Nick Kent

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Nick Kent (born December 24, 1951) is a British rock critic and musician.

Along with such writers as Paul Morley, Charles Shaar Murray and Danny Baker, Nick Kent was seen as one of the most important and influential UK music journalists of the 1970s. He wrote for the British music publication New Musical Express, moving to Melody Maker later in his career, and is the author of The Dark Stuff, a collection of his journalism. He is a musician (guitar), and rehearsed with a group musicians then using the name The London SS, but who would go on to form early British punk bands such as The Damned and The Clash. He also jammed with an early incarnation of the Sex Pistols. Kent's relationship with the punk scene was strained, however, particularly by one episode in which future Sex Pistol Sid Vicious and entourage member John "Jah Wobble" Wardle (later bassist with Public Image Ltd) allegedly attacked Kent, then already a well-known music critic and ostensibly a symbol of the music industry, at an early gig at the 100 Club. Nick Kent relates the incident in The Filth and the Fury, Director Julien Temple's 2000 documentary of the punk rock group, the Sex Pistols.

Kent's work sought to explain from a cynical point of view the lives of rock and roll musicians who risked their sanity and health. His prose was laced with images of self-destruction and ultimate compassion, exploring the reality of being an artist in the late twentieth century.