On the 28th December 1976 I left my parents and returned south in a state of some urgency. The drugs I’d taken there to tide me over the Christmas season had run out and it was only a matter of a few hours before I’d be feeling the withdrawal symptoms. I had no actual London home base as such to return to-I was still effectively sans domicile - but the dealers would probably still let me pass out on their floors and that was all the roof I needed over my head at the time.

Stepping back into the city I looked around and the streets seemed virtually deserted. Everyone had left to see in the new year with family and friends out in the provinces. I immediately made some phone calls and checked out some addresses but all my former drug connections were out of town as well. My bones were beginning to ache and my eyes were watering like a lovesick girl’s. In desperation I visited the surgery of a well-known London ‘croaker’-a registered doctor who was known to prescribe strong pain medication, tranquillisers and pill-form speed if the price was right. I told him my problem-I was a heroin addict on the verge of withdrawal - and he tut-tutted and played the armchair moralist for five minutes. Then he wrote out a script and handed it to me, though not before pocketing £20 of my dwindling personal cash flow. I took it straight to a pharmacy, only to discover that he’d prescribed me nothing for the physical pain I was about to experience, just some mood-altering medication I’d never taken before.

Now I had to attend to a second pressing concern: finding myself some form of temporary accommodation. I ran into a girl I’d sometimes seen on the smack circuit in the streets of Westbourne Grove and unburdened my tale of woe on her. She then took me back to her squat and said I could sleep in the spare room. Her boyfriend lived in the building too-a big Scottish guy, hard as nails. I think his name was Trevor. He’d been a well-known and justly feared fixture on the local junk scene for some time - shaking down users and dealers alike, stealing and swindling his way around the metropolis. But then he’d gotten addicted to a drug even stronger than heroin-a pink pill they gave only to terminal cancer patients the name of which now escapes me. It was manufactured in such a way that it was extremely dangerous to attempt direct injection. The chalk in the pills wouldn’t dissolve and would then be mainlined straight into veins as well as muscle tissue and bone marrow and start spreading disease. But this hadn’t stopped Trevor. He’d started shooting up the stuff in his left leg. Now he couldn’t walk. He just lay there in bed and got his girlfriend to do everything for him - cook his food, change his bandage, cop his dope. The first night I moved in, he showed me the infected leg; from the toes up to the knee, everything was swollen green. ‘Looks like gangrene,’ I muttered, albeit cautiously. ‘Aye, I know,’ he’d replied. ‘It’s only a matter of time before this bugger’ - indicating the infected leg - ‘gets amputated. I’m nae worried, though. I’ll get a ton of gear free off the NHS as a result - maybe a lifetime’s supply. Giving up a leg for a deal like that is the best thing that’s happened to me in a while.’

By and by, I retired to the room they’d let me crash in for a few days. Drab drawn curtains, one naked light bulb, no heating, one raggedy-ass mattress awash with the aroma of stale joss sticks. It was like taking up residence inside a Hieronymus Bosch painting. For two whole days and nights I lay there trembling, sweating and cursing. Upstairs someone kept playing the same record over and over again. It was a weird jazz instrumental with a free-form sax solo that slurred in and out of concert pitch, like a form of musical water torture. It was one of the rare times in my life when I genuinely feared for my sanity. I tried taking these mood-altering pills my doctor pally had thoughtfully prescribed for me but they only made things worse.

Now I was shaking so hard I was scared I’d go into epileptic convulsions, whilst my brain seemed to have suddenly turned to quicksand. I looked at the name on the pill bottle again: Tryptizol. I’d heard that name before. Then it slowly dawned on me. This was the same drug that had killed Nick Drake and he’d overdosed on just three of the treacherous capsules. I’d been given a potentially life-threatening drug by a registered physician without being advised beforehand on the quantity I was supposed to take. A year later, this same physician took on Keith Moon as one of his patients and prescribed him a drug called Heminevrin to combat the drummer’s alcoholism. Again, he failed to alert his patient to the dangers of taking too many and Moon died as a result. The point being - you had a hard road to hoe if you were a drug addict in the seventies. There was no Narcotics Anonymous or Priory-styled detox facilities to escape into. Most medical professionals wouldn’t touch you with a bargepole. And almost everyone else treated you like a leper. It was all down, down, down. You’d think you’d hit the bottom rung of the ladder and then the ground would open up and once again you’d be in free fall, blindly grasping the air around you.

When would I wake from this nightmare? Not any time soon - that was for sure. I still couldn’t see any righteous alternative. The real world outside felt even more inhospitable than the junkie world I was trapped in. And just as insane. A power-crazy greengrocer’s daughter was about to take over the country. And Sid Vicious had just joined the Sex Pistols.

Glen Matlock was the one who informed me that January. He wasn’t well chuffed by the turn of events - as you can probably imagine. But Lydon - feeling threatened by Jones and Cook’s evil Siamese-twin-like closeness - had wanted one of his own bully-boy accomplices in the line-up to balance their internal chemistry out more evenly. And then McLaren had fallen in love with the idea of an authentic sociopath joining the group. No one bothered to question the musical wisdom of replacing Matlock - a powerful bassist and key songwriting source - with someone who could barely play a musical instrument and who was incapable of contributing to new material. Ever since the group had sparked a national tempest by swearing at a drunken oaf called Bill Grundy who was supposed to be interviewing them on the telly that winter, the Pistols had been trading on a policy of outrage over proficiency at every turn and the yield to date had been singular to say the least. Their name was on everybody’s lips but they were banned from playing live throughout England and kept getting signed and then abruptly dropped by record labels. Bringing Sid into their mix was like adding fire to a leaking pool of gasoline. A terrible explosion was bound to transpire as a result. People would get badly injured, some would lose their lives. It was a disaster just waiting to happen and I was just glad I’d been exiled when I had; at least I was out of the eye of their latest hurricane.

Only I wasn’t. McLaren chose to broadcast the arrival of Sid Vicious into the Sex Pistols by sending a series of telegrams out to the music - and daily - press on which a single curt message was inscribed. Sid was now a Sex Pistol, the missive stated, and the main reason he’d been picked was because ‘he gave Nick Kent just what he deserved at the 100 Club’.

Reading that in the NME and everywhere else certainly jolted me out of my junkie stupor for at least five minutes. The thoughts that flooded through my head in that moment of ersatz clarity were distinctly unpleasant ones. I’d been victimised once - by people I’d helped and befriended - and now I was being victimised and slandered again in the public forum - by the same vampiric morally bankrupt preening scumsuckery backstabbers. This was war. But a war I was never going to be able to win. What was I going to do? Buy a gun on the black market and cap the little red-haired prick? He wasn’t worth the angst, the effort or the expense. Nor did I have the time to even plot a feud. The moment-to-moment fabric of my life was tied up in far more pressing issues - like ‘Where will I sleep tonight?’ and ‘How can I stay loaded for the next twenty-four hours?’ Revenge was a luxury I couldn’t afford to cultivate at this stage in my life.

One evening either two or three weeks after McLaren’s poisonous telegram had hit the presses, I made my way up to Dingwalls for some social distraction. I was scarcely through the door when I turned to my right and saw a figure approaching. He had ink-black hair and a big village-idiot grin breaking up his features like a split coconut. Once again I found myself face to face with Sid Vicious.

My first thought on seeing him advance before me? ‘Oh boy, here we go again. Look out for that bike chain.’ But he just stood there grinning and offered me his hand to shake. ‘Listen, mate,’ he said, ‘I want to say sorry about what happened at the 100 Club. I was out of my head that night. It was nothing personal.’ He then told me that he and Lydon ‘felt bad’ about what McLaren had written about me in his press statement, that it was ‘well out of order’. I just stood there drinking in his words, thankful that my cranium wasn’t again under siege. ‘He doesn’t seem too bright,’ I remember thinking. But he sounded sincere. And borderline contrite too. I accepted his apologies, we shook hands and that was that. He sloped back to the bar presumably to cosh some unlucky music-industry shill whilst I went in the opposite direction in search of anyone who might give me free drugs. It was just a brief encounter of the ‘ships passing in the night’ variety - but it would not be our last.

Meanwhile, it would be fair to say that ‘what happened at the 100 Club’ and McLaren’s later glorification of the incident in the media had a truly calamitous effect on my life. Whenever I attended punk-themed events around London throughout all of 1977 and most of the following year, someone I’d never met before would walk up to me and try to start a fight. It was like suddenly having my very existence turned into the script for a bad Western, the kind where the star-crossed wandering hero has to confront some new trigger-happy inebriated ruckus-raiser in every saloon bar in every town he stumbles through.

Actually I’m overstating the menace a little: I never actually got threatened with a gun. But knives and other sharp wounding objects were sometimes waved provocatively in my face. My tormentors just wanted to earn a bit of instant punk cred for themselves and maybe even a mention in the music comics. Some misguided person with orange hair tried to stab me in the toilets at the Roxy whilst my back was turned. He failed to pierce my flesh with his blade but cut the jacket I was wearing to ribbons in the ensuing mêlée.

Mostly though it was just verbal violence. I’d be standing there minding my own business and some ferret-eyed mouth almighty flanked by the inevitable pair of gormless-looking sidekicks would sidle up and begin harassing me. ‘You think you’re it’ - that was always the first line out of their lips. ‘You think you’re it. But you’re not. You’re just a piece of shit.’ And so on. Usually I was so stoned that the invective being evoked at my expense splashed over me like water off the proverbial duck’s back. That’s one of the only good things about using narcotics - it can shield you from having your senses too infiltrated by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. But it was still a draining process to have to withstand these assaults on my flesh and general character time after time.

Did I truly merit this sorry, sorry fate? Well, yes and no. Much of my bad fortune - specifically drug addiction and homelessness - I’d brought upon myself. They were nobody’s fault but mine. And I’d done a lot of bad things over the past three years. I’d been too arrogant and too vain, too immature and too judgemental, too wayward and too goddam hot-headed - and that was just the short list. But I never ever let myself become one of those all-the-way bad people who lose all sense of personal humanity and conscience. My heart just wasn’t in it. My inner moral compass was still halfway functioning throughout this whole wretched era. And yet to suddenly become an all-purpose whipping boy for the emerging punk hordes - that was unjust and plain wicked. Shit, I’d been running around in the music press like a headless chicken talking up punk rock as the next big thing back when Joe Strummer had still been a folk-singing Woody Guthrie wannabe, Malcolm McLaren a fifties rockabilly haberdasher and John Lydon a bloke with long red hair who sometimes sold LSD at Hawkwind concerts. And then to be victimised by the very thing I’d helped bring into being - that was cold.

But at the same time there was no way out. What could I have done? Retreat to the provinces, get healthy and become a librarian? That wasn’t my idea of a viable lifestyle alternative. I just had to keep brassing it out and stay breathing.

After seeing in the new year at the House of Gangrene, I’d spread my junkie wings and moved on to other druggy crash pads in the immediate vicinity as a source of temporary refuge. One shelter from the storm was a first-floor apartment on All Saints Road just two or three doors along from the notorious Mangrove restaurant, a well-known local hotbed of friction between Jamaican potheads and the local constabulary. A guy called Nigel lived there - white, well-spoken, Oxbridge graduate, held down a straight job on weekdays, took loads of drugs on the weekend. He was one of the few genuinely soulful yuppies I’ve ever crossed paths with. He was also homosexual, as were his two flatmates, one of whom was a journalist for Gay News. He’d let me sleep on his floor when I had nowhere else to go. He and his co-inhabitants never tried to foist their sexuality onto me. They were out in the margins of society too - down by law and circumstance - and kind-hearted enough to invite a sad specimen like me in from the cold to share their frugal living space.

One afternoon I wandered in and Nigel was talking to an alarming-looking young American woman with dyed blonde hair and a nerve-jangling voice. The subject of their increasingly heated conversation centred on a recent drug deal gone wrong. Nigel had given this harpy money to secure him some heroin and she’d come back with a tiny packet full of brick-dust. ‘Money for old rope,’ he kept muttering darkly. ‘Fuck you, you simpering faggot, ’ the woman - who’d obviously just robbed him - fired back. She then turned on her heels and exited the building, leaving only a trail of insults in her wake. It was my first encounter with Nancy Spungen.

I’d be at Nigel’s place for two or three days at a time and then - not wishing to outstay my welcome - scoot across the road to a hard-core junkie crash pad on a small street parallel to Portobello Road. This place was the closest I ever came to frequenting one of those Victorian opium dens where the clientele would all be splayed out on the floor in states of shared horizontal stupefaction. It was really a ground-floor flat that had been lately squatted by a guy called Gary, who’d fitted the main space out with some mattresses he found on a nearby skip and then opened up the premises to any junkie who might share his dope with him. He was a pretty typical example of what passed for a heroin addict in the more downtrodden areas of London during the late seventies: a nice guy - too sweet-natured to become fully criminal-minded - who’d stumbled into a deadly lifestyle and who was trying to just keep his head above water. His big problem - apart from the dope - was his girlfriend Amanda. Amanda was as grey as a ghost and she babbled incessantly-a semi-comatose, deeply disturbed human ragbag of rampant neurosis. Nobody could stand her apart from Gary, who was utterly besotted with the ungrateful woman and who saw himself as her knight-in-shining-armour protector. She didn’t deserve him: the love he felt for her was pearls before swine. Later in 1977 she left him to move in with a psychotic dealer working out of North London and Gary had committed suicide the night he found out.

Another of my junkie ‘homes away from home’ was up in Maida Vale, close to Little Venice, where a Persian youth named Attila (it was his real name) was dealing from a basement squat that due to lack of electricity looked more like a cave than a bedsit. Attila was a rich oil sheikh’s son but daddy had promptly disowned him when he’d discovered his son courting a drug habit and exiled him from the land of his birth. The boy - who looked about seventeen years of age - had landed in London and was now connected with some heavy-duty Persian gangsters who used him to sell their product from his extremely humble outpost. He was not long for this world but at least he had an older companion from his homeland with him to keep an eye on the business.

Engin, his Persian compatriot, was a real box of human fireworks: long, thinning hair, a beard from straight out of the Old Testament days, yellow skin, emaciated, cadaverous features, mad terrorist eyes - he looked like a smack-addled Ivan the Terrible and he talked like the ultimate soothsayer of doom. Even when stoned out of his gourd, he’d be mumbling darkly about the impending apocalypse and the godless nature of mankind. It was just as well he devoted all his energies to using and selling heroin or else he’d have probably been out and about putting bombs in tube stations.

Engin dealt from a tip of a squat he shared with a rail-thin, comatose Irish hippie girl called Siobhan down on Castellain Road, only two minutes’ walk from Attila’s abode. One late afternoon I had cause to visit the place and found myself ambling towards the building in question when something else caught my eye. A youth was lying horizontally, half of him on the pavement, half of him on the road directly in front of Engin’s. He looked to be in a lot of pain. My first instinct was ‘Oh shit - maybe he’s been shot. Maybe Engin’s just been robbed by some heavy-duty villains and there’s been some kind of massacre.’

But then - as I approached the prone form-I recognised who it was: Sid Vicious - again. Moreover, a Sid Vicious undergoing extremely nasty physical contortions. ‘What the fuck are you doing laid out like that?’ I asked him. He was crying and moaning - literally - babbling on about how he had to get some smack because the Pistols had a show that night and he was too sick to make the date. He’d heard that someone was dealing on this street and so had gone from door to door, getting them slammed in his face at every turn. He’d gotten so frustrated - he said - that he’d taken out his knife and started cutting up his chest. He then showed me the wounds. I’d never seen the results of self-mutilation before. It was an alarming sight. Anyway, I helped him up off the ground and guided him to Engin’s door. Sid after all was breaking the number-one commandment in the drug addict’s Bible - never needlessly draw attention to yourself in public - and had to be removed from the sidewalk before the police were called in.

When he opened the door, I could see Engin was not elated by the thought of seeing Sid about to cross his threshold. Apart from being a full-time harbinger of gloom, he also fancied himself as a prog-rock drummer. His drum kit took up most of the living room where he and his true love spent all their time. You’d be nodding out on a sofa and suddenly be rudely awakened by him bashing away on the thing as he tried in vain to keep time to a Mahavishnu Orchestra record blasting from the stereo. Engin had heard about punk and reckoned it was the music of the Antichrist. Now the Antichrist was about to step into his home and hearth. Suffice to say, it took all my powers of persuasion to get him inside. Once in, I asked Engin to help Sid out, and after some grumbling he supplied him with a five-quid bag of heroin. Sid dug a syringe out of one of his pockets, cooked the stuff up, drew the residue up into the syringe’s barrel and then - without tying off to find a vein - just drove the needle into his arm, sending blood spurting onto the floor before him. Thirty seconds later, his eyes were as tiny as pinwheels and he was weaving uncertainly about the room with a beatific grin on his face. He couldn’t stop thanking me and Engin for our generosity, and with good reason. Nothing bonds junkies closer than when one helps another in time of sickness.

Four days later I returned to Engin’s Castellain Road sink-hole only to find him sharing the space with two new tenants. Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen had taken up squatter’s rights there too - just strong-armed their way into his living room with all their worldly possessions contained inside three or four plastic shopping bags. This was a truly mind-boggling living arrangement: Engin and his whispering girlfriend were dyed-in-the-wool hippie relics whilst Sid and Nancy were foul-mouthed barbarians who would have gladly spat on their hosts and then left them both bleeding in an alley in normal circumstances. But heroin has a curious way of bridging all social and cultural divides once one has succumbed to it. At first Engin had bristled at the idea of these two moving into his domain but Sid had pulled out a bunch of cash he wished to exchange for dope, and from that moment on he and his horrifying girlfriend had been allowed to become fixtures on the premises. They occupied a ratty old couch which they lay on in a semi-conscious stupor.

When I arrived, a black-and-white telly was already relaying the sounds and images of a live Eric Clapton concert especially filmed and recorded for the BBC. On the flickery screen, Clapton-a former heroin addict himself - stared out at us from behind a gold prospector’s beard. He looked seriously liquored up and sang in a voice frayed with exhaustion and too much inhaled nicotine. There was nothing remotely dynamic about the music he and his group were making - no energy or daring. It sounded like everything that punk had lately been invented to give the bum’s rush to and Spungen kept up a running commentary as she stared witheringly at the spectacle, employing language that even a sailor might have paused before using. One of Clapton’s backing singers was a black woman and Spungen kept running her down, calling her ‘that dumb fuckin’ nigger’ over and over again. I looked at Sid to see whether he shared his love interest’s racist outlook but he was comatose, eyes shut tight, mouth slightly ajar. How this scabby pair ended up becoming the token Romeo and Juliet of the late seventies is something I-and pretty much anyone else who knew them - still find bafflingly hard to take into full account. Theirs wasn’t even what you would call ‘love’ per se - more an intense mutual neediness.

Both of them were damaged goods and bad apples and each saw in the other disturbing qualities they craved for themselves. Sid was initially drawn to Nancy because she was stronger, bossier, more abrasive and even more morally vacuous than he was. Nancy glommed on to Sid because he was a rising star with a malleable, still-not-fully-formed personality that she quickly recognised she could exploit in a way that could help her realise her one burning ambition - to become a celebrity herself.

Heroin did the rest - tied them up together in nasty little knots and fabricated the love-dust they claimed to see in each other’s eyes - and now heroin had thrown them into my orbit too. Almost everywhere I stayed throughout most of 1977 Sid and Nancy would somehow end up there too. I crashed at Johnny Thunders’s Mayfair flat for two weeks that summer until the pair dropped by and never left. You couldn’t pass out around either of them because they’d start frantically ransacking your pockets for drugs and money whilst you slept. That was an occupational hazard for any socialising junkie in the seventies and I soon found a way to circumvent it - I’d Sellotape my drugs to my body when it came time to turn in.

Later that summer, Hermine found me temporary accommodation in a large Dockland warehouse complex also frequented by the sculptor Andrew Logan and film-maker Derek Jarman. My new living quarters were one large unfurnished room overlooking the Thames. It was an ideal place to lie low in, reflect on recent events and try and change my disastrous way of living. But then - just three days after I’d moved in - Sid and Nancy turned up without prior warning too and everything promptly turned to shit. I’d just been to the local shop and had arrived back in time to find Sid pissing against my front door. I immediately pointed out to him that if he’d just turned around and walked three steps forward, the stream of his urine would now be sailing into Father Thames instead of befouling my new hidey-hole, but he didn’t seem able to grasp the point I was making. The evening we spent together was like all the others: Sid nodding out whilst Nancy sat around maliciously cursing out the rest of mankind for hours on end. Apart from Iggy Pop and Johnny Thunders, she never had a good word to say about anybody - and she had a real bee in her bonnet about Sid’s soul-brother Lydon. ‘He thinks he’s such a fuckin’ star - but he isn’t. Sid’s the real star in the Sex Pistols. Aren’t you, Sid?’ She’d then whack her boyfriend in the ribs, causing him to stir from his coma. ‘Yeah, Nance, you’re right,’ he’d mumble before promptly falling back into the arms of Morpheus.

Late in the night Nancy decided it was time for her and her intended to get some actual bedrest. There was only one bed available - the one I was using - but she bitched and moaned so much about sleeping on the floor that I let them pass out on it instead. The next morning I noticed the pillow had a rancid-looking yellowish substance stained all over it. I reached out to touch it and it felt moist and greasy. Sid noticed my growing consternation. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he said. ‘I didn’t have any hairspray yesterday so I stuck a bunch of margarine in my hair to get it to stand up. It must have melted when I was sleeping and messed up your pillow.’

How was one expected to react to situations like this? My solution was not to react at all. Just let them run wild until they find another strung-out fool to leech off. A couple of days later they’d vanished, leaving behind a touching memento: a torn plastic bag full of used, unwashed syringes that they’d hidden under the mattress. I’d tolerated their company for days and nights on end but I can’t say I ever enjoyed a single second. Sid had a certain goofy charm when he was on his own but let’s not kid ourselves here please - they were both supremely unlikeable people who tainted every setting they stumbled into. Only twenty years old and already they had the smell of death in their young pores. That’s not something that deserves to be romanticised down through the ages.

Whilst I continued to languish in junkie-land, my relationship with the (relatively) straight world outside grew more and more tenuous. My visits to the NME throughout the year were infrequent at best. There had been changes afoot in my absence, none of them for the better. The office had moved from Long Acre to the twenty-first floor of a multi-storey high-rise near Waterloo station where it now shared space alongside all of IPC’s other printed outlets. This relocation led to a sharp dip in office morale that everyone involved was affected by in one way or another.

Nick Logan - still the editor - started showing the symptoms of a looming nervous breakdown, whilst his former second lieutenant Ian MacDonald appeared to be engulfed in a mental meltdown all of his own. Ian had actually resigned from his assistant editor post in late ’75. In ’76 he decided to experiment with LSD for the first time. By 1977 he’d given up his worldly possessions and rented Maida Vale apartment and moved in with a Sufi commune living in a squat off Little Venice. (Two of his cohabitants had been the gifted singer/songwriter Richard Thompson and his wife Linda.) Later in the decade, he returned to his parents’ neck of the woods back in Gloucestershire, where I believe he remained until he took his own life in 2003. For me, Ian and Nick had been the best and brightest of the NME’s golden-age hierarchy. The three of us had been the ones in the engine room feeding the furnace and steering the train. But the stress and friction involved had finally drained us all and sent us spinning each into our own lonely orbit.

It was a sad way to end a winning streak, even more so because no one else in the paper’s then workforce had the requisite gumption to take over the weekly running of the enterprise with a genuinely inspired new game plan. The punk explosion then being detonated throughout the British Isles had rattled the NME writers’ cages too, leaving the majority of them scared and uncertain about how they ought to react. To better cater to this new trend, two new staff writers had been brought into the fold the year before. One was a young man who dressed much like Frank Sinatra had in the fifties - pork-pie hat, dark suit, white shirt with black tie hung loose around the collar. His name was Tony Parsons and even though he was only twenty-two or thereabouts, he’d already managed to have his first novel published-a tome entitled The Kids.

He talked like a young East End scrapper and looked like he could be handy in a fist fight, something that couldn’t have been said about any other male in the office. The other new recruit was a strange teenaged girl with a pronounced West Country twang to her accent, sullen eyes and a vibe about her that could best be described as ‘Myra Hindleyesque’. I liked the idea of Julie Burchill coming aboard - she certainly knew how to shake things up - but the reality was often hard to stomach, particularly when one found oneself in close physical proximity to the young woman. Soon enough they became an item and their romance speedily turned into one of those classic ‘you and me against the world’ kamikaze affairs. The repercussions of this union were felt clear through the London music industry in ’77 but most especially at the NME’s headquarters, where older staff members began developing stomach ulcers as a consequence of having to coexist alongside the Parsons-Burchill juggernaut. My so-called colleagues still apparently bear the psychic scars from the time the pair decorated their combined desk space with barbed wire, dubbed the area ‘the kinderbunker’ and then basically declared war on the rest of the paper. I don’t recall personally witnessing that particular episode but, like I said, I made it my business to frequent the NME as little as possible during this period. I’d simply drop in from time to time and stick around long enough to steal as many albums as I could from the ‘reviews’ drawer and then go off and sell them at a local record exchange to get money for more dope.

But I had the misfortune to be lurking there the day Burchill goaded Tony Parsons into beating up Mick Farren, and that was an ugly and disturbing sight to behold. Farren was a friend of mine - one of the few non-junkies who still let me visit his apartment during my lost years. He and his then girlfriend Ingrid von Essen would often feed me and let me sleep on their cushions when I had nowhere else to go. Mick had been another punk pioneer - back in 1967 he’d been insulting audiences and generally inciting mayhem as the singer in a three-chord thrash act who’d called themselves the Deviants - but was now having a hard time connecting with this graceless new breed more than ten years his junior. He made the mistake of locking horns with Julie Burchill and - kaboom! - ended up getting his face flattened by Parsons’s fists of fury.

Looking back now it’s clear to me that amphetamines were at the root of this and most other outbursts of punk-related blood-letting. Bad speed was the stimulant of choice for London youth in 1977, specifically a product known as amphetamine sulphate, a white powder often fabricated in the bathtubs of provincial biker gangs that burnt nasal membranes, destroyed brain cells, promoted paranoia and aggressivity and generally transformed its adherents into emaciated bug-eyed wack-jobs. When you inhaled a line of the noxious substance, your nose stung for a whole minute and your sense of smell was engulfed by a rank Ajax-like odour that left you temporarily cross-eyed with nausea.

It was cheap though and could keep you so wide awake you’d be grinding your teeth together until your gums started to bleed. Then, several sleep-deprived days and nights later, your bones would be aching and you’d feel like something a stray dog had just vomited up. You’d also have only the slightest recollection of what had actually transpired during the prior seventy-two hours. That’s why most reminiscences by UK punk musicians of the time are generally so unreliable: they simply don’t have the brain cells required to reactivate the past objectively any more. Thus the era gets rewritten and turned into a myth without due reference to the driving poisons - the mindless violence, bad drugs and Tin Pan Alley ponces - that would so quickly nip its momentum in the bud.

Those who gleefully recast the time as one long happy-go-lucky punky reggae party evidently weren’t present at the same events that I beheld. Or maybe it’s just that we come from such different perspectives. Take for example the Slits. Others viewed them as a bold and liberating feminist clarion call. I thought they were a bunch of talentless exhibitionists. Watching them in the early days shrieking and stumbling cack-handedly through their tuneless repertoire was as grim an experience as going to get my wisdom teeth removed by an incompetent dentist. How had this concept that you could legitimately stand onstage holding a musical instrument even though you couldn’t actually play the thing taken root and why was no one else viewing it as a musical version of the emperor’s new clothes? The lunatics had now taken over the asylum that doubled as the late seventies’ rock landscape. The seditious youthquake that had started in the fifties with James Dean had ended up being co-opted into a wretched hail storm of spit, safety pins and bathtub speed: from Rebel Without a Cause to rebels without a clue.

The only old-school punk pathfinder to benefit from the generational tumult of 1977 was my old pal Iggy Pop, who pulled off a major comeback coup that spring. The last time he appeared in this book it was back in 1975 and we’d left Iggy languishing in a Los Angeles nuthouse. But then clear out of the blue he received a surprise visit. ‘I was in a mental hospital and Bowie happened to be there for another reason,’ he would later recall. ‘And he came up one day, stoned out of his brain in his little spacesuit, with Dean Stockwell the actor. They were like “We want to see Jimmy. Let us in.” Now the strict rule was never to let outsiders in: it was an insane asylum. But the doctors were star-struck [laughs] so they let them enter. And the first thing they did was say “Hey, want some blow [cocaine]?” I think I took a little, which is really unpleasant in there. And that’s how we got back in touch.’

When Bowie toured America in spring 1976, Iggy was his travelling companion. The former Stooge was also close by when Bowie made what appeared to be an ill-considered fascist salute to fans as he re-entered Britain via Victoria train station. Standing in the wings and watching the stick-insect Duke with his taut hair and stark black-and-white Station to Station stage show, Iggy later recalled feeling ‘miserable, lost, lonesome and nostalgic . . . [Yet] I had been offered an opportunity in that David Bowie offered me the chance to make solo records, basically with him as my band. And at the time that he offered me that, the guy was a white-hot talent.’

In June, a month after the Station to Station tour had ended - without further incident - Bowie and Iggy began recording an album together at the Château d’Hérouville studios near Paris. Bowie wrote the music, played almost all the instruments, directed the vocal performances and suggested many of the several lyrical themes. ‘To work with him as a producer,’ Iggy now claims, ‘he was a pain in the arse - megalomaniacal, loco! But he had good ideas. The best example I can give you was when I was working on the lyrics to “Funtime” and he said, “Yeah, the words are good. But don’t sing it like a rock guy. Sing it like Mae West.” Which made it informed of other genres, like cinema. Also, it was a little bit gay. The vocals there became more menacing as a result of that suggestion.

‘He has a work pattern that recurs again and again. If he has an idea about an area of work that he wants to enter, as a first step, he’ll use side projects or works for other people to gain experience and gain a little taste of the water before he goes in and does his . . . And I think he used working with me that way also.’

Whilst completing The Idiot at the Château, Bowie began work on Low, the record that would become his follow-up to Station to Station. At exactly the same juncture, Playboy published a lengthy interview conducted by Cameron Crowe and dating from Bowie’s recent mad sojourn in LA. ‘I’d adore to be Prime Minister,’ the singer stated provocatively. ‘And yes, I believe very strongly in fascism. The only way we can rid ourselves from the sort of liberalism that’s hanging foul in the air at the moment is to speed up the progress of a right-wing, totally dictatorial tyranny and get it over with as fast as possible. People have always responded better under a regimental leadership.’ And then came the punchline: ‘Rock stars are fascists, too. Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.’ Seeing such sentiments uttered in cold print must have given David Bowie serious pause for thought. If they didn’t, he needed only to stand in front of a full-length mirror and study his skeletal physique to see that all was not well in his fame-insulated world.

Vowing never to live again in Los Angeles, he remained in Europe, staying briefly in Switzerland (where his faithful assistant Corinne Schwab put him in touch with a therapist) before heading for Berlin with Iggy Pop. Moving into a seven-room flat at 155 Hauptstrasse in the city’s downmarket Schöneberg district, he mingled anonymously with the area’s mostly immigrant population and found inspiration for several instrumental pieces he planned to record with the recently recruited Brian Eno. ‘The first side of Low was all about me,’ Bowie later explained. ‘Always crashing in the same car and all that self-pitying crap. Isn’t it great to be on your own; let’s just pull down the blinds and fuck ’em all . . .’

The record shocked listeners at first. Bowie sounded withdrawn and down in the mouth throughout his five vocal performances, as though his personality was deflating before our very ears. ‘Deep in your room / So deep in your room,’ he intoned, like some crooner peddling Valium via a television advert. Today, Bowie likes to claim that Low and its two follow-ups Heroes and Lodger were conceived and recorded in a largely cocaine-free state of being, but other sources insist this wasn’t exactly the case. Certainly he was taking far less of the drug in Berlin than he’d managed in LA, but there was also a lot of alcohol being consumed. Iggy would later recount that in a typical seven-day week he and Bowie would spend two days in some form of intoxication, two days recovering from the hangovers, and three days straight, ‘which is a pretty good balance for musicians’. Of his months as Bowie’s Berlin house guest, Iggy still remembers the basic routine. ‘Get up in the morning on the fourth floor of a cold-water building and take a sponge bath. Cut a little brown bread and cheese, and eat. Then walk over the city, which hasn’t changed since 1910: organ grinders who still had monkeys, quality transvestite shows. A different world. By evening, I’d go have dinner with Bowie, see a film or watch Starsky and Hutch - that was our big thing. If there wasn’t enough to do, I knew some bad people and I’d get stoned and drunk. Sometimes I’d do the bad stuff with Bowie and the good stuff with the bad people.’

In March 1977 Iggy played his first-ever ‘solo’ concert in a venue called ‘Friars’ out in the English town of Aylesbury as the official unveiling of a world tour booked for that spring. Only it wasn’t really a solo deal because David Bowie was part of his backing band, supplying the keyboard accompaniment and backing vocals. The Duke remained out of the stage spotlight and had certainly dressed down for the occasion. In an anorak and flat cap he looked more like a registered taxi driver than a rock star. Still, his everyman attire and dimly lit profile hunched over a keyboard couldn’t detract from the soon-drawn realisation that he was the one who was really in charge of Iggy’s new direction.

As a result, the singer’s own performance felt oddly constrained in its desire to exhibit a higher grasp of professionalism. He still moved and danced like a whirling dervish but he wasn’t interacting with the audience, wasn’t stirring up the communal frenzy any more. Bowie was midwifing him into a new career phase - that of the performer in control of himself and his surroundings - with a pre-arranged set and precious little room for any kind of spontaneity or ‘sonic jazz’. The London punk cognoscenti came out in force to savour the moment and Johnny Thunders stood next to me through much of the show. But before the end he was turning on his heels. ‘I can’t watch this shit any more,’ he’d murmured. ‘Jim’s just Bowie’s bitch now. I can’t believe he sold out his rock ’n’ roll side to go cabaret.’ I thought his reaction was small-minded and told him so. I actually liked some of the music they were playing. Not the brace of ill-advised Stooges covers but the new material that no one in the audience had ever heard before: songs from The Idiot and Lust for Life. I saw what Bowie was essentially trying to pull off - rehabilitating his ‘wild American friend’ whilst enlarging his own musical frontiers and gaining some handy punk cred in the process - but my heart still went out to the guy because his patronage was an act of genuine kindness that had probably saved Iggy’s life and such acts were desperately hard to come by in the seventies, particularly in the music-making marketplace.

The Idiot got released at the end of March and promptly polarised its audience. Lester Bangs wrote one of his last truly worthwhile pieces of criticism on the subject in a Village Voice article entitled ‘Blowtorch in Bondage’. He lambasted the album’s contents with a vengeance; ‘the person singing on The Idiot sounds like a dead man’, he wrote disparagingly. But he and other Stooges hardliners were missing the point. Iggy and Bowie were just taking the whole dank vampiric vibe of the seventies to a further sonic and conceptual extremity. Too remorselessly bleak and experimental-sounding to snare any kind of mainstream hit momentum, the record nonetheless held a rising new demographic - most notably creative young Mancunians such as Ian Curtis and Howard Devoto - spellbound with awe and the accompanying tour turned out to be a stirring standing-room-only success everywhere it played.

At its conclusion, Iggy and Bowie promptly deployed their working unit - Hunt and Tony Sales as the rhythm section plus a Scottish guitarist named Ricky Gardiner - back to West Berlin, where they all entered a recording studio known as Hansa together and commenced work on a second album project. It was at this juncture that Iggy started to rebel against his European patron’s grip on his own creative destiny. ‘Bowie’s a hell of a fast guy,’ he’d later reflect. ‘Very quick thinker, very quick action, very active person, very sharp. I realised I had to be quicker than him or whose album was it going to be?’ By the end of the summer sessions, he’d managed to wrest back control of his core musical identity - Lust for Life, the resulting record, was brim-full of inspired autobiographical lyrics that dovetailed neatly into Bowie’s generally more uplifting-sounding backing tracks. Indeed it was such a tour de force that many were predicting that it would provide Iggy with the elusive cross-over hit that would finally transform him into a bona fide superstar.

But then just as the record was being shipped into stores that September, news broke that Iggy’s more prestigious RCA Victor label-mate Elvis Presley had died and the company promptly suspended the further pressing and distribution of Lust for Life in order to cope with worldwide demand for the King’s back catalogue. The curse of Osterberg was still in full effect. His career had been sidelined yet again, this time by a fat bloke dying on the toilet. He tried keeping a stiff upper lip but became seriously unglued just prior to going out on his second world tour that year, booked - without Bowie’s presence this time - to promote a new record that was barely available in the shops.

One afternoon in September I wandered into the NME’s drab Waterloo headquarters only to hear a familiar sound coming from out of Nick Logan’s office-a deep-voiced American baritone that suddenly see-sawed into a high-pitched cackle whenever its owner came to the punchline of the tale he was telling. From a distance, I could just about make out the form of a strange little man in thick, frameless glasses and sporting disastrously short hair and a nondescript trench coat, slacks and golfing shoes who looked disconcertingly like the kind of character Jerry Lewis might have played in one of his early movie romps. Only the voice gave him away: it was Iggy.

I went over to greet him but couldn’t get past the fact that his appearance and general demeanour were those of a completely crazy man. I took him to one side and asked what on earth he was doing on the premises. ‘I’m trying to get hold of some crank,’ he replied - ‘crank’ being US slang for speed. ‘And I heard there might be some here. Can you help me out?’ Oh boy - Iggy Pop on uppers: the most hyperactive man on the planet under the sway of the most hyperactive drug on the planet. It was a recipe for utter bedlam. He then invited me to join him for a ride around London in his limo parked outside. I told him I couldn’t help him obtain any amphetamine but followed along anyway simply to further our sudden reacquaintance. I ended up spending the rest of the evening in his company and wishing I hadn’t. He wasn’t unfriendly but he was so bizarrely different from the guy I’d known back in the Stooges that it felt like he’d assumed a whole new personality in the interim-a personality moreover that was bewilderingly hard to actually like. He’d strut around like a little banty rooster marshalling his troops - his tour organisers and general personnel - like the drug-deluded ghost of General Patton. Then I joined him on an impromptu midnight trek to the Roxy, London’s most notorious punk niterie, only to watch him behave there with such a haughty sense of self-entitlement he almost got punched out by the barely pubescent drummer of X-Ray Spex.

Still, Iggy managed to get two great albums out in 1977 and build a lucrative solo career for himself as a live act hither and yon, and these positive accomplishments ultimately far outweighed any negative energy and tricky karma still dogging his tracks. By any reckoning he’d be able to look back on the year as a providential one-a time of growth and dreams fulfilled. Other rock stars I’d known back in the early seventies wouldn’t be so lucky.

1977 came down like a jackhammer even on big boys like the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. Keith Richards got busted in Toronto that February by some Mounties who discovered enough heroin and cocaine in his hotel room to put him behind bars for several years. Many strings had to be pulled - many favours called in - but the Stones organisation somehow managed to keep him out of jail and out of Canada until an actual trial date was set. A rehab stint was set into motion but it evidently failed to have lasting results. In Ian McLagan’s autobiography All the Rage the former Faces keyboard player recalls doing sessions with the group in a Paris recording studio later the same year and witnessing the guitarist ‘jab a needle straight through his jeans into his bum and leave it there, the syringe sticking out as he walked around the room laughing loudly’.

With no fresh product to promote apart from a ropey in-concert album entitled Love You Live and a key member in big trouble, the group wisely opted not to tour that year. Led Zeppelin also had no new recordings to release during the same time frame, a singer still recovering from an auto accident in Greece eighteen months earlier that had come close to crippling him for life and two other band members in the early stages of heroin addiction. Even more alarmingly, their manager Peter Grant had just been put through a painful divorce by his once-devoted wife Gloria and was numbing the extensive emotional wounds brought on by no longer having a family to counterbalance the craziness of being at the helm of the world’s biggest rock attraction by consuming far too much cocaine for a man of his gargantuan girth. His mood quickly darkened and he began making bad business decisions, the most far-reachingly ill-conceived being his green-lighting of a huge Zeppelin tour booked into all the major cities in America throughout the spring and summer months of ’77.

To the group’s credit, they managed to perform well through most of the forty-nine shows despite ill health, frayed nerves and escalating levels of chemical refreshment. But the tour would end up going down in the history books not on its musical merits but for a single grotesque incident that will haunt the group for an eternity. In Oakland Coliseum just prior to the first of two Zeppelin concerts being presented by Bill Graham, the most powerful promoter in America, Peter Grant, bookended by John Bonham and Richard Cole, had savagely beaten up one of Graham’s security team, a young man named Jim Matzorkis. ‘Grant said “Hold him,”’ Matzorkis later testified, ‘and just started punching me in the face with his fists and kicking me in the balls.’ The victim then recalled a fourth accomplice of Grant’s ‘trying to rip my eyeballs out of their sockets. I think my lawyers found later that there was some incident where he did rip somebody’s eyes out. That scared the hell out of me.’

The identity of this fourth accomplice was made available under the banner headlines that prevailed in the world’s press when he, Grant, Bonham and Cole were formally arrested at Graham’s instigation in their San Francisco hotel two days after the attack and all charged with grievous assault. It was John Bindon, a well-known London-based career criminal who’d dabbled in acting - he played the slow-witted enforcer Moody in Performance - and improved his circumstances by becoming one of those colourful East End villain types that sections of the seventies aristocracy liked to adopt and invite to their soirées. Bindon wasn’t short on colour: he was supposed to be equipped with the largest penis in the whole South of England and was known to be a close personal friend of Princess Margaret, the Queen’s wayward little sister. But those bored rich folk who fell under his earthy charm generally preferred to remain blissfully ignorant of his shadow self and its gleeful ongoing involvement in murders and acts of bodily harm too gruesome to itemise here. In the same way that human excrement like Charles Manson could only make their homicidal mark in the LSDDRENCHED late sixties, someone as brutish and bloodthirsty as Bindon could only rise up and get himself integrated into the worlds of glamour and prestige that fell under the dark voyeuristic penchants of the seventies. When Grant and Richard Cole elected to have him be part of Led Zeppelin’s security staff that year, they unwittingly unloosed real demons within their organisation that were far more deadly and disruptive than anything Jimmy Page could have possibly conjured up in Aleister Crowley’s old lair with his occultist books and spells.

Why on earth did they embark on such a foolhardy collaboration? It was the drugs again. Everyone was so coked up they’d convinced themselves that the lives of the members of Led Zeppelin were under threat and that the only way to combat a possible assassination attempt whilst touring the States was to hand-pick the most vicious brutes known throughout the whole Western world to be on their team. When you think about it, it was a distinctly ‘punk’ way of reacting, particularly for a bunch who’d lately been branded ‘tired old farts’ by the same demographic. After all, back in London, Malcolm McLaren was behaving in an identical fashion and making out like a bandit on the publicity. His thugs just hadn’t killed anybody yet.

But razor-boys and the violence groupies who enable them were generally less tolerated in the American music business of the late seventies. Bill Graham had Grant and co. (briefly) jailed and fingerprinted and then went on the radio to denounce Led Zeppelin and their management as the closest thing in rock ’n’ roll to Nazi Germany. This must have sounded like serious fighting talk to Grant’s ears - he was Jewish after all - but he was still too chemically looped to fully comprehend the consequences of what he’d set into motion in Oakland. As Richard Cole later recalled, ‘Once we got out of jail we rounded up the troops, jumped on a plane and got the hell out of town. We went to New Orleans where we were going to be given the keys to the city! Led Zeppelin was to be the first group to play at their new stadium.’ The group hadn’t even had time to book into their New Orleans hotel when a phone call came to the reception area requesting the presence of Robert Plant. Plant - who’d apparently been unhappy about John Bindon being on the tour and who’d also been the only Zeppelin member to try and talk reasonably with Bill Graham on the day of the aggression - then learned that his six-year-old son Karac had suddenly died from a mysterious viral infection.

From that moment on, Led Zeppelin was never the same again. In his sorrow Plant turned away from the life he’d been living for the past ten years and even considered giving up music as a career and becoming a teacher instead. He was also apparently deeply hurt when Page, Jones and Grant failed to appear in person to pay their respects at his son’s funeral. But Grant had already exiled himself away deep inside his warped head-space. One of Bill Graham’s assistants, Nicholas Clainos, was in conference with his boss in their San Francisco office the night the news came through. The phone rang. ‘Bill’s secretary said, “There’s a guy on the line who says he’s Peter Grant,”’ Clainos later recalled. ‘Bill and I picked up the phone. Bill said “Hello.” The guy was speaking real low. He said, “I hope you’re happy.” Those were his exact words. Bill said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “Thanks to you, Robert Plant’s kid died today.” And he hung up the phone. We found out later . . . [Led Zeppelin] had to go home. They cancelled New Orleans and they never played again in America as the original Led Zeppelin. In their eyes, it was all karma and all tied together. Whether Robert Plant ever thought that or only Peter Grant, I don’t know.’

The above testimony is just one eyewitness quote from a whole grizzly chapter dedicated to the Oakland incident and its repercussions that appears in Bill Graham Presents, the famed promoter’s posthumous autobiography. Published in the nineties, a copy of the book fell into the hands of Grant himself not long before his own death from heart failure in 1995. According to a friend whom he contacted as soon as he’d finished reading its contents, the revelations in the chapter entitled ‘Led Zeppelin’ caused the big man to weep uncontrollably. ‘Is it all true though?’ asked the friend, who happened to be Ed Bicknell, Dire Straits’ manager. ‘Yes,’ replied Grant through gulping tears. The truth had clearly mortified him. ‘I don’t want to be remembered as a bad person,’ he kept saying. But it was too late. History was about to shunt his positive accomplishments into the margins and portray him for the ages as some fearsome ogre who hired known killers to help further his omnipotence.

Virtually everyone in the rock ’n’ roll hemisphere seemed to be adrift in troubled waters during 1977. It was that kind of year. You might look enviously across the Atlantic at groups like the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac raking in the cash, hogging the top slots in the hit parade and racking up multi-platinum sales for their latest output, but when you actually listened to either Hotel California or Rumours it became numbingly apparent that it was just more high-grade cocaine music for the masses. Bruce Springsteen, the country’s big hope, was out of action for most of the year, tied down by legal proceedings that threatened to jinx his future recording career. And the US heartland was generally unresponsive to the first New York-based punk recordings being made available. The Ramones still weren’t getting played on the radio and the debut albums by Talking Heads, Television and Richard Hell and the Voidoids were all destined to attain only meagre chart placings in their homeland. A few disaffected kids in every major city would cherish these records but there was no discernibly ‘mainstream’ youth shift towards all things ‘punk’ like there was that year throughout Britain.

It was still some kind of freak-show cult out there in the land of shopping malls and sagebrush. Some elemental galvanising force needed to arrive in the country much like the Beatles had in 1964 and then take the nation completely by storm. Iggy Pop was too old and the Ramones didn’t really have the right personalities for the job. The only logical candidates were the Sex Pistols. In late autumn of 1977, Bill Graham, Peter Grant’s new worst nightmare, contacted Malcolm McLaren and offered the band their very own San Francisco showcase at an old hippie venue he still ran known as the Winterland. McLaren eventually took him up on his offer and scheduled a small tour of other US states to precede the show. And that - as history now clearly indicates - was the end of the Sex Pistols. America has a habit of decimating English groups on their first tour of the colonies and such was the case with Shepherd’s Bush’s finest. In the end they had the bollocks but lacked the stamina. If the New York Dolls were too much too soon, the Pistols were too little too fast.

I saw Sid maybe two weeks before he was due to ‘invade’ the United States. I was walking out of a dope house on Powis Square as he stumbled into the courtyard. He was wearing a black patch over his right eye like a pirate. ‘Is that for theatrical effect then?’ I asked him. It wasn’t, he cheerily insisted. He’d lately lost the vision in his right eye. It was all to do with him shooting up something he shouldn’t have and going temporarily blind as a consequence. Then he mentioned - apropos of nothing - that he’d overdosed thirteen times in the previous twelve weeks. He was grinning as he said it, like he was waving around some kind of junkie badge of courage. ‘Way to go, son. Way to go,’ I mumbled back. And then we went our separate ways. I knew I’d never see him again. The smell of death coming off him had become way too pungent.

It’s funny though - when Sid got booked for murdering Nancy over in Manhattan a few months into 1978, his mother, whom I’d never met before, sought me out at the NME’s new office in Carnaby Street. She was a well-spoken, small, birdlike woman - pencil-thin, quiet-natured, noticeably intelligent, younger-looking than I’d expected - and she asked me to help her in drumming up support for her son in his darkest hour. By chance, the Clash were having a record-company-sponsored knees-up for their latest recording only a few streets away and so I shepherded her over to the festivities and introduced her to Mick Jones and Paul Simonon. I think they actually ended up playing a special benefit show for Sid not long afterwards. In the brief time we were together, I pondered asking Ann Beverley how she felt now about having used heroin whilst her son was still in her womb. And what had actually transpired in their home environment to create such a monster - but left the questions unspoken. I didn’t want to cultivate any kind of relationship with the woman. I just wanted to be rid of the whole sordid Sid scenario and the hateful, barbaric time frame that had seen its rise and fall.

Did anything good happen for me in 1977? Well, I managed to obtain a pre-release tape of Television’s Marquee Moon album sometime in spring and played it incessantly on the crummy little cassette player I took with me on my travels around London’s smack shacks. I quickly concluded that I hadn’t heard new music this compelling in years and wrote a long review to the effect that ended up netting the New York quartet their first NME cover. This exposure actually gave Television a handy springboard for instant recognition in a country where no one had yet heard them play a note. Upon its release, Marquee Moon penetrated the lower echelons of the UK album top 30 and even the notoriously prickly Tom Verlaine thanked me later for having aided its commercial momentum. At least it indicated to me that whilst my own writing might have become stilted and flawed of late, my instincts for recognising other people’s talent were still safe and sound.

The only other worthwhile assignment I pulled off for the NME that year was to instigate the first interview the paper ever ran with Elvis Costello. I’d known his manager Andrew Jakeman, aka Jake Riviera, for more than three years and had watched him formulate and then boldly put into practice an independent record label he’d called Stiff, which began releasing singles in ’77. I’d also steered the Damned onto his management roster a year earlier. Jake started out pinning his main hopes on developing Nick Lowe from the underrated pub-rock stalwarts Brinsley Schwarz as a hit-making singer/songwriter and record producer but secretly lusted to find his very own Bob Dylan to play Albert Grossman alongside. When a former roadie of Lowe’s old group sent in a demo tape to Stiff, he sensed he’d struck gold dust. There was a compelling urgency in Declan MacManus’s beseeching voice and an eloquence and trickiness to the lyrics of all his self-penned compositions that were astonishing to hear from one so young. The twenty-year-old MacManus had lately been gaining experience as a struggling UK Bruce Springsteen clone with a group named Flip City but was now ready to assume a musical identity of his own. Riviera renamed him Elvis Costello but MacManus was otherwise firmly in control of his own destiny.

The newly rechristened Costello was as young as any of the other punk upstarts making merry that year and could instinctively relate to their rage and youthful audacity. But his music drew from a deeper well than the one containing just the Stooges and a bit of reggae. He’d already digested the works of the real masters of pop songcraft - Burt Bacharach, Brian Wilson, Lennon and McCartney, Bob Dylan and Randy Newman - and was determined to create songs of his own that stood up to their exacting standards. He was a big talent and big thinker blessed with a canny knack for self-packaging. ‘The only motivating points for me writing songs are revenge and guilt,’ he’d seethed at me during our first encounter. It was a great line that was destined to appear many times hence in banner headlines over other articles on the guy. He knew it and I knew it too. He was using me to construct his very own media profile for future exploitation.

But he was still very young and not a little drunk and so when he slipped out of his Mr Angry routines and started to reveal a sweeter, more playful nature, I warmed to him. He ended up paying me two of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received. The first was something he told me in an alcoholic semi-stupor. Just before making music his full-time profession, Costello had been working in the office of a company engaged in the creation and upkeep of early computers. On his last day there, he went to clean out his desk and found my old Brian Wilson articles from 1975 lurking at the bottom.

And he wrote part of his song ‘Waiting for the End of the World’ about seeing me almost get attacked by fellow passengers on a tube ride out towards Middlesex. I’m the guy in the first verse - or at least that’s what its composer told me. I don’t mean to brag but I’ve been the subject matter of several tunes penned by the great, the good and the indifferent. Chrissie Hynde lyrically re-enacted our ugly break-up in a dirgey ballad the Pretenders released in 1994 called ‘977’. Adam and his wretched Ants wrote and recorded a sneer-driven early B-side called ‘Press Darlings’ that featured the refrain ‘Nick Kent - he’s the best-dressed man in the town’. And Morrissey’s supposed to have penned a particularly vituperative attack on my person that I’ve never bothered to listen to-a song called ‘Reader Meet Author’ that appeared on 1996’s Southpaw Grammar. Being a ‘rock muse’ may be the secret dream of many but believe me, hearing your name and likeness sullied in song isn’t all it’s supposedly cracked up to be. I could’ve certainly done without the exposure. But I always liked the Elvis song and hearing him play it live that year with his Attractions was always a moment to cherish. It told me that even in my current shabby state, I was somehow still having an impact on the way rock culture was developing.

But the best thing that happened to me in 1977 occurred in late autumn, when I finally succeeded in becoming a registered drug addict at an NHS-sponsored facility in Westbourne Grove. It was actually just a small wooden hut that had been recently constructed on the grounds of the local hospital to deal with the growing heroin epidemic in the region. A young doctor and a nurse were in charge. Their job was to determine whether anyone who came through the door seeking their aid was a real addict or some joker trying to feign dependency in order to ponce off the system. If - after countless urine samples - you’d proven to them that you were one of the former breed, then they’d prescribe you daily dosages of a drug called methadone - almost exclusively taken orally in liquid form - which you could then pick up legally and free of charge from an obliging chemist’s.

I liked methadone. A lot. It gave me the same warm inner glow and skewed sense of dreamy invulnerability that heroin had provided at the beginning. In fact, there didn’t seem to be much difference between the two drugs - they were equally addictive on a purely physical level and interacted pleasingly with the same parts of the brain once they’d invaded the bloodstream. Ultimately I was just substituting one bad form of chemical dependency with another.

But there were still immediate upsides aplenty for me to gloat over. First and foremost, it broke the spell smack had me under for the past four years. This was a miraculous occurrence in itself: another few months of struggling through the life I’d been living of late and I’d have ended up a corpse decomposing inside a condemned building. Everyone I’d started out using heroin with was now dead, near death or facing jail time. We all should have known better. We’d all read the stories. Heroin is bad karma in powder form and it killed loads of jazz musicians so what chance did the flakier rock generation stand under its influence? We were all like sheep being led to the slaughterhouse. But then just as I reached the killing floor, salvation - in the form of a methadone script - plucked me away from death’s merciless blade. I had a lot to be thankful for. I was now getting high daily on a drug that was both legal and free. That was my definition back then of heaven on earth.

And I no longer had to spend 80 per cent of my waking hours wasting time in increasingly dangerous hot spots looking to score a drug that was sucking up 100 per cent of my income. For the first time in ages, I had money in my pockets again. That winter I moved into a hotel in Kilburn and rented a cheap room there throughout the next twelve months. I started bathing regularly and taking better care of my physical appearance. Let’s just say that personal hygiene hadn’t been too high on my list of priorities during those hard-core junkie years. I started eating again too. Before that, I’d been subsisting on a daily diet of bread and soup. When I could afford it, I’d sometimes buy a can of baked beans to tide my intestinal juices over, but now the prospect of eating from a plate full of warm, solid, nutritious food was a luxury I could once more afford. I must have felt like I was back in the high life again even though I was really still just chicken-scratching around in the outer margins of abject poverty.

If you’d been living in or even commuting to London during 1977, you’d have more than likely seen me promenading through its streets. Every postal code in the metropolis had its pathways stained by my shadow that year. I was always on the move, scurrying from one dilemma to the next. My presence often provoked verbal abuse from other passers-by-I may hold the seventies record for being called a poof the most times in public by complete strangers - but at least it had never escalated into the realm of actual bodily attacks.

But then in mid-December I found myself strolling alone through King’s Cross late one evening when I suddenly felt a sharp pain in the back of my neck. I turned slightly and realised someone was directly behind me holding a knife. As this sank in, three more individuals surrounded me, pointing their knives at my face.

There was a sort of open field next to where we were all standing - a dismal-looking patch of parched grass and brown rainy mud. They propelled me onto this stretch and began beating and slashing my skin with their weapons. They were more punk wannabes who wanted to do what Sid did. I’d never seen them before in my life. But boy, did they leave a lasting impression. They had this ritual of first cutting me and then kicking me in the same place their knives had just been. My face was such a bloody pulp from the attack after three minutes I could barely see in front of me and strongly sensed I was about to be stabbed to death. Somehow I struggled to my feet at one point and screamed at them ‘Just kill me. Get it over with’ over and over again. It seemed to stun them momentarily. Then I felt a boot connect with the left side of my lower torso and, as I started to fall to the ground again, another boot drove into my skull, effectively knocking me unconscious.

When I came to, my assailants had vanished into the night, leaving me spreadeagled like a piece of human debris in the drizzling rain. For a while I didn’t have the strength to pick myself up off the ground. But at the same time I could feel my blood seeping into the mud around me and I knew that if I didn’t get back on my feet there and then I’d never ever be getting up again.

I managed to negotiate the several streets needed in order to collapse in a nearby drug house of recent acquaintance. A junkie girl living there bathed my wounds with a damp cloth whilst her boyfriend fed me with lashings of Valium, pain pills and reefer. An hour later, I was blissfully high and laughing out loud at some inane spectacle playing itself out on the tiny black-and-white TV they had in their room. A very, very bad thing had just befallen me but I’d not been left traumatised by its occurrence. This moment would stay with me because it was the moment I realised that whatever vile circumstances fate might still have in store for me, I’d somehow find a way to survive them all. Over the past two years, I’d been beaten by chains, stabbed with knives and had my very lifeblood drained by drugs and homelessness. All I needed now was to be visited by a plague of locusts and an outbreak of boils and I could have set myself up quite credibly as a seventies fop son of Job figure. But my recent travails had left me stronger in spirit than I’d first imagined. I’d become battle-tested.

I was just counting the days now until 1977 reached its expiration date. I couldn’t wait to be shot of it. Rastafarians had put forth the theory that the year would be one of mighty, life-altering mystical portent. When the two sevens clashed - so they preached - an apocalypse would be ignited. Either that or some momentous messianic visitation-I was never quite sure which. But of course nothing remotely like that actually came to pass.

On the white side of the tracks, though, the grim reaper had been hard at work. By year’s end, the obituary lists were overflowing. There was Elvis checking out on the commode and Marc Bolan the fatal victim in the passenger seat of a car that crashed into a tree. ‘Who’s dead this week then?’ Mick Jagger had asked me that summer over lunch in a Soho-based Chinese restaurant. ‘Hard to tell these days innit. Pop stars! They’re dropping like flies. Droppin’ all over the place, mate.’ He was being flippant but the point was still clear. That dark vortex he and his henchmen had helped open up in the Zeitgeist of a dawning decade was now reaching critical mass and getting darker and more omnivorous with every ticking second. Anyone who tells you 1977 was a bright and bountiful year wasn’t really living in the belly of the beast. Those of us who were deserve a medal for simply having stayed the course. Meanwhile, 1978 lay ahead, grinning like a lazy crocodile. Old Blighty was about to get royally pussy-whipped by Mrs T and her political enablers. To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Macbeth - what fresh hell was all this going to set into motion?