My perspective was the polar opposite of theirs. I wasn’t writing about rock as an idea: I was writing about it as a full-blown flesh-and-blood reality - surreal people living surreal, action-packed lives. From what I’d learned coming up, rock writing was fundamentally an action medium that best came to life when the writer was right in the thick of that action and yet removed enough to comprehend its possible consequences. The range of characters the medium offered was phenomenally rich. There was the lead singer with his monumental narcissistic personality disorders. The guitarists with their witchy girlfriends and ever-mounting drug-dependency issues. The managers feverishly working the money angle whilst secretly envying their wards’ success and pulling power. The roadies building their own thuggish power base. The audience - like the children of Hamelin - hypnotised and bug-eyed with communal ecstasy. It’s the convergence of human elements like these that made the form start to come alive for me. Some degree of windy theorising is always necessary - true - but only in small doses. Nothing longer than three or four incisive, well-worded sentences to establish a wider context and also pass judgement on the music actually being made. Then - back to the action.

The key trick, though, is to somehow create prose that flows with a distinct musicality all of its own. That’s what I finally hit on in ’74: the right tone and the right groove. Before that, there’d been something contrived about my writing as well as the literary persona I’d hastily adopted. But I’d toiled long and hard to find a style and approach that I was happy with. I took my evolving writerly skills very, very seriously during that whole period. I made a point of never taking any drugs just prior to and during the actual act of scribbling my texts out. I’d tried once or twice whilst on speed and it had screwed up my ability to focus and fuse together incidents to the best of my ability. And pot only befuddled my thinking whenever a deadline loomed. No, I really needed to be straight to do full justice to the talent growing within me.

That was one of the better aspects of my relationship with Chrissie Hynde: it wasn’t a drug-driven liaison. We’d take drugs in social situations when they were being offered freely to us but didn’t have any where we lived and rarely felt the urge to actually buy them. Chrissie was like me - she’d snort cocaine if she was given it but it invariably left her nervous and ill at ease. The best times we shared together were the ones when it was just the two of us, clear-headed and drunk simply on each other’s company. You don’t need drugs when you’re truly in love and on the same wavelength as your intended.

But romantic love - as the poets have often pointed out - is a multifaceted condition of the heart that can end up deeply wounding those who fall under its spell. Some can ride its giddy momentum whilst others become destabilised and start to come apart from within. That’s what was about to happen to me. The image I was trying to project out to the world was that of a self-assured, waspishly witty young sophisticate, but behind it I was emotionally still sixteen years old in the head: insecure and possessive - two qualities almost all self-respecting species of womankind have a built-in contempt of.

Meanwhile, weird scenes had been happening within the NME. Sales continued to increase throughout ’73, but then in the year’s final weeks the paper had been forced to cease production and go on strike. It was out of circulation for almost two months as I recall-a nerve-wracking time for its staff and contributors wondering if it would ever resurface. The strike coincided with our IPC paymasters taking umbrage at the NME’s new laissez-faire editorial policy regarding bad language. The word ‘cunt’ had lately cropped up in one feature and the higher-ups were mortified by this turn of events, threatening to shut the paper down if further obscenities were committed to print. A compromise was duly arrived at. We could use ‘fuck’ in moderation, as well as ‘asshole’ and ‘bugger’. But any slang word for genitalia - male or female - was strictly out of bounds.

Mercifully, this petty-minded contretemps didn’t put too deep a dent in ongoing office morale. Big changes were afoot in the NME’s Long Acre office space. Editor Alan Lewis chose this period to step down from his duties and hand the reins over to Nick Logan. This was a major step in the right direction. Lewis had been a canny opportunist, but Nick had the ideal mixture of sensibility and creative instinct to take us all to the next level, whatever and wherever that was. His first act as the journal’s captain was most inspired: he persuaded Ian MacDonald to take over his previous post as assistant editor. Ian wasted no time in bringing all his daunting intellect, boundless intensity and unshakeable thirst for excellence to the role he’d been assigned.

The pair immediately green-lighted a visual make-over for the paper. The first post-strike issue to hit the shops in January ’74 featured an arty full-length photo - of Bryan Ferry - taking up the entire cover. Before that, the paper had unimaginatively run their lead news story of the week in the same space. But now it looked classier, bolder and infinitely more pleasing to the eye. Pennie Smith was really coming into her own as a photographer, and Ian and Nick made sure her contributions were always laid out for maximum visual impact. Likewise, they knew how to get the best out of me and all the other writers on board. Thus began the NME’s true golden age. From that point on, we were truly a force to be reckoned with.

Of course, ‘new journalistic directions’ invariably require the constant hiring of new writers to keep the pot boiling. So it surprised no one when word came through that two fresh recruits would soon be joining up to bolster our ranks. The first to arrive was a Bert Jansch lookalike called Andrew Tyler-a fine writer and all-round good person. The second choice took me aback somewhat. It was Chrissie. Ian and Nick had socialised with her on several occasions when I’d brought her to the office and Ian in particular felt she had the perfect attitude to become an NME contributor. He basically told her so until he’d convinced her to actually sit down and churn out some text. They evidently liked what she submitted because the next thing I knew she was interviewing Brian Eno for a centre-page spread.

At first I was happy for her. She could dump her dead-end job at the architects’ office and focus on matters that genuinely interested her for greater financial recompense. Suddenly she had her own profile on the London music scene apart from being my girlfriend. But her recruitment onto the NME masthead also left me distinctly wary. I felt the paper was pushing her into their big spotlight far too soon, that the editors should have allowed her to find her bearings as a music journalist before parading her in front of our readers.

One consequence of her being showcased so prominently so early in her career was that she always felt a terrible pressure whenever she had to turn out copy and found the whole process both taxing and deeply unenjoyable. That’s unfortunate because she possessed some talent as a burgeoning writer. Over the first six months of 1974 she managed to complete and get published interviews/articles on acts as diverse as Brian Eno, Suzi Quatro, David Cassidy (a teen idol du jour) and Tim Buckley. The best thing she turned in to the NME was a touching write-up of an encounter with one of her heroes, the zen-cool veteran jazzer Mose Allison that took place during a spring residency the piano-playing US singer/songwriter was undertaking at Ronnie Scott’s Soho club. If she’d been given the chance to pen more low-key heartfelt pieces like that, maybe she would have continued longer in the profession than she did. After six months, however, she’d simply had enough and left the NME - and music journalism - to pursue other goals.

By that time, she’d found another avenue of employment for herself as a shop assistant at Malcolm McLaren’s King’s Road clothes store. Once again I’d first introduced her to McLaren and his clique, never thinking it would amount to much. I’d first noticed him in the spring of ’72. His shop was called ‘Let It Rock’ then and it catered exclusively to a fifties retro crowd: brothel-creeping Teds from the London suburbs with nicknames like ‘Biffo’ and ‘Crazy-Legged John’. He was a real fifties purist back then and I took a generally dim view of those who opt to live single-mindedly in the past.

But then the New York Dolls returned to London at the end of November ’73 to perform a concert there and promote their critically acclaimed debut album. On a day off, they’d gone shopping and had trooped into Let It Rock together. The moment McLaren saw them, a major man-crush ensued. Suddenly the seventies came alive for him and he began obsessively following them around.

In December I flew to Paris to see the group play at the prestigious Olympia concert hall. The concert itself was a musical nightmare highlighted by guitarist Johnny Thunders abruptly leaving the stage in mid-performance at least twice to vomit behind the amplifiers. But afterwards there was a celebratory dinner at a ritzy restaurant and I found myself seated at a table with David Johansen and McLaren. The latter was animatedly talking about a pet project of his: a filmed documentary of his hero, the gifted but physically frail UK former rock idol Billy Fury that he was struggling to find financial backing for.

I’d actually met Fury just a month earlier. Someone had convinced him to make a tentative comeback and so he’d duded himself up in a pink leather suit and Rod Stewart feather cut and started performing a greatest-hits repertoire in a Northern working men’s club. His voice still sounded great, his face remained flawlessly beautiful and he was as thin as a whippet. But he was also far too sweet-natured and trusting, and lacked the gumption and physical stamina needed to sustain a career in the seventies. He also had a serious heart condition. I mentioned all this to McLaren and he was most impressed. It was the start of our very first conversation and it continued long into the night.

He revealed a lot about himself during that chat. He talked at length about his Jewish upbringing and his childhood living under the influence of a mad meddlesome grandmother who instilled in him the innate belief that he was so special he could achieve absolutely anything in life, no matter what obstacles were placed before him. He also mentioned his many years spent as a mature art-school student during the sixties. He hated that decade with a venom that would have been shocking had it not been so comical to hear about. He became apoplectic when he began railing against the Beatles, hippies and the whole peace and love movement of the time. The very idea of anything even vaguely spiritual and uplifting filtering into youth culture automatically filled him with nausea. At one point I got into a heated argument with him over who had been a more influential force in popular music - Bob Dylan (my choice) or Johnny Kidd and the Pirates (his). Kidd and his cohorts were an early-sixties English rock band of merit with one indisputably seminal recording to their credit - the original version of ‘Shakin’ All Over’. Dylan by contrast had over one hundred timeless songs under his belt and had been a far-reaching creative trailblazer whose name still inspired millions with awe. There really was no contest. But he still waffled on ardently about how Dylan was a talentless fake who’d influenced nothing and no one whilst Johnny Kidd - who’d been killed in a car crash back in 1965 - was someone who’d left a deep and lasting impression on the mindset of twentieth-century youth.

His own mindset was still hopelessly trapped in the late fifties as far as rock ’n’ roll and pop culture in general were concerned. Gene Vincent - the sweet-voiced hillbilly psychopath - was his ultimate musical reference point, the figure that best summed up his vision of rock as something truly untamed and seditious. But then the New York Dolls walked into his life and he’d instinctively sensed that - behind their tacky transvestite outward appearance - something equally untamed and seditious lurked within them too. It turned out to be his very own ‘road to Damascus’ moment. For one thing, he got to hear that night for the very first time the fateful phrase he’d later claim he single-handedly invented - ‘punk rock’. It either came from my lips or from one of the New York Dolls.

The upshot of this first encounter was that we stayed in touch back in London and he invited me out one evening in January. I took Chrissie along and she quickly bonded with McLaren’s girlfriend, a feisty Northern lass called Vivienne Westwood. They shared several pointed character traits. They were both aggressively forthright in voicing their opinions in any given situation, used bad language liberally and liked nothing more than initiating confrontations with complete strangers when not driving their own boyfriends to distraction with their nagging ways. I liked Vivienne - she was a tough old bird who’d lived a tough old life prior to becoming McLaren’s personal Eliza Doolittle - but I was also wary of her because I could detect something unhealthily malicious lurking behind her eyes. That’s probably why McLaren and I grew close. We both shared the same sorry romantic predicament.

Still, what attracted me most was the guy’s passion, intelligence and daring. He was always thinking outside of the box. Within the first six months of ’74, he completely transformed his shop, changed the clothes he and Westwood were designing and even changed the name. In January it had still been ‘Let It Rock’, but by early summer it became ‘Seditionaries’ and began selling an exclusive range of leather and rubber fetishist clothing whilst all the other London fashion lairs were still stocking up on tacky satin jackets and bell-bottomed loon pants. He was quick-witted and audacious and - because he never took drugs - he also possessed the mental stamina and focus to will his mad ideas into fruition. Meanwhile, the rest of London was still stuck in the aimless pothead purgatory of the late sixties. You could say I was an early supporter of his work as a fashion designer. In the late spring of ’74 I even interviewed him in the NME about his clothes-designing relationship with the New York Dolls and his thoughts on fashion and rock. It was one of his first-ever appearances in the media.

The most significant aspect of our relationship though was the way I took it upon myself to educate him on what had actually been happening in rock music over the past ten years. As soon as the Beatles arrived in 1963, McLaren had simply turned his back on rock music and buried his head in the ground like an ostrich. He didn’t even know who Jimi Hendrix was until I forced him to attend a late-night screening of Joe Boyd’s film documentary on the guitarist. He sat in that cinema utterly slack-jawed with wonderment. He told me he couldn’t believe what he’d been missing out on.

I got him to watch Gimme Shelter too and he was deeply affected by its evocation of contemporary rock as a way to still incite blood-drenched mass pandemonium. He loved what he saw because it registered to him in no uncertain terms that rock’s wild anarchic spirit hadn’t died back when Elvis got co-opted into the army, that it was still obscenely alive and capable of raising a nuclear-sized ruckus in whatever social and cultural context you chose to set it loose in. It was great to be around him in those moments because you could see he was receiving major revelations from the screen. It didn’t always work, though. One time I coerced him into sitting through the great D. A. Pennebaker Dylan doc Don’t Look Back and he came out cursing the Bard of Beat with even greater vigour. And the Beatles were always a strictly no-go area. But he loved the Doors and the early Who. In many ways it was just like teaching a bloke who’d been living in a cave for ten years about what had transpired during his absence. But McLaren was a lightning-quick learner. You didn’t have to draw him any maps. He’d just fixate on what became instantly fascinating to him like a magpie and then pilfer it into his own private agenda.

As my relationship with him intensified so my relationship with Chrissie began to unravel. Our first six months together had been heavenly. But the six months after that - from January 1st 1974 to early summer - became increasingly hellish for both of us. All love affairs have their honeymoon period when two hearts beat as one and joy is unconfined. But then reality descends and suddenly the lovers wake up and start having to grimly confront each other’s shortcomings and personal eccentricities. Chrissie woke up first. I could see it in her eyes. You can always tell when a woman’s truly in love simply by looking directly in her eyes. If she is, then there’s an intangibly luminous glow to her gaze. It’s a wondrous thing to behold. But when love starts to die, those same eyes will turn cold on you and you will see only irritation and unhappiness within them. I’ve seen it happen a number of times since but I learned it first from being with Chrissie.

The problem was, whilst she was waking up, I was still blissfully comatose inside love’s young dream. Only a moment ago, we’d been giddily talking about getting married. Now she was suddenly pushing for us to live separately. With the aid of hindsight I can now see the merits of her suggestion: we were so glued together at first it was starting to become suffocating. But at the time I reacted to it as an act of colossal rejection on her part. That’s what I mean about still being sixteen emotionally in the old noggin.

Plus the fact that she was suddenly doing the same job as me didn’t help matters one jot or iota. Though neither of us was aware of it initially, working for the NME back then had a compulsory side effect. It put everyone involved in a position where they were automatically in competition with each other. It wasn’t a soothing or nurturing environment to work in. There was an unhealthily divisive undercurrent to the way writers were pitted against each other. My relationship with Charles Shaar Murray had suffered because of this but at least I didn’t have to live with the guy. When Chrissie started adopting much the same confrontational attitude in our home, however, that’s when major indoor fireworks starting going off. I couldn’t believe it at first. I was still lost in love-land. But I felt the change soon enough. It was like being on a plane when a sudden mid-air explosion occurs. After the initial shock, I started looking around in earnest for some kind of safety parachute to help break the free fall.

From what I’d observed, most examples of humankind facing imminent heartache tended to pour themselves into a bottle and let the liquor anaesthetise their woes. In fact, poor old John Lennon was busy doing just that over in Hollywood, drinking his way through a lost weekend that lasted through most of 1974 because he couldn’t stand to be separated from Yoko Ono. But immersing oneself in alcohol was never really an option for me. Booze of any grain and potency tended to leave me dizzy and red-faced. I was a died-in-the-wool drug snob anyway.

But which drug could truly comfort me in my time of sorrow? Not cocaine - it just made me crazier and more fever-headed. Pot couldn’t quell the pain, either. Only one pharmaceutical really possessed what I needed - the power to effect a complete shutdown of all emotional feeling within me. It was called heroin and it was becoming steadily more and more available throughout parts of London - particularly in Chelsea, where many bored young things with too much of daddy’s money had fallen victim to its lure.

As I’ve already mentioned, I tried it first in Germany at the end of the previous year. But I don’t think the powder I inhaled that night actually was heroin. The effect was altogether too benign. A month later Chrissie and I were at a photographer friend’s Maida Vale flat. We’d been snorting cocaine all night together and we were both seriously wired. I asked the photographer if he had a Valium to counteract the tremors and he said no - but that we’d be less agitated if we both snorted a line of heroin. We were so desperate for any kind of calming antidote that we immediately took him up on his offer. This time it really was heroin. I have a dim recollection of us almost literally crawling our way back to Clapham South just as rush hour was commencing. Chrissie didn’t take it after that for a long long time. I wasn’t so cautious.

Actually it was my third encounter with the drug that was to prove the most fatal. I was spending a lot of my down time in Chelsea during ’74. You’d often have found me lurking around McLaren’s headquarters but I was also a regular presence at another World’s End clothing emporium just a few doors down; Granny Takes a Trip had been fêted internationally as London’s hippest and most exclusive haberdashers during London’s psychedelic summer of 1967, the year it first opened. The Beatles, Stones and Syd Barrett had all their most flamboyant outfits made up on the premises that season.

The guy who actually set it all up was an enterprising young Englishman named Nigel Waymouth, but he soon tired of his creation and sold it to a couple of fashion-besotted young New Yorkers named Marty Breslau and Gene Krell at the end of the sixties. I first got to know these two when I began buying clothes from them in late ’72. ‘Granny’s’ was practically the only clothes shop in London at that time that still sold elegantly cut straight-legged trousers unencumbered by a flare and cool-looking boots without clumpy platform heels and soles, and I was always a stickler for both. Flared trousers should be worn only by those unfortunate people with one leg significantly shorter than the other. And only midgets need to even consider sporting platform heels. Anyone else who adopts their look is committing an abomination against both style and nature.

But I digress. I actually became friends with Gene and Marty during the Stones’ European tour back in autumn. They’d turned up to several shows on the Continent as Keith Richards’s personal guests. I didn’t know it then but Marty was one of Keith’s many heroin suppliers. He and Spanish Tony Sanchez - Richards’s main drug courier and general enforcer who’d later co-write the scurrilous Up and Down with the Rolling Stones literary exposé - were thick as thieves. Marty was a handsome fellow - he looked like a stoned Warren Beatty with a girlish shag cut - and he’d evidently led something of a charmed life throughout his teens and twenties. But his luck changed dramatically when he met Keith Richards because he fell head-over-heels in love with the guy and - in order to remain in his presence - ended up destroying his career in the fashion world in order to become his drug dealer. It never got better for Marty after that and he ended up dying of an overdose in the early eighties. He wasn’t what you’d call an especially nice guy - too vain, too tricky, too stupid - but I rather liked him all the same. Ditto Spanish Tony.

Anyway, one night in early spring I was over at their Chelsea Embankment luxury basement flat. Chrissie and I had just had a major spat back in Clapham South and I was seeking temporary refuge elsewhere. Marty and Tony laid out three lines of heroin and offered me one. And that’s when it truly hit me - the drug, I mean. Suddenly I felt all my burdens melting from my shoulders, all that bad static in my brain - banished. And in their place - plugged into every atom of my being - utter serenity. Total palpable bliss.

Charlie Parker called it ‘the cool world’. Once you’ve been there it’s hard to rid it from your thoughts. It’s like discovering an enchanted island you can suddenly escape to where everything is safe and serene, where no pain can find you. Your conscious mind keeps telling you that you’re stepping over a dangerous line here and messing with the forbidden but your subconscious keeps replaying the ecstasy of that moment when heroin first revealed its full power within you. You can already tell what was about to happen, can’t you, dear reader? All the ingredients for impending disaster were stacking up around me.

And yet 1974 still managed to bring the best out of me to date as a writer. In March of that year I set out on a personal crusade I’d wanted to instigate since my mid-teens: to research and then write an article that would finally explain to the world what had actually happened to Syd Barrett. The Madcap now has apparently more than 30,000 fan websites devoted to his memory but back in ’74 interest in the man was scant at best. Several NMEites were openly dismissive of the project at the outset. ‘Barrett is a has-been and has-beens have no place in the pages of the NME’ was one rationale I recall being confronted with. But I knew better. His old group had just had a worldwide no. 1 album, The Dark Side of the Moon, that was partly a concept album about madness. And Syd - from everything I’d been informed - had gone completely mad himself. It was high time his tale be fully told.

Here at last was a subject I could totally sink my teeth into. In 1967, the impish-eyed Barrett had been the world’s most beautiful man - the golden boy of psychedelia. By 1974 he’d become a scary-eyed balding recluse whom former acquaintances couldn’t even recognise any more. He lived alone in a flat in Chelsea Cloisters where he spent all his time watching a large colour television and eating meat he kept in a giant freezer in the kitchen. I thought about approaching him directly-I had the address - but was told he probably wouldn’t answer the door. I spoke to at least two people who’d recently crossed paths with him and they claimed it was now impossible to have a coherent conversation with him. He rarely went out, never searched out old acquaintances and hadn’t made music in two years. Everything was closing in around him and so it seemed more humane to just leave him alone and let others document what happened to him. In the end his absence worked to the piece’s advantage because it further enhanced his mystique, made him even more distantly compelling as subject matter.

Almost everyone I interrogated about Syd openly bore the psychic scars of having witnessed his unforgettable deterioration. Several came close to tears as they recalled the way his wreckless use of LSD had fractured first his potential and then his every mental process. Others expressed the view that - as gifted as he was - he was too young and undisciplined, too over-indulged and too good-looking, and simply lacked the mental focus and spartan nervous system required to successfully sustain a career for himself as a rock star.

The Pink Floyd somehow got wind of what I was preparing and Dave Gilmour - whom I’d never met before - phoned me up out of the blue at home in Clapham South. He offered to do an interview on the subject of Syd because he wanted to put the record straight about his friend and hopefully counterbalance any misinformation I might have picked up along the way. I was scheduled to deliver the finished text - which eventually ran to over 6,000 words - to the NME on the Friday morning of the first week in April. But I couldn’t start writing it until I’d finished my chinwag with Gilmour, which ended up taking place in a Long Acre pub on Thursday evening. It was worth the added deadline stress because Gilmour gave me by far the most revealing account of Syd’s rise and fall, and I’m eternally grateful that he saw fit to entrust me with his often intimate recollections. To him, his friend’s breakdown wasn’t simply triggered by drug abuse; the roots of it stretched back to Barrett’s pampered childhood and his doting mother. His testimony proved to be the last crucial piece of the puzzle I had to conjure up in prose.

I left Gilmour at close to 10.00 p.m. and taxied back to Clapham South. When I’d interviewed Barrett’s former co-manager Peter Jenner some weeks earlier at his office, he’d taken me down to the basement once my tape recorder had been turned off. The floor was damp and in one corner he located a large black plastic bag covered in grime and mildew. Inside were the blow-ups and contact sheets of practically every photograph ever taken of Barrett since the Pink Floyd’s first formation. He then handed the package to me. ‘You can keep them,’ he said, ‘I can’t imagine anyone else being interested in them.’

It was these photographs that I placed all around the room just prior to putting pen to paper. The story I had to tell was all there in the eyes I saw staring back at me. In the early shots, Syd’s eyes sparkled like sapphires but by late ’67 those same eyes had turned full of foreboding. Then, in the photos taken to promote his later solo career, they looked hopelessly lost and uncomprehending. That was the trajectory I had to capture in the next twelve hours. I started scribbling away frantically and never stopped. No drugs, no coffee - just pure obsession. The story ended up telling itself, but by the time I’d finished, I knew I’d written something that was going to resonate. Logan and MacDonald gave me a hard time for handing it in three hours after the appointed deadline but then they read the thing and realised its potential.

Four days later, it appeared spread over the four middle pages of the NME’s April 13th issue, with an evocative wind-blown shot of Syd gracing the cover. It was the first time an English music weekly had ever run such a long piece. The response was immediate and deeply gratifying.

But there was also a serious downside. Suddenly I was inundated with correspondence and phone calls from every acid-damaged NME reader in the world. They only wanted to help Syd, they all informed me with scary self-assurance, and needed to be given his personal address immediately so that they could go down and comfort him. I thought I’d left these kinds of nutjobs behind when I’d absconded from the underground press. And Ladbroke Grove. No such luck. Everyone suddenly seemed to think I had some sort of personal access to the man, that I was a kind of intermediary between him and the outside world.

The Pink Floyd’s reaction was more guarded. Gilmour let it be known that though he’d quite liked the piece, he also felt it occasionally dipped into the realm of ‘sensationalism’. And Roger Waters apparently didn’t like it at all. Still, it must have left an impact because - partly as a response - he wrote the song ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ soon afterwards.

And Syd himself - how did it all register with him? Well, his mystique certainly benefited from the renewed exposure. He was suddenly a hot topic again. Peter Jenner called up to ask for the prompt return of all those photographs he’d ‘given’ me. And EMI, who’d recently deleted Barrett’s two solo albums from their catalogue, promptly decided to re-release them as a special double package. Hoping to feature a new photograph of the man on the cover design, they’d then dispatched two former Cambridge pals of Barrett’s, Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell, down to Chelsea Cloisters armed with a camera. They told me later that they’d knocked on his door for several minutes without success. He wouldn’t let them in. Still, they had a conversation - of sorts - through the letter box. At one point, one of them asked him, ‘So, Syd - did you see that big piece on you in NME?’ Barrett - with some hesitation - replied, ‘Yes . . . No.’ ‘What did you think of it then?’ asked Thorgerson. ‘It was OK,’ Barrett’s voice came back drowsily, ‘but I didn’t read it.’ That was Syd sure enough. Unfathomable to the end.

The only person to give me any serious grief about the Syd piece was Chrissie Hynde. ‘Where do you get off thinking you have the right to invade the lives of mentally unstable people?’ she once exploded at me. ‘You’re not a registered psychiatrist.’ It was a moot point but the way she broached it smacked of professional jealousy. She even started giving me a hard time about working with the Rolling Stones. ‘Those old guys are just trying to exploit you’ became one of her oft-repeated scornful diatribes aimed at my ears only. In retrospect, this was pretty damn rich, particularly when you consider that thirty years later she and her group would be blithely supporting the senior-citizen Stones for negligible financial reward on one of their gargantuan moneysiphoning American tours.

Things were just going from bad to worse between us. I should have moved out then but I was still too love-struck to make the break. I kept holding on blindly to the deluded notion that the bad period we were traversing would suddenly evaporate and we’d magically return to the idyllic times we’d shared back in the beginning. I was about to learn a very important lesson in life: there’s ultimately not that much difference between being a hopeless romantic and a feckless sap.

In May we agreed to a two-week trial separation and I used the opportunity to go off with a friend of mine, a New York-born, smart-alec photographer named Joe Stevens, to France on a much-needed holiday. We took the Paris night train down to St Tropez - what a sleazy, overpriced dump that turned out to be. I went there armed with the mad hope of somehow encountering Brigitte Bardot, a well-known resident of the tiny beach town, and ended up having to hide away from a fleet of drunken sailors who were overrunning the area and who took great exception to my pallid form and foppish attire.

Joe and I escaped to Cannes - only to discover that their annual film festival had ended just a week earlier and the streets were deserted apart from heaping piles of torn film posters. So we headed back to Paris. Springtime in Paris agreed with me. I felt suddenly light-headed again. But then temptation reared its sordid head - and with it came dire consequences. I started screwing around and, unbeknownst to me at the time, one of my conquests gave me a special going-away present: gonorrhoea.

Do you really need to know the rest? Yes, I suppose you do. June was hell on earth for Chrissie and me. We fought, we cursed. Then one night she got ill and experienced the same crippling stomach cramps that I’d seen her suffering from the first time I’d met her. I held her that night like I’d done the other time and tried to comfort her. It was the last truly tender moment we ever got to share. The next morning an ambulance came and took her to the hospital. She stayed there for three days. Meanwhile, I was starting to experience an unpleasant burning sensation whenever I took a piss. The doctors then told Chrissie that her gynaecological problems were caused by her having lately contracted a sexually transmissible disease. From that point on, she didn’t really want to have anything more to do with me.

I moved out to a dingy two-room flat in Archway that I first had to have fumigated by the local pest-control. During my first evening there, I got an unexpected call from Chrissie. Her voice sounded less icy than of late, gentler and more forgiving. She told me she still loved me and that our living apart would only make our relationship stronger. She asked me to meet her the next day at McLaren’s shop near closing time. We’d go out together. It would be a new beginning.

This was music to my ears. For the next twenty hours I was back floating on air. But then I turned up at the appointed time and walked into yet another nightmare scenario. Chrissie was not happy to see me. Her eyes were like poison darts. ‘Go fuck yourself! ’ was her opening greeting. I reminded her about what she’d said the night before. ‘Well, I’ve changed my mind,’ she countered coldly. ‘I met this guy and I’m going out with him now.’

That’s when I saw red. I attacked her right there in the shop. McLaren was also present and he was so scared he ran off and hid under a table. I was about to hit her with my belt when a strange bloke who just happened to be on the premises - one of McLaren’s mad brood - stepped forward and punched me in the face so hard my whole body almost flew through the shop window onto the pavement outside. Exit Chrissie. Meanwhile, I’m splayed out on the floor, pathetic and bleeding profusely from the mouth. That was the final scene in our great love affair. Everything changed from that moment on. Farewell charmed life - hello cruel fate. A bad moon was presently rising over Chelsea Embankment and now it had turned its ruinous glow on me too. Where did our love go? That’s what I wanted to know. All my life I’d been told that love was the answer, that it was what made the world go round, that it conquered all adversity and soothed the savage within. But the love I’d just lived through had been neither soothing nor strengthening and it had left me with more questions than answers. It had also left me with a dull, aching pain and a vastly diminished sense of personal self-esteem.

For a while there I became a very gloomy fellow indeed. I’d still socialise but my acquaintances soon became weary of my glum discourses on the treacherous lie that is romantic infatuation and told me so in no uncertain terms. Some offered a solution to my woes: a comforting line of heroin. At that point in time I saw little difference in being a lovesick fool and full-blown drug addict so I continually accepted their offer. At first I only indulged one evening a month. Then it quickly grew to once a week. Then it was every three days. By the end of the year it had become a daily habit.

I’d abandoned myself. It was partly due to my raging self-disgust. However much I tried to believe otherwise, it was me who’d been the weak link in our love-chain. I’d been too arrogant, too stifling, too immature. And yet I couldn’t get around the lurking suspicion that I’d been used by her, that she’d glommed on to me to further her profile in London and then basically taken my initial kindness for cuntishness and dropped me like a bad debt once she’d established herself as someone of consequence in the city’s music circles.

‘The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage’ - the great Smokey Robinson and the Miracles heartbreaker - was on constant rotation in my lonely Archway pad that year. It spoke to my inner condition, my ongoing dilemma. All this time I’d been like a needy child craving the love of the loveless. But everyone just used everybody else in this world - that was the name of the game when it came to fundamental human interaction. Musicians were using me for their publicity whilst I was using them as subject matter and source material. The NME was using me to sell more copies and I was using them to extend my writing abilities and personal profile. And where was the love in all of this? Nowhere. It seemed to me there was no love. It didn’t really exist. So - bring on the darkness. At least - as Spinal Tap once so eloquently put it - you know where you stand in a hellhole. The dark world tends to get a bad rap but it has much to recommend it - particularly if you’re one of the broken-hearted. Faster women. Harder drugs. Drunker wine. When you’re twenty-two years old, you don’t think about the consequences. You just swan-dive in.

And what became of Chrissie? Well, McLaren sacked her shortly after our violent parting of the ways in his shop and she stuck around London for another month or two before decamping to Paris. She first shared a flat there with a transsexual guy who ran a local cabaret act. Then she started living with the junkie bass player for a local glam-rock act called the Frenchies. In due course, she became their singer. But the line-up splintered apart in early ’75, and she returned to her native Akron.

I tried twice during that time to persuade her to return to me. Even flew to Paris once just to plead my case. Not a chance. I was just a bad memory to her. She wanted to move on. She returned to her new social circle and I went back to my drug buddies. I only realised it recently but our love affair turned out to be the very first proven casualty of the NME in the seventies. There would be others.

But enough of my dreary, milksop blatherings - at least for now. What was transpiring in the ongoing pop-culture Zeitgeist as summer turned to autumn and autumn turned to winter? I still had a ringside seat and continued to monitor the situation for my NME paymasters with due dedication. David Bowie - now an American resident - had lately gone disco, a move that utterly bewildered his UK fan base when they first read about it. Bryan Ferry meanwhile had stolen his thunder in England: Roxy Music were unstoppable even without Brian Eno. Wherever I went that year - to clubs or people’s apartments - someone would always be playing a Steely Dan record. Or Al Green. Whenever I hear ‘Let’s Stay Together’ or ‘Do It Again’ these days, the essence of 1974 is instantly re-evoked in my mind. I’m lurking around some dimly lit smoky club in a state of stoned semi-consciousness, scoping out the dead-eyed fellow revellers as though we’ve all just been shanghaied onto the set of a bad Peter Sellers movie.

The London pubs meanwhile had pub rock to keep their customers entertained whilst hoisting pints. The genre had lately been greatly boosted by the arrival of the one group that would actually go on to enjoy mainstream success in the coming months: a rough-and-ready R & B quartet from Canvey Island called Dr. Feelgood. The group didn’t make it on looks alone. In point of fact, they were the seediest-looking bunch that ever stood on a stage in the seventies.

The singer had all the physical grace of a homicidal plumber, the guitarist with the pudding-bowl haircut was a bizarre black-suited blur, darting around the stage ceaselessly as though his legs had just been set alight, and the rhythm section resembled a couple of small-time penny-arcade pimps. They played strictly retro rock - mostly old R & B material with a few originals written in the same spirit - but virtually everyone who saw them live that year came away excited by what they’d seen and heard. Their music hasn’t really lasted the test of time but they were still important because they heralded an important sea change in UK rock. Before them, the fops had ruled the roost. But the Feelgoods’ ascension marked the pivotal moment when the spivs started creeping back into the big picture. Malcolm McLaren could often be espied side-stage at their shows taking mental notes.

The big event as summer turned to autumn was a Wembley Stadium show headlined by the recently reformed hippie dreamers Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. They played for almost three hours, their voices audibly hollowed out by ongoing cocaine abuse. Half the band appeared to be struggling with recurrent nose-bleeding. It was a sorry spectacle all told - only Neil Young managed to fleetingly impress.

At the party afterwards at a West End watering hole called Quaglino’s a wild-eyed, chemically impacted Young and an obnoxiously drunk-as-a-skunk Stills booed the ropey pick-up band hired to perform at their festivities off the makeshift stage and then climbed up and took over their instruments. Young immediately took control of the repertoire and started performing several sluggish-tempoed compositions from his just-released album On the Beach. Stills tried to play the drums but fell backwards off the stool after a couple of minutes. He then decided to approach the microphone and address the many illustrious English rock musicians who’d turned up to the event as invited guests. In a nutshell, he dared them to come up and match their playing skills with his. It was just a pissed-up brag but both Jimmy Page and John Bonham volunteered and played a memorable ten-minute jam with Young still firmly at the helm. Robbie Robertson of the Band also stepped up and he and Young got into a lively guitar duel that would have involuntarily curled the whiskers of any bearded man present in the room.

Young was a force of nature that night. No one could intimidate him or outplay him. You could tell he was having an excessively good time. Even Stills’s bullish presence didn’t faze him. Why should it have? After all, Young was on a major creative roll that showed no signs of slowing to a halt in the immediate future. His 1975 masterpiece Tonight’s the Night was already done and dusted. After that came Zuma and a slew of brilliant records, culminating in 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps. By then, many were concluding that Neil Young had been the most consistently inspired male troubadour of the seventies. I wouldn’t argue the point. No one else - apart from Bowie - had the same insatiable need to push ahead and keep challenging an audience’s expectations and no one else had anywhere near the same mixture of self-discipline, creative gumption and sheer bloody-mindedness.

As Young was holding forth from the Quaglino’s stage, his Canadian soulmate Joni Mitchell was sat in one of the more exclusive corners of the restaurant area surveying the human clutter around her with a fierce ‘do not approach’ look in her eyes and a haughty sneer creasing her lips. Bianca Jagger was seated beside her and together they made for a daunting double act in championship-level seventies snobbishness.

At least Mitchell had something to back up her lofty demeanour. Like her fellow countryman Young, she was right at the top of her music-making game at that point in time. She’d started out as a folkie singer/songwriter in the late sixties and musically and lyrically she quickly proved herself to be head and shoulders above the rest of her introspective, acoustic-guitar-picking peers. But of late her voice had grown deeper and more worldly-sounding and she’d begun letting jazz musicians tamper with her songs on stage and in the studio. This bold stylistic detour would ultimately cost her a large section of her audience but it was also the best move she ever made. The next two albums, The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira, were both masterpieces, a major artist entering maturity at the very peak of her powers and focused unblinkingly on two big issues of the era: the spiritual bankruptcy inherent in aimless hedonism and status-seeking and the inevitable trials and tribulations of searching for love in a vanity-driven universe. She’d always been a spectacular talent but the songs on those two records somehow cast a spell that seemed to penetrate deep inside the listener’s skin, clear through to his or her DNA. I continue to have boundless respect for Ms Mitchell but I’m also glad I never got to actually meet her.

In late September I was back living the high life with my boys the Rolling Stones. They had a new album poised for imminent release entitled It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll that contained nothing particularly earth-shattering but which still managed to garner mostly enthusiastic reviews at the time. I did an interview with Mick Taylor which turned out to be his last as a Stones member. Unbeknownst to everyone else, he’d lately been encouraged by the engineer Andy Johns to start a group with the fiery-tempered Scottish bass player Jack Bruce. He was fed up with the Stones anyway. Jagger and Richards were way too intimidating for him to ever feel like he truly belonged in their midst. They criticised his playing and generally refused to give him a songwriter credit when he contributed to their tunes. He was starting to get strung out on heroin too. His brusque departure two months later was partly an attempt on Taylor’s part to seek out a healthier avenue for his professional music-making expertise. As it turned out, it became more a case of ‘out of the frying pan into the fire’. Too bad. He was a sweet guy and a massively gifted guitar player.

After seeing Taylor, I was invited to follow Keith Richards around London for what turned out to be something in the region of forty non-stop hours. He’d flown in from Switzerland without his family and was at something of a loose end. His new best pal Ronnie Wood was somewhere in Europe playing with the Faces and he was on his own looking for any like-minded druggie to share his time with. I’d always wanted to see up close what his life was really like - and then nail it in print. But his moment-to-moment existence back then was so mind-bogglingly X-rated and fraught with libellous content that I’d have to wait twenty years to do the story justice. The mid-section of ‘Twilight in Babylon’ from my first book The Dark Stuff is a detailed account of the first twenty hours of our encounter. It starts with us taking humongous amounts of drugs in central London, rises to a crescendo with the guitarist falling into a coma in Ronnie Wood’s Richmond guest house and ends with me vomiting all over his welcome mat. But I’ve never documented the second half - the twenty hours spent after my unfortunate Technicolor yawn incident. Until now.

One thing about Keith during his junkie years - he was a remarkably non-judgemental host. Vomit on his premises and he wouldn’t throw you out. He was definitely a live-and-let-live kind of guy in that respect. Instead he offered me more drugs, or ‘the real breakfast of champions’ as he called them. He laid out a six-inch line of heroin and cocaine mixed together, snorted it, laid out another and handed me a rolled-up pound note with a conspiratorial nudge. It was still 7 a.m. and a bit early in the day for me but nonetheless I honked the whole thing back without further thought. Hey, when in Rome . . .

The next few hours were understandably somewhat hazy but around midday Keith proposed we drive into London because he fancied something to eat. Whilst clambering into the passenger seat of his Dino Ferrari sports car, I offered up a silent prayer to the god of all London-bound motor-vehicle occupants that the man to my right would be more safety-code-conscious in daylight hours than I’d seen him be once night came a-falling. No such luck, of course. The open highway was just one big racetrack for him to burn rubber down. As far as he was concerned, heeding caution was strictly for sissies. Keith drove like a man transfixed. There was no conversation when he was in transit at the wheel. He just fixed the landscape in his windscreen with a withering glare and ramrodded into the bugger at full wheel-screeching velocity. He drove with the single-minded intensity of a tattooed man wading into a bar-room fight. It was a way of relieving some of his considerable inner aggression and frustrations.

We were only two streets away from our destination-aswanky restaurant nestling on the borderline between Chelsea and Earls Court - when Keith noticed an old man in a shed on the adjacent pavement selling copies of the Evening Standard. The cover of the paper featured a photo of the leader of T.Rex and alongside it the headline read ‘Marc Bolan says “I am still the greatest”’. The headline had then been copied onto a makeshift poster that stood in a grille next to the man’s shed. Keith saw the thing and instantly brought his car to a juddering standstill. He leapt out onto the pavement and started kicking the sign with intimidating gusto. The old bloke peered out of his shed and started remonstrating with Richards for damaging his property. Keith stood his ground and started jabbing a warning finger in his wizened direction. ‘Listen, old man - you should be ashamed of yourself selling bullshit like that. Marc Bolan never has been the fuckin’ greatest. He’s just a mouthy little poof whose fifteen minutes of fame are all used up. You’re misleading the public.’ Then he got back in the car and drove off in a silent fury.

Keith - it has to be said - was not a fan of early-seventies rock. He couldn’t abide glam rock. Couldn’t stomach David Bowie’s music and was extremely sniffy about Bowie’s whole transsexual shtick. One time in a London club I saw Gary Glitter tentatively approach Keith. Before he could introduce himself, Richards had fixed him with such a disapproving scowl that poor old Gary practically wet himself on the spot. Like the Fall’s Mark E. Smith, Keith maintained a zero-tolerance policy when it came to ‘soft lads’ trying to make their bones in the medium of rock ’n’ roll. But Marc Bolan was by far and away the softest lad of them all from his exalted vantage point. Keith had a major bee in his bonnet and cursed him out at every opportunity.

Five minutes later, he’d parked his car and we located the restaurant. There’s a great scene in John Ford’s classic Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance when the hellion gunslinger Valance - played to perfection by Lee Marvin - abruptly enters a saloon bar with his faithful giggling accomplice at his side and all the action in the room suddenly grinds to an ominous halt. The roulette wheel stops spinning. The piano goes silent. All conversation ceases. Everyone stares at the intruders in stark terror. That’s what it was like when Keith sauntered into the dining room. The place was packed with lunching yuppies - only they weren’t called that then - who looked like they’d just dropped a gallstone when they saw him arriving. Suddenly the noisy environment was stilled to an eerie silence. The only sound to be heard was that of cutlery dropping to the floor in shock. Every eye there was warily fixed on him as though Vlad the Impaler had just stepped into the big room.

Not that the reaction he was eliciting fazed the guitarist in the slightest. I doubt if he even noticed. He just nonchalantly strode to a corner table, sat down and proceeded to disappear behind a fog of billowing cigarette smoke. I suppose he’d long grown accustomed to the supernatural effect he automatically set into motion whenever he chose to step out in public. Both he and Jagger shared a lucid grasp of the charisma they could radiate. That’s why they’d lately started calling themselves the ‘Glimmer Twins’: ‘glimmer’ was the word they used to define their personal auras. ‘A glimmer is more addictive than heroin,’ Keith once told a journalist. He vividly understood the power he possessed.

After lunch, we moved on to the Rolling Stones’ central London office, where Keith immediately espied yet another newspaper trumpeting a Marc Bolan interview inside its pages. This prompted a further avalanche of unprintable invective against the Boppin’ Elf and his faltering career that lasted clear through the afternoon. Then - just as daylight was dimming out in the streets - Keith bumped into a drug buddy acquaintance called Rick Grech who’d been the bass player in Family and Blind Faith and who’d also co-produced Gram Parsons’s first solo album. Grech returned to Ronnie Wood’s guest house with us and then at midnight Keith took us both with him to a recording studio, where he was set to preside over a remix of the Stones’ version of the Temptations’ classic ‘Ain’t Too Proud to Beg’ for future single release.

Sometime the next morning Ronnie Wood - fresh off the plane from Europe - joined Keith’s little clan, followed by Jimmy Page later in the day. That night they returned to Wood’s and wrote and recorded a song together in the same studio called ‘Scarlet’ - ‘a folk ballad with reggae guitars’ (according to Page) that remains unissued to date. I wish I’d been there to tell you more about it but I flaked out during the earlier mixing session and had crawled back to my dingy Archway shack for some much-needed rest and recuperation. Richards and I had been more or less awake for the same length of time - about forty hours - and I was dead on my legs whilst he was still wide awake and readying himself for three more days and nights of full-on wakefulness. Truly the man was a walking miracle of wayward stamina. Don’t ever find yourself in a drug stand-off with him. No one throughout history has taken more drugs with more pleasurable consequences than Keith Richards. It’s like going into combat with something out of Greek mythology. The grave-yards of the world are littered with the corpses of those who tried and failed. I’m profoundly lucky that I came out of it with some good stories and just an upset stomach.

Whilst on the subject of upset stomachs, I need to put the proverbial kibosh on a scurrilous piece of gossip that has been printed and reprinted about me and Keith Richards in magazines and books and which persists to this day. This story claims that one night the guitarist accidentally threw up on me and that I was so besotted with the guy that I continued to wear his vomit stains on my jacket for days afterwards as a badge of pride. Utter slanderous poppycock! It’s just pure fantasy and misinformation. First, it’s insulting to the guitarist who’s rarely - if ever - thrown up in his entire life. The man was born with a stomach - as well as a will - of purest iron. And it’s deeply belittling to me also. Indeed, this bald-faced lie was the beginning of a cruel perception that dogged me more and more as the decade progressed: that I was nothing more than just another Stones hanger-on/ casualty. The NME have played up this bullshit angle too. In 2004 the BBC ran a documentary on the paper and one of the editors interviewed was droning on about me ‘living the Keith Richards dream’. They don’t know what they’re talking about.

I didn’t get into hard drugs - specifically heroin - so that I could be more like Keith Richards. I took the narcotic partly as a misguided way of temporarily gluing back together a broken heart but mostly because I liked the world it plunged me into, that instant all-embracing comfort zone. I would have become a user and addict whether or not I’d ever encountered Chrissie Hynde or heard a note of the Rolling Stones’ music.

Neither was I ever - technically speaking-a Stones hanger-on. In practically all the time I spent with them, our roles were always pre-fixed. I was a writer on assignment and they were the subject matter. I never wanted to become a regular fixture in their entourage because I recognised early on that the only way to do that was to become a resident court jester for them, and I didn’t need the condescension or fancy wearing the cap and bells.

As for being one of the group’s many ‘casualties’ - well, once again I beg to differ. If you want to read a book about a real Stones casualty, then dig out a tome on Gram Parsons. Or read the last chapters of Wired, Bob Woodward’s account of doomed comedian John Belushi’s life and ugly death. Or check out the part in legendary US promoter Bill Graham’s autobiography where he describes undergoing a complete mental breakdown as a result of being passed over by the Stones when they toured the States in 1989.

Probably all big rock acts have a personal trail of destruction stacking up behind them but the one shadowing the Rolling Stones is the biggest of them all, with corpses and broken spirits strewn far and wide across the universe mostly because the victims let their imaginations get too enflamed by what they heard and saw whilst in the group’s orbit. But I was never one of them. On the contrary, I was one of the lucky few who stared into their dark vortex at close quarters and lived to tell the tale(s) with all my powers of recall still intact. I’ve always looked at our association as a boon not a curse.

When I wasn’t busy consorting with the stars of the mid-seventies rock galaxy, the final months of 1974 would often find me lurking forlornly in my crummy bedsit cultivating a world-weary melancholy mood. I remember spending drugged-up hours alone listening intensely to Frank Sinatra’s great Capitol albums - Only the Lonely, No One Cares and Wee Small Hours, the ones he made after being jilted by Ava Gardner. The pain in his voice spoke to me across the ages; Frank knew exactly how I was feeling.

But let’s not get too down and dreary here. After all, I’d lately acquired new friends to help draw me out of the clutches of gloomy introspection. I even had a new girlfriend - of sorts. Her name was Hermine Demoriane and she was a performance artist. Her ‘performance’ speciality involved walking a tightrope stretched across a lake, thus giving the impression that she was actually walking on water. Imagine a younger Juliette Gréco with Yoko Ono’s mind - that’s how I saw her anyway. She was a lot older than I was, French, a real looker and eccentric as all hell. But that was OK with me. Consorting with the nuttiest broads in town was fast becoming my destiny as a young adult: like attracting like and all that. As a teenager I’d sat enraptured in front of TV sets and film screens taking in the French nouvelle vague films of François Truffaut and Louis Malle and I always carried a torch in my heart for the young actresses these great directors would employ - women like Jeanne Moreau, Stéphane Audran, Bulle Ogier and Bernadette Lafont. The characters they portrayed were invariably free spirits who couldn’t be tamed by any one man and as such they heralded the first true wave of post-war feminism in Europe. Hermine was just like these women.

She was actually married to a poet with whom she still lived. They had a child as well-a daughter about to enter her teens. Theirs was an open marriage, though, with both parties free to explore other relationships. She approached me at a London club one night and told me she’d fallen in love with my writing and wanted to get to know me better. I was flattered but initially leery of her ‘married mother’ status-I didn’t need to add the role of ‘home-wrecker’ to my list of dubious accomplishments in 1974. But when my relationship with Chrissie Hynde went into free fall, Hermine was there to console me. She just kept coming around and I kept letting her in. There was a peaceful aura about her that I appreciated. Most women I’ve been close to could talk the hind legs off a donkey but Hermine was the opposite - given to long, enigmatic silences. At first I didn’t have particularly deep feelings for her as my heart still belonged to another, but as time passed we sought out each other’s company more and more. Hermine actually cared for me a lot more than Chrissie ever did. As the decade progressed, she would become my personal guardian angel. Without her watching over me, I would surely have died. If there is a heroine to be found in the story I’m telling you throughout this book, then she is it.

Another daunting European female I found myself socialising with in the autumn-to-winter months of ’74 was Nico, the German-born former chanteuse for the Velvet Underground who’d lately signed a solo recording deal with Island records’ UK A&R branch. Whilst recording her fourth album The End in London, with John Cale once again producing, she’d met up with my pal Gene Krell from Granny Takes a Trip and they’d become romantically entwined for a brief period. The Chelsea apartment Gene shared with Marty Breslau became a home away from home for both Nico and me during those months because heroin was so freely available there.

I liked her a lot - and we developed a friendship. She was a fascinating individual and a quintessential bohemian free spirit. Part of her was like a child - naive and incredulous - but the other part - the part that kept her surviving - was ruthless and self-possessed. She saw herself quite rightly as a genuine artist. No man was ever going to make her his dutiful spouse. Poor old Gene tried and got his heart broken into a million pieces just like I did with Chrissie Hynde. He asked for her hand in marriage and she turned him down and ended their affair. ‘You just don’t amuse me any more,’ she told him. I felt sorry for the guy but I still told him he was emotionally way out of his depth. You don’t fall in love with women like Nico: it’s like trying to bottle a lightning bolt.

Meanwhile, a much younger generation was vying for my attention in 1974. A few of them I cemented budding relationships with, others I let escape through my net. The most significant example of the latter breed was a precocious Mancunian youth called Steven Morrissey who wrote letters to me practically every week during that year. I wish I could tell you that these missives contained glimpses of the poetic audacity that he brought to his lyric-writing when he became the lead singer of the Smiths a decade later - but suffice to say this was not the case. How could it have been otherwise? He was only fourteen years old at the time. Instead he wrote ardently and single-mindedly about his fierce devotion for the New York Dolls. His teenage dream was to escape dreary Manchester and reinvent himself as one of the Dolls’ glitzy entourage in downtown Manhattan. That’s why I never wrote him back. I didn’t want to inadvertently encourage an underage youth into embarking on a life of wilful self-destruction. I told him as much ten years later when I actually got to meet him. But I don’t think he ever fully forgave me for ignoring him during his adolescent wallflower years.

Two teenagers I did become reasonably close to during that time were a pair of eighteen-year-old likely-lad law-breakers called Steve Jones and Paul Cook who hailed from the White City precinct of London. They approached me early in the year at McLaren’s emporium. They had a group called the Swankers that they’d started with one of the shop’s assistants, an art student called Glen Matlock. Matlock was a middle-class youth with better opportunities and a more responsible head on his shoulders whilst Jones and Cook were so working-class they could have been Arthur Mullard’s two illegitimate sons.

Those two were always up to some kind of mischief. McLaren had initially caught them stealing from his shop but still let them frequent the place because he quickly became fascinated by their criminal-minded lifestyles. He saw Jones in particular as a seventies update of the Artful Dodger from Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and in time would start fantasising that he could invent a role for himself as their very own Fagin. But that was all in the immediate future. In ’74, Jones and Cook were out and about, ducking and diving, thieving and looting pretty much wherever they went.

Jones was the motivating force in all of this. He had major skills as a cat burglar - most specifically, the power to make himself virtually invisible whenever he entered an establishment intent on pulling off a heist. He’d recently succeeded in half-inching no less than thirteen expensive electric guitars one by one from various instrument shops situated on central London’s Denmark Street. He even sold me one of his pilfered acquisitions - a beautiful black Fender Telecaster Deluxe. They were always up to no good. I remember their impromptu arrival that summer at a concert in a Kilburn cinema that Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards were putting on in order to promote Wood’s first solo album. Jones, Cook and Matlock got in by literally dismantling and then climbing through a trapdoor on the building’s extremely high roof.

Like McLaren, I could tell instantly that these oiks were going to go on to big things in the future - unless Jones and Cook got sent to jail first. At that point they could barely play at all but that didn’t prevent them from projecting an aura of championship-level cockiness at all times. As I reported earlier, Dr. Feelgood were the hot up-and-coming band on the London club and pub scene that year, the one act everyone had high praise for. And yet Jones and co. were unimpressed. ‘We could do better than those Southend cunts,’ they blurted out more than once within my earshot. They even went so far as to refer to the Feelgoods’ large-domed guitarist Wilko Johnson as ‘Fuckin’ brick-head’ one night to his face. They weren’t what you’d call diplomatic or deep thinkers but I liked being in their company because they never took anything seriously and I found their continual tomfoolery an entertaining tonic to counterbalance my usual bedsit blues.

But the individual I became closest to during the second half of ’74 was another rock journalist who’d climbed aboard the NME masthead that summer as the paper’s newest staff writer. His name was Pete Erskine and he and I had already become fast friends when we were on an assignment together in New York at the beginning of the year. Pete was thin, pale and feminine-featured like me and we shared the same dark sense of humour so we just naturally gravitated towards each other. He was two or three years older than me, married with a young son and I think he was drawn to my company partly because my lifestyle at the time was less restrictive and fenced-in than his was.

That turned out to be our eventual undoing, however. Through being around me he first came into contact with heroin and succumbed to his temptation with little or no pre-thought. By the end of the year, we were both hooked on the stuff. Our brief honeymoon period with the drug was tapering off and trouble was getting ready to engulf us both. In Pete’s case, he was never able to fully extricate himself from the jaws of addiction. He died nine years later. The official cause was a fatal asthma attack but that attack wouldn’t have occurred if he’d been clean and healthy. It’s always been my greatest regret in life that I couldn’t help him redeem his circumstances and that I in effect contributed to his long decline by introducing him to the drug in the first place. But I also believe that he would have eventually fallen under its grip whether he’d ever known me or not.

Bad times were a-coming but in the dying weeks of 1974 I still maintained an upright ‘cock of the walk’ status within the music industry. The media bedazzled still lined up around the block to kiss my ass. And promiscuous women in London nightspots still dangled themselves before my gaze like overdressed car keys. But I’d long grown weary of their attentions. And I was becoming wary of the whole idea of thoughtless, passionless sex. With all the diseases I’d managed to pick up over the past two years, sleeping around had become indistinguishable in my mind from playing Russian roulette with my genitalia.

Meanwhile, music wasn’t exciting me as much as it once had - at least not the new music I was hearing. There were suddenly far too many white guys trying to play funk and failing miserably. The glam thing was now dead on its legs. And the one new trend on the horizon - disco - sounded shallow and inconsequential when I’d hear it played alongside the great black rhythm ’n’ blues music of the sixties. I knew what I was becoming - jaded - and I found the condition unsettling. I was still only twenty-two for God’s sake.

Every now and then though something would transpire to temporarily rekindle my wavering interest in the whole pop process and the personalities contained within. Two close encounters during the final two weeks of the year still play vividly in my mind to this day. The first took place a week before Christmas. I went to visit a cocaine dealer friend of mine who lived off Edgware Road. Once inside his dimly lit apartment, I realised we were not alone. Two inebriated people were reclining on some cushions laid out across the living-room floor. One was a vivacious young black woman who spoke with a pronounced American drawl - her name was Gloria Jones. The other figure - her boyfriend - was a short baby-faced man swathed in a floor-length Edwardian popinjay coat. It took me a full minute to actually identify him. It was Marc Bolan.

He looked a lot bulkier than the elfin figure he’d cut back in his glam messiah days. His once flawless features were now effectively rubberised by a bad case of toxic bloat and his body under that ludicrous coat of his seemed flabby and shapeless. What a turn-up for the books: the prettiest boy in the seventies pop stratosphere had prematurely gone to fat. At first I couldn’t understand why. After all, he was snorting cocaine all the time and that usually acts as an appetite suppressant. But then I noticed how much alcohol he was putting away and realised that his added girth was all booze-related. He’d been doing the tax-exile boogie over in some bland Euro-trash hidey-hole like Monaco and had gotten so bored he’d just let himself go until he’d developed a nasty case of full-blown alcoholism. His physical deterioration also coincided with a marked dip in his personal popularity here in the UK. His records weren’t setting the charts on fire any more. Most of his old fans had shifted their allegiance over to his arch-enemy David Bowie. In short, he was free-falling from grace at the speed of light and was unsure of how to rectify the situation. The musical formulae he’d still felt compelled to feed the media with were sounding more and more hollow and self-deluded.

At least he didn’t launch into one of his ‘I am still the greatest’ diatribes that had so vexed Keith Richards just two months earlier. I ended up talking to him for a couple of hours - two Limey fop dudes on coke babbling away - and found him pleasant enough. On the surface he was woozy and effete but at heart he was a canny little hustler who knew how to turn on the charm whenever it might involve furthering his all-consuming fame-seeking agenda. But he also had a lively sense of humour and good taste in heroes. Syd Barrett was an obsession of his and he’d read my piece on the guy earlier in the year so he was particularly interested in learning anything about Barrett’s current whereabouts and state of health. I told him that Syd had lately gotten fat too. He winced tenderly at the news: clearly he could relate.

Then we went off into a long debate about Bob Dylan, and Bolan told me a funny, oddly self-deprecating story about Dylan being his ultimate idol and how he’d finally met him in Los Angeles that year at the house of a mutual friend, songwriter Harry Nilsson. After listening to Bolan’s effusive praise for several minutes without interrupting, Dylan had looked at him quizzically and asked, ‘Say, man - are you one of those guys from the Incredible String Band?’ The Bopping Elf was temporarily crushed - Bob didn’t know him from Adam - but thinking about it afterwards - he told me - it only made Dylan seem more untouchable in his estimation. I told him that I’d heard a pre-release copy of Blood on the Tracks and that it was the first record Dylan had released in eight years that you could justifiably call a masterpiece. Bolan - who’d yet to hear the record - looked delighted. Complete artistic rehabilitation - that must have been his dream too. It’s sad he didn’t live long enough to truly achieve it. During the taxi ride home afterwards, I thought of Bolan and a line from the final track of Blood on the Tracks began replaying itself in my head over and over again. ‘I’ve seen pretty people disappear like smoke.’ Me too, Bob. Me too.

A week later, the NME sent me off to follow Rod Stewart around for a couple of days. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier chapter, Bolan and Stewart were the two golden boys of the fledgling seventies pop/rock mainstream, its two adored kingpins. But once they’d made it to the top of the charts in Britain, their career trajectories started to veer off in radically different directions. Stewart scored chart-topping records in America and quickly became a superstar attraction over there. Bolan didn’t: he was simply too ethereal and too aloof for their earthy tastes. Stewart wasn’t as pretty but he was a far better singer and projected a more fun-loving and altogether more approachable image out to the masses. Result: unwavering global megastardom was his to command throughout the entire decade. When we met, the critics still loved him and the fans still kept growing in numbers. He was the first to admit it: the guy was one lucky son of a bitch.

Stewart’s career was about to find itself at a major crossroads. His group the Faces still hadn’t gotten over losing their original bassist Ronnie Lane eighteen months earlier and were starting to stagnate as a musical unit. More problematic still, his faithful second lieutenant Ronnie Wood was spending more and more time in the Rolling Stones’ druggy world. A couple of weeks earlier, Mick Taylor had quit the group and now everyone was expecting to see Wood take over his post. It was a foregone conclusion really. Jagger and Richards both wanted him and he was simply too besotted with the band to even think of turning them down. Stewart spoke long and candidly to me about his own views on the unfurling situation. Woody wouldn’t leave him - he reckoned. He had too much of a good thing going with the Faces. Why would he willingly demote himself to hired-hand status for the Rolling Stones when he could stay an equal partner with his own lucrative outfit? It just didn’t make sense to Rod. It would have been fair to say that he wasn’t best pleased by the predicament. But Rod wasn’t what you’d call a born worrier. Career issues would need to be addressed sooner or later but they weren’t ever going to interfere too much with his constant pursuit of fun.

No one I’ve ever hung out with ever eked a better time out of being rich and famous than old Rod the Mod. It was like he’d been born into the condition. He took to the celebrity playboy lifestyle like the proverbial duck to water. The Faces played a series of pre-Christmas shows in Kilburn and on the last night Stewart invited me to join him on a visit to a central London members-only nightclub known as Tramp. The place reeked of new money, predatory women and European gangsters soaked in overpriced aftershave.

When Stewart walked through the door, the whole room stood up and applauded him like he was Father Christmas. One by one, wealthy dudes would stop by our table and kneel down as though they were about to kiss his ring. Women would suddenly materialise in pairs and offer to give him a blow job under the table - offers he cheerfully declined. At one point, he suggested I follow him to the toilets. Once through the door we were besieged by at least three adoring drug dealers determined to offer us free lines of cocaine. Back in the dining room he ate and drank like a Viking lord after being told by the maître d’ that everything his table consumed was strictly on the house.

Stewart just took all the generosity being extended towards him in cheerful stride and drank it all in. He didn’t have the kind of addictive personality that most musicians seem to struggle with so he could booze and snort without things getting seriously out of hand. He was suave, laconic and drop-dead funny as well - the closest thing to Dean Martin that England has ever produced. You couldn’t have dreamed of better company. By the end of the night he’d lined up several of the most attractive women in the club and was instructing his chauffeur to ferry them all back to his country pile for further hanky-panky. He even invited me along to share in the festivities. I would have gone too like a shot from a gun but Hermine had turned up to the club in the interim and I didn’t want to just abandon her there. Still, maximum respect and gratitude to Mr Stewart for extending the invitation in the first place. Shortly after our encounter, all his best musical instincts started to desert him and he began releasing bland codswallop like ‘Sailing’ and ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ but I always kept a soft spot in my heart for the singer. To me, he’ll always remain a prince amongst men.

I thought a lot about Rod in the final week of 1974. I mean, here was a guy who instinctively knew how to live the high life without getting needlessly bogged down in self-absorbed neurosis. I wasn’t that lucky. Why couldn’t I be that flippant?

Because I couldn’t reconcile myself to what I’d lately become - a bad person. I didn’t like myself any more. And I didn’t like the smoky nightclub world and tawdry Tin Pan Alley sideshow that I’d abandoned myself to either. My dad had been right all along: the entertainment industry is a tainted, corrupting universe. And as the seventies hit their midway stretch I realised that I’d become corrupted too. Like the New York Dolls, I’d experienced too much too soon and part of me now felt like I’d been ground through a lemon squeezer. That’s where the heroin came in: at first it glued me back together and gave me the get-up-and-go to continue to play out my role as the NME’s resident hit man.

What other options were there? The idea of stepping back into anonymity was unthinkable. I’d set out on this journey and couldn’t back out now that the landscape had suddenly turned all bleak. Rock stars in the seventies were facing much the same dilemma. Neil Young wilfully ostracised his mainstream fan base by ‘heading for the ditch. It was a rougher ride but I met more interesting people there.’ And Sly Stone once stated that ‘sometimes a man has to lose everything he’s built up just in order to check himself out’. In other words, practically all the people worth a damn in music were headed for the low side of the road too.

The abyss was yawning - and so was I. I could have slept for a thousand years. My drug-drenched dreams now seemed more real to me than the moment-to-moment reality I was drifting through. And that’s when the real darkness came seeping in. Real darkness and catastrophic bad luck. I’d entered the decade with a golden touch. Now - exactly halfway through its ten-year duration - it was about to be snatched from me and replaced by the mark of Cain.