The Dark Stuff by Nick Kent

Author:Nick Kent [NICK KENT]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2012-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

But then, when you break it down, decomposing was their greatest achievement. A mere seven hours after expiring Nancy Spungen was already smelling of death. It takes up to forty-eight hours before the putrefying odour commences in the corpses of the old. At the age of twenty both had wasted themselves beyond belief. Let them rot.

Horn-Rims from Hell: Elvis Costello

First, let it be known that young Elvis Costello is no shrinking violet when it comes to arm-wrestling manfully with the chilly tentacles of controversy. Why, even the National Front have been trying to cast their long unpleasant shadow across his path ever since the release of his debut single ‘Less Than Zero’, the song itself being a tacitly fanciful depiction of the landed gentry’s fave black sheep boy of the Isherwood era, Oswald Mosley. Our El croons about Mosley’s swastika tattoo before pointing out in a ream of impressive if often fairly hard-to-grasp couplets, the innate British hypocrisy afoot in the double-moral standard twists that forbid your favourite new-wave band, say, from polluting the main media outlets while some gnarled pathetic self-confessed anti-Semite like the senile Mosley can blithely saunter into the BBC studios and run off at the mouth for forty-five riveting minutes over his sordid reminiscences. The marchings, the beatings, the black shirts, the foul sub-Nietzschean rhetoric – the nation ‘tut-tutted’ at the time but now it’s OK ’cos the old fool’s past it and virtually everything in this scum-pit that is England gets a benevolent white-washed canonization as time goes by.

It’s OK for everyone except for one feisty young computer operator married with one child and living in Whitton near Twickenham whose brain has somehow been left unparalysed by the sickly rays of television and who is moreover downright offended by having this slimy old fascist drooling away in his living-room and who, instead of penning a barbed missive to his local MP, sits down and writes a sly little song full of jaundiced spleen.

We’re in a pub just round the corner from Island Records’ St Peter’s Square building, the man who would be king and I, talking about the subject matter of ‘Less Than Zero’, when his garrulous speed-freak Jerry Lee Lewis wanna-be of a manager Jake Riviera suddenly pipes up with the information that all the Yanks who’ve heard it think it’s about Lee Harvey Oswald. ‘Yeah right,’ Costello’s terse, gruff voice breaks in. ‘In fact’ – he’s quite animated now – ‘just for the States, I’m going to write a new set of lyrics to that song about . . . a guy, yeah, this guy’s watching the box when he suddenly sees his girlfriend right behind Lee Harvey Oswald just at the moment when Jack Ruby shoots him. And the screen . . . the shot freezes, y’know . . .’

He sits back with a self-satisfied smirk, savouring this perverse little morsel while even Riviera, whose job it is to deal with all the little weirdnesses spurting from his client’s lively mind, is temporarily rendered speechless by this information: no mean feat.

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