Judge not unless you’re prepared to be judged yourself: the Bible is very clear on this point. Yet journalists instinctively feel compelled to make extravagant judgement calls on their subjects - endlessly measuring their talent, their political and moral agendas, calling into question their public images, belittling their fashion sense. Whilst this approach often results in widely read copy and the promise of a highly paid column in the dailies, it also tends to set those who initiate the process onto the rocky road towards karmic retribution.

Of course, most news hounds become so gung-ho ambitious and intoxicated by their power-playing status that they conveniently misplace any residue of conscience that may have once lurked within them. Without conscience there can be no awareness of consequences; thus no awareness of the forces of karma. But ignorance doesn’t prevent it from working its own mysterious magic at all times.

Like Burt Lancaster’s sociopathic columnist in Sweet Smell of Success, the hard-core media breed make their bones taking indelicate pot-shots at the cultural movers and shakers du jour, become - briefly - ersatz celebrities themselves, lose all perspective as a direct result, turn arrogant and lazy and cultivate many high-powered enemies. Then they almost inevitably become the victims of a scandal of their own making and have to suddenly be put out to pasture by their long-suffering bosses, their twilight years eked out in bitter alcoholic reclusion.

This is karma in full effect - powered by greed, riddled with hubris, ending in drunken recriminations and unholy isolation - and it hits worst when least expected. I was only in my early twenties, with little knowledge of Buddhist theology to back me up, but even I could sense its intricate sway over the very scheme of human existence, if only as a form of divine superstition. People in the seventies talked about karma as though it was as obsolete as the kaftan but I knew I was still somehow under its tricky spell. My charmed life was running out of blind luck. My playhouse was about to get burned down.

Still, I had no ready clues about how or when my judgement day would manifest itself exactly, though there was always the distinct possibility of having my legs broken by revenge-seeking aggrieved recording artistes who’d fallen foul of my critical faculties. ‘You need to watch what you write, young Kent,’ a disgruntled manager once informed me in a London nightclub. ‘You’re making too many enemies in this business.’ He wasn’t alone in this view. From day one, I’d been actively looking for trouble in one form or another. It was only a matter of time before trouble came looking for me.

In mid-’73 a tabloid reporter informed me that the Bee Gees were planning to beat me up because of an unflattering review I’d penned of one of their singles. Put yourself in my place: you are suddenly told that the Bee Gees intend to break you limb from limb at an undisclosed place and time in the immediate future. How do you react?

Well, if you were me, you’d make a point of heading to a nearby record store and studying the sleeve of the trio’s most recent album in order to see exactly what kind of physical shape your opponents might be in. Scanning the cover I quickly surmised that I might be in for a terrible thrashing. Two of the Gibb siblings, Robin and Maurice, were reassuringly pasty-faced but big brother Barry was clearly the one in the family who’d inherited all the testosterone and muscles. He was also sporting more hairs on his chest than you could count nestling against loud golden medallions at a New Jersey convention for mafia capos. If he and I ever crossed paths, I knew I was wheelchair-bound.

The NME threw a party in August at the Speakeasy to further trumpet the fact that we’d lately become the biggest-selling music weekly in the known universe, and the Bee Gees’ publicist duly let it be known that the trio would be turning up specifically to extract their pound of flesh. My co-workers at the paper all thought this was tremendous fun and never wasted an opportunity to tweak my paranoia further on the matter. But as the evening progressed in a blur of alcohol and back-slapping bonhomie, it became increasingly apparent that the three Bee Gees would not be gracing us with their six-fisted presence. Only little Maurice put in an appearance and he was so drunk he needed two minders to keep him from falling over.

At one point, he stood about two yards away from me and attempted to look menacing, but to scant avail. His face was flushed like raw beetroot. His pair of human crutches quickly encircled my would-be tormentor, shepherding him to the exit of the club, and that was the end of that. In the battle between myself and the Bee Gees, I had somehow ended up the victor by default. Still, it was a pyrrhic victory at best. Four years hence, the trio would become one of the biggest-selling and most influential acts of the seventies - experiencing a second coming that even Lazarus might envy. I meanwhile would be occupying the same period of time as a homeless junkie barely staying alive.

The fates were certainly frowning on me a full year later when I found myself in Island Records’ Basing Street studios in Ladbroke Grove watching Brian Eno record a track for his Taking Tiger Mountain album in the company of John Cale. Cale and I had been consuming cocaine quite liberally just prior to this and so everything in the studio felt like it was somehow alive and humming with diabolic energy.

Feeling fragile, I went looking for a toilet, hoping it would prove to possess a more soothing atmosphere. I opened the door to a dimly lit room fitted out with a urinal and several separate cubicles and realised that I wasn’t its only occupant. Six or seven strange-looking black guys were standing by the urinal. One of them was holding the largest joint I have ever seen in my entire life. It looked like a smouldering tree limb wrapped in countless rolling papers. An entire pack of Rizlas must have gone into its construction. The guy had to hold the thing aloft with both his hands in order to get a hit off it. He was a wiry arrogant-looking little fellow with angry eyes blazing out of an enormous head topped off by a humongous mass of braided hair, and he and his cohorts were clearly none too happy to see me suddenly in their midst. It was Bob Marley and the Wailers taking a break from recording tracks for their album Natty Dread in the adjacent studio.

Although I’d briefly lived in a Jamaican community in Ladbroke Grove two years earlier, I’d never seen a fully fledged Rastafarian with ample dreadlocks in the flesh before. Now I was suddenly being confronted with a whole gang of them. I felt like Bob Hope in Son of Paleface, in the scene where the comedian as prissy, citified dentist ‘Painless’ Potter - having ventured west - comes suddenly face to face with a tribe of homicidal tomahawk-wielding Apaches in full warpaint. If I hadn’t been so looped, I would have simply turned on my heels and found an alternative location for the emptying of my bladder. But cocaine has an irksome habit of decimating presence of mind and so I hurried to a cubicle, locking it behind me in shocked surprise.

The next two minutes were awkward in the extreme. I was so nervous I pissed all over my boots. There was loud derisive laughter coming from the urinals. I steeled myself to make a quick exit but knew I was doomed to experience an impromptu lesson in what happens when different cultures clash in awkward circumstances. As I edged towards the door, Marley started moving towards me, flanked by his grinning accomplices. He had a cut-throat grin on his face. He stood about three inches away and spat out the word ‘Rasclaat’ directly into my worried face. Apparently, it’s Jamaican for ‘scumbag’ or something equally demeaning. I bowed my head and departed in haste. This was my first-hand introduction to Jah Bob’s supposedly all-inclusive ‘one love’ philosophy for mankind and all I could think was, ‘Oh well, at least I didn’t get lynched.’

In the years that followed, Marley and his media enablers would convincingly fashion a public image of the man as a quasi-mystical deity that millions would unquestioningly buy into, but my brief encounter told me he was as deeply flawed as any other ambitious little man slouching arrogantly around the planet. I’d never written a word on him or the Wailers. He didn’t know me from a hole in the ground. He just took offence because I was dressed flamboyantly and was sporting traces of eye make-up. It was obvious he had a serious problem with men who were unafraid to exhibit their feminine side in public. To Marley’s hard-eyed Rasta-centric mindset spiritual salvation was not attainable to Southern Jessies on hard drugs. He may well have been right too.

Now fast-forward to eight months later. I’m floating around the Roxy, the music-industry watering hole on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip, when Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham and Richard Cole suddenly decide to hurl their drinks at me and declare - according to the notorious Zeppelin biography Hammer of the Gods - that my life ‘isn’t worth piss’.

This wasn’t something to be taken lightly. Bonham was a great big brick shithouse of a man who habitually became transformed into a psychopathic farmhand out of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs when over-inebriated, and Cole had the reputation of being able to kill a man or woman with a single karate blow. I got out of there as quickly as possible before any real physical damage could be done.

The next morning, Peter Grant phoned me - all sweetness, light and profuse apologies: ‘I’ve spoken to both Bonzo and Coley . . . they’re very sorry . . . you’re still our ally.’ To further mend fences, he invited me on the group’s private jet to take in a Zeppelin concert in nearby Oakland later that day. A sobered-up Bonham and Cole were duly apologetic when I arrived at their hotel.

Later that night - at around 3 a.m. - me, Grant, Bonham and Cole were all in Grant’s suite, snorting yet more cocaine - Jimmy Page was in an adjacent room with a young woman - and listening to a white-label copy of Bad Company’s second album when the large bay windows that opened onto the suite’s fifteenth-floor balcony suddenly burst open and Keith Moon appeared in our midst as if conjured out of thin air. He’d just climbed down the side of the building from the roof of the hotel attached to some sort of mountaineer’s winch and had narrowly escaped falling to his death. His eyes were bulging out of his face like huge mischievous saucers and he wasted no time in making his unruly presence felt in every corner of the room. ‘I tell you what, playmates - that Raquel Welch was on the blower to me again. She won’t bloody leave me alone. It’s always the same old line. “Keith, I need you so desperately. You’re the only man who can fulfil my needs.” I had to tell ’er right there and then, “Raquel, love, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Keith Moon can’t be tied down to just one woman. I’ve got to play the field. Go buy a dog instead. Buy yourself a three-piece suite.”’

Everyone fell about laughing. And I got to spend several hours in the company of the two greatest drummers in the history of rock ’n’ roll. Bonham absolutely adored Moon, and Moon clearly loved Bonham back. But he didn’t seem to like himself much. His moods shifted chaotically and without due cause. One minute he’d be the life and soul of the party, performing his side-splitting Robert Newton-as-Long John Silver impersonation to everyone’s delight, the next he’d be talking glumly about his aimless life in Hollywood and the difficulties of getting the other three Who members interested in more group activities.

His face and torso that night were both extensively padded with an unsightly strain of toxic bloat and behind his customary shield of berserk bravado you could catch glimpses of a man struggling to make sense of his own insanity whilst trying to kid himself that it wasn’t somehow all linked in with his continuing descent into full-blown alcoholism. No wonder he and Bonham were soulmates: they shared the same terminal disease. Moon had only three more years to live, Bonham five.

The early-seventies rock scene had its share of violent outbursts but that violence was usually ignited only in hotel rooms, backstage facilities or small VIP clubs when too much cocaine and alcohol were mixed together. It rarely spilled over to the public sector. Paying audiences were never targeted for a pummelling. Even the early punk bands didn’t physically abuse those who’d come to see them. They’d abuse themselves instead.

This became apparent to me when I flew to New York in April ’76 for a forty-eight-hour stopover whilst en route to cover a catastrophe in the making: a tour of the US Midwest being undertaken by UK bubblegum glam rockers the Sweet, who were then trying to pass themselves off as virtuoso hard rockers, a kind of poor man’s Deep Purple with permed hair and shiny jump-suits.

The three days and nights I got to spend with that sorry bunch are forever etched on my mind. Imagine Spinal Tap without the punchlines. The high-or-low point was reached one morning in the lobby of a Holiday Inn in Cleveland we were checking out of. The jazz legend Count Basie was also in the vicinity and - being a friendly, non-judgemental soul - wandered up to the group members at one point and offered his best wishes for their continued success, even though he obviously didn’t have a clue who they were. ‘Fuck all that, mate,’ tartly responded the Sweet’s Neanderthal singer, who’d evidently mistaken the venerable big-band maestro for a hall porter. ‘Help us load our baggage into those limousines outside the door instead.’

Returning to New York I felt an immediate urge to get high once more. Richard Hell phoned me out of the blue and offered to set up a meeting with his heroin dealer. I jumped in a yellow cab and hightailed it down to his grungy-looking apartment.

We’d never met before but struck up a lively rapport nonetheless. Malcolm McLaren had told me all about him, anyway. His real name was Richard Meyers and he’d been born in Kentucky: he and a school friend named Tom Miller had moved to New York in their late teens intent on becoming published poets. That’s why they’d both changed their surnames: Miller called himself ‘Tom Verlaine’ in homage to Arthur Rimbaud’s dissolute literary sidekick. Both were equally taken with the idea of forming a rock group and Verlaine was already a more-than-accomplished electric guitarist. Hell learned some rudimentary bass lines and the pair duly instigated their first line-up-a quartet known first as the Neon Boys and then as Television.

Unfortunately they soon developed vastly different visions about what their group should be sounding like. Hell favoured shorter, more dynamic songs that gave extensive vent to his nihilistic world view. Verlaine felt intrinsically drawn to the dreamy improvisations of late-sixties West Coast rock and his lyrics often read like LSD hallucinations transposed into text. Their club audiences around Manhattan during the early months of 1975 soon split into two camps: those who came to lose themselves in Verlaine’s ethereal guitar solos and sensitive ‘starvation artist’ persona and those who came to cheer on Hell as he boisterously leaped around the stage singing in a grating voice about being part of ‘the blank generation’, his chosen appellation for the emerging seventies youth mindset.

Malcolm McLaren and the New York Dolls were part of the latter crowd. McLaren in particular was utterly smitten by Hell. He loved his look: the short self-cut electric-shock hairstyle, the ripped T-shirts and thrift-store suits held together by safety pins. His rampant magpie instincts for kick-starting a possible future fashion explosion were suddenly detonated the very moment he first espied the Television bassist in the flesh. Hell’s whole appearance was too radical to make an impact on torpid mid-seventies American culture, but take the same ingredients, repackage them first as costly designer garments to the lovey fashionistas of London and then find a young impressionable rock band to model them and turn those same designs into compulsory high-street rebel-wear for youngsters throughout the British Isles et voilà! Of course, he would only really be stealing someone else’s ideas but basic moral considerations never seemed to invade McLaren’s devious mindset. He was a little man with a big destiny to fulfil and woe betide anyone who underestimated the fact.

For his part Richard Hell saw McLaren as a bit of a con artist but essentially harmless. No one in New York could imagine that the nervous little red-haired Limey who’d briefly convinced the New York Dolls to become Marxist sympathisers-a move that utterly torpedoed their career - was actually going to rob them of everything they were working towards.

At that exact moment in time, the New York scene around CBGBs was ablaze with talent. Patti Smith was about to start recording her debut album, but almost everyone else from Television to Talking Heads was still unsigned and therefore financially reliant on performing live in small clubs. The three acts mentioned had nothing to do with punk rock, however. Smith, Verlaine and David Byrne were all worshippers at the altar of the art-rock aesthetic that came into play in the late sixties with the advent of the Velvet Underground and the Doors, and were now attempting to find new creative avenues for its expression within the dilapidated context of mid-seventies Manhattan clubland.

There were only two real punk bands on that scene. The first was the Heartbreakers, who’d been formed after Richard Hell had been evicted from Television at the end of 1974 by his old school pal Verlaine, and Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan had walked out of the New York Dolls shortly afterwards. This three-some already shared one common bond: drug addiction. At first when they played around Manhattan everyone had dubbed them ‘the Dooji Brothers’, ‘dooji’ being one of many local slang terms for heroin. ‘Catch them while they’re still alive’ became the group’s catchphrase whenever they were advertising one of their shows.

Hell and Thunders - the group’s two leaders - had enjoyed a brief honeymoon period of mutual admiration but soon fell into open dispute about the Heartbreakers’ creative development. Hell wanted to make edgy art rock based around his bleak poetic insights whilst Thunders wanted to play simple-minded three-chord rock that tallied well with his newly assumed image as a scrappy Italo-American cross between Keith Richards and Arthur Fonzarelli, the hero of mid-seventies TV show Happy Days. Their musical alliance would end in tears by mid-’76, but in April Richard was still a Heartbreaker struggling to keep his band-mates attuned to his artsy sensibility when all they really wanted to do was further promote their own junkie lifestyle to a small, like-minded clique of followers.

Quite sensibly, no one remotely affiliated with the US music industry at the time - or even the incestuous CBGBs scene - felt they had much of a future. Instead all eyes were on a younger act - a quartet from Forest Hills who’d suddenly made a big impression on downtown Manhattan. The Ramones were the real punk-rock deal: four deeply dysfunctional young men who had never darkened the towers of higher education and who therefore felt absolutely no affinity whatsoever with the prevailing ‘rock goes to college’ aesthetic of the early seventies.

Their music wasn’t about intellect; it was all about instinct: geeky three-chord bubblegum rock played with authentic primordial savagery. They sang about their aimless lives as well as their often-morbid fantasies but did so with a kind of understated drop-dead humour that immediately became hugely endearing to anyone hip enough to get the joke. It also made them an instant paradox. How could four guys who seemed so many bricks shy of a full hod still write lyrics so exquisitely laced with deadpan irony?

This was an enigma I found myself confronting during my April sojourn in Manhattan. The Ramones had caused such a sensation in so short a space of time that they’d actually been signed up to a record deal with Seymour Stein’s local Sire imprint by the very beginning of ’76. In fact, they’d just finished their debut album. It hadn’t taken long to record. I was invited up to Sire’s headquarters one afternoon to hear the finished product as it was being mastered.

Only the record’s producer, one Craig Leon, was present in the tiny listening room. After several minutes of superficial banter, he placed an acetate - or maybe it was a tape - onto an extremely expensive piece of recording equipment and cued the first bars of ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’. The opening chords suddenly roared out at us at an ear-shredding volume. And then just as the vocals came in, there was a sudden explosion. One of the speakers had literally been blown out by the sonic bombardment of the music. Leon and I looked at each other approvingly: rock music that shattered everything in its path - it seemed like a good omen for the future.

And the Ramones themselves? Deeply weird, every last one of ’em. Tommy the drummer, the oldest, straightest one, was their leader back then and had elected himself the group’s spokesman in a misguided attempt to play down their general lack of cerebral sophistication. Tommy would go to great pains to promote his group’s ‘normal, blue-collar rock’ agenda and became increasingly frustrated when other members like Johnny and Dee Dee would interrupt him with offhand comments that inevitably showed just how bizarre they really were.

Dee Dee Ramone was already a legend of sorts around downtown Manhattan. I remember walking around the Bowery one afternoon with Richard Hell and seeing Dee Dee on three separate occasions - each time in the company of a different middle-aged, effeminate-looking man. ‘Uh, this is my uncle,’ he’d tell us with a shameful expression on his sweet young face. He was really turning gay tricks to feed his drug habit - everybody knew this. He even wrote a song about his experiences - ‘53rd & 3rd’ - that was included on the Ramones’ first album. But in reality he was anything but proud of his part-time vocation. Johnny Thunders in particular used to needle him about it mercilessly. ‘Hey, Dee Dee Ramone - where’s your fucking uncle?’ he used to shout at the Ramones bassist whenever their paths crossed.

Looking back, the New York scene in 1976 had everything going for it: a diverse range of groundbreaking young bands, a sense of (fragile) community, novel alternatives to style and basic rock charisma and a new attitude for youth at decade’s end to consolidate themselves around. Yet they were still grievously deficient in two key areas: management and media coverage.

Most of the managers floating around the CBGBs bands seemed to be older gay men more interested in coercing young boys into acts of sexual congress than in advancing careers. And media interest in America was minimal at best, especially from national publications like Rolling Stone. The US has never had a weekly music press - apart from industry tip-sheets like Billboard and Cashbox - and the few monthlies available were too stuck in the immediate past to recognise that a new era was dawning under their very noses.

That’s fundamentally why the English punk scene exploded with such deadly efficacy, whilst its more creative New York counterpart - and forerunner - spluttered around like a damp squib pinned to a tree trunk. London is a small city inhabited by a media always ravenous to glom on to anything new and potentially provocative and splash it over their pages. Chas Chandler understood this implicitly when he took Jimi Hendrix from New York clubland anonymity in late 1966 and transplanted him to London, where his extraordinary guitar-playing and exotic image could be more effectively assimilated first by the press and then by a mass audience. Malcolm McLaren understood this too. It was one of the few smart insights he ever had as the Sex Pistols’ manager. Another bright ploy he capitalised on was to involve the Pistols’ grass-roots following, the so-called Bromley Contingent, in the group’s early media coverage, thus making it look to all and sundry as though a genuine new movement was coming into bloom. Apart from that, he was way out of his depth and riddled with wrong-headed notions.

His yuppie apologists like to throw around big words like ‘situationism’ and ‘postmodernism’ when discussing McLaren’s questionable accomplishments in the realm of seventies punk management these days, terms inevitably designed to bewilder rather than illuminate. I knew McLaren throughout 1974 and 1975 and was privy to many conversations with him about his personal vision of what the Sex Pistols might represent as a potential art concept. He never once mentioned situationism to me as his guiding philosophy. It only appeared in his interviews after the fact.

No, Malcolm’s real career gurus were the old-school Tin Pan Alley chicken hawks who’d controlled the late-fifties UK rock marketplace. His key point of reference in this domain was Larry Parnes, whom he quoted endlessly. Parnes was a gay man with music-industry connections who ‘discovered’ his acts whilst cruising local building sites looking for attractive young men he could mould into the next Fabian and then exploit mercilessly. Like a pimp, he’d first seduce his quarry with specious promises, then dress them up in a sexually provocative fashion and change their names to something preposterous like Stormy Tempest or Vince Eager. Then he’d put them to work until they literally dropped, always making sure to pocket the lion’s share of whatever monies they managed to generate during their few fleeting months of fame.

Parnes and his ilk would duly be overtaken as pop impresarios in the early sixties by the likes of Don Arden. Arden showed no inclination for ever wanting to sexually molest his young male acts. He was too busy ripping them off and breaking the legs of anyone who fell foul of him. In short, the man was a sadist and a vicious thieving spiv, so warped by his own petty-minded criminality that he was fundamentally unable to see that he could actually make himself more money by treating his clients fairly than he could from robbing them blind.

This was a lesson learned by Arden’s former enforcer Peter Grant - and it was one he would put to spectacular use when he came to manage Led Zeppelin in 1968. It was at this point that UK rock/pop management entered a new era - one where the musicians and performers were finally permitted to share generously in all the wealth they were generating but had previously never seen on their own bank statements.

In later years - the early nineties to be precise - McLaren would become obsessed with Grant’s music-biz accomplishments to the point of trying (unsuccessfully) to produce a film about his life, but in 1976 he was way more infatuated with the ongoing career trajectory of the Bay City Rollers than Led Zeppelin’s globe-straddling antics. The platinum-plated Rollers and their singularly creepy manager Tam Paton were proof enough that the Larry Parnes approach to pop Svengalism was still alive and capable of reaping big financial dividends in the seventies. To McLaren, the teeny-bopper Scottish quintet were the Beatles to his band’s Rolling Stones and in the early days he endlessly talked up the parallel as a way of getting the Pistols established in the public eye.

To him - like Parnes and Paton - the whole pop process was divided into two neat sub-headings: the puppets and the puppeteers. Musicians were the puppets, born to be endlessly manipulated like slow-witted peasants. The managers meanwhile were the string-pullers, the men with the plan, the princes guiding the paupers. Jones, Matlock and Cook never questioned McLaren’s basic scruples or possible hidden agenda in his dealings with them - how sweet to be an idiot - until it was far too late. But John Lydon was onto him pretty much from the get-go.

When Lydon joined the Pistols in the autumn of ’75, McLaren should have sensed that he was bringing in someone who might soon turn out to be a thorn in his side. Unlike the other three, Lydon - though still a teenager - had a mind of his own. It wasn’t a particularly attractive or well-ordered mind - the guy was often on acid - but he was certainly its only occupant and wasn’t about to let some King’s Road fashion ponce claim squatter’s rights in it and then brainwash him into a state of pop-star servility.

McLaren and Lydon’s relationship at the outset was strained at best. I spent an evening with them one night in October at the Camden Town club known as Dingwalls. It was the first time I’d ever encountered the future Johnny Rotten. He wasn’t yet the viper-tongued larger-than-life entity we read about nowadays. He was sullen and withdrawn, an obvious victim of chronic shyness. He was physically fragile too and strangely sexless. At one point, an attractive woman approached our table simply to compliment Lydon on his (suspiciously Richard Hell-like) hairstyle. The gesture appeared to totally unnerve him. Straight afterwards he bolted from his chair and ran out of the building. McLaren and I looked at each other quizzically. How could a wallflower like this credibly front a band who called themselves the Sex Pistols?

Of course, we all know the answer to that question more than thirty years later. Lydon quickly banished all traces of post-adolescent wimpiness from his public persona and promptly rose to the occasion with a scary single-mindedness. Shortly after the Dingwalls incident, McLaren and the group invited me to one of their first-ever public appearances, at a party held by an effete artist and social gadfly named Andrew Logan.

There were only about thirty people present, amongst them Mick Jones and Brian James, both still in the process of forming bands of their own. Lydon was saucer-eyed from the LSD he’d just consumed, the other three were drunk as lords and their repertoire that night consisted of only one song - the Stooges’ ‘No Fun’ - played over and over again until a seriously disturbed-looking Lydon began smashing up his mike stand. At this point Logan swanned over and suggested that maybe their set had reached its fitting conclusion.

It had been an odd spectacle to say the least, rather like seeing the early Stooges fronted not by a young white James Brown but a teenage version of Albert Steptoe, the miserable-old-geezer from much-loved British sitcom Steptoe and Son, instead. It was a mad blend to aim for and yet somehow it worked. Lydon’s very sexlessness and physical fragility only seemed to make his stage presence all the more menacing. He represented a radical departure from the conventional lead-singer-in-a-rock-band stereotypes of the time. His vocal range was limited to no more than three notes and its tone was instantly harsh and grating. It was an instrument that was nonetheless ideal for projecting a sense of overwhelming contempt over any subject the singer chose to sink his mangled teeth into.

Lydon loathed most of what passed for classic rock ’n’ roll. He despised Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and all the other pioneers - thought they were a bunch of gormless plooks. He disliked the Beatles too and thought the Rolling Stones were well past their sell-by date. Instead he listened intently to German avant-garde bands, even going so far as to model his own malevolent wailing on the sound made by the vocalist on Neu’s debut album. He was a bit of a closet art-rock aficionado. It must have driven Jones and the others mad. But without his infuriating presence in the foreground spitting into a microphone, the rest of the group had no centre to galvanise their individual capabilities around. If he hadn’t been there, they’d have still been a good - and potentially successful - little rock act but they would never have been a bona fide cultural phenomenon.

Things changed radically within the group once they started getting written about in the UK press. As soon as Lydon saw his face staring back at him from the pages of the music comics, he was never the same again. His ego suddenly exploded to sky-rocket proportions, as did his sense of personal power. But this was only to be expected: after all, he was still a teenager whose childhood had been blighted by recurring bouts of chronic illness that had left him mentally disorientated until his adolescence.

McLaren’s reaction to sudden infamy though was even more dramatic and he had fewer excuses. He was considerably older than everyone else and therefore supposedly more mature and level-headed. And yet a full personality transformation occurred within him the moment his group started getting fêted by the media. Fame lifted up her skirt to him and little Malcolm became utterly transfixed by the sight he beheld. It ruined him for the rest of his life.

At the end of April ’76 he came to visit me, and his personal metamorphosis was obvious from the moment he entered my living room. Gone were the slight stutter and air of self-conscious nervousness that had so defined his demeanour in the immediate past. He now walked with the cocksure air of a young prince mingling with his lowly courtiers.

Chrissie Hynde was with him - fresh from her native Akron to try her luck once again back in swinging London town. She didn’t seem too happy to see me again but McLaren immediately came to the point of why this visitation was taking place. He’d decided to extend his pop-Svengali instincts beyond the realm of the Sex Pistols and start a second band that he was fully intent on controlling with the same steely grip. Chrissie would be the singer and I’d play guitar. Mick Jones - then known only as ‘Brady’ - would be the bassist and a kid from Croydon called Chris Miller would be the drummer. The three of us - McLaren, Hynde and myself - even drove to Miller’s hotel room that same night somewhere on the outskirts of London to sound him out on the project. He seemed to be up for anything but was still taken aback when McLaren suddenly insisted that our group had to be called ‘the Masters of the Backside’.

The guy still couldn’t see past using musicians as glorified rent boys for his pimp-centric ambitions. The project was over for me as soon as he came up with that demeaning name. Plus Hynde and I were still far from comfortable in each other’s company. Time had not healed the old wounds that still festered between us. She came back to see me alone a few days later and our conversation soon degenerated into an almighty row that promptly spelt the end of ‘the Masters of the Backside’ before we’d even played a note of music together.

It was at this time also that my girlfriend Hermine discovered that her tightrope had been stolen. This was most inconvenient as she’d just been booked to walk it at a Women’s Lib festival somewhere in Cardiff during early May. Somehow this unfortunate state of affairs developed into a scenario where she would sing at the festival instead and I would back her up. It was then that Chris Miller turned up and offered to lend his musical support. He had two friends with him: a black-haired guitarist called Brian Robertson some years his senior and a maladjusted youth called Ray who’d spent much of his adolescence devoid of parental guidance, even sleeping on Brighton beach for extended periods. In a couple of months’ time, Brian would change his surname to ‘James’, Ray would reinvent himself as ‘Captain Sensible’, Chris would take on the daunting sobriquet of ‘Rat Scabies’ - and with a horror-film obsessive who called himself Dave Vanian also in tow they’d begin playing around London as the Damned.

But before that they committed themselves to two performances as the Subterraneans - the name came courtesy of a Jack Kerouac novel I favoured at the time - in my old stomping ground of Wales’s capital city. Half the show consisted of us doing the least liberating-for-women songs ever conceived in rock - nasty misogynistic numbers like the Stones’ ‘Under My Thumb’ and the Crystals’ ‘He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)’. The other half featured brand-new songs, most significantly Brian’s composition ‘New Rose’, which was premiered for the first time ever at the two concerts we gave. Not that anyone noticed: there were only eight people present in both audiences.

Back in London, though, a fierce conflict was brewing between Malcolm McLaren and anyone he perceived to be threatening his pre-eminence as the Pygmalion of punk. Anyone operating outside of his personal radar was suddenly marked out for instant retribution. He’d lately become so caught up in his new-found power that he’d started a new trend at his group’s London shows: setting members of the audience up for a bloody beating.

Lydon - intimidated by the rest of the Pistols - had opted to bring some of his own hooligan cohorts into the group’s immediate entourage - proper bad boys like John ‘Sid’ Beverley and Jah Wobble. Watching their former school pal suddenly become the poster boy of late-seventies rock revolution had made them equally determined to make their mark on this new scene. At this exact moment their capacities for music-making were at best minimal but not to worry: little Malcolm conscripted them instead into his own private thug army. They could run wild at Pistols concerts, punching and stabbing and blood-letting with complete impunity.

When Beverley blinded a young girl during a show at the 100 Club that summer, few amongst the media chose to draw attention to the incident. McLaren had them all hypnotised like chickens. Some bright spark at Melody Maker had just come up with a new ‘punk’ manifesto. 1976 was ‘year zero’. The old rock ’n’ roll was dead. Punk was the new reality and anyone who disagreed was a walking fossil. A kind of mass hysteria was being conjured forth that threw the old music-industry guard based in Britain into a complete panic.

No one knew what to think of this new music for fear of being suddenly judged old and obsolete. And no one dared to directly address the savagery and barbarism of its protagonists. Like sex, physical violence isn’t something the English generally feel too confident about exploring. When it erupts before them, they tend to cower back, hide in the shadows and pretend that nothing untoward is going on. Thus it was that McLaren and his bully boys were able to terrorise London club-goers over and over again and still receive a clean bill of health from the city’s jobbing journos.

The first time I saw ‘Sid’ Beverley was on the 27th of May, 1976. He was lurking around the backstage entrance of a Rolling Stones concert being held in the huge Earls Court exhibition show-room, unsuccessfully trying to chance his way into the venue. In an ill-fitting second-hand suit and electric-shock hair, he looked like a juvenile Dickensian chimney sweep.

The second time I saw him - just two weeks later at a Pistols show at the 100 Club - he left more of an impact. The atmosphere that night was tense in the extreme. McLaren was doing his puppet-master routine, setting up more dupes for a public thrashing. Two members of Eddie and the Hot Rods’ entourage - their logo designer Michael Beal and A&R man Howard Thompson - were in the house, and to the Pistols this was tantamount to a rival gang invading their turf. Just before his band started playing, McLaren stood on the stage alongside John Lydon and beckoned to ‘Sid’ to join them. They then pointed seemingly in the direction of the two interlopers and grinned conspiratorially. Sid pulled out his chain and immediately went to work. But I was mistaken: McLaren and Lydon hadn’t dispatched him to beat up the Hot Rods intruders. They’d sent him to beat me up instead.

Sid didn’t waste any words. He just lurched over and started kicking merry hell out of my seated frame whilst brandishing his bike chain just above my head. One of the Hot Rods guys intervened momentarily, only to have his face lacerated by the chain. Whilst this was happening, Vicious’s accomplice Jah Wobble materialised before me. He held an open penknife and was waving it no more than two inches from my eyes. There was dried blood on the blade and a look of pure sadistic delight in his piggy eyes as though he was about to experience an impromptu orgasm at any second.

Then he stepped back, allowing Sid dead aim at my skull. He took three or four bike-chain swings but only managed to connect with me once. I was so stoned that night that I didn’t even feel the blow. But I could tell that something potentially life-threatening had transpired because there was blood everywhere: on the wall behind me in a wide crimson arc and all over the back of my jacket. If two more of those chain-swings had actually reached me, I’d probably have been killed by the head trauma. And what was the audience doing whilst this was going on? Just standing there, afraid to react, taking it all in voyeuristically. Finally a bouncer grabbed ‘Sid’ from behind, disarmed him and dragged him towards the nearest exit. As I was being led out, Vivienne Westwood ran up and started apologising profusely for what had happened: ‘The boy who did that - he’s just this psychopath who’s fastened on to the group. We’ll make sure he’s never allowed into one of our shows again.’ Blah-blah-blah. McLaren told me the same thing when he phoned up a day later to try and mend fences.

Who did they think they were fooling? I knew they’d set me up, that it had all been pre-arranged and that my old buddies in the Sex Pistols were probably all in on it too. All my professional life, I’d been expecting this moment. But I’d always imagined it coming at the hand of someone I’d genuinely affronted. I never dreamed I’d be stitched up by people I’d helped and viewed as kindred spirits.

Still, I should have seen it coming. Only a year before, McLaren and Westwood had marketed a T-shirt they’d designed together. On its front was written ‘One of these days you’re going to wake up and discover which side of the bed you’ve been sleeping on’ and below were two lists of names. One list was a roll call of their chosen favourites, the other of their most despised enemies. My name turns up in the pro column right next to ‘QT Jones and the Sex Pistols’. Now I’d been shunted rudely over to the other side of the bed. That’s what happens when you find yourself mingling with the beautiful people. You’ve always got to keep your back to the wall. You never know when you’ll be their next sacrificial victim.

Did I tell you I’d become recently homeless? I was now entering the most brutal hard-core phase of heroin addiction - the phase where nothing else matters, not even a roof over one’s head - or loving companionship. Hermine had left me too. I’d become too toxic for her to waste further time on - at least for the moment. So I was out on my own and up to no good.

Drug addiction inevitably promotes a heightened sense of isolation within the mindset of its victims but that didn’t mean I was alone in my predicament. In May I’d spent time with the Rolling Stones and they were slowly unravelling too from all the chronic drug abuse around them. Their music had lost all of its primal momentum. Bob Dylan saw them live around this time and Ian Hunter later asked him what he’d thought of the group’s mid-seventies incarnation. ‘Apathy for the devil,’ he’d simply replied with a jaundiced sneer on his cocky little face.

Something had turned distinctly rotten in the state of Led Zeppelin too that same year. In October I went to their newly instigated World’s End headquarters to interview Jimmy Page for the NME. They had a film coming out - The Song Remains the Same - accompanied by a live soundtrack album but both were deeply underwhelming approximations of what usually transpired at a Zeppelin live event.

Normally the film reels and live tapes would have been judged inadequate and left in a closet. But Peter Grant was not fully on top of the situation and had let them both reach completion in order to feed the record label with new product whilst the group stayed away from the touring circuit. Grant’s impending divorce had taken all the wind out of his sails and had sent him spinning into the throes of a full-blown drug-accelerated breakdown. I spoke to him on the phone for just five minutes that day: he sounded like a cross between a wounded bear and Darth Vader with a slight East London lisp. ‘I just want to know if you’re still our ally,’ he kept asking me. It made my blood run cold.

Page looked distinctly fragile when he finally arrived. It soon became clear he wasn’t too enamoured with the film and record he was supposed to promote either - and so our talk centred more on his recent adventures. He was particularly vexed about the Scorpio Rising film project and its director Kenneth Anger. He claimed he’d contributed the soundtrack music and even helped finance the editing, but that Anger was unable to complete the work and had generally been mistaking the guitarist’s kindness for weakness.

I wrote up Page’s comments only to find myself later having to confront Anger face to face. He turned up at the NME’s office demanding a right of reply. When one wasn’t forthcoming, he held aloft his right hand puckishly. ‘I just have to crook this little finger and Jimmy Page will automatically be transformed into a toad,’ he informed me with due theatricality. He was also strongly implying that he could do the same trick on me. But I was unmoved. That’s the one positive about being a homeless junkie: even witchcraft can’t intimidate you. You’re so far down the ladder anyway, nothing seems worse than where you already are.

What else was going on? Oh yes, the Clash. Bernie Rhodes had been McLaren’s boy - his gofer and general dogsbody. Rhodes had been heavily under his spell, working tirelessly for whatever mad cause Malcolm had drawn him into. But devotion has its limits and - seeing his mentor suddenly neck-deep in media attention - Bernie had started developing ambitions of his own. If McLaren could become a bona fide pop Svengali, then so could he.

In the late spring of 1976 he began consorting with Mick Jones and a strikingly handsome youth named Paul Simonon who’d been briefly employed by David Bowie’s Mainman organisation as a lookalike decoy to confuse fans when the star himself was out in public. Keith Levene-a prog-rock-besotted guitarist - was also in the picture as was a drummer called Terry Chimes. But they needed a frontman more than anything else - as well as a new musical direction. The latter they discovered the first time they listened to the Ramones’ debut album. Then they lured Joe Strummer of the 101’ers into their web.

Strummer was already a known quantity around London’s pub-rock circuit as the snaggle-toothed troubadour of the capital’s new bohemian squatocracy, so his sudden defection to the cause of punk was not without personal consequences. I saw one of the Clash’s first-ever London shows - again at the 100 Club. It was visually impressive but the players - still including Keith Levene - hadn’t yet secured a solid rhythmic foundation to build their sound from and were basically just making a bunch of shrill, overamplified noise. Afterwards I saw Strummer in a state of advanced inebriation and close to tears remonstrating with Bernie Rhodes. ‘I’ve sold out, Bernie,’ he kept saying over and over again. But it was only a fleeting moment of uncertainty on the singer’s part. As soon as the glowing reviews started getting published, the former John Mellor - the upper-middle-class son of a former British government diplomat turned self-styled king of the proles - knew he’d made the right decision when he ruthlessly rejected his old squat-rock cronies in order to throw in his lot with the new breed.

By the end of ’76, his group were out there on the cultural barricades alongside the Pistols and the Damned as part of the Anarchy package tour, getting banned and/or publicly demonised almost everywhere they played. The tour should have compounded a sense of genuine unity within this fragile punk community but instead only contributed to its ongoing fragmentation. The managers were all at each other’s throats and the groups began to get coldly competitive with each other. An even more divisive element had been imported into the mix: Johnny Thunders’s Heartbreakers had been invited over from New York to take part in the tour. Thunders’s arrival in the London punk milieu that winter would have grievous consequences. The guy was a walking advert for heroin and many impressionable young scene-makers were suddenly seduced into sharing the high with the guitarist.

But was I really any better than him? Junkies are junkies, after all. Sordid people leading sordid lives. It’s the nature of the beast. I wasn’t consciously endangering others in my thirst for junk but in the past twelve months it had managed to turn me into a pitiful public spectacle. There’s one photograph that sometimes turns up in punk-related tomes that was taken at year’s end 1976. John Lydon is sneering triumphantly next to a high-spirited Brian James whilst I stand to their immediate left looking like I’ve just been liberated from Dachau concentration camp.

Even more alarming to behold were the few articles I managed to eke out during this spell. Reading them now is like watching a man trying to swim his way through an ocean of mud. At Christmas time I made my annual pilgrimage to visit my parents, who now lived in Morecambe, Lancashire. My mother burst into tears when she opened the door and saw the state I was in. That’s when I knew I was truly in hell.

Death-dealing druggies and psychopaths to the left of me. Chicken-hearted chicken hawks and yuppie violence-groupies to the right. Stones in my pathway every step of the way. I felt like I’d suddenly taken up residence in one of Robert Johnson’s most godforsaken compositions. ‘The valley of the shadow of death’ wasn’t just some grim reference from the Bible any more; it was my new postal code.

If I’d had my druthers, I would have been making radical New Year’s resolutions to redeem my situation, but I simply couldn’t summon the required willpower. The worst was yet to come.