THE HISTORY OF THE NME: HIGH TIMES AND LOW LIVES AT THE WORLD9S MOST FAMOUS MUSIC MAGAZINE by PAT LONG

Author:PAT LONG [LONG, PAT]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PORTICO
Published: 2012-02-16T16:00:00+00:00

Doomed love: Chrissie Hynde and Nick Kent, 1975 (© Joe Stevens)

‘I used to get the NME at my local mall in Ohio, where it was always a couple of weeks late,’ Hynde says. ‘It was the only English paper I’d see and I didn’t know much about the English rock scene but there was one piece which I cut out and sellotaped to my wall, an Iggy Pop review. That review was one of my inspirations to leave America and move to London: “at least they get Iggy Pop there”.’

Born into a middle-class family in the small city of Akron, Ohio, Hynde attended Kent State University’s Art School, and was on campus during the May 1970 shootings, during which National Guardsmen opened fire on unarmed college students, killing four and inspiring the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young single ‘Ohio’. Obsessed with rock’n’roll and its peripheral concerns, in October 1973, aged 22, Hynde moved to London. She didn’t know anyone in the city, or indeed the country.

‘A few months after I arrived I went to some student party in Acton and I walked in and I was in a bad mood because some guy had nicked my records. So I was grumbling about how someone had stolen my copy of Raw Power and this voice from the back of the room says “I know Iggy Pop”. I was pleased because I’d been in London for months and no one I’d met had even heard of Iggy. Anyway, weeks later I realised that this was the guy who had written the article that I had stuck to my wall.’

Nick Kent rapidly moved himself and his few possessions into Hynde’s shared flat in Clapham. In return, he introduced her to Ian MacDonald, who offered her some freelance writing work when her job answering the phone in an architect’s office fell through.

‘I didn’t have a work permit and was doing all this hand-to-mouth illegal stuff so I thought I had no choice but to take the work,’ says Hynde. ‘I never thought of myself as a writer but they kept bigging me up – they’d print pictures of me in the paper and I didn’t want to be known as a writer because I didn’t feel like I was very good at it. Then one day they asked me to write a piece looking back at The Velvet Underground and I thought well, “I don’t want to be doing looking back pieces”, so I quit.’

Taking up a job at McLaren’s Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, by now renamed Sex, Hynde also split up with Kent after he gave her gonorrhea. He repaid her by turning up at the shop one day, removing his leather belt and whipping her with it, drawing blood while the rest of the shop’s staff cowered behind the counter.

It didn’t end there. One night in July 1976, the day before Mick Farren’s Titanic piece was published in NME, Kent was watching the Sex Pistols and The Damned play at the 100 Club when he was approached by Sid Vicious and a friend from his pre-Vicious days.

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