Apathy for the Devil by Nick Kent

Author:Nick Kent
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-fiction
ISBN: 9780306819155
Publisher: PID
Published: 2010-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

1976

Working within the media is rather like being employed as a snake handler. Sooner or later it’s going to bite you back.

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

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