Bad drug craziness was afflicting every nook and cranny of the youth music hemisphere that year. Young hard-rock hopefuls like Michigan’s MC₅ and the Stooges were being seriously sidetracked by their addictions. Down in Georgia, the Allman Bros. Band had to be forced into a rehab clinic by their record company just prior to a tour. The intervention didn’t prevent their guitarist Duane Allman from dying in a motorbike crash just a few months later whilst stoned out of his gourd. Even the introspective US folkie brigade of the hour were tainted: James Taylor, the dulcet-voiced shy and retiring troubadour who’d lately become a bashful million-selling superstar the world over, was regularly on the nod throughout the period.

Over in England, it was just as bad. John and Yoko were both strung out. Eric Clapton had lately succumbed too. The fabled guitarist stopped playing in public in 1971 and self-medicated himself into temporary oblivion instead. He only left his country home once that year - to fly to the South of France in midsummer in order to attend Mick Jagger’s wedding. As soon as he arrived at his destination he started experiencing acute heroin withdrawal. In great physical discomfort he phoned Keith Richards - who lived nearby - for something to tide him over. ‘Tell him to go and find his own,’ responded Richards curtly to the person who answered the phone and then transmitted the message. The caring, sharing sixties were dead and gone. Now it was every man for himself.

In such a cold and divisive climate, the Rolling Stones could only further flourish. They’d never made convincing propagandists for utopianism anyway. They were more inclined to view life through a dark prism of worldly cynicism. The inky black vortex was their natural habitat and so 1971 became their greatest-ever year, their sustained moment of true creative majesty. It saw the release of two mind-boggling Stones-related films - Performance and Gimme Shelter - as well as Sticky Fingers, the best album of their entire career. That same year, they toured the UK and then tax-dodged their way over to the South of France, where they lived whilst recording their last real masterpiece, Exile on Main St., in Keith Richards’s basement.

Performance had actually been filmed in the autumn of 1968 but an early edit had so mortified the higher-ups at Warner Bros., the project’s backers, that it was initially deemed unviewable. After approximately two years of haggling and re-editing it was given a limited opening in the States, followed by a brief showcase at a plushly seated cinema in London’s West End that began in early January ’71. The delayed exposure would prove propitious to its acceptance. Late-sixties audiences would have found it generally too violent and disturbing to readily accept. It spoke far more eloquently to the uncentred, ‘something wrong something not quite right’ mood of the emerging seventies. The plot line starts out straightforwardly enough: a psychotically violent London gang-land enforcer named Chas - unforgettably played by James Fox - gets too caught up in his bloodlust and incurs the wrath of his deeply scary employers. His life in jeopardy, he hides out in the basement of a Ladbroke Grove town house only to discover that his landlord is a reclusive rock star named Turner (Jagger) who shares his living quarters with two wacky female paramours and a prodigious supply of hallucinogenic drugs. The second half of the film revolves around an extended druggy mind-fuck confrontation between the gangster, the rock star and his witchy girlfriend Pherber (Anita Pallenberg). Turner wants to fasten onto Chas’s ruthless self-confidence as a way to rekindle his own fractured career ambitions but only ends up reaping the whirlwind when Fox’s character calmly shoots him during the film’s final climax.

Essentially, it’s a cautionary tale about corrupted souls toying with forbidden forces and then having to face the consequences, but that didn’t prevent its mastermind, writer/director Donald Cammell, from also depicting the lives of his dissolute protagonists in a hypnotically alluring fashion. Seeing the naked Turner/Jagger smoking reefer in a bathtub surrounded by two exotic-looking naked European women certainly had a forceful impact on my easily stimulated late-teenage imagination. When I was only twelve years old, my dad had let me stay up to see La Dolce Vita on the telly and I’d experienced a similar tingling reaction. Fellini’s film - like Performance - is a surreal meditation on the spiritual bankruptcy that lurks within the souls of those who ardently pursue the glamorous life. But that only became apparent to me when I saw the film again years later as a fully fledged adult. As a child, all I connected with was the endless cavalcade of beautiful available women, the dizzy flashing lights and wild all-night parties. It looked like heaven on earth. And the vision Performance conjured up of life in Turner’s dimly lit Ladbroke Grove lair was equally bewitching.

The film still conveys an almost supernatural power whenever it’s shown, but its lasting brilliance was clearly obtained at a steep cost to its key players. James Fox became mentally unhinged as a result of immersing himself in the film’s disorientating script, suffered a personality meltdown and had to retire from acting for several years. Anita Pallenberg didn’t act in a film again for some time. Cammell never managed to build a prolific career for himself in cinema after Performance; he committed suicide in the nineties. And Mick Jagger deeply estranged his soulmate Keith Richards during the actual filming when he and Anita Pallenberg, Richards’s girlfriend, supposedly began an affair of their own. This would have perilous consequences as Richards chose to react to the perceived infidelity by introducing his bloodstream to the pain-relieving panacea known as heroin, thus setting in motion the Stones’ true dark age and an antipathy between the two head Stones that exists to this day.

Both Performance and Gimme Shelter - which opened in London just a few short months later - focused down hard on the calamitous predicaments that tend to prevail whenever narcissistic would-be ‘outlaws’ come into direct contact with the infinitely more barbaric genuine article. But whereas the former was a many-layered work of fiction, Shelter was a flashback-driven documentary that chillingly captured the mayhem and carnage let loose at the Altamont Speedway on December 6th 1969, when the Stones headlined a free concert there only to be upstaged by the Oakland Hells Angels - unwisely chosen to provide security around the stage - who savagely beat up anyone in the audience they happened to take a personal dislike to. ‘Altamont’ was already being touted in the print media as the byword for the spiritual death of the sixties - that and the much publicised arrest in November ’69 of hippie mass murderer Charles Manson - but prior to the film’s premiere few had actually seen what transpired that fateful day and those that had all had different takes on whose fault it really was. Gimme Shelter didn’t moralise or apportion blame; it simply replayed the nightmarish events as they occurred, leaving the stunned viewer to draw his or her own conclusions.

No one came out looking good from the experience. The onlookers resembled doomed sheep on bad drugs, the Angels acted like sadistic animals and the Stones seemed clearly out of their depth yet still numbly detached from the madness they were inspiring. Mick Jagger in particular is captured on film looking decidedly forlorn and fearful during his Altamont performance - a control freak suddenly confronted with dire circumstances way beyond his control. When the famous death scene is finally played out on screen - several Angels plunging knives into an eighteen-year-old black youth named Meredith Hunter during the Stones’ live rendition of ‘Under My Thumb’ - the sense of mounting dread that the film has been building on from its opening scenes suddenly arrives at a harrowingly inevitable climax. It’s amazing to think that this bloody debacle took place only six months after Woodstock’s gentle-spirited bringing together of the massed hippie tribes up on the East Coast of the USA. The film made of Woodstock was one of 1970’s biggest global cinematic earners-a three-hour-long love-fest mainstream blockbuster - but Gimme Shelter was generally for more acquired tastes, diehard Stones fans and art-house connoisseurs. The former’s scenes of benign, beatific communal squalor were as pacifying to behold as the utter bedlam depicted in the latter was painful to even think about and yet the two events weren’t essentially that different from the viewpoints of many who’d attended both. ‘Woodstock was a bunch of stupid slobs in the mud,’ opined Jefferson Airplane’s strident vocalist Grace Slick. ‘And Altamont was a bunch of angry slobs in the mud.’ Grateful Dead manager Rock Scully - who’d been involved in the early stages of Altamont’s genesis - was more specific still. ‘Woodstock and Altamont are seen as polar opposites in a mass-media-generated parable of light and darkness but they were just two ends of the same mucky stick, the net result of the same disease: the bloating of mass bohemia in the late sixties.’

After Altamont, the Stones returned to England and Keith Richards promptly began shooting heroin directly into his veins. Suddenly he wasn’t turning up to recording sessions any more or even answering the phone. The Stones had a lucrative new record deal with Atlantic to inaugurate, tiresome old contractual obligations with both Allen Klein and Decca to settle and a new decade to come to terms with. With no manager to guide them and a guitar player seemingly insensitive to their collective plight, Mick Jagger promptly become the Stones’ de facto leader and business brain. The Stones’ two closest rivals - the Who and Led Zeppelin - were both in the process of completing new albums for release later that year - Who’s Next and Led Zep 4 - so Jagger knew his band had to deliver or die on the vine. Sticky Fingers was what he came up with - the classiest, most self-assured collection of Stones songs about wild sex, hard drugs and doomed love ever concocted. Richards didn’t even play on three cuts - ‘Sway’, ‘Sister Morphine’ and ‘Moonlight Mile’ - but managed to make his maddeningly erratic presence felt on the other seven selections.

The record’s young engineer Andy Johns would later recall a telling episode during a session at Jagger’s country home Stargroves in 1970. ‘We were doing “Bitch”, Keith was very late and Jagger and Mick Taylor had been playing the song without him. And it didn’t sound very good. I walked out of the kitchen and he was sitting on the floor with no shoes, eating a bowl of cereal. Suddenly he said “Oi, Andy! Give me that guitar.” He put it on, kicked the song up in tempo and just put the vibe right on it. Instantly, it went from being this laconic mess into a real groove. And I thought - Wow! That’s what he does.’

When the Stones decamped to the South of France in spring 1971, they quickly became absorbed in recording the follow-up album to Sticky Fingers. By this point they’d become so frustrated by Richards’s infrequent appearances at virtually any studio they booked that they opted to record the thing in the one place they knew he was always guaranteed to be, the house where he actually lived. It was an opulent mansion called Nellcôte that had formerly been the local headquarters for the invading Gestapo. Nazi crosses carved into the heating system vents were still plainly visible. The dank basement the group used to record in had once been the interrogation room. This became Keith’s own dark realm in exile.

For his first month or so on the Riviera he was heroin-free but quickly returned to its soothing embrace after injuring his back in a go-kart accident. What happened next has already been well documented. Local drug dealers descended on the property, eventually alerting the local constabulary. The rest of the Stones, producer Jimmy Miller and engineer Andy Johns meanwhile wasted hours of each evening waiting for the smacked-back guitarist to descend from his living quarters and grace them with his presence. But - according to Johns - ‘Everyone was too scared [to directly confront him]. Even Mick would never go up there. It was as if hell existed upstairs.’ Then Keith had all his guitars stolen, unadvisedly pulled a gun on the local harbour master and also managed to alienate certain of his household staff, who promptly went to the police and denounced Richards and girlfriend Pallenberg as major-league heroin distributors and all-purpose degenerates.

The fallout was considerable: arrest warrants were immediately issued for the couple, they had to disappear from the country like thieves in the night in order to avoid incarceration and the rest of the Stones were also placed under investigation in the resulting messy legal brouhaha. One member’s ballooning drug problem had managed to turn the ongoing odyssey of the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band into one potentially career-ending scenario after another.

Many supporting players in the whole Nellcôte saga soon fell by the wayside but the Stones still managed to turn adversity into sonic gold dust. Exile on Main St. - the record that mostly resulted from those troubled sessions in Keith’s basement - took the whole sun-baked Riviera-on-hard-drugs languor of their day-to-day lifestyle and artfully moulded it to the hard-nosed horn-drenched American roadhouse rhythm ’n’ blues sensibility that has always best suited their particular musical chemistry. Released in mid-1972, it would prove to be their last truly Zeitgeist-defining collection of new songs.

But we’re getting too far ahead of ourselves here. Let’s back-track a little. On March 10th 1971 the Stones played a concert in Brighton as part of a farewell-to-the-old-country tour of the UK just prior to Sticky Fingers’ release and their move to the South of France, and I was there to cheer them on. The performance was prefaced by its share of backstage dramas. Keith Richards - arriving early for a change - found his group’s dressing-room facilities still locked up and came close to pulling out a lethal weapon and braining the promoter in retaliation. Gram Parsons, Richards’s ex-Byrd drug buddy who was travelling with him on all the English dates, became so chemically deranged as the evening progressed that when he attempted to find the stage the Stones were playing on he ended up instead staggering into a nearby cinema. But I’d only learn about those incidents many years later after reading an article by Robert Greenfield, an American journalist then on assignment for Rolling Stone who’d actually been in the group’s designated touring party that night. On the evening in question, I was just another paying punter in a sea of faces and limbs come to pay homage to my dark-prince heroes and watch a truly stupendous live spectacle in an overcrowded provincial sweat-box of a venue named the Big Apple. It would be another two and a half years before I’d be granted direct access to their inner sanctum, and in retrospect I’m glad that fate didn’t summon me sooner. The dark vortex could wait awhile before it claimed my young bones. Like Elvis, I still had a lot of living to do.

Did I tell you I’d finally located a girlfriend? She was a looker too with cascading blonde hair and a supple dancer’s physique, a sweet sixteen-year-old suburban little princess for me to bottle all my overstimulated post-adolescent romantic fantasies up in. Her name was Joanne Good and we’d first linked up in December 1970 when I was press-ganged into being the side-stage prompt for a school play that she was acting in. Joanne’s thespian skills would later bring her mainstream recognition throughout the British Isles: in the late seventies she’d become a regular fixture in the cast of Crossroads, the decade’s best-loved UK TV soap opera (these days, she’s a popular morning disc jockey on Radio London). But in 1971 we were both still soldiering down the treacherous path intersecting post-puberty with young adulthood. We both declared undying love for each other - our favourite courting song was the Temptations’ heart-fluttering ‘Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me)’, a big hit that spring - but the love we really shared was closer to the toothachingly sugar-rush rapture expressed in a less sumptuous-sounding chart smash du jour - Donnie Osmond’s ‘Puppy Love’. We stared into each other’s misty eyes a lot and held hands whenever in public. But physically speaking, we were an odd fit. I was 6 foot 1 whilst she measured 5 foot in her stocking feet. And temperamentally too we bordered on the incompatible. Joanne was vivacious, outgoing and gregarious whilst I was generally intense and prone to introspection.

Her family was Good in both name and nature, apart from her older brother Nigel, who was what they used to call ‘a bit of a tearaway’. He was also Horsham’s most notorious druggy, having lately been busted for pot-smoking in the town centre, an incident that saw his name subsequently splashed over the front page of the local paper. He and another youth named Rob Daneski, who looked like anyone in Black Sabbath, were the drowsy little commuter town’s two resident heads. I met them through Joanne and we quickly became fast friends forever stalking the neighbourhood together in search of cannabis resin. Nigel and Rob liked to drop acid whenever possible, but I always refused to join them, as I sensed - quite rightly, I now realise - that I was still too emotionally and spiritually immature to react well to its lysergic lift-off.

Though I would later come to be perceived as one of the championship-level London-based substance-abusers of the late twentieth century, I started my journey into the world of chemical refreshment with tentative steps. I first smoked pot at the Bath Festival in summer 1970 when a fellow audience member passed me a droopy, hand-rolled cigarette and bade me suck on its soggy cardboard filter. Inhaling its fumes must have had some effect on me because the next thing I remember was descending from my instant reverie to be confronted by a hippie girl who was staring at me with an extremely alarmed look on her face. I felt like a door had been suddenly ripped open in my brain. Time no longer hung heavy on my stooped shoulders. Pot put me right in the moment, enriching my consciousness with the sensation of feeling simultaneously giddy and alive. From then on it became an integral part of my religion to consume as much of it as I could get my hands on.

But daily consumption only began in earnest once I’d moved to London later in ’71. Drugs in general were hard to come by in the early seventies if you didn’t live in England’s capital or near one of its major cities that also doubled as a port. Forget heroin, cocaine and ecstasy. Crack had yet to be invented. All you could hope for was to befriend some long-haired ne’er-do-well in your region who sometimes purchased reefer from a connection in the big bad metropolis and pester him to sell you a small chunk. Doping up was still in its infancy as a British national pastime, particularly out in the suburbs, and those few who dared partake invariably became extremely paranoid due to the build-up of cerebral befuddlement and fear of getting busted.

In the early part of 1971, when I wasn’t illegally stimulating my endorphins or belatedly experiencing first-hand the tumultuous joys and sorrows of teenage romance, I was sending my CV around to various universities in the hope that one of them would accept me onto their campus and postpone the day when I’d actually have to go out and find a job for a further three years. I was flat-out rejected by all of them, except for Bedford College, which was then part of London University. They called me down for an interview so I tied my hair back and hid the ponytail under my shirt collar, wore a suit that even an undertaker might call ‘subdued’ and somehow charmed them into taking me on board. I had good reason to feel elated by their decision. Not only would it mean that henceforth I’d be living in London but Bedford College was one of the only places of further education in Britain where the female student population sharply outnumbered the male. Like Jan and Dean’s mythical ‘Surf City’, it functioned on a ratio of two girls for every boy.

In order to bolster my finances that summer in readiness for student life I went looking for any kind of legitimate work. Soon enough I got employed by a Sussex-based chemical plant and spent long days digging drainage ditches for a pittance. Later I manned the pumps at a local garage. Each job lasted roughly two weeks in duration, after which I got promptly fired for rank incompetence. I learned a lot from these experiences, the key lesson being that I was simply not cut out for the rigours of manual labour and should never consider it as a temporary career option ever again. Leave all that heavy lifting and sod-busting to the brawny lads with the muscles on their muscles. I was better off developing my brain and making a living from that.

Looking back through the misty veil of nostalgia, that summer of ’71 now feels like a sun-drenched and special season of rampant carefree splendour. England’s green and pleasant land never looked greener or seemed more pleasant to be a part of. Maybe it’s just the pot I smoked back then playing tricks with my retroactive memory but I think not. It was indeed a golden age for middle-class floaters like me. Students still received grants. The world’s biggest rock bands still performed to audiences no larger than two thousand at a time at venues that didn’t cost an arm and a leg to enter. Records - my main expenditure - were reasonably priced. It cost nothing to hitch-hike whenever the urge for travel struck. Sex wasn’t fatal. Only skinheads were to be avoided at all cost.

And the music being released that year was often outstandingly good. It was Tamla Motown’s last golden year for example - starting with the Jackson 5’s irresistible ‘The Love You Save’ and building to Marvin Gaye’s transcendent ‘What’s Going On’ - and you’d hear these singles constantly blaring out of transistor radios in public places, boldly lifting the spirits of the nation. On the white side of the tracks Rod Stewart - the rooster-haired, dandy-dressing Sam Cooke soundalike who’d left Jeff Beck’s employment at the turn of the last decade to join the remnants of the Small Faces as their resident singer - was on constant rotation in pub jukeboxes throughout the country with his first-ever hit recording, ‘Maggie May’, a bitter-sweet smoky-sounding rumination on the perils of falling in love with an elderly prostitute. Everybody had mad love for the man sometimes referred to as Rod the Mod that year: rock critics swooned at the sound of his gritty self-deprecating voice, student drinkers were in seventh heaven over his habitual public displays of boozy camaraderie with the Faces whilst teenage girls were particularly smitten by his big-nosed cock-of-the-walk charm and tight satin trousers.

Another former sixties London ‘face’ making bold inroads into the mainstream pop landscape of the early seventies was a brash little hustler who called himself Marc Bolan. Three years earlier, Bolan could have been found sitting cross-legged on the wooden stage of any self-respecting UK hippie venue, strumming a cheap acoustic guitar and warbling arcane pseudo-Tolkien gobbledegook whilst an extremely stoned individual played bongos haphazardly alongside him. This quaint spectacle were known as Tyrannosaurus Rex and they quickly came to enjoy the patronage of several key underground taste-makers, most notably John Peel, who played their records ceaselessly on his Radio One broadcast and even contributed some dubious spoken-word snippets to one of their early albums.

But John Peel couldn’t help Bolan achieve what he really wanted, which were big hit records and a shot at Elvis-like mega-rock superstardom. So ‘the bopping elf’ - as he was sometimes known - rudely brushed aside his DJ champion, sacked the stoned bongo player (who called himself Steve Peregrine Took), bought an electric guitar and started shaping his gauche, nonsensical lyrics around rudimentary riffs archly filched from old fifties vintage rock chestnuts like Chuck Berry’s ‘Little Queenie’ and Eddie Cochran’s ‘C’mon Everybody’. His ‘Queenie’ rewrite - entitled ‘Get It On’ - became one of ’71’s national pop anthems and he and his new electric ensemble now known as T.Rex were suddenly on a serious roll that year with a succession of chart-topping singles and a hit album called Electric Warrior. At first Bolan seemed like a breath of fresh air: a new breed of rock star - haughty, androgynous and glamour-fixated - who was unapologetic about his thirst for fame and utter self-fixation. He was the first to cut loose from the late-sixties notion that rock was one big sharing, caring community where musicians and audience members stood together on equal footing. Bolan was more interested in creating an in-concert ambience that separated the two entities into ‘the superstar’ and his ‘slaves’. T.Rex concerts in 1971 were actually the first public manifestation of the seventies ‘me decade’ consciousness in action. Bolan would primp and pose around the stage like a narcissistic guitar-strumming 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 and fumbled opportunities. A pretty, moon-faced Welsh girl named Ann - one of my student co-tenants at the dorm - latched on to me and wasted no time in inviting me to share her bed. God bless you, Ann, if you happen to read this. You set me free to roam freely in the world of adult pleasure and promiscuity-a great place to take up squatter’s rights in when you’re still only nineteen. I received a better life education from being in your carnal caress than I ever did from attending any lectures.

The only problem I had as a student was the actual course I’d enrolled in: linguistics, or the study of the English language. For some reason I’d envisioned reading and discussing mostly modern literature and so was deeply underwhelmed when I discovered I had to decipher the original texts of Geoffrey Chaucer instead. Chaucer is rightly renowned as one of England’s first book-writers but that doesn’t automatically mean he’s one of the best too. His original Canterbury Tales is like a bad Carry On script written by a halfwit and having to translate it into a modern-language idiom was a task I couldn’t work up the remotest inkling of a desire to pursue. When we weren’t focusing on Chaucer’s silly texts, we were getting bombarded by lecturers hopelessly in thrall to the ancient words and thoughts of my old pal John Milton. One old biddy who taught us would even occasionally break down and weep when discussing his timeless magnificence. Meanwhile, I was weeping invisible tears of utter stultifying boredom.

Soon enough I stopped turning up to these lectures altogether and spent my time instead furtively exploring current London-based culture. The city had some great live venues like Finsbury Park’s Rainbow Theatre and Camden Town’s Roundhouse: Sunday afternoons at the latter were a real poseur’s paradise. The artsy cinemas had special late-night showings that were always instructive to attend and the hip bookshops regularly put on literary happenings and poetry readings: I saw Patti Smith boldly reciting some early texts of hers without the aid of musical accompaniment - her first-ever public performance in Europe, I believe - that winter to an audience of no more than fifteen people. I knew there and then she’d go on to become one of the decade’s creative players. I’d already been impressed by her work because her poetry had lately been published in a Michigan-based periodical called Creem which you could only buy here in the UK from one source: Camden Town’s Compendium bookshop. One issue I bought that year featured a review by staff writer Dave Marsh of a Question Mark and the Mysterians reunion concert in which the term ‘punk rock’ was first coined. A new genre was making its first tottering baby steps courtesy of the international rock press.

Meanwhile, Creem’s rival Rolling Stone was going from strength to strength - like its namesakes, the journal enjoyed its all-time creative peak throughout 1971. That year, Hunter S. Thompson’s seminal gonzo screed Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas got published in its pages, months before it appeared in book form. John Lennon laid his soul bare to editor Jann Wenner in an extraordinary two-part interview. A freelancer named Grover Lewis - assigned to cover the Allman Bros. on a draining US tour - almost got beaten up by the group and retaliated by writing a wonderfully observed warts-and-all exposé of their charmless lives and nasty habits. And another freelancer, Tom Nolan, turned in a mesmerising extra-length feature on Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, the first article ever to pull back the curtain on the madness and dysfunctionalism that reigned behind their rugged all-American image. This was new journalism at its very best. The writers weren’t blandly observing their subjects from a respectful distance any more, they were right there in the scrum as wilful participants soaking up the essence and then channelling it into an art form of their own. That’s exactly where I wanted to be. That’s exactly what I wanted to do.

It wouldn’t be long now. I could feel it in my bones. Being back in London had started a fire in me. The city was mine again - and it owed me a living. Destiny would take care of the rest.