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"The winter of ‘75 was a particularly cruel season – bitingly cold and bleak, bleak, bleak. I was holed up in an otherwise empty house awaiting demolition somewhere in Islington that Hermine had found to me, God bless her. And there was a heroine famine in the city : I had to spend practically all my waking hours walking around the metropolis in search of a ready source. But the worst of it was music I’d always be hearing wherever I went. One song reigned supreme over Britain’s airwaves at year’s end : Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Every home in the British seemed to own a copy. Walk down any street and you could hear it wafting out onto the sidewalk like the smell of bad drains. Pub jukeboxes played nothing else. If anyone dared pick another selection, they’d have probably been ejected. The omnipotence of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ made it official : prog rock was still the opium of the masses. Hearing it echo around me on daily travels, I felt utterly defeated. Queen’s record shamelessly paraded everything I’d fought against as a rock commentator : it was theatrical, pretentious and meaningless, faux classical music for high-brow poseurs with low-brow attention spans, kitsch masquerading as art. I couldn’t see a way out of it ; I was doomed and so was rock’n roll. Heroin was killing me and Freddie Mercury and his fruity chums had just seen off the later. It was one of those ‘darkest hour befor the dawn’."

Nick Kent, Apathy For the Devil, Faber and Faber, 2010