key focal point - publicly thanked me for being the first to write about him in a feature about his early career that he wrote for Mojo.

He wasn’t so courteous at the time, though. I remember him once approaching me drunkenly in a club in Camden Town and growling in my ears, ‘I’ve got a gun in my pocket and I want to stick it right up your bum.’ What do you say to something like that? I was glad when he found success with his Blockheads much later in the decade partly because he deserved it but mostly because if he’d stayed in the cultural margins much longer, he’d have become so twisted with rage he’d have probably ended up killing someone.

By early September, I was back in the big leagues. The Rolling Stones were touring Europe and the NME sent Pennie Smith and me out to cover their opening UK dates. I interviewed Keith Richards, Mick Jagger and Mick Taylor together in a pancake house adjoining their Manchester hotel one afternoon and got to ride with them to the show that evening in their bus. I couldn’t stop flashing back in my mind to the time when I’d first met them ten years earlier.

I’d still been a child then and they’d seemed like a new hooligan-youth superpower. Now they were maturing men of wealth and taste who shared little in common apart from the music they still made. When the five members were together in the same space, the conversational repartee between them was usually so strained and hesitant it could have been scripted by Harold Pinter. The source of their group discomfort wasn’t hard to locate: they were each at their personal wits’ end about how to coexist harmoniously with Keith Richards, whose ongoing drug addiction continued to daily imperil their potential to work and make more money.

I coined a new phrase for him and his spooky girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, who’d lurked side-stage behind a pair of giant ‘human bug’ op-art sunglasses - ‘wastedly elegant’ - in the piece I submitted to the NME, and other journalists soon followed suit. The group must have been tickled by what I’d written about them because someone from their office phoned a few days later and offered me the chance to travel around with the Stones on the final leg of the tour and then write a book about the experience. The band would pay my travel and hotel expenses and also pony up for the text I’d be penning. This was like being offered a chance to attain nirvana for me, my wildest teenage dream becoming reality.

As fate would have it, the book - though duly completed - would never get published. As I’ve said before, this was no tragedy as the text I concocted rarely dared to go below the surface and confront what was really going on in the group’s universe. Twenty years later, though, I wrote up a more substantial and honest account of that tour in a piece entitled ‘Twilight in Babylon’ that became a chapter in my first book, The Dark Stuff. I don’t intend to repeat the basic information and character sketches contained within it here except to reiterate that the Stones were sinking more and more into the same dark vortex they’d unloosed at the dawning of the decade.

It made them an irresistible force for others to want to fasten on to. Bored European monarchs and their spoilt-rotten in-laws, leading international fashion designers and their self-fixated ‘muses’, sun-baked movie stars with a yen for cocaine and pussy, big-time gangsters turned out in expensively tailored suits to play down their Neanderthal physiques - all these and more flocked to ingratiate themselves within the group’s touring entourage because they sensed the Stones were a musical mini-Mafia who possessed unique power, that they were in effect a law unto themselves.

Keith Richards kept getting busted every few months or so for possessing hard drugs and firearms but rarely even turned up to the law court where his misdemeanours were being judged, never mind facing any kind of jail time. Midway through the tour, the road convoy transporting the group’s equipment was forced to pull over at a customs checkpoint and various officials dismantled the amplifiers only to discover that they contained sizeable quantities of various illegal Class A and B drugs hidden inside. Mick Jagger and tour manager Peter Rudge then got a high-ranking lawyer to tell the authorities that the Stones knew nothing about the drugs and that they’d simply been the innocent victims of ‘international drug smugglers’ who’d somehow infiltrated their equipment without their direct knowledge. Result: the Stones were instantly exonerated of any wrongdoing and the case was conveniently closed. That’s the kind of power they had at their disposal when the necessity arose.

But it evidently came at a steep karmic cost because the more their collective charisma and bargaining power increased on the world’s stage, the less potent they sounded as a working musical unit. The Stones’ best music is all about conjuring up just the right groove and then taking it somewhere interesting, but in 1973 they often found difficulty in locking together in live performance because their prodigal-son guitar player - whose job it was to set the actual pace for each song - was on a completely different planet, chemically speaking, to most of his fellow players.

At the same time, he was also the coolest-looking dude in the known hemisphere. Back in the early sixties he’d looked less cool: big-eared, slightly bashful and distinctly human, someone who was best summed up in Andrew Loog Oldham’s Stoned autobiography when the ex-Stones manager recalled his own mother stating that Keith was the only truly decent human being in the group because he was kind to animals and always phoned his mum at least twice a week. But then he started pitching woo with Anita Pallenberg and daily testing his personal stamina with drugs and a most dramatic physical and spiritual transformation was set into motion. Lately it had reached the point where he’d begun to resemble a cross between a human blackened spoon and Count Dracula. This in turn provided him with a singularly intimidating demeanour to shield himself behind. It was so effective that no one in the Stones organisation dared to initiate a frank exchange of views with him over the fact that his overstimulated lifestyle was so sorely taxing the group’s morale, music and money-making potential.

I broached this tender subject with Mick Jagger when we finally met for a lunch/interview in a gentleman’s club he frequented near Piccadilly Circus more than a month after the tour had wound down. Jagger had actually been the one who’d chosen me for the book assignment - he told me so during our meal - but he and I had never actually spoken during all the time I’d travelled with them. Sometimes I’d seen him from the corner of my eye backstage checking me out, mentally sizing up whether I truly merited being in his group’s exalted midst. He had his own way of intimidating people. But it was ultimately small beer compared to his soulmate Keith’s championship-level scowling expertise.

‘How do you deal with keeping the group afloat when your guitarist is so frequently in trouble?’ I asked him. He turned reflective for several seconds and then said, ‘Well, you’ve seen a bit of what he’s like. He’s not really someone who responds well to advice.’ His famous mouth exploded into a broad grin. I tried to continue the line of questioning but he soon cut me off. ‘Listen, I’m not going to judge Keith. I don’t judge Keith - period. That’s how our relationship works. That’s how I am.’

These days Jagger habitually gets worse press - principally in his native England - than a convicted child molester and it’s something that’s always baffled me, particularly when his equally money-hungry peer Paul McCartney is fêted by the same media organs as an all-purpose paragon of virtue. It’s obvious the guy isn’t the most loveable and approachable human being to have ever drawn breath but he never wanted to be loved by the general public in the first place. Patronised and applauded - yes. But not ‘loved’ in the gooey showbiz sense of the word. He’s always been smart enough to recognise that performers who actively look for love from their audiences often end up needy and burned-out like Judy Garland.

In order to understand Mick Jagger better, it’s always instructive to recall the state he found himself in at the end of the sixties. On the one hand, he was the rebel prince of New Bohemia - someone millions of young people the world over idolised and aspired to be. On the other, he’d had to witness Brian Jones’s pitiful meltdown and strange, sudden death as well as the descent into heroin addiction by the two people he was then closest to - Marianne Faithfull and Keith Richards.

Even more dramatically, he’d lately discovered that most of the money the Stones had made in the sixties had been pocketed by manager Allen Klein, along with all the rights to their recorded back catalogue. He had two basic choices: either join his soulmates in narcotic never-never land or assert himself and as a canny businessman steer the Rolling Stones’ leaky ship towards more advantageous waters. The guy chose to survive and thrive. Without his relentless input, the group would have petered out after the recording of Let It Bleed. And yet somehow he always ends up the villain whenever the Stones saga gets recounted - the control freak, the cold fish, the cunning, heartless greed-head. It’s become one big fairy story - the Rolling Stones as perceived by the world’s media - with Jagger as the resident evil goblin.

So what’s he really like then? Hard to say these days-I haven’t been in direct contact with the man for over twenty years. But back in the seventies he was someone who always made it his business to be one step ahead of everyone else and who cultivated relationships mostly to achieve this aim. He was extremely shrewd too. He was amused by the clonish likes of the New York Dolls but recognised instantly that they were far too unprofessional and scatterbrained to ever cause his outfit any worried side glances. David Bowie on the other hand fascinated him. For Jagger, Bowie was the only white guy from the seventies who ever caused him to look anxiously over his shoulder. Mention the likes of Lou Reed and Marc Bolan to him though and he’d dissolve in laughter. He knew a thing or two about performers, did Mick Jagger. They had to be fearless, vain and deeply ambitious in order to cast their spell meaningfully night after night. Back in 1964 he’d gone toe to toe with James Brown on the T.A.M.I. show and he’d learned more about stagecraft from that one encounter than any of the new glam boys - apart from Bowie - could ever comprehend. ‘It’s hard work being me,’ he once said in an unguarded moment, and that’s what I most recall him being: a hard worker. Back then his life wasn’t just about getting paid and getting laid.

And he could be really good company too when he was relaxed. But he was rarely relaxed in public situations. His problem was, whenever he’d walk into a room of strangers, people would invariably go stark staring mad. Women would suddenly lose all sense of decorum and men would start following him around like hypnotised puppy dogs. Jagger had to muster every atom of his considerable sense of self-possession in order to deal with the star-struck behaviour his very presence automatically tended to incite. That’s why being Mick Jagger was ultimately such a hard gig. His ongoing retreat into the world of aristocracy and high society has been one way of distancing himself from such situations, I would imagine.

Perhaps this would be the ideal moment to end this chapter and draw a veil over 1973. I’d realised my most ardent teenage fantasy: acceptance and patronage within the Rolling Stones’ inner sanctum. Plus I was crazy in love. It couldn’t get any better than this. And it didn’t, either.

I’m not complaining but too much had happened to me in too short a time and as exhilarating as they had been to live through, the previous two years had left me dizzy and disoriented. I needed an anchor in my life and that’s what my relationship with Chrissie Hynde gave me - initially. For the first six months, it was bliss. But then 1974 dawned and our honeymoon period was over.

Something else deeply significant to my future standing in society happened right at the tail-end of 1973. I went over to Cologne in Germany to visit Can in their rehearsal studio there on assignment from the NME. Had a great time too. So great in fact that when someone in their entourage offered me a tiny line of heroin to snort, I did so without much forethought on the matter. I’d been offered the drug before on occasion but had always had the presence of mind to turn it down. This time, though, was different: my first time. I didn’t know it then but in that one heedless moment I’d just opened the door to a world of hurt.