The Dark Stuff Quotes

“Self-destructing – in rock, in public, in fact anywhere – is not good for the human spirit, not to mention the lungs, liver and kidneys. Artistically, it’s best approached the way David Bowie did it in the mid-1970s. His cocaine addiction turned him into a withered stick-insect figure of a man but also inspired the best music of his entire career. Then he sorted himself out and became the golden-haired survivor we know and love today.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“A genius musician but an amateur human being.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“But this new music had a spiritual thing going for it. This was his music, the sound of his soul rising up,”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“The building housed a strictly nine-to-five breed: hack tune-smiths and instant slogan writers – straight-arrow dudes with mortgages and ulcers who concentrated their efforts on coming up with ‘jingles, catch-phrases and the like for various advertising campaigns’.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“All this terrible self-destructive shit I supposedly did,’ he claimed five years ago, ‘I only did it because I believed I was in the right and that I was playing the music that real people with real lives wanted to hear. Frankly, throughout my life, I’ve always felt I was completely innocent. I see myself as a genuine innocent. Always have done.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“Elvis Presley exhibited all the classic symptoms of those driven to self-destruction by too much fame and medication: short attention span, an egocentric, chronically addictive personality, bad taste in friends and horrendous eating habits. He was also stupid.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“Everybody has a shadow self to contend with but most manage to contain it effectively as they settle into their regimented routines of daily living. Rock stars, by contrast, are often actively encouraged to cultivate their darker qualities and that’s where the trouble usually starts.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“now, with too much idle time on his hands, he was a lost boy.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“Iggy and his father have always been kindred spirits split by different eras and different social circumstances.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“hypermanic – that’s one level below becoming a full-on manic depressive.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“all this vital music pouring out of him, all this new-found acceptance coming his way as well as money and acclaim, and all the guy wanted to do was sleep through the whole experience.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“In a sense, it’s all about running away. I’ve been running all my life. Where I’m going … Who the fuck knows? But that’s not the point. The point is just to see how long you can keep going strong. And right now there is no end. The way I feel now, I can keep going for a long time.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“I’ve got to keep moving somewhere. I’ve written some of my best songs on the move, driving on a long journey, scribbling lyrics on cigarette packets while steering. I like that style,”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“I try to be as understandable and easy-going as possible.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“Something just opened up inside me,’ he’d say softly. ‘I don’t know what it is but I can feel it every day now. I don’t take anything for granted anymore.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“That’s what I was gonna do, and I wasn’t going to hurt. And if you shut yourself off and say, “This isn’t going to hurt me,” you can’t shut it down without shutting it down totally. I closed myself down so much that I was making it, doing great with surviving – but my soul was completely encased. I didn’t even consider that I would need a soul to play my music, that when I shut the door on pain, I shut the door on my music. That’s what I did. And that’s how people get old.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“That’s what I was gonna do, and I wasn’t going to hurt. And if you shut yourself off and say, “This isn’t going to hurt me,” you can’t shut it down without shutting it down totally. I closed myself down so much that I was making it, doing great with surviving – but my soul was completely encased.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“You can make it on your own time? / Laid-back and laughing? Oh no!’ he’d admonished during the album’s grand finale. It was just his way of letting the culture know that the upcoming seventies were going to be very tricky indeed, that all that sixties sweet-talk no longer applied to what lay ahead, and that it was time, for him at least, to get to grips with the dark, deadly undertow of the Aquarian age.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“OK, let’s just get really, really mellow and peaceful. Let’s make music that’s just as intense as the electric stuff but which comes from a completely different, more loving place.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“For me, an image becomes meaningless inasmuch as it’s always temporary. See, I’ve gone off on that tangent again, because you asked me about the image and all that. I just couldn’t relate to all that side of things because, all that time, I was focused on trying to make the music sound half-way decent.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“For me, an image becomes meaningless inasmuch as it’s always temporary.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“Every wall has two reasons for existing.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“could never get anything going in Toronto, never even got one gig with a band. So I moved instead towards acoustic music and immediately became very introspective and musically inward. That’s the beginning of that whole side of my music.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“Looking back on my childhood now, there’s a sort of glow to my reminiscences. It’s like my memory has blocked out most of the bad stuff. I just remember all those glorious sunny days and good times. You need to have good memories from your past. You never know when you’re going to have to depend on those memories just to see you through a bad patch in your adult life.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“Looking back on my childhood now, there’s a sort of glow to my reminiscences. It’s like my memory has blocked out most of the bad stuff.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“See, I’m not trying to write. It just comes out when it comes out. So there is no block! Like, I’m not sitting down, going [frantically], “Oh my God, I’ve got to write a song! I really, really have to … Oh my God!” Hey, if I don’t write a song, I don’t record a song. Hell, it just gives me more time to do other things.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“It’s like there’s a mighty reservoir of songs that no one’s ever heard up there in heaven and there’s a tap in Neil Young’s brain that’s somehow attached to it. All he has to do is ease his mind into the right gear and something will always come trickling down.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“Each song highlights one feeling, and whatever that feeling, I think I’ve succeeded in showing the positive elements along with its gloomy side.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“For me, adolescence was such a glorious time. The intensity of your emotions at that period in your development is something awe-inspiring, no matter how painful it might sometimes seem. I believe that none of us really grows out of that. At least I haven’t, or I just wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993

“And what I recall of it was that their zest and gusto for life was what made those times so supercharged. So that if they were drinking they’d drink a lot, and when they were playing they’d play with all their heart and soul.”
― Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993