Writing a 1970s memoir 30 years after the fact is, one imagines, akin to playing private detective with your own past. For the first half of that decade Nick Kent led a charmed life, reporting on the era’s most mercurial acts for the NME: the Stooges, the New York Dolls, David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin. Iggy Pop saved his life. Chrissie Hynde was his first long term girlfriend. Lester Bangs tutored him in journalism.

But some time after Kent’s short-lived stint as guitarist with the embryonic Sex Pistols it all went belly-up, culminating in an assault at the hands of Sid Vicious and Jah Wobble, and the former wonder boy of London letters spent most of the 70s and 80s in junkie squalor – not that it’s impeded his powers of recollection.

“My memory is very good,” Kent says on the phone from his home in France. “I wish I could blot out more, frankly. Drugs don’t necessarily destroy memory as some people claim. While I was planning this book I talked to several people, like Chrissie Hynde, and (NME photographer) Pennie Smith who I worked with and who never took a drug in all the time I’ve known her, and their memories were pretty bad, so I just trusted my own.

“I still dream of that decade, and the dreams are very bittersweet,” Kent continues. “They’re not nightmares, but once again I’m homeless, once again I’m a drug addict, once again I’m dealing with people who are so fucking vain you can’t trust them as far as you can throw them ‘cos you really don’t know what their agenda is. And at the same time I’ve got my own agenda, I’m just as ruthless as they are.

“That was my personal tragedy during that period, the inability to trust anybody. I couldn’t really trust the NME because we were often at cross purposes. My relationship with the people I was writing about was tricky at best because they knew that they couldn’t control me, I wasn’t going to be in their pocket, so if Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones or whoever took me on the road with them, they were taking a gamble. They liked what I was doing and they were… amused by me, shall we say, and so I became very close with some of them, often on a kind of drug buddy level.”

But, as Kent concedes, you don’t need a degree in psychology, pharmacology or etymology to recognise that the words ‘drug’ and ‘buddy’ don’t belong together.

“If you’re in the world of hard drugs you can’t trust anybody, that’s a given,” he says. “The dealers and the other users are trying to rip you off, you are desperately on your own, so it’s a very, very cold life. It’s left its psychological scars, but nothing I can’t live with. I don’t regret what happened and I don’t sit around being bitter about it. I’m not particularly happy about what happened to me with Jah Wobble and Malcolm McClaren, that still irks me somewhat, but I think frankly I deserved most of it. You have to take responsibility for your own actions in this life, particularly if you’ve been a junkie. You can’t play the victim.”

Kent’s last book The Dark Stuff, a collection of writings that included epic portraits of Brian Wilson, Syd Barrett, the Stones and Neil Young, was published in 1994. Since then he’s continued to freelance, has directed music shows for French television, and is currently working on his first novel. Apathy For The Devil, he maintains, will be his last full-on rock ‘n’ roll book.

“Rock music will be evoked in other books that I do, but it won’t be as central or as factual,” he says. “I’ll still do the odd article, but I haven’t had the desire to write about anything in the music forum for the last three or four years. I love what Radiohead are doing, I’m a big fan of Rufus Wainwright, I like Weezer, there are a number of acts that I think are good, but I wouldn’t want to go on tour with them. There isn’t a rock scene to write about anymore. In the 70s all the acts were putting out at least one album a year, there was still a heathy record industry, not this thing that’s sinking into the quicksand even as we speak.

“I started writing in the first place because I’d read Melody Maker and the NME in the 60s and think, ‘You’re not telling me enough. I’m a kid stuck in fucking Grammar School out in the sticks somewhere and my imagination wants to connect as deeply as possible with the lifestyle and the adventures around this new music’. I had a very vivid awareness of what it was like to be an audience for the music press: you really want to know what’s going on in the characters of the musicians you hero worship. That’s what I was trying to create for the NME readership.”

Indeed, many dispatches from the golden age of rock journalism – Bangs’s Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, or Stanley Booth’s New Adventures of the Rolling Stones – now read more like war reportage than music writing.

“Most of us were trying in our way to develop that whole New Journalism aesthetic,” Kent says. “For me it started with Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, and then it developed with Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson. I wasn’t a huge fan of Thompson, but where he did impress and influence me was when he embedded himself in the Hell’s Angels in the late 60s. He travelled with them and did a book on them and ended up getting beaten up very badly by them. I thought, ‘Shit, what I need to do is embed myself in the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin and the Sex Pistols, and then write about this thing as a big adventure’.”

Kent ended up emulating Thompson in ways he mightn’t have expected or desired. His sojourn inside the Pistols’ camp culminated in betrayal when he was attacked by Jah Wobble and chain-whipped by Sid Vicious one night at the 100 Club. Here is where Apathy For the Devil is at its best: debunking rose-tinted retrospectives of punk and examining the ugliness and violence of the period as well as the romance. After a fashion, it’s quite a moral book.

“If I so desired I could have turned Apathy For the Devil into one big tragedy,” Kent concludes, “all these people dying and having nervous breakdowns. But I felt a more honest way to write it was to turn it into a sort of comedic vehicle. It got a bit gloomy in the latter stages when I was getting beaten up and god knows what else, but I’ve made my peace with the person that I was. I’ve changed a great deal, but I can still readily relate to him, he’s just a work in progress version of me who was very young and caught up in a situation where he didn’t have much choice but to behave in the way he did. And I’m at a place in my life now where writing is almost pleasant, which it wasn’t in the past, it was a traumatic experience that involved drinking loads of cups of coffee and getting into a right state. Now I want to write more. I feel the world needs more Nick Kent books.”

Apathy For the Devil is published by Faber & Faber