Nico (15 page)

Sleep cost money. It meant the studio wasn't being used. We were all in that semi-trance state that the mind gets into when regular sleep-patterns are broken. Cale would stagger off into the night, looking for some action, banging on the doors of some low-rent bacchanal, demanding to be admitted. Instead of rugby, he'd found art, but he still wandered the streets at midnight, like a boozed-up boyo.

Nico returned, suggesting we do the two cover songs – not that she was wildly keen about them herself, she just couldn't come up with any more original material, and we were running out of time. We put them down. She sang ‘Valentine' well, like a graveside elegy, but it still seemed out of place, a cabaret spotlight on a cream grand piano in a Gothic ruin.

We still had to make up one more track. I had an idea to put down something that would somehow encapsulate the whole Brixton/Nico/Cale experience. A kind of musical distillation of the fragmentary video we were subjected to back at Effra Road. I played a keyboard melody and suggested Cale recite a passage from
Tropic of Capricorn
:
‘The last white man pulling the trigger on the last emotion …' To which we added blasts of Nico's Lorelei foghorn. Then, finally, Dids came downstairs from the studio kitchen carrying an assortment of pots, pans and kettles. He arranged them on the floor in a circle and sat in the middle, playing his bric-à-brac Balham gamelan. Way down upon the Mekong Delta with Crazy Christa and Psycho Johnny.

Back in Brixton Cale couldn't/wouldn't sleep. He'd blunder around the flat all night long, playing endless mixes on a ghetto-blaster. Nico gave him a shot to knock him out, he was bugging us so badly. He spent the next day puking up the consequences. The alleyway up to the studio was an archipelago of vomit atolls.

At the end of three weeks we just had to leave it and walk away. There were some good ideas and one really standout track, called ‘König'. A beautiful, almost chorale-like piece. Cale wanted to do an arrangement for it, but I urged him to leave it alone. Just Nico and the harmonium, her voice cracking at times, yet free – unencumbered by anyone else's image of her. No need to give her a setting, or dress her up in modernity. What she had was her own.

‘König'

Oh König lass Dich leiten

Lass mich Dich begleiten

Oh König lass Dich leiten

Lass mich Dich begleiten

Auf diesem weiten Strand

Ergreife meine Hand.

Ich will Dir alles geben

Dass Dich am Leben halt

Ein Hoffen und ein Streben

Dein Blick ist in mein Zelt.

‘King'

(Oh King let yourself be led

Let me escort you

Oh King let yourself be led

Let me escort you.

On this wide shore

Take hold of my hand

I want to give you everything

That will keep you alive

Hope and Striving

Your glance falls into my tent.)

As I put my key into the lock I heard a noise to my left. I looked down. Hiding behind one of the stone lions was Echo.

‘Echo, is that you? … What are you doing?'

‘Doin'? Doin'? A'm gonna do 'im, that's what! The boyo – the sheepshagger.' He stepped dramatically out of the shadows, thumping his fist into his hand. He had a thick brass knuckleduster.

‘Jesus, Echo …' I'd never seen a knuckleduster before. It weighed down my hand. You could break someone's jaw with one blow. Two would kill. I let him in, told him to put the weapon away and made him a bed on the sofa.

Cale had gone. Nico was in her room listening to her new album over and over again.

‘There's somethin' about that moon I don't like,' said Echo, ‘now yer see it, now yer don't – day in, day out. I'm fookin' sick, Jimmy.' He left me his sketch book to peruse, the one marked private, while he went upstairs to knock on Nico's door.

The first page had a picture of John Cooper Clarke on the cross. Instead of
inri
it bore the inscription
i
♥
new york
. Another had Nico in a parody of a renaissance Madonna and child, crouched in her black cloak, as if nursing the infant Jesus. When you looked closer you could see her strapped up and tourniqué'd, ready to hit the vein. I turned the pages: me, playing a grand piano whose curves metamorphosed into a recumbent naked Venus. Demetrius as a bright pink devil with the fires of hell glowing on his naked skin … in his right hand, instead of a pitchfork, a Bullworker; in his left a swagbag with dollar bills falling out, his beard trimmed wickedly, and two little nascent horns protruding from his bald pate. Like a medieval bestiary the book contained the phantasmagoria of Echo's everyday existence.

May '85:

THE SONS OF SLUMBER

As soon as Cale had left, Echo and John Cooper Clarke were reinstalled. Clarke had been doing some shows promoted by Demetrius. Echo was always there, the emperor's food-taster, personal valet, ‘Wife even,' said Nico. Clarke would always bring home the necessaries, like a good husband. The two of them would spend entire evenings taking shot after shot until they were dangerously close to OD:

‘Amma goin', John, amma?'

‘Aye … yer turnin' blue…'

‘Amma, John … amma?'

They'd take turns to see who dared touch the chill hand of Papa Death.

Nico was caught up in pre-release publicity
platitudes. Int
erminable interviews with the same old soundtrack: ‘… Aaaandy … Looooou … Jaaawn … Aaaandy … Veeelvet … Loooou … Aaandy …'

She still hadn't come up with a title for the album.

‘How about: Morphia and the Sons of Slumber?' I'd suggested. She gave me her stun-gun look and tapped the hypodermic, deadening any air-bubbles.

Demetrius suggested her backing group should find a name, that way our jobs would be safeguarded. Bookers would want the whole package. I was stuck on ‘the Sons of Slumber', but Nico just wouldn't have it. In fact she didn't want anyone else's name anywhere on the album cover.

‘OK then – what about
NICO
very big and
the Sons of
Slumber
,
very small?' I appealed to her. ‘It has a definite ring to it, don't you think?'

‘Jim … you are reedeeeculous, always joking. That English sense of humooor … you know I don't get it.'

‘But I'm
serious
,' I protested.

She tutted, and loaded the open-heart surgery video into the player. Clarke and Echo perked up – there was a particular sequence they liked, a configuration of clamps and catheters, peeled flesh and subcutaneous fat, all of this intercut with snippets of the tape's previous occupant, Kurtz/Brando: ‘The Horror … the Horror …'

‘Come on, Nico – tell us a joke,' I suggested, wearying of the collage of bloodstained scalpels and crumbling pagodas.

‘But I don't know any jokes.'

‘You must know
one
,' I persisted.

‘No, really, I don't …'

Clarke was amazed. ‘Everybody should know
one
joke, Nico.'

‘Yeh,' said Echo, ‘yer never know 'oo yer might get banged up with.'

‘Banged up?' she was puzzled. ‘You mean like sharing a needle?'

‘No …
Banged up
, pleasurin' 'er Majesty …'

‘Oooo, I see.' She smiled and nodded understanding. ‘You mean,
in the bedroooom
.
'

‘He means in
jail,
Nico,' I said, killing the confusion.

‘Oooh … yeees …' She pondered the impossible mysteries of the English language. Clarke remained incredulous: ‘Straight up – yer don't know
one
joke?'

‘Honestly, John, I've told you. We Germans have no sense of huuumoooor.'

‘Yer right,' said Echo. ‘If they 'ad, they'd 'ave copped the resemblance ter Charlie Chaplin.'

Again, Nico was lost. Echo rarely introduced the subject matter of his observations.

Clarke was still intrigued by Nico's jokeless personality: ‘I know … why don't yer just try ter learn
one
joke? Think of all the new friends yer could make … yer need a sense of 'umour, yer can't get through this world on charm alone, Nico.'

‘I just don't seem to remember them.'

‘
Try
,' said Clarke. He launched into his repertoire. It was a private performance even funnier than his public ones. All the vicious, really funny jokes the Alternative crowd disapprove of.

We'd wait after each one … waiting, not necessarily for laughter, but for some click of understanding. It never came. She just didn't get it. We went back to the open-heart video.

Clarke squeezed a subtle hint of lemon juice into his elixir of happiness and heated the base of the spoon with his lighter:

‘I've been readin' about this completely new type of birth pill …' He pulled back the dropper and filled the empty syringe. ‘Yer swallow one an' it's like yer were never born.' He handed the hypodermic to Echo, who had his vein up and ready. As Echo injected his share, Clarke tightened a polka-dot tie round his forearm, bracing himself for Echo's administration of the remaining half-shot. Clarke still feared yet loved the needle, a novice at communion.

Nico began to shake, silently and slowly, then her shoulders began to jig up and down: ‘H'mmmm … Ho Ho …'

Clarke and Echo closed their eyes in mutual prayer, sensing the benign radiance of Mother Love as she poured divine unction into their abject souls. Without committing mortal sin, smacking up was the only way two males could come together.

‘… H'mmmm … Ho Ho … H'mmmm … Ho Ho … Like you were never boooorn … Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho …'

Nico came up with a title for the album:
Camera Obscura.
Demetrius and I smuggled a name for the group on to the cover. ‘Something small,' he'd suggested. Clarke and Echo came up with
The Faction.
Nondescript, diminutive. That's how Nico liked us.

When she saw the sleeve she freaked.

‘Who's this fucking Faction?' She made it sound like Fucktion.

Everyone shrugged. ‘It's you, Jim, isn't it?'

‘OK, it's me.'

‘You've got a damned cheek – on
my
album.'

‘If you're so concerned about
your
album, how come you were only present in the studio for four days out of the three

weeks?'

I just wanted to chisel a little foothold somewhere – she wouldn't give an inch. I knew she'd be straight on the phone to Demetrius.

‘That Jim, so puuushy. Who does he think he is, huh? Can't we get someone else?'

The album came out to kind reviews. The serious doom-dwellers went into ecstasies. Mostly critics just seemed to be reassured by the fact that Nico was still alive somewhere, so long as it wasn't in their vicinity.

Beggar's Banquet went for the safe option and released ‘My Funny Valentine' as the single. The more I heard it, the more I hated it. It wasn't Nico's fault especially in choosing the song, or mine for its bland piano and unnecessary trumpet arrangement. There had been so little time to do anything interesting with it, to reinvent it, make it say something. I dreamed of a steady, funereal, E-flat figure on the piano, repeated throughout the piece, and held together by simple architectural chords, like a Delphic tomb. Instead it sounded like a drag act in a half-dead cabaret. But then, maybe that's what everyone wanted.

June '85:

SUSPICIOUS MINDS

It was two thousand years since the last Poetry Olympics flop at the Albert Hall … people would have forgotten. Time for another bout of logorrhoea. The Beatniks' revenge.

John Cooper Clarke had been slipped on the bill as a young(ish) contender so Demetrius finally got the chance to get to Allen Ginsberg, the headline act. Nico knew Ginsberg from the good old days back at the Dom – in fact she'd borrowed the harmonium idea from him. Demetrius and Ginsberg had a shared enthusiasm … Enthusiasm. Demetrius championed Ginsberg because he was never really ‘hip', being too much of a celebrant … the nebbish at the centre of every groovy scene, holding a candle, chanting his homoerotic mantras. He'd get excited and take off his clothes in
the presence of
people who were too cool to remove their RayBans. He was Dr Demetrius's kind of guy.

Demetrius quickly elected himself as Ginsberg's road manager and fixed him up with a rentagig reading in Liverpool. Nico and I tagged along.

Ginsberg was dressed in a check jacket, white shirt and tie, his beard neatly trimmed. He looked like an elderly Emeritus professor of American literature, rather than the guru of mutual masturbation. Demetrius seemed a bit disappointed. As the exhausted Citroën panted up the M6, the conversation limped along behind.

‘How smaaart you look now, Allen,' remarked Nico.

‘Weell you know, times have changed. I'm told the Buddah would wear a jacket and tie now, and host his own talk show, on cable of course.'

‘Well, I'm not so sure about that, Allen,' said Demetrius, offended by the image.

‘Neither am I,' he chuckled.

Rather than the hoped-for instant bridge of sensibilities between the two men of letters, Demetrius encountered an immediate chasm of understanding, constantly widened by their attempts at conversation. Demetrius had believed that Ginsberg was the true inheritor of the Whitman flame, the Ecstatic Priapic, an unrepentant self-pleasurer.

But … the Master Beat, it turned out, was not a true man of the people. He didn't endorse the simple and honest virtues of the people's music (Country & Western). Nor did he honour the memory of the people's sovereign. The King:

We're caught in a trap

I can't walk out

Because I love you too much, Baby.

‘I really can't,' said Ginsberg, the words muffled by a mouthful of cheese and onion crisps, ‘see any redeeming qualities in the music of Elvis Presley. I'm sorry …' He really did seem sorry.

Demetrius turned up the cassette. ‘Just listen to this, Allen.' He sang along in that bluff, hunker-down baritone:

We can't go on together

With suspicious minds

And we can't build our dreams

On suspicious minds.

‘There you go, Allen,' Demetrius paused the cassette. ‘
We can't build our dreams on suspicious minds.
What a line!'

Ginsberg shook his head. ‘Once again, I'm sorry, I just don't see it.' To him it was just honky music, whiter than a Klansman's hood. ‘Compared with an artist of Dylan's depth and originality, Presley is pure Vegas Schlock.'

‘Bloody'ell, Allen, you're talking about the King there.' Demetrius was wounded. He canvassed Nico's opinion.

Nico was smoking a thin, single joint like a rollup, of opiated hash. She mulled over the message of the dead King, then smiled at everyone. ‘You know, there's this new birth pill, that when you take it, it's like you were never boorn … funny, huh?' She laughed.

Ginsberg popped open another bag of crisps and offered them round. It kept our mouths wordlessly occupied.

Demetrius had hoped he might be in for some
On the Road
epiphanies. Ginsberg, perhaps, hoped he might be in for some Front-Line Brixton Faggotry. (I'd expressed interest in his small Indian pump-organ. I think he got the wrong idea.)

Nico just seemed happy to be with someone older than herself, who endorsed some of the same Dionysiac myths. For Artist Guru, read Favourite Uncle.

Ginsberg seemed genuinely to go for the good in people, straight away. Demetrius's competitiveness and cock-size comparisons were of little interest to him. There was a seriousness behind the hedonism and an austerity beneath the hyperbole. He was a kindly man who held strong beliefs, the belief in happiness being paramount. He just didn't like Elvis Presley.

We weren't accustomed to such positivism and the dank European fog of pessimism took a little time to lift … though, strangely, not from Nico's shoulders. She seemed almost childlike with him, less tortured. Enriched by his spiritual largesse.

Demetrius's father, Big Lionel, was a gruff, bluff, Manchester patriarch. The Tyrannosaurus Rex of the Rotary Club. He detested all lesser reptiles like his son's associates and thought Demetrius Jr an unworthy recipient of the family chemist fortune. He'd had three heart attacks already – one for each of his sons.

Demetrius Jr had witnessed Ginsberg's dignified professorial manner at the Albert Hall. Perhaps a poetry recital would reassure his father that his son was at last engaged in serious cultural pursuits.

The dressing-room was unlike any I'd ever seen. People talking quietly, holding glasses of white wine at shoulder level. Women in frocks, men in suits, cheese on sticks, a couple of bearded Robin Hall and Jimmie McGregor lookalikes discussing ballad form by the beer tray. There was no one puking, fighting, shooting up, or sulking.

Nico wandered around the chattering forest of literary wind, a lost child smoking an opium joint.

I remained, the corner paranoiac, aware only of a slight whiff of body odour, of nervous provincialism, of defeat. Allen was the most famous poet in the world. Not as famous as a medium-level pop-star would be, but it was an extraordinary achievement, nonetheless. You could detect little bite-size morsels of envy, they popped in and out of mouths, like the skewered cubes of sweating cheddar: ‘This psychedelic Rabbi, this media-manipulator, this Half-Holy Fool of the Beautiful People gets everywhere, all the time. How does the bastard find time to write? Huh, no wife, no kids of course … Gay, you
know …
the first to come out, they say … Quite courageous really, in the middle of McCarthyism … H'mmmm, he has been around rather a long time, though …'

The cheese-and-winos left the dressing-room and took their seats in the hall. Big Lionel was escorted to the ‘Reserved' row.

Nico offered Ginsberg some of her joint (a rare act) before he went on stage. He paused, then as if resolving against false resolutions, accepted it, sipping little by little the tarry euphoria. He passed it to Demetrius, who shook his head.

‘No, no, Allen, never, not for me … the mirror is already distorted.'

‘Are you going to take your clothes off, Allen?' Nico asked.

In front of the ‘mild, withdrawn English', we'd have to see.

Nico and I took our places at the back, directly behind Big Lionel and Demetrius.

Ginsberg began by chanting the Padma Sambhava mantra: ‘Om Ah Hum …' seated on a chair, squeeze-box on his knees, sustaining a single-note drone. The embarrassment prickled, but it was bearable. People half expected the chanting. What made the audience crave invisibility, though, was Ginsberg's increasingly homosexual subject matter.

He lubricated our sensibilities with ‘Red cheeked boyfriends tenderly kiss me sweet-mouthed/Under Boulder coverlets winter springtime …' Gently he slipped in the ‘happy hard-ons'.

Then he yelled a climactic sonnet to the stretched sphincter: ‘Fuck me in the ass! Suck me! Come in my ears!/I want those pink Abdominal Bellybuttons!'

The veins in Big Lionel's neck bulged. His skin turned red to purple with barely suppressed outrage.

After the reading Big Lionel refused to shake the hand of the sodomite, the fellator of blond boys, the man who washed his own arse like a street Arab. Instead he exploded at Demetrius: ‘My Godfathers! Call that poetry? That I should desert my hearth and home to be subjected to the foul-mouthed ravings of a bearded nancy.'

In the dressing-room the serious Liverpool literati gathered as Ginsberg carefully packed his squeeze-box. Mersey Beat Poets. Beards and BeBop glasses. Thelonius Monk and the Man in the Moon.

Nico poured herself a glass of warm Liebfraumilch and shook her head; she seemed disappointed.

‘What's up?' I asked.

‘I thought Allen
always
took his clothes off,' she sighed.