Apathy for the Devil by Nick Kent

girl in front of a giant full-length mirror whilst his mostly teenage female fans would scream ‘Me! Me! Me!’ back at him hysterically from the stalls. Certainly it was a shallow and sometimes unhealthy spectacle but infinitely more entertaining than having to sit through yet another twenty-minute-long drum solo. Prog rock’s halcyon days were suddenly numbered. The kids wanted vanity instead of virtuosity and Bolan was ideally suited to spearhead the new sea change - at least until his nemesis David Bowie swept in and stole his audience the following year.
    Stewart, Bolan and Bowie were all flashily attired young fops who’d already tried to become superstars in the sixties only to languish in the musical margins of the decade. Their early failures had simply strengthened their resolve to make their mark on a
new era. A similar case was Cat Stevens; in 1967 Stevens had enjoyed two UK pop hit singles - ‘I Love My Dog’ and ‘Matthew and Son’ which he’d written and recorded whilst still in his late teens. Ill health then dogged him for the rest of the decade and he fell off the pop radar for a while. But at the very outset of the seventies he bounced back as a bedroom mystic troubadour hippie Rod McKuen and by 1971 - when he had two new albums out, Tea for the Tillerman and Teaser and the Firecat - he’d become the new Messiah of the sensitivity set.
    In early October I moved in to a dormitory overlooking Regent’s Park, where Bedford College was actually located. The single room I occupied there became my new living quarters and my first home away from my parents’ hearth. A month earlier I’d had my heart broken for the very first time: Joanne had chucked me. My first reaction was to feel like a victim in some maudlin country song about small-town cheating hearts but fortunately I didn’t have the time or circumstances to mope too much. After all, I was one of maybe only three males living in a building with twenty-seven females, many of whom were soon inviting me into their rooms to get better acquainted.
    That’s when I experienced first-hand the hold Cat Stevens then had on young middle-class women throughout the British Isles. Practically all my female fellow students were head-over-heels in love with the guy and played his albums as though their lives depended on it. They were mostly nice girls from the provinces with lank hair and long skirts who were adjusting to their arrival in wicked old London by immersing themselves day and night in Cat Stevens’s soothing airy-fairy blather until his discs became their own personal comfort zones. Sometimes their record-listening habits would stretch to superior musings like
Joni Mitchell’s ‘River’ or anything by Leonard Cohen but they’d always return to the Cat-man piously proclaiming morning had broken. I couldn’t stand it. His music was so drippy and saccharine it made my teeth ache. I quickly developed an irrational hatred of the man, which only intensified the following year when I started knowing several bona fide rock groupies in the biblical sense and all these women turned out to be dating Cat Stevens at the same time. One of them even phoned him up when we were together to tell him what she was up to. Now, of course, Cat Stevens is internationally known as a devout Muslim who left the lust-filled music industry to dedicate his life to his strict religious beliefs but back in the day the Tea for the Tillerman man was getting more pussy than Frank Sinatra.
    Talking of pussy, I actually lost my virginity at the end of my first week there. Before that, I’d engaged in what can only be described as tentative oral sex but I’d never been inside a woman. I seem to recall being worried about actual penetration because so many of my school-going cronies had gotten their girlfriends pregnant and been prematurely forced into matrimony and a dead-end provincial job. But I’d finally escaped that sorry fate and was now free to make up for lost time