Nico (21 page)

*

Clarke and Echo had been to Australia together for a couple of weeks. Echo spelt out the hazards to me as Nico was to do the same tour imminently. He told me how the promoter had personally threatened him, accusing him of being a parasite on Clarke. Nico said, ‘You two should get married – I guess for them it's like you're living in sin.'

Any hints of homosexuality threw them both into a stir of Catholic homophobia. ‘It sez in the Bible,' etc etc. In fact, for Clarke, mentioning any kind of male sexuality risked an unwanted reference to the seat of shame itself: ‘the three-piece suite, the sausage and mash – God's cruellest joke.'

Echo reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out a couple of snapshots. One was of a girl who looked like Alice in Wonderland but with an Edgar Allen Poe twist, an emaciated child-woman who looked like she'd scratched her way out of a coffin. ‘Met 'er in Sydney, wonderful girl, 'Elena, amazin' 'ow she's kept 'erself tergether – yer'd never guess she was on the gear would yer?' He showed me his other snap. ‘They'ave whales up near Brisbane,' he said with awe. I looked at the photo, it was a picture of the empty sea, nothing else.

‘But where are the whales?' I asked.

‘They dived,' he said, pointing to a blank area of sea. ‘But that's where they were.'

Echo complained of a perpetual toothache but said he couldn't go to the dentist as he was scared of injections. Also he'd told Dr Strang back in Prestwich hospital that he was ‘sick of the bloody methadone … I want what they give prisoners – bromide. Ev'ry time I get the bus up ter Prestwich I get a fookin' 'ard-on cos o' the vibrations … the only way I can ged it down is ter think o' the bleedin' dentist.'

You'd get dizzy listening to Echo's explanations of his life. Sooner or later he'd get round to how disloyal I'd been not quitting Nico's ensemble when he did.

‘But you didn't quit,' I said, ‘you were fired.'

‘Yeh, but I wouldn't'ave bin if you'd quit too, then it would 'ave bin proper workers' solidarity.'

‘Workers? Nico and Demetrius fired you because you're a junkie,' I said. ‘She's not your mother … she doesn't need dependants, she's got her own habit to look after.'

‘But after all I fookin' did fer'er … an' fer you.'

Nico was also turning weirder by the minute. One day I caught her rifling through my coat pockets, probably in search of cigs or a bit of change. The kleptomania reached its peak when I found out she'd pinched a love-letter of mine from Norway.

‘It wasn't very interesting,' she said, ‘the usual gerrl's stuff.'

‘That's all right, then,' I replied, ‘just pass on the bills as usual.'

We had a red-hot row about it that became really childish. She started off with all that nymphomaniac stuff again so I called her a nosy old nun.

‘Can I have it back?' I demanded.

‘I've lost it,' she said.

I grabbed her shoulder bag and rummaged inside … God, the junk in there, something from every hotel of every tour, packets of soap and shampoo (never to be used), stationery, an ashtray … but no letter.

‘You see, I'm telling the truth,' she said. ‘I've lost it … so you can believe me when I tell you it's not worth reading.'

It was always the same old junkie meta-logic. Any nonsense could be justified, any absurdity rationalised.

Demetrius had also had enough, retreating to Manchester to recuperate. He had to find another road manager in his stead, someone dependable and unbreakable. Raincoat pleaded for the job, but after the poisoning attempt Raincoat's days were numbered. Besides, Raincoat was doing a new Frankie impersonation – the Man With the Golden Arm – for real. Raincoat had joined up with the Undead and was now plying his mission on the street. Demetrius felt there was no alternative but to bring in a character he'd threatened us with before – the Big Grief.

We-e-e-ll … 'ere we are

'n 'ere we go 'n geddawayeeay

… Rockin' all over the world.

‘C'mon, let's fookin' 'ear yer! Sing up! That means you, snog-gin' each other in the back … Now, are yer right, Nico? 'Ave yer got yer words sorted, luv? Sound. Right, I'll count ter four an' then all tergether …'

Grief was the last in a long line of missing links, Cro-Magnon throwbacks from Eccles. Demetrius had pulled him in to control us and to punish us. Eccles is a social anthropologist's paradise, the sinkhole of Manchester, where the indigenous troglodytic inhabitants have squatted round campfires, roasting carcasses and molesting each other's wives for millennia. Now their caves all have satellite dishes but their table manners remain the same. Grief was indigenous Eccles. Hair a long frizzy helmet, huge canine teeth and an expression of permanent rabid rage. He'd learned his craft down the Stretford End, cracking skulls, throwing (and catching) Irish grenades, potatoes with razorblades stuck in their sides. Grief was playtime dread, everything you ever feared back in the schoolyard.

‘Right! One more time! … Just listen ter Nico – singin' 'er 'eart out, arntyer luv? An' they lost the fookin' war! So, come on, loud an' clear … ‘Rockin' All Over the World'
one more time
!'

February–March '86:

DOWN UNDER NICO

Dennis picked us up at Sydney Airport in a Rolls. He'd hired it just for the trip into town. He wanted to spoil us because it was in his nature – he had this good feeling about
us. Late forties, stocky, toug
h, he was the Boss of the Job in Sydney. He knew every angle, every crack behind the wallpaper. His girlfriend ran a chain of high-class brothels called That Touch of Venus. Venus had many moons, one of which was a mobile bordello in a converted trailer, lined with pink fur, called Transports of Delight.

‘When we started out t'gither, Venus told me I couldn't fack 'er … straight up, said I'd 'ave t' wait til the wedding night – but I could 'ave it on the'ouse till then … wadda woman.'

‘A goddess,' I said.

He dropped us at the Cosmopolitan Hotel at Bondi.

‘Anythin' y'want – come t'me. Any problems – come t'me.'

‘We want ter go to That Touch of Venus,' said Random.

We went to the beach instead, where we immediately fell asleep, dreaming of Venus and catching sunstroke. That night we both had a fever. Then the next day our skins started to fall off in great patches. ‘Enough to make a lampshade,' said Nico. It looked like she'd brought a couple of lepers along with her when we did our first date at the Piggery in Byron Bay.

The Piggery was a converted abattoir, if you could call it a conversion; basically they'd just slaughtered all the pigs. It still stank of pigshit and animal fear. It was a deeply inauspicious place to start a tour. The Piggery audience were expecting to hear a hugely popular local support group called the Headless Chickens, but they got killed in a road smash on the way to the gig. There was an atmosphere of sadness and latent anger, as if we were somehow responsible. The Curse of Nico.

Everywhere we went, we bombed. It just wasn't their thing: like California before, they danced to a different beat, theirs being essentially garage rock – lots of grungy guitars, fast and funny lyrics, walloping drums – no poetry, it just makes you feel good. Nico's ship of doom had definitely docked into the wrong port. For the first time, though, she was philosophical about it. She knew her stuff was an alien brew and it didn't hurt her too deeply, it didn't feel like total failure. Though Dennis's ‘good feeling' about us had rapidly degenerated into acid indigestion he still remained charming and encouraging. He genuinely adored Nico, wanted to protect her. She was a real lady, she had
‘class,
mate'. He knew all about Nico's habit and it concerned him, even hurt him, to see her mistreat herself like that – but he'd been around enough to know that there were no quick cures or clever explanations. He liked us all, even Grief. When Dennis told us the girls at That Touch of Venus had all been trained in the arts of love by a Thai sex guru, Random's talisman started to twinkle. We kept bugging him for an intro. It was only fifty yards up the hill from his own club. The girls lived in. We'd see them drinking coffee and hanging up their smalls in the laundry room as we passed by, to while away the afternoon in Dennis's office, while Nico followed the white rabbit through Wonderland with Echo's girl, Helena.

Helena was indeed Echo's anima, his feminine counterpart. Thin and wasted, obsessed with heroin and its whole history, she would hold seminars. Did we know, for instance, that Bayer, the company that first manufactured aspirin, also came up with the first synthesised Diacetylmorphine and that they patented it under the name ‘Heroin', as a cough cure? That was back in 1898. Did we also know that it was legal for nearly twenty years? We didn't. She offered everyone a sample and then went into a detailed description of the physiological and neurological effects as they occurred. Did we know that opiate molecules attach themselves to certain receptor sites in the brain? We didn't. The high being the act of making these neurological connections, and that the opiate molecules imitate the action of endorphins, which are the body's natural analgesic? We didn't.

‘Weird ter think of all them endolphins swimmin' about in yer brain, in't it?' said Toby.

Bondi offered Nico most of her everyday needs – all-night pharmacists and healthfood shops. Nico was on something of a health kick at the time. She'd settle on one food substance – like yoghurt – and she'd stick exclusively to it. The idea of planning a menu for herself and then eating it alone was too depressing a prospect. So she'd just think
yoghurt.
You don't need to chew yoghurt.

At first it seemed the gigs would do well in Sydney. The first night they packed the place and the reviews were on our side. But Dennis had booked Nico in for three shows. There just weren't enough doom-dwellers in Paddington and Bayswater. Junkies there might be aplenty, but the difference was the sun shone all day on their craniums, all that melanin produced wallflowers who needed a different aesthetic climate to Nico's teutonic fog.

On days off Grief would herd us into the bus and insist we explore the hinterlands. ‘Gerraway from all this faggot'ealth food and microbiotic bollox.' He took us up into the Blue Mountains, where great flocks of parrots would break their roosts high up in the trees and dive and circle above our heads. He made us
walk
– something we'd grown unaccustomed to.

Most of the time Nico had to stay behind to do endless interviews. Dennis had tried every promotional angle. TV, radio, newspapers. But still the attendance at shows was little more than a dribble.

Nico's connection in New Zealand was arrested before we arrived and he'd given her name to the customs.

‘They even squeezed out my toothpaste,' she said. Luckily she'd handed her stuff to Toby in the arrival lounge and he did the lot on the spot.

At the Glue Pot in Auckland (the name gives some hint of the clientele – mostly high on solvents) there was a bevy of separatist dykes standing at the front, keeping up a nonstop chant the moment Random, Toby and I stepped on stage. ‘We want Nico – we don't want you! We want Nico – we don't want you!' Whenever there was a lull in a song they'd stick their noses into a cellophane carrier-bag, get a head full of Araldite, and start up again. During a break between numbers I whispered to Nico to tell them to shut it.

‘He says,' she said, pointing me out to our chorus of super-glue valkyries, ‘tell the dykes to shut it.'

After the show they came hunting for me backstage and I had to be escorted from the building for my own safety.

The local promoter said he'd taped the show and thought it might make an interesting live album.

‘With all that heckling?' I asked.

‘Especially with the heckling,' he said. ‘Novelty market, mate.'

Did I have any ideas for a title?

‘How about
Down Under Nico
?'

Back in Oz, our four nights in Melbourne coincided with the Australian leg of Bob Dylan's endless world tour.

‘I'd so like to see Bawb … it's been such a long time.'

Dennis called Dylan's tour management. He got the classic Rock'n'roll runaround … call back at such and such a time, maybe you will, maybe you won't. Finally Dennis got ‘Maybe Bob will drop in and see Nico after his own show.'

Nico was so excited, like it was a date. She had a bath and bought a new shirt. Throughout the gig she kept craning her neck, scanning the audience for a glimpse of Lonesome Bob. When he didn't show I found her crying in the dressing- room.

‘No one comes to see me any more.'

One late afternoon back in Bondi I bumped into her on the street. I was carrying bottles of sunscreen for me and Random and she had her daily carton of yoghurt. She seemed uncharacteristically cheerful, so I said why don't we go down to the sea? She said she couldn't swim.

‘How's about a paddle?' I suggested.

‘OK.'

We rolled up our trousers and walked along the shoreline, still carrying our groceries. I reminded her of a heckler from the Brisbane show: ‘Doncha know no happy songs, darlin?' She giggled, then started singing ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do'.

‘I bet that's the first English song you ever learnt,' I said.

She just smiled and carried on singing, swishing her feet in the water, happy in the sunset.

After the Canberra show, in search of something to do in Australia's eerie Brasilia, Toby, Random and I phoned up for three hookers. ‘Yew in a greup, theen?' said mine, already looking at her watch. ‘First off – I don't swallow it, noway. Even with me boyfriend I always spit'n' rinse after with List'rine.'

The bumps and grinds, sighs and moans, started up in the rooms on either side of mine. She wasn't bad looking, just lacking any pretence of sensuality.

‘Fancy a cup of tea?' I asked.

‘If y'like.'

She checked her wristwatch again. After precisely one hour she banged on the wall.

‘Right then! Finish'em off, girls!'

Later we three clients sat around talking about Nico, a subject perfectly suited to post-coital
tristesse.
We all seemed to have come to the same conclusion, separately, that Nico's need for heroin far outweighed any other ambition she might have. We knew that, ultimately, anything we might contribute musically was incidental. If we wanted to be either serious or indifferent then it was our own affair. Despite
Camera Obscura
'
s
enthusiastic reception, and the resurgence of interest in her, Nico remained a slave to her habit. Japan was the last leg of the tour, and then we agreed it would be time to take our leave of Estradella and her Dog of Doom.

Before we left Australia Nico met a biker in Perth called Squasher. He had a Harley and plenty of what Nico liked.

‘Him big fella,' said Random, looking like a streak of black ink beside Squasher in conventional biker mode of sweat-stained T-shirt and arse-crack jeans. Squasher would bring Random bags of fresh marijuana heads and take Nico off for long rides along the coast of the Indian Ocean to see the ‘dawlphins'.

For some time after Nico would refer nostalgically to her Knight on the shining Harley. ‘Squorscher … I miss him soooo.'

Squasher was the only guy I ever heard her sound really fond of. He had no sophistication or artistic pretensions, no misguided romantic yearnings for
La Belle Dame Sans Merci,
and no camp illusions about the Moon Goddess. He was just a regular guy and Nico could be his regular girl if she wanted.

‘Just hop on the back, darlin, wrap yer arms around me barrel and let's kick-start each other t' heaven.'