By an odd coincidence, I took a call from a member of staff at the NME yesterday as I was about to start this article on one of the magazine’s best-known former contributors, Nick Kent. “NME,” I said tetchily (it was press day and I was on deadline), “what’s that?” “The New Musical Express,” said my caller. It never occurred to me that it might be this publication; I cannot recall anyone from there getting in touch with me before.

When I was in my teens and a keen follower of popular music, the NME did not have the influence it later gained. The magazine – really a newspaper – that rock aficionados favoured was the Melody Maker, whose writers, especially Chris Welch, were considered arbiters of taste in the field.

The NME’s later ascendancy owed much to the work of Kent and what he would probably call (he goes in for antiquated journalese) his fellow scribes Charles Shaar Murray and Ian MacDonald. By then, in the mid-to-late 1970s, my interests in music had moved on.

This doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy reading about the period now. Kent’s is one of three books on the subject I have read in the past couple of weeks. The others were Patti Smith’s Just Kids, which I discussed here last week, and Edmund White’s City Boy (Bloomsbury, £18.99). I had the pleasure of meeting White a couple of summers ago on the Greek island of Naxos, which added an extra piquancy to reading his account in his memoir of all the eye-popping gay activity he enjoyed in pre-Aids America.

White has also just published a book of short stories Chaos (Bloomsbury, £8.99) in which I was surprised to find a tale set on the island – complete with ungallant gibes about our party hostess.

With Kent, it is not gay sex we are told of, although his flamboyant dress sense and pretty boy features often led people to assume this was an interest. At one point he felt he held the record for having “poof!” shouted at him in the street.

No, his is a story of the music industry’s traditional sex and drugs and rock and roll – appropriately in industrial quantity. A late starter on the sex front as most in our generation were (Kent and I were born in the same year, 1951), he lost no time in catching up once he gained the allure of close connections with the rock world.

Chrissie Hynde was an early long-term girlfriend, before her days of fame with the Pretenders. He re-estabished friendly relations with her in 2003, but he wonders whether these will survive the publication of his book.

The gallery of stars dealt with in Apathy for the Devil (Faber and Faber, £12.99) include many of rock’s most celebrated hell-raisers. Most are depicted – as you would expect – raising hell.

We learn plenty, for instance, about the Rolling Stones, and especially about the great (and miraculous) survivor of years of drug abuse, Keith Richards. Kent, himself a junky for many years, adds to his picture of the star – “the coolest looking dude in the known hemisphere . . . a cross between a human blacked spoon and Count Dracula” – already drawn in his earlier book The Dark Stuff.

Concerning Iggy Pop, we are presented with convincing evidence – the testimony of Kent’s own eyes – about his long-rumoured gifts in the trouser department. The writer knew him in his early days with the Stooges, long before his second coming under the influence of David Bowie (whom Kent encountered engaged in sex with a groupie while his wife Angie was in the same room).

I enjoyed the stories of such acts of lese majesty as The Sweet’s singer mistaking Count Basie for a hotel porter and sending him off with his bags and Led Zeppelin’s manager, the legendarily fat Peter Grant, sitting down with full force into an armchair that already contained Elvis Presley’s father Vernon. Whether Vernon’s reaction is described I can’t recall, and since the book is irritatingly without an index, I have no time to look it up.