Nico (16 page)

June '85:

BLOP

The music of
Camer
a Obscura
was co
mplicated and illogical. Structures were there, but they weren't easy to remember: they mostly defied the remorseless logic of the traditional pop song, i.e. intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight, brief jazzy squirt of wine-bar saxophone, verse, chorus, fade to sax and repeated hook – sax player collects cheque. The songs had been only half written to begin with, then recomposed in the studio, assembled, like a collage, but without the use of pre-existing material. Every musical detail had been engendered spontaneously under studio conditions and although alcohol and drugs are a cheap form of inspiration (at merely financial rather than spiritual cost) I felt chances had been taken. Rock ‘musicians' often forget they're in the Image Industry and get cosmic delusions of grandeur, imagining they're in the same lineage as Beethoven and Mozart. For all her doom-laden seriousness, Nico spared us any nauseating prattle about her ‘art'. And all we were doing was just ganging up around her name. It was only a little thing. Just enough to get us out and about.

Occasionally she would hint at a more exacting creative purpose. She wished she'd made a success of acting – but, she was the first to admit, it required a diligence and an intellectual discipline she didn't possess. It wasn't exactly a regret, she'd made her choice and allowed Warhol to add his signature to her persona, but, back then with Fellini, ‘if only I'd got up on time!'

The sporadic bursts of fame or notoriety would, in the meantime, sustain her in the knowledge that, unable to get out of bed, she'd done what she could. Essentially, she loved to do nothing more than lie in her room, smoking and listening to a Mahler concert on her tinny radio, hypodermic reassuringly within arm's reach. It was a life measured out in Marlboro butts.

We previewed the album at Ronnie Scott's. As we'd only just left the recording studio it was a tense occasion, no one knew the material that well. This meant that we underplayed and, I think, considering the kitchen-sink nature of previous concerts, our inhibitions worked to the music's advantage.

The real showcase for Nico's new progeny, its relaunch into the artocracy, occurred at Chelsea Town Hall. It was an inspired setting, chosen by Demetrius. Just a short walk from the Charter Clinic and thus within easy access of the celebrity junkies. It was an occasion whose significance would inevitably reverberate throughout the drug community. Lots of ‘lovies' and ‘darlings' and ‘poor Georgina had a terrible fix this after noon and puked all over the kilim'.

Demetrius had been persisting in his courtship of the Beat Literati and had forged an attachment to Carolyn Cassady, the wife of Neal (who, as Dean Moriarty, was the hero of Kerouac's
On the Road
).
Although she was twenty years Demetrius's senior, she had a young female companion with her who might provide the ideal literary (and erotic) muse for his poetic soul.

The debts had been mounting. Not counting the whole U.S. tour, I still hadn't been paid for a whole succession of shows, plus there was a percentage share due on the advance for Nico's album. Demetrius and I came to an agreement that there would be a settling of accounts at the Chelsea show.

Nico gave her best performance yet and at last her accompaniment sounded convincing. Her authority on stage was absolute and the gig proved to be a landmark that reaffirmed her legend and, for the druggists, vindicated a whole way of life … you could be a really bad girl and still get away with it. I no longer felt ashamed or embarrassed for her or myself. The music was an integrated whole – it managed to be a summation of her past and a direction for the future.

The past was the hardest aspect of her repertoire to deal with – those Velvet Underground songs that people, naturally, expected to hear. How to revitalise them? Nico had become so utterly bored with them, locking into automatic pilot whenever they came up in the set. I suggested she sing ‘All Tomorrow's Parties' a cappella. No other accompaniment could better John Cale's arrangement – that nagging ostinato octave D on the piano with the relentless death-march tumbril-tread of the drums. Stripped of its ‘blackened shroud' and ‘hand-me-down gown' the naked voice resounded about the hall, underlining the hollowness of the subject matter. For ‘Femme Fatale' we did a kind of Sugarplum Fairy parody with a toy piano. For the first time in a while the tart humour came out from behind those lyrics and the rather earnest art-house solemnity that surrounded the Velvet Underground was briefly dispelled.

After the encores (!) I asked Demetrius if we could settle up. He called me a capitalist. What should have been an occasion for celebration and congratulation turned instead into another pathetic and ugly farce with me diving off the stage on top of Demetrius, even as the audience were leaving and Carolyn Cassady and the future Demetrieuse were lining themselves up for an evening's Beat-itudes and impromptu free verse.

We made up later, but by then it was too late. The aesthetes were aghast at such rough-house vulgarity and Demetrius's love-life was forced to take yet another strange twist:

The Couchette of Dr Demetrius

(
In the Erotes, written by Lucian in the second century A.
D., we are told of how a youth, enamoured by the beauty of Praxiteles's statue of Aphrodite, contrived to hide himself one night in the temple of the goddess of love, at Knidos. A flaw in the marble of one of Aphrodite's thighs was interpreted as a semen stain, evidence of the intensity of the youth's ardour.
)

On the top bunk of an Intercity couchette Omega, the Moon Goddess, sleeps soundly. The dull opiate fallen from her hand, she sails her barque of dreams down the winding River Styx to rest her weary head on Hades's darkest shore.

Upon the other bank her suitor stands – one Demetrius, erstwhile physician to Dionysus himself, the great God of Mischief and Merriment, Appetite and Lust. In leaner years the medicant has been a mere spectator at the feast, looking on with educated disdain as the ignorant and carefree revellers indulge their reckless appetites. Now, cast out for quackery and knavishness from the benign patronage of the Great Gods' Court, he has vowed to return as Demetrius the Enabler, vanquish those who mock his genius, and claim for his own the hand of the fair Omega, daughter of Morpheus, the God of Sleep.

By his side the Sword of Theseus, the Bullworker; in his hand the Chalice of Valium, the Confidence Builder; he braves the swelling tide of the libidinous waves to stand, at last, upon the pagan shore and bestow his silver testament, the seed of his longing, upon the sleeping form of the beloved Omega.

‘Naturally, I wiped it off afterwards. Wouldn't wish to leave a stain on her character.'

The Connoisseurs

J. C-CLARKE
[
quizzically
]: I don't know if I don't prefer the brown stuff or the
white. [
Measures a double dose
]

ECHO: Generally speakin' as a regular tipple, I'm more in favour of the brown … it's warmer some'ow.

J. C-CLARKE: I know, there's more of a softer glow about the Eye-ranian stuff, it lingers that much longer … with the China white, on the other'and, it's'arder – I must say I sometimes feel chastened by its astringency.

[
Phone rings. ECHO picks up receiver, then replaces it
.]

ECHO
: Plus, the brown stuff is that much more dependable …

I've rarely bin disappointed …

J. C-CLARKE: Whereas the white can be bleached ter fuck.

[
ECHO presses J. C-Clarke's arm to find a vein. Slips needle in gently, at horizontal angle. Then administers himself a shot.

J. C-CLARKE [
leaning against kitchen wall, head slumped
]: …

The brown
…
[
ten-second pause
]
…
or the white?

[
They both stare at the floor.
]

ECHO:
…
I must say though …

J. C-CLARKE and
ECHO
in unison: I could just do with some of the white right now. [
Fade
]

The Effra Road flat directly overlooked the Fridge. Beggar's Banquet had commissioned a Nico video, and the director and crew (a couple of trainee directors who'd never even heard of Nico) thought the Fridge would be an ideal location for their big break. The Fridge had been an unprofitable theatre until it had been gutted by fire. Now that it was a burnt-out ruin, stinking of charred wood, soot and ash, it had become a favoured nightspot for the Brixton crowd. Nico had to mime and lip-synch the vocals for a breezy little number called ‘My Heart Is Empty'. Try as she might, she could barely remember the words, let alone mouth them.

The director was obsessed by my watch.

‘It's all about the concept of Entropy … the erosion of beauty … the inexorable march of time.' He'd point his stupid camera at my wristwatch, then pan across to Nico's face. In the end she just kept opening and closing her mouth, more, it seemed, in an effort to breathe (the soot and the dust) than to stay in synch with the song.

Blop. Blop. Blop. When I examined the rushes, I could just see her mouth doing a fish-like blop, and a look of increasing hopelessness creeping across her face. She resembled a giant carp in a sushi bar, just selected for the table.

Then, a few weeks later, came the Velvet Underground documentary for the
South Bank Show.
Nico had remembered why she left modelling, why she was an unsuccessful film actress … she hated the camera. Idiots pointing lenses into her, poking away for some corny truism. Nico had a poetic sensibility, the fantastic she could happily bear, Fellini's wit and charm, her association with Philippe Garrel, an independent French filmmaker, both had allowed her to just get on with it, just be herself. But having to remember lines, even her own … she was just too stoned, too far out.

Nothing came out the same way twice when she was really performing. Now that the music had begun to sound like something, she responded more to it. She actually began to
listen
occasionally to the people on stage with her. Sometimes she'd get more into listening than singing, and forget her cues. And so we started to make the songs as abstracted and free as possible, so that, at times, anyone could do anything within a certain number of bars. It made her happier and more confident on stage. But those cameras … When Demetrius told Nico they'd be filming her section of the documentary at the Fridge, she fell into a deep gloom.

‘'Ave some of the brown stuff, then top it up with a China White chaser,' suggested Echo. ‘It'll just give yer that extra bit of push.'

‘This isn't really Melvyn's kind of things,' said the directrice, very keen, very
wasp
. We'd plugged into her for a session fee so that Nico could pick up some of the white stuff, and typed out a phony bill for instrument hire.

Cale was also in town, and had been bugging everyone for ‘a bit of what I like'. We'd just made an album together, a pitiful offering called
Artificial Intelligence.
The drugs, the booze, the key-jangling manager had all been present to push him to greater heights, but he just sank into a confused stupor for much of the time.

‘Jim says your album's no good,' Nico told him, after which Cale had asked me to leave the studio. I was grateful to be out of it. A tired, flatulent mess of sub-Dylan lyrics written by a drinking chum, and half-assed tunes co-written by me and Dave Young. I didn't get credited properly for the songs which, retrospectively, was a blessing; and I didn't get paid properly, which was unsurprising.

Here she comes. You'd better watch your step. Nico copped her stuff and did a quick rendition of ‘Femme Fatale'. The Art junkies were satisfied.

Demetrius had pressed the directrice into interviewing me as someone who could perhaps give a brief perspective on Nico's music now. I prepared a couple of things to say but, instead, they asked what influence the Velvet Underground had been on my own musical make-up. As I was only fourteen during the Summer of Love, which didn't really shine on Oldham – let alone
The Exploding Plastic Inevitable
,
and all the other daffy psychedelic happenings – I couldn't give them much of an answer.

Nico reprimanded me afterwards. ‘You should always have something to say.'

‘I did … I told them I liked the clothes.'

‘But didn't you say anything about the music?'

‘No … just the clothes.'

‘Don't you like the music?'

‘I prefer the clothes.'

Sometimes you have to state your preferences. The brown stuff or the white.

October-November '85:

A FRIEND IN THE FOG

A new record to promote gave Nico an ostensible purpose to tour. Demetrius interpreted it to me as an obligation. Having
been featured heavily on the
record I was now morally obliged to support Nico and promote her career. What, I asked him, was Nico's obligation towards me? He searched for an answer. For once, Dr Demetrius was out of words. I helped him: ‘Money.'

I wanted to be paid properly, as did everyone else that played with her. I'd been getting, at best, £30 a night. ‘A night' means: pick up the instruments, load them, lug them; pick up the personnel; travel in discomfort, perhaps London to Glasgow; set up instruments (pianos are heavy); soundcheck (sitting around in a cold hall waiting for Nico to get herself fixed, listening to drummers ‘get their sound balanced'); find hotel; gig; pack up instruments and reload them; search for all-night gas station to buy Nico's cigarettes. Sixteen hours for thirty quid.

Not enough.

Demetrius was adamant. I went to Nico – she wasn't interested, as long as she got her fifty per cent of the gig fee. Since she was already getting the publishing royalties from the album – the shows being supposedly a showcase to encourage album sales – I felt she ought to split the gig money equally between everyone.

Demetrius would say, ‘But you're not famous – try doing it without her.' I'd labour the point that she was getting all the record royalties and the fan mail, which was fine. I just wanted paying.

When Demetrius fixed up an enormous tour that would include the Iron Curtain countries (except the U.S.S.R.), Northern Europe, Spain and then, possibly, Australia and Japan, I dragged my feet.

‘Get another piano player to learn all the parts.'

When Nico realised that this would entail having to rehearse, work with and remunerate a total stranger, she relaxed her grip on the swag a little. We got upped to £50 per show. Big time.

Demetrius reckoned this would be the first time a non-mainstream rock act had been to the Iron Curtain. Nico was worried that she wouldn't be able to score. She knew there was some stuff around but connecting could be a problem. I reassured her that anyone who had it would come and seek her out, top junkie, Queen of the Road.

About this time I'd become involved with a Norwegian girl called Eva. It was one of those long-distance impossibilities, doomed to extinction from the start. She worked in a strip show in Stockholm, as well as turning the occasional trick if times were hard. She'd been writing and illustrating her exploits since the age of sixteen when she ran away from home in Oslo after being raped by her grandfather, a Mauthausen survivor, and had gone to live in a sex commune in Austria. My English suburban sensibility felt a bit out of step with a history like that.

The phone at Effra Road had been disconnected; Demetrius had ordered a new one under the name of Dr J. Mengele, but it hadn't been installed yet, so I was obliged to call Eva from a street payphone. I was trying to reach numbers in Stockholm and Oslo from a callbox on Brixton High Street, whamming in 50ps every ten seconds, hippies pestering me for change. Hopeless. It would be a relief to get on that tour bus.

Now that we'd become less squeamish about the Great Unmentionable (money), Demetrius gave me a rough breakdown of the tour. As the musicians' fees had been increased, economies would therefore have to be made elsewhere. One of the chief bugbears was transport hire. That could amount to around £500 a week. One ruse Demetrius had employed in the past had been to hire a bus on the understanding that it would be just for U.K. travel only … we'd therefore be in illegal possession of a vehicle and without the appropriate insurance. This was felt to be particularly unwise for Eastern Europe. I suggested he
buy
a bus. Vehicle hire for an eight-week tour would add up to about £4,000. He could buy a decent Talbot tourer for around £5,000. He slapped £500 down on one and off we went.

Eric Random

Da-Ga-Di-Di Da-Ga-Dum

Da-Ga-Di-Di Da-Ga-Dum

Do Da De Ge

Do Da De Ge

R
I
P
P
P
P!

Demetrius flung the cassette to the back of the bus.

‘That stuff's
dangerous
!'

We had a new recruit, a tabl
a player from Manchester, called Eric Random. Eric had been part of the early eight
ies Manchester Scene. First hanging out with Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks, who wrote a song about him called ‘What do I Get?'; then as one of Shelley's Tiller Boys; and latterly forming his own punkadelic group, Eric Random and the Bedlamites.

Eric had swung this way and that. Shelley had tried to grab his pendulum, but the little fella was hard to catch. Slippery as a tube of KY, petite, with shiny black hair and a bone structure that Vogue models would kill for, Eric would provide an essential element missing since Echo's departure – Cool. He didn't actually ‘play' those tablas, nothing so crude, he seduced them as they sat coyly on a riser above the stage. First he'd remove the heavy black silk drape that protected them, then he'd shower their skins with baby talc. He'd sit cross-legged, in his own spotlight, Tantric medallion gleaming on his neck. An instant harem of adoring females would gather around his corner of the stage.

Random had spent some time in the Himalayas, smoking bongs, climbing personal mountains. He'd put himself in touch with some of the higher experiences but now he was ready to come down and get shagged.

Though Random had been talent-spotted by Demetrius, the Doctor's new protégé drove him crazy with the Indian music. He genuinely found it psychologically distressing – too linear, abstract, he liked words that you could sing along to, stuff rooted in the common clay. Great clouds of marijuana smoke would come wafting from the back of the bus as Random puffed massive lungfuls from a chillum improvised out of a Coke tin. He'd drink the Coke (breakfast), then immediately get to work bending and shaping the tin into a pipe, scraping away the paint and piercing little holes in the aluminium to accommodate the hash. One day archaeologists will be digging up Random's tins and reinterpreting them as unique counter-cultural artefacts.

Nico thought he was cute.

‘Oh, Eric,' she'd say, in a singsong voice, ‘have you got a little bit of haash?'

He'd give her a piece to roll one of her individual-size joints.

‘You see,' she'd pointedly tell Demetrius, ‘Eric knows what I need to be happy.'

We decided to decorate the new bus in a manner suited to kings of the road. We bought some stick-on girlie pinups from a French gas station, a dangling Saint Christopher and a luminous madonna, and a great Fire Eagle to stick on the bonnet. We got to the van next morning – Nico had been so incensed that for the first time in years she'd got up early and taken them all down, except for the Eagle, which couldn't be removed. Within twenty-four hours, though, she made her own contribution to the bus decor by setting her ashtray alight and burning the upholstery.

Demetrius the commander, Raincoat the driver, plus passengers Nico, me, Toby, Random and a sound engineer from Ashton-under-Lyne called Wadada. Wadada had spent a lot of time mushroom-picking up on the Saddleworth Moors. He believed that all phenomena could be divided into two categories of good and evil: ‘Devil' and ‘Righteous'. Meat was ‘devil-food' and Nico's act was ‘devil-music'. Demetrius had also taken him on as a reserve driver, but he was too shortsighted to see the road clearly. Wadada had recently been in Kingston, Jamaica, producing the great Prince Far-I, but had to return to Babylon after Prince Far-I was murdered.

En route to Yugoslavia we did a couple of warm-ups, spaced out just far enough to pay the gas, hotels and smack. The gigs were nothing special, but:

Paris

Demetrius had gone off to buy some cakes. He hated this kind of thing. Nico pressed the buzzer. The lobby door opened. Nico, Random and I entered the handsome marble foyer of an apartment block in one of the more fashionable
arrondissem
ents
.
There was a bowl of glacé mints on a smoked-glass table. Nico stubbed out her cigarette.

Mirrored lift. Bach Double Violin Concerto serenading us to the top floor.

We stood in the hallway. The fish-eye spyglass darkened for a second. Then the unlocking began. First the mortice, the bolt, then the door creaked open a couple of inches on a chain. Nico peeked her nose into the crack.

‘It's me, Nico.'

The door opened on to a scene of pure devastation. What had once been a chic
pied-à-terre
for the discreet lunchtime affairs of the Parisian
haute bourgeoisie
had been reduced to a microcosm of Beirut. The walls were smoke-blackened. The curtains eaten by fire. The sofa and chairs charred and disembowelled. The kitchen was piled high with the solidified remains of a hundred spaghetti dinners. The sweet, pungent reek of lactic acid and stale parmesan vomit cut through the all-pervading smell of burning.

In the far corner, crouched by the gutted TV, was a woman of about twenty-five pushing forty-five. A curtain of henna'd hair half covered her face, the other half was a mass of scabs and running sores. Her arms were bare and crisscrossed with needle scars. Her legs likewise.

‘Monica?' said Nico.

The girl made an effort to look up in our direction. Just then a male voice from behind us said in English, ‘If you come for ze stuff zere's nossing. Ze bitch 'as'ad it.'

A small guy in a leather blouson, with greying hair, stepped from behind the door. He strode across the room and dragged the girl to her feet by her hair. ‘
Salope!
' He smacked her across the face. She didn't flinch.

‘Excuse me …' I said.

‘You shoot your mouse.'

Random and I made a move towards him. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a gun, just to show us he was carrying a bit of weight, then replaced it.

‘Listen,' said Random, ‘we've just popped in on the off-chance, like, of a bit o' business.'

‘You can shoot your fucking mouse too, ass'ole.'

‘But,' Nico pleaded, ‘I need to get straight … Monica and I will get some stuff and we'll bring some back for you too, I promise … just don't do that to her,
pl
ee
ase.'

The guy still had the girl by the hair. He was thinking.

‘Yes,' I said, ‘that sounds like the best plan …'

‘I sought I tell you to shoot it,' the guy snarled at me.

We all stood in silence, except the girl, who was still kneeling, still held up by her hair.

‘OK' he said, ‘ze chicks can go for ze stuff. You two wet 'ere.' He shoved Monica's head into his crotch. ‘Don't come back empty-'anded, or shiz back on ze strit' – and threw her away from him.

Nico helped the girl to the door. As soon as they opened it, a well-groomed man in a camel coat burst in, looking around in horror. ‘My God! My apartment! What have you bastards done?' (He was the landlord and had been hovering around, waiting for someone to open the door.) He ran straight over to the guy and landed him one right in the mouth. We exited with the girl.

The bus was parked on the corner across the street. ‘Go!' shouted Nico, once we were inside, ‘Just go!'

Raincoat slammed his foot down and we careered off down the blind alleys of backstreet Paris.

Nico and Monica scored off the street and had it cooked and loaded in a jiffy. They were true professionals.

‘Where's Demetrius?' I asked.

‘He's still in the cakeshop,' said Toby.

We turned back to pick him up. There he was, standing where the bus had been, looking a little lost, holding a prettily wrapped box of cream cakes.

He jumped into the front seat, unaware of all the drama, and opened the cakes.

‘We have a guest,' I said.

Demetrius turned round, saw the girl, nodding out on Nico's shoulder.

‘Care for a chocolate éclair?' he said, offering the open box to her. The girl lifted her head slightly, her eyes rolled up, and a small blob of vomit, like baby puke, flopped out of her mouth.

Turned out the girl was the daughter of a South American movie star. Like Nico, she'd been taken up by Fellini, appearing in
Casanova
, and like Nico, she'd been dropped. Under the scabs and scars and the sweat-matted hair were the remnants of a real beauty. Demetrius wanted to save her. ‘Let me take you away from all this.' But to what? To a corner cupboard in Brixton with Nico, Clarke and Echo? To a death worse than fate?

The next show was in the gingerbread town of Nuremberg in southern Germany. Needless to say we had to go and see the Zeppelinwiese Stadium, Hitler's biggest gig. It was a huge amphitheatre, once a Zeppelin landing field, redesigned by Albert Speer, that in 1938 could hold a quarter of a million men and seventy thousand spectators. Indeed, the whole town had been one big rallying point, with one and a half million visitors for the Greatest Show on Earth. Hitler would deliver apoplectic rants from the podium (still there) that overlooked the parade ground.

The Nazi insignia have all been torn down, of course, although the impress of huge imperial eagles can still be detected in the pseudo-classicism of the arena, and the great bronze doors out of which the Führer would step to greet the massed multitudes still remain, scratched with graffiti, crude swastikas, ‘Walthamstow Boot Boys', ‘Adolf loves Eva '39', that kind of thing.

Needless to say everyone had their snapshot taken on Hitler's podium, except for Demetrius who, unable to leave the protective shadow of the bus, stood by the driver's door in case a sudden Nazi renaissance required a quick Diaspora. Nico just stayed in her seat and whacked up a big one.