Nick Kent, who is as close as British music journalism ever came to producing a legend, finally stopped writing about rock in 2007. “There was really nothing around that sparked my imagination,” he tells me. “There was no mystery, and rock’n’roll needs mystery.” So ended a singular odyssey that had begun 35 years earlier, in 1972, when Kent joined a then struggling NME and, within a year or two, had helped push its weekly readership to near the 300,000 mark. Back then, a tall, stick-thin fop in leather trousers, matching biker jacket, a dangling earring and eyeliner, Kent was as sartorially stylish and – to borrow one of his own phrases – as “elegantly wasted” as the dissolute rock stars he profiled. And he walked it like he talked it, hanging out with the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, befriending Iggy Pop, stepping out with Chrissie Hynde (briefly a fellow NME writer) and even playing guitar in a very early incarnation of the Sex Pistols. By 1975, though, a burgeoning heroin habit had impinged on his ability to meet deadlines – never his strong suit – and so began several years of struggle with an addiction that, by the end of the decade, had consigned him to the margins. “I was in the right place at the right time, on the wrong drugs,” he says. “That was essentially the story of my 1970s.” All of that seems an eternity ago. Now approaching his 70th birthday, a milestone few of his contemporaries would have bet on him reaching, Kent is enjoying a life of quotidian domesticity in Paris, his adopted home since the late 1980s, when, finally off drugs, he fled London and his old errant lifestyle. “I survived,” he says, matter of factly. “And now I’m officially going to be an old man and it’s OK. I’ve been married for 32 years [to the French music journalist Laurence Romance] and my son, James [a successful electronic musician who goes by the name Perturbator], is 27. I live a pretty quiet life these days – my profile is so low it’s almost nonexistent.” All that may change with the imminent publication of Kent’s first novel, The Unstable Boys, a darkly comic caper about the strange afterlife of a briefly famous 60s rock group of the same name. Having been consigned to the dustbin of pop history for decades, the surviving members suddenly attain cult status via one of those rose-tinted critical reappraisals that classic rock magazines like Mojo specialise in. The story really takes flight when their ageing lead singer, who still trades under his stage name “The Boy”, turns up on the doorstep of his most obsessive fan, Michael Martindale, a successful but vulnerable, middle-aged crime writer in thrall to the primal 60s rock music of his adolescence. Inevitably, mayhem ensues as the deluded, but ruthlessly opportunistic, idol shamelessly exploits his adoring acolyte. “I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of the world’s biggest fan of an underrated 60s rock group opening his door to find his idol, a damaged Syd Barrett type, standing there seeking shelter,” says Kent. “That scenario was the starting point for the book, and from there, it could only go one way – someone’s wildest dream suddenly and unbelievably comes true, but just as quickly turns into a nightmare.” This, he tells me, is what actually happened when the legendary 50s rocker Vince Taylor turned up unannounced at the home of his fan club president in the mid-1970s. Taylor, a wildly maverick character who also became the template for David Bowie’s alter ego Ziggy Stardust, had originally found fleeting fame as, in Kent’s words, “England’s first dangerous rock star”. His career was derailed by an onstage mental breakdown precipitated by his prodigious use of LSD and amphetamines. That, as Kent tells me, was only the half of it. “The story goes that he turned up at his fan club president’s house in Switzerland. Of course, the guy could not believe his luck and invited him to stay for as long as he liked. Big mistake. Before long, his wife had left him, his dog had disappeared and his pub had burnt down.” Kent is eager to point out that, while the Vince Taylor anecdote was the starting point for his novel, the character of The Boy is not based on the doomed 50s rocker, or in fact on anyone he encountered in his time as a rock journalist. “The book is not a roman à clef,” he insists. “It’s not a thinly disguised portrait of an actual 60s rock band like, say, the Pretty Things, who were great but never made it big. Instead, I wanted to create a character who has the kind of humongous narcissistic personality disorder that Donald Trump has. In fact, if you ask me, Trump is the ultimate frustrated rock star. He’s Axl Rose in 1991, haranguing the media and film stars from the stage. But, at least Axl had his music. Trump doesn’t have that outlet, he just has his ego.” For all that, his novel has the ring of truth, not least in its skewering of rock megalomania and the nerdy, needy, predominantly male fandom that feeds it. And, it turns out, some incidents in the book are based on events that Kent actually witnessed back in his NME days, having been granted the kind of access that today’s music writers can only dream of. “There’s a scene in which a girl has a plate of spaghetti thrown at her face,” he says. “I actually saw Keith Moon [the drummer in the Who] do that to a girl, and she had to be taken to hospital. You realise pretty quickly that there are consequences to that sort of so-called rock’n’roll behaviour.” Back in 1972, Kent arrived at NME by way of a short apprenticeship at an underground paper called Frendz, which was situated on London’s Portobello Road and edited by a young Rosie Boycott. Aged 21, he had turned up there unannounced and offered his services as an album reviewer, which they gratefully accepted. “It was the end of the long hippy daze,” he says, laughing, “and Portobello Road was still bohemia central. I wasn’t expecting to get paid, I just wanted to write about music instead of linguistics, which I had been studying at Bedford College.” He submitted his reviews in longhand, they were duly published, and the next time he visited the office, he was offered the music editor’s job. “That’s how ridiculous those days were,” he says. Like many survivors, he has a raft of rock’n’ roll anecdotes to hand from those heady times. One of his earliest assignments, he tells me, was an on-the-road piece on Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, arguably the most far-out American rock group of all, who were touring the UK. He recalls their bus breaking down en route to a gig in Brighton and he and the group repairing to a nearby motorway service station cafe. “In walks this bunch of total freaks in retina-strafing coloured outfits, all of them, apart from Beefheart, who hated drugs, off their heads on PCP [a powerful hallucinogenic commonly known as “angel dust”]. People just left.” Having somehow managed to order food, the band realised they did not have enough money to pay for it. “Beefheart immediately drew a squiggle on a napkin and offered it to the old dear on the till,” recalls Kent, laughing. “She just shook her head and, in this Irene Handl voice, said, ‘Sorry dear, we only take money here.’” By the summer, Kent had been recruited by NME, where, alongside other pioneering writers like Charles Shaar Murray and the late Ian MacDonald, he set about reinventing music journalism as a serious medium. Even among his most gifted peers, he was a one-off, whether championing unsung proto-punk pioneers such as Iggy and the Stooges and the New York Dolls, or composing epic homages to lost geniuses such as Syd Barrett, Nick Drake and Brian Wilson. (His paean to the lost genius of the Beach Boys was 10,000 words long and unfolded across three issues of NME.) “Nick had his own style and it was so personal you just had to take him as he was,” says Nick Logan, the visionary editor who hired him. “He wrote in spidery long-hand, crouched over a sheet of paper, surrounded by all these cigarettes that he had left standing up so that all these little tombstones of ash formed on them. You’d get one sheet at a time and, as it got closer to the deadline, we often didn’t have time to get someone to type them out, never mind sub them properly. They just got marked up and sent to the printers. It was agonising, but it was always worth the wait.” The sheer novelistic ambition of Kent’s extended features left a deep impression on me as a young Northern Irish teenager with little access to a lot of the music he wrote about, unless John Peel played it on his radio show. It lived in my head, I tell him, through his writing. “Well, in a way, I was writing for people like you,” he replies, “but my feeling was that the majority of the NME’s readers were buying it to see what Bowie’s new look was, or to find out if Led Zeppelin were playing in a town near them. They wanted gossip and information.” By 1975, though, Kent was struggling to meet his deadlines, as his heroin problem took control of his life. At one point, he was sacked then reinstated by NME and, for a brief time, rehearsed with Glen Matlock and Steve Jones in an early version of the Sex Pistols. He later fell out of favour with the group and was famously assaulted by Sid Vicious at the 100 Club, his head bloodied by a rusty bicycle chain. A new generation of music writers had emerged and Kent found himself increasingly marginalised, though his instincts remained keen, as evidenced by a laudatory review of the now classic Marquee Moon album by the revered New York group Television. No matter how bad things got, he says, he always had “an instinct for music that would have a lasting influence even if it would never be mainstream”. In John Cooper Clarke’s recent memoir, I Wanna be Yours, he recalls crossing paths with Kent in 1976, when both of them were heroin addicts: “If you saw him across the road, you’d go ‘WOW!’ A fantastic rock’n’roll apparition, but when you got up close you’d notice the patina of grime. It was like he slept in his clothes all the time, or perhaps never went to bed.” When I started writing for NME in the mid-1980s, Kent would appear in the office from time to time, looking slightly bedraggled but still evincing a rock’n’roll cool, his famous leather trousers now ripped and torn with wear. Does he regret the bad decisions that knocked him off course? “I regret that it took so long to get clean. I was four years on heroin and 10 years as a registered methadone addict. The worst thing about addiction is the time you spend waiting, all the wasted time when you’re not really functioning. Also, I was not a nice person when I was on hard drugs. There was an arrogance that did not win me any friends. So, guilty as charged.” By the late 1980s, though, having finally cleaned up, Kent’s byline was appearing regularly in the Face magazine, which was owned by his old mentor, Nick Logan. There, he brilliantly profiled legends such as Miles Davis and Jerry Lee Lewis as well as Prince and the Smiths. “You could say, I got lucky again, but you make your own luck by working hard.” His collected journalism, some of it updated, was finally published in 1994 in a volume called The Dark Stuff, and he found himself sought out by younger writers and musicians, many of whom visited his Paris apartment to pay their respects. I remember a long evening spent there, the conversation ranging far and wide, from Morrissey and Shane MacGowan to TS Eliot. It struck me afterwards that he was, at heart, a storyteller, a myth maker, whose own tangled story had itself become a part of rock’s mythology. It seems obvious in a way that he would write a novel, however belatedly. Is he anxious about how this late foray into fiction will be received critically? “Well, I’m interested to know what people think. I worked hard on the plot and I think it’s pretty credible. As a reader, I’d enjoy it.” As he approaches old age, does he reflect on his younger, wilder life and wonder what happened to those times when rock music meant so much to people like himself? “Well, I’m not going to give you the whole ‘rock is dead’ line, but it is a cult now and maybe it will flourish as a cult, I really don’t know. The people I knew back then who got up on stage and performed, they did it because they had no choice. They really could not have done anything else. I mean, Iggy Pop went to university, but could you imagine him teaching your daughter?” One could, of course, say the same about Nick Kent. • The Unstable Boys by Nick Kent is published by Constable on 28 January (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply