Nico (14 page)

Nico sitting next to Taylor Mead at Max's Kansas City (Billy Name)

Nico's
The Marble Index
LP cover, 1968 (Guy Webster)

Nico, 1985 (Jill Furmanowsky LFI)

Nico on her final tour (London Features)

We'd done a few things together with Nico. It all sounded a bit like a blind man trying to kick his way out of a scrap yard. What with Toby's thumping great piledriver beat and Dids's clanging old hubcaps, there wasn't much room left for a mere ivory-tickler.

‘Ow yez. Industrial groove, mate,' was how Dids described it. Not even Nico's voice could cover that horrendous din of clanging metal. And she had the loudest female voice in Rock'n'roll.

‘John Cale will sort it all out,' said Nico. ‘He knows exactly what to do with my music.'

Consistently lazy, Nico still hadn't come up with any new songs, not even a lyric or a line. Demetrius packed her off to a hotel in the Lancashire moors near Pendle Hill (a legendary meeting place for practitioners of the Black Arts). The hotel was located in an area called the Trough of Bowland (it's near the Slough of Despond, close to the Vale of Tears, above the Back of Beyond).

I got a call from Toby.

‘It's balderdash, Jim. I'm Rock'n'roll, yer know – I've just 'ad an offer from Auto Da Fé – 'eavy metal satanists from Birmingham. One-month residency in Bermuda, then on ter the American circuit … more bollox, not the real thing, but I'll be quids in. Got ter do it, sorry, the wife … yer know.'

Toby had just got married to a Bruce Springsteen lookalike from Copenhagen. Real tough girl. She could whistle through her teeth and had a knockout punch. Her father was some famous Argentinian primitivist. She was ugly-beautiful, but the ugliness had been in the ascendant, the more smack she used. She and Toby had got themselves fixed up with a nice little habit, as well as a domestic routine. He had to go to Bermuda to get away from himself.

April '85:

COUNTER-INTELLIGENCE

John Cale

John Cale plunged into Dids's miniature elf's lair in Balham. Overweight, overcoat, over here. Hiding his wild coke-stary eyes beneath scratched Wayfarers, covering his beer-barrel gut with a stained sweatshirt and a No-Smoking sticker. This was the man who'd directed the aesthetic of New York's most stylish pop-group. Distanced now, by more than a deca
de, from the marketing
genius of Warhol and the savvy of Reed, he'd had to take on the narcotic, alcoholic and psychic abuse alone. Yet beneath the overcoat, the distended belly and the bloated ego you sensed there might still exist a good-looking, almost likeable, Welsh grammar-school boy on the make.

Dids's living-room was suddenly full of him. He commandeered the coffee-table, emptied a wrap of coke, and carved out four massive lines – one for me, one for Dids and two for himself. I don't think we'd even said ‘Hello'.

He pulled a videocassette from out of his overcoat pocket. It was one of those clanging competitions between me, Dids, Toby and poor Nico. After less than a minute he pressed Stop:

‘What's
this
called?' he asked in his West Village/Welsh Village accent. ‘Strangers on a Stage?'

It was godawful. Nico fighting to be heard. The rest of us ignoring her completely – showing off our skills, selling our wares, like barrow-boys on Balham market. No one, at any time, had stopped to listen.

‘Where's the drummer?' he asked.

‘Ow yez … Old Tobe … Doin' a stretch on the Pina Colada circuit dahn in Bermew-da,' said Dids, pleased to have the drum stool to himself.

‘That's a pity,' said Cale. ‘He's the only one who plays in time.'

Dids was deeply offended. He was about to spit some Balham bile at this Son of the Valleys, but he bit his tongue instead, remembering who held the job-cards.

Back in Brixton, Demetrius had given over his room to Cale for the duration. (Cale being too tight to rent a place of his own.) Cale took one look at John Cooper Clarke and Echo:

‘Get the fuck out!' He pointed to the open door.

It was 4.00 a.m. TV transmission had stopped and there was just a fizz of white noise – neither of them had bothered to turn it off.

Clarke was standing in the middle of the room, bent double, seemingly comatose.

I switched off the red-hot set.

‘I wuz watchin' that,' said Clarke.

He was, too. He'd probably made the attempt to turn off the TV at close-down, a couple of hours before, but had abandoned such a Herculean task and was locked in a neo-paralysis halfway across the living-room floor. Echo, meanwhile, had been playing with the aimer, creating patterns out of the seemingly random white dots. Shoals of electric anchovies were swimming across the screen.

‘I thought I just told you to
get out
!
' Cale repeated.

Who the fook's this obnoxious swine?' Echo asked me, ignoring the irate Welshman, resting his head on a pillow in motionless indifference.

‘John Cale,' answered John Cale.

‘Oh …' said Clarke, still bent double.‘One of our Welsh cousins … not renowned for their politesse.'

‘Where did you get that pillow?' Cale snapped at Echo, snatching it from behind his head. ‘You got it from my room, didn't you, eh, didn't you?' He marched off to Demetrius's bedroom, pillow tucked under his arm, and slammed the door.

Clarke and Echo left the next day. The ambience shifted abruptly from smack to booze. Beer crates were stacked in the kitchen, six-packs chilling in the once-empty fridge, bottles of vodka abandoned where they dropped.

Over the following few days, Cale rambled a broken monologue, referring to things he may or may not have mentioned previously. Blurred by booze, confused by coke, it was hard to follow the sudden leaps of association. I got caught in his mad Welsh rhapsody. He loved to talk plots and intrigues. Paranoid conspiracy theories were his brain-food. I'd be on the edge of sleep, when there'd be a knock at my door:

‘James! Wake up! Listen! It says here that terrorist groups in Europe are being covertly funded by powerful economic interests in the U.S., in order to prolong European disunity and subordination to the power of the dollar. Whatd'youthinkof thatthen, eh?' He'd wait for an answer. A paranoid insomniac with a bottle of Stolichnaya in one hand and a wrap of coke in the other. He tried to blanket his high-toned Welshness under that heavy Manhattan overcoat, but those ringing, singing vowels gave him away – like a rotting sheep or a male voice choir, there was no mistaking their origins.

Cale was clearly nuts, but it made a change to be working with someone who had energy and who was both gifted and dedicated to his profession. Nico had an inherent talent – her voice, her persona – but she was lazy and morose. Cale, on the other hand, possessed a skill that he'd worked at and a set of creative principles that he'd tested and honed down rigorously into one simple aesthetic credo: ‘Keep it simple'.

Demetrius brought his Bullworker and Nico back from the Trough of Bowland.

‘So, Johnny Viola.' Nico hadn't seen Cale in a couple of years. ‘Put on a little weight, I see.' This seemed to delight her, other people letting themselves go.

At last Nico had some songs, in varying stages of completion. Some had the m
elody but not the words, others vice versa. We listened to a couple she'd recorded on her cassette player. Rough as they were, they sounded a thousand times more focused than the clanging competitions we'd done on the video nasty. Even in her indolence Nico had an essential style that was uniquely her own. It worked – with that damned harmonium. Anything we might add was a superficial distraction, artifice. We were merely gatecrashers on her talent.

The Strongroom had just been completed. A state-of-the-art, top-of-the-middle-range studio, located in a converted warehouse in Shoreditch. We got it cheap because we were the first. Everything looked good – but what exactly was I looking at? Little red dots that winked intriguingly in the blackness. A huge mixing console. Instant studio-to-desk monitoring. Stacks of gadgets and FX. Diffused lighting. Ambient colour scheme. Everything to seduce you away from what you should be doing.

‘Keep it simple' would be a tough aesthetic to follow in such tempting surroundings.

Demetrius ferried Nico to the studio. She'd been to see some Harley Street shrink earlier, who told her that Demetrius was an ‘enabler', someone whose emotional dependency on her facilitated her dependency on heroin. This interpretation of need had increased Nico's paranoia. She was clutching her lyric sheet as if it was an audition.

Recording studios are a place where you try to preserve the memory of a musical experience you had somewhere else. For a performer like Nico they were discomforting. She needed a live atmosphere, a sense of place, to do her stuff – not a laboratory, however tasteful the decor. With a live audience at least you can project yourself at something. In a studio your audience is potentially that much greater, but invisible.

Maybe a shot would help.

The control room and the acoustic room were separated by two glass doors six feet apart. They formed a kind of booth. On one side was Cale, myself and Dave Young the engineer (Dids was outside somewhere poking about the alleyways and construction sites, looking for bits of scrap metal he could utilise for his artistic purpose). On the other side was a large acoustic room that housed a grand piano and looked out on to the London sky. In between sat Nico, hermetically sealed between the two glass doors, like a slide specimen.

Dave miked up the harmonium. This took some time. With a non-electric, unpluggable instrument, you have to work out exactly where to position the microphones. Dave was both a serious player as well as a button-presser, but the harmonium proved something of a problem. (‘Like a dinosaur with bad breath,' commented Cale.) It seemed to have developed an arthritic creak in its pedals and a strange, high-pitched squeak, like a rusty wheelchair. Dave got rid of the creak, but the squeak remained, more pronounced than ever.

Cale switched off all the studio lights. Now it was just darkness, Nico's voice, and the little red dots.

They will give you what you need

They will run your life.

They will get you where they want you

On the cross you'll die.

What a game,

Our fair frame,

Consumed into a single flame.

Demetrius had embedded himself in the warm labial folds of a soft black leather sofa. He hugged his Bullworker, squeezing it tightly between his thighs. As Nico's song rose to its climax he pushed down on the tensely sprung steel –
uuhnnn
– and collapsed on the floor, nose to nose with Cale's fungoid trainers.

Cale was on his spy riff again: ‘So, your father could speak six languages, including Russian and Turkish, eh? Used to travel to Eastern Europe all the time? What was he up to, we all ask ourselves?'

‘I don't know what you mean, Jaaawn,' said Nico, defensively.

‘Counter-intelligence,' – Cale's Welsh accent stressed the first syllable of every sentence – ‘Espionage … it's the only logical explanation for someone of his background and education … what else could he do?'

‘He didn't like to do anything much, he was lazy, like me.' She winked at me knowingly.

‘Exactly … posh family, overeducated, indolent – ideal secret service material.'

‘Oh really, John, you're getting tooo much.'

‘Not at all. James, don't you agree? You know – Oxford and all that.'

‘Well, John, you're thinking of Cambridge,' I said. ‘Oxford's got the dreaming spires, it's Cambridge that's got the spying dreamers.'

‘Whatever. The point is, it stands to reason – Nico's father was involved in counter-intelligence. Probably even a double agent, considering early Soviet policy towards the Hitler régime.'

Spies were everywhere. Cale's pathological suspicions of clandestine agents lurking in our midst ensured that we had a twenty-four-hour lockout. No one unconnected with Nico's album would be allowed to enter the studio. Unless, of course, it was the delivery boy from the pub, bringing the evening's crates of Grolsch.

Nico worked through the only songs she had over the following few days. Just the six, with harmonium accompaniment. It wasn't a lot to go on. Certainly not enough to satisfy the record company, or the purchaser. She suggested we do ‘My Funny Valentine' and an old German ballad called ‘Das Lied vom Der einsamen Mädchen' (‘The Song of the Lonely Girl' – all blood-red lips and death-white skin, juvenilia). No one rushed to greet her suggestions.

Cale was aware of the limited studio time available, we didn't have an extendable budget. Where big-time pop stars might spend a year polishing up the right triangle sound, we had three weeks to get the whole thing written, arranged, produced and recorded, ready for the test pressing. Cale suggested Nico should leave us to it and come back towards the end to re-do her vocals. In the meantime, the rest of us would dismantle and rebuild the songs around the guide vocals she'd put down.

Nico's songs were like mini-dramas – they depended upon pauses and silence. There was no inherent rhythm that suggested itself, and no sense in which she kept strict time, as there was no intrinsic pulse. Thus, a rhythm track would have to be created against a vocal line that wavered and faltered. A drummer's nightmare.

Dids arrived at the studio the next day, expecting Nico to be there, ready to work on the rhythm tracks with her, getting everything just tight. He was aghast at the task that had been left to him, trying to play around a nervous, stoned Nico singing songs she only half knew. He stormed across the acoustic room to set up his drum kit. Standing tense and erect against Nico's harmonium was a Bullworker. Dids's head jerked to one side, he peered at the alien intruder from the corner of his eye like an enraged rooster, and threw the offending object across the room. It bounced off the wall, leaving a thin crack veining across the pristine colour scheme.

Wherever you sat an empty bottle would alert you to Cale's presence. He turned the studio upside-down, making it his own. And then he turned myself and Dids upside-down for ideas. Administering profligate quantities of drugs and booze, ‘keep it simple' became a fractured legend. One musical idea or phrase would become instantly superseded by another and yet another until they were all subsumed beneath a 3.00 a.m. alcoholic blur.

‘Now,
doant
discuss anything of what goes on in here.' (The spies.) ‘Pass a beer! There's a squeak on the bass drum pedal …' (Swigs beer. Farts.) ‘Gimme that blade.' (Chop. Chop. Chop.) Got a note?' (sniffs) ‘…
hmnyeeah
…' (pockets note).

The delivery boy would arrive with beer and champagne. Coke dealers would slither in and out. Cale's manager, Dan Saliva, would come in, a supercilious sneer on his face, jangling his keys, wincing at the teutonic cacophony, suggesting we do a Jim Morrison song.

‘Think of America, John, think of America.'

Each song was virgin territory. Dids was tearing himself apart on a song called ‘Tananore', trying to follow Nico's vocal without wandering massively out of time. Cale suggested a flat, trotting rhythm that would cover any snags, a sound like the banging of a coffin lid. He found an old suitcase used to house Dids's car parts, placed it across his knees like a set of bongos, and miked it up. We had the basis of a rhythm track.

Other songs he'd ask me to play blind, without thinking about keys or chord changes. He'd record layers of ideas, colours and textures, to play with later on at the mixing stage. We had endless arguments about this. He'd switch off all the studio lights so I couldn't even see my keyboard.