Dark Stuff

"Kent first made his journalistic name with elegiac yet unsparing celebrations of rock's 'lost boys'-–Brian Wilson, Syd Barrett, Nick Drake-–and now his willingness to confront the extent to which his own considerable talents were dissipated rather than sustained by the self-conscious pursuit of decadence allows him to bring a welcome new perspective to the all-too-familiar contours of the addiction memoir. When he describes the experience of re-reading the articles he wrote at the height of his drug-addled notoriety as 'like watching a man trying to swim his way through an ocean of mud', you can almost feel the barnacles of chemical dependency being stripped away from the steel hull of his intellect.'"

Ben Thompson in The Independent reviews Nick Kent's Apathy for the Devil.