by James Young
‘I often feel that the motorway is the modern river – “On tides of tarmac/we travel our trends.”’ (He self-quoted.)
Toby cut into the versifying, ‘’Ow does it look, Doc? Yer can tell us straight, like.’
‘Now, what we have here,’ Demetrius began, ‘is essentially a conflict of interests, compounded by a multiplicity of needs … Nico needs to work in order to buy heroin, and heroin in order to work; Echo needs Nico to buy heroin in order not to work; we, on the other hand, have but one simple need: Adventure.’
He pulled a Vick inhaler from his waistcoat pocket and took a deep sniff.
‘Aaaah … Yes, gentlemen, Adventure. After all, is that not why we are gathered here now? There are other rewards in life, to be sure, but they are brittle and transient. Adventure sustains the Spirit, feeds the Will, makes us rise above our miserable subjectivity … unlike our friend Echo, who prefers to wallow in his. A victim of unquestioning dogma, Echo crucifies himself for imagined sins.’ He poked a Trust House Forte biro at Toby. ‘Are we to stand motionless at the foot of the cross, in some bizarre Pietà of indecision?’
‘Don’t ask me, squire, I jus’ want me cab fare back ter Wythenshawe.’
‘May I suggest, Toby, that you set your sights a little higher than the windswept council estates of south Manchester? A golden egg of opportunity has been placed in our fragile nest. Let us endeavour to incubate it with our support, so that it may hatch into full plumage.’
‘I’m not sure I catch yer drift,’ said Toby.
Demetrius sighed, scratched his beard, and shook a couple of Valium from a small brown bottle (his father owned a chain of chemists). ‘Quite simply. Keep Echo off the stuff, and keep Nico on her feet … I’m relying on you both. I’ve already redirected the career aspirations of that degenerate little freeloader with the septic leg who lived on her floor. “Artistic Adviser” indeed. An unfortunate attachment – though I suppose abscess makes the heart grow fonder.’ He chuckled to himself and necked the valium. ‘It’s up to us now to take care of her. Remember, this is “Nico”, “Chanteuse of the Velvet Underground”. Buy yourselves some dark sunglasses and a couple of black polonecks … we’ll need the art crowd behind us if we intend to make a go of this.’
He handed us three £10 notes each. Toby immediately went out and bought half a gram of heroin.
The days zigzagged into an endlessly frustrating stop/start come/go nowhere affair. Cabs from Demetrius’s office over to Echo’s and back again. Mysterious journeys down dark country lanes in the Saddleworth Moors, looking for Nico’s heroin connection; or through the windtunnels and concrete labyrinths of the Hulme and Moss Side estates where the ice-cream men sold amphetamine before smack became more profitable. Suffer little children.
Nico-Watching: scanning her features for vestiges of that flawless beauty that I’d only ever glimpsed in a dim bedroom hopelessness, tuning into a voice that had only ever accompanied the late-night confessional elegy for a lost virginity.
In photographs the light seemed to carve and recreate her, like living sculpture, slicing into those granite cheekbones, chiselling the profile. Close up it was a different picture. The long blonde hair of the Chelsea Girl was now a greying brown, her facial skin puffed and slack, her hands and arms scabbed and scarred by needletracks, and her eyes like a broken mirror. It wasn’t necessarily the years that had been unkind to her – she was only forty-two – but the woman herself. She had simply traded in her previous glamorous image for something altogether more unappealing. Yet she didn’t seem to care, insulated from self-appraisal by the warm, nullifying reassurance that heroin provides. She’d locked herself in so deep that she hadn’t surveyed the exterior in a while.
I couldn’t work out how to talk to her. She spoke her own language … dreamy, cryptic. It was pointless trying to engage her with anodyne topics like current events or even music. But then, I was beginning to learn that musicians don’t talk much. It’s not that they’re enigmatic or interesting. They just have nothing to say.
I didn’t know if she was particularly unhappy, just strangely absent. Occasionally she’d throw out a casual remark like, ‘I haven’t had a bath in a year, you know.’ What was I supposed to say? From day one she remarked on a certain fastidiousness.
‘You’re like a girl,’ she’d say, ‘always preening.’
My academic preoccupations amused her as well.
‘How’s life in Ox-foord?’ she kept on asking, knowing perfectly well that ‘life’ and ‘Oxfoord’ viewed each other with mutual distaste. ‘Such a pretty town …’ and then she’d laugh. ‘Pretty’ meaning exactly that to her: ornamental and useless. Girls were ‘pretty’ … and a nuisance; she made it clear they would not be a welcome addition to our company with their ‘squeaky little voices’ and ‘teeedious love lives’. Then her mouth would take on a sneer and she’d lapse once more into silence, her thoughts pursuing themselves in a tumbling morphine rush …
‘Ah, poor Nico,’ said Demetrius. ‘Down what dark and empty avenues must the nightingale fly?’
After a week of near-total inertia, broken only by the sporadic tuning of guitars, I began to realise that a future with Nico was in fact an invitation to the land where time stood still and where lost causes returned to inert promise. I knew the territory. It was just like a library.
Demetrius had pulled us all together from different corners of his life, expecting some sort of golden alchemical reaction. But we remained a bunch of base metal misfits, hitching up our rusty wagon to Nico’s celebrity in the hope that it might take us somewhere, anywhere. As her ‘manager’ he tried to keep a grip on things, but his authority was undermined by his appearance. Fatter than a cream cheese bagel, undersize trilby perched precariously on his bald head, he lumbered around Echo’s place, crushing the children’s toys, tripping over lead-wires, Caliban in a Burton suit.
Even when we got down to some serious attempt at a rehearsal, it was hopeless. No one knew what to do. It didn’t matter how clever or proficient you might be (in fact, in Rock terms these are negative qualities), you couldn’t fake the stuff. Either you felt it or you didn’t.
A group of musicians have to find some purpose that unites them, apart from money. Pop groups are only gangs of preadults huddling together, finding a mutual coherence or security in the same two-chord language. Once they start to become individuals, curious and critical, then the thing falls apart and they grow up. It’s a way of prolonging adolescence. We were all grownups except for Toby, and Nico wasn’t really a team player.
Nico had ideas in her head but she couldn’t communicate them, at least not precisely enough to convince everyone. But she knew when it worked and when it didn’t, and the frustration was starting to get to her.
‘No. No. Don’t play it like that,’ she would say to me. ‘Play it more repetitiously … the same thing over and over.’
She was right. But I couldn’t do it. I’d always want to embellish. The secret was that every time you picked up an instrument it had to be like the first time. No amount of fancy gadgetry or effects could simulate directness and intensity. Trouble was I knew my scales.
Toby would ‘Clack Clack Clack’ the drumsticks, to lead us into a song, but the response would be ragged and indifferent, a splutter of notes, instead of one affirmative chord.
There was no way out except ‘out’. So I stayed at the piano and played:
over … and over … again.
‘That’s nice,’ said Nico.
Echo and I joined Demetrius at the Isola Bar.
‘Fame is an exacting science,’ he remarked, over a full English breakfast, ‘and the famous are continually being tested.’ He held up a tomato-shaped ketchup dispenser. ‘To arrive at a three-dimensional image of oneself that can be engraved upon the contemporary consciousness, one has to eradicate that bitter-sweet fourth dimension of doubt.’ He squirted a bright red blob on to his fried eggs. ‘Doubt equals Irony equals Collapse equals Failure … Pass the sugar.�
�� Distractedly stirring his mug of tea, he continued, ‘Fame, James, projects a gigantic shadow of loneliness upon the world. Yet to want to be alone is as impertinent a wish as it would be for most of us to desire instant celebrity.’ He sipped from his mug with a delicately-crooked pinkie. ‘Famous people do not have private lives and they are never alone …’
‘ … even when they’re dyin’ from an overdose,’ added Echo.
Nico’s life seemed to be refined down to interviews which, in turn, were further distillations of a constant dialogue she enacted with herself.
A man and a woman sit silently in the control room of a radio station. He’s young, about twenty-five, fresh-faced, fair hair, pastel-framed glasses, baggy sweatshirt. She’s of a certain age, long brown hair turning grey, dressed in a morning coat and a black leather wristband with silver skulls. There’s a record on the turntable, ‘Femme Fatale’; the song’s about to end.
… - - -’ - / - - - - - / - - / - - - - / - - - / - - - / - / - - - -
- - - / - -’ - / - - -
’- - - / - - - - - - - - - / - - - - -
- - -’ - / - / - - - - - / - - - - - - …
[Permission to reproduce lyrics refused]
d.j.: Heyyyy … We’re Piccadilly Radio. It’s eight forty-five and I have here with me in the studio the original Femme Fatale herself … the Legendary Nico, singer with the cult sixties group the Velvet Underground … Created by pop-art supremo himself Mr Andy Warhol … Welcome to Manchester, Nico.
nico (pause): That song … It’s not about me … I just sang it … a long time ago.
d.j.: Right. Right. OK, Nico, before we talk about what you’re doing now and why you’re in Manchester, can we retrace our steps a little, just for our listeners?
nico: If we have to.
d.j.: You come from Berlin originally, I’m told?
nico: (groans): Oh … (sighs) Yes … well … nearly … kind of … not exactly …
d.j.: Now, er, that city has a special mystique … the Nazis … ‘Cabaret’ an’ all that … What was it like?
nico: I didn’t like it. I thought it was all rather tasteless.
d.j.: Tasteless? That’s a rather unusual way to describe it.
nico: You know … Overdone. That Liza Minnelli, she can’t keep her mouth shut.
d.j. (confused): Liza Minnelli? Oh yeah, yeah … No, I meant, when you were young, that special mystique of Berlin.
nico: Young? Mystique?
d.j.: Well, you know, they say Berlin was a kind of happening, dangerous, action kindovaplace.
nico: Oh, yes, plenty of danger … The buildings falling down around you … The streets full of dust, you choked …
d.j.: Dear oh dear, Nico, that sounds pretty awful. Anyway, you began modelling in the fifties?
nico: We had to live in the country. At night you could see the city burning, the sky red as blood …
d.j. (coughs. Tries to clear a way out): The War, a terrible time on both sides –
nico: … The smell of burning buildings on the wind.
d.j.: OK … This is Piccadilly Radio and I’ve just been talking to Nico of the fabulous Velvet Underground. (Jazzy voices: ‘Picc-adilly Ra-dio … Manchester’s Numero U-ni-o.’)
‘Enough!’ Dr Demetrius slammed off the car radio.
‘What does she think she’s doing?’ He pounded a heavy, leather-gloved hand on the steering wheel. ‘Makes me look like a total nebbish … Here I am, trying to stop her career going down the toilet, while she’s just flushing away …’ He yanked off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. The car swerved out of lane.
‘Steady Doc,’ said Toby, putting a hand on his shoulder.
Dr Demetrius was a man under siege. The creditors were closing in. The Philistines were at the gate, dropping brown paper envelopes through the letterbox.
‘I must make a phone-call … I don’t know why I’m doing it for her.’
‘I know,’ said Echo slyly.
‘Oh really? What do you know?’
‘I know that you’re no kosher medicine man … “Doctor”.’
‘I see no reason to justify my existence to a creature whose inability to even get out of bed puts him little higher in the evolutionary chain than an invertebrate slug.’
‘An’ you’d be a man of backbone, eh? Demetrius Erectus … I’ve seen the polaroids. Enough ter stiffen the resolve are they?’
Demetrius lifted his trilby and wiped his pate with a stiff, grey handkerchief.
‘Dear God, this is not the life for a searcher after Truth … for one who seeks a poetic reality. The days of the great impresarios are gone. What room is there in this squat, tawdry business for a man of substance and vision?’
Echo slipped something into my hand – a polaroid photograph. A picture of Demetrius in a girl’s white frock, so tight on him you could see each bulge of fat. He was bending over a chair, his naked behind raised up in the air, red lipstick smudged across his lips, his head turned towards the camera. He had a dark, possessed look in his eyes and a weird, almost disembodied grin. I handed it back to Echo. He leaned over and whispered in my ear.
‘I’ve got a cupboardful on’im …’
Demetrius caught us in the rear-view mirror.
‘The Whisperers, forever relegated to the back seat of life, yet always ready to butt in with their miniature version of reality … Why don’t you damn well learn to speak up, Echo?’
He whammed on a Tammy Wynette tape.
It was raining. Manchester was golden. At night, when the yellow streetlights reflect from the wet pavements and the cathedrals of the cotton barons glower sternly in the dark, you would not be mistaken in thinking it the most beautiful city in England.
‘There’s a phone,’ said Demetrius.
He double-parked beside it and got out.
The telephone was Dr Demetrius’s umbilical link with a more stable world. Long before the mobile phone became such an essential accessory to urban dementia, Demetrius was trying to make the connection. It was territorial. Like a dog pissing on a lamp-post.
He banged on the window. Toby leaned over and wound it down.
‘Anyone got a 10p?’
No one had a 10p. He scuttled off to the all-night chemist on the corner.
Hair lacquer was hanging thick in the air, the smell of cheap perfume, aphrodisia to all but the mean-hearted. They were crowding into Fagin’s, the fantasy palace of the Wicked Lady and the Snowball, where the drinks were as sweet as the perfume, but less alcoholic. Echo and I looked at the girls. That’s where we wanted to be, leaning against the wall, standing in the shadows of love, watching them dance around their handbags. The sexiest sight in the world.
Demetrius came back with a paper bag full of disposable syringes. (‘It’s a beautiful thing, but I can’t use it,’ said Nico the day before, handing him back a giant stainless-steel surgical hypodermic.) It was an instant ‘open-sesame’ having the title Doctor on his cheque book, people were always ready to ingratiate themselves.
‘I’m tired out.’ He sagged, breathless, into the driver’s seat and started up the engine.
Echo and I blew kisses to the angels in the rain. They were yelling rendezvous to each other across the street, stamping their white stilettos impatiently, bare white legs blue veined with cold.
‘They’re not bothered about the weather,’ said Echo, ‘they’re used to it. Everyone knows it’s always rainin’ in Manchester.’ He curled up in the corner of the seat and wrapped himself in a dirty old blanket Nico used to protect her harmonium.
We turned into Piccadilly.
‘Bloody night,’ said Demetrius. ‘Windscreen wipers on the blink again … Toby, get in the back with Jim and Echo. And give the screen a wipe while you’re out there, would you?’
Toby grabbed the cloth perfunctorily. ‘’Ow come it’s always yours truly that gets the soggy end of the rag?’
‘Because you’re a drummer,’ said Demetrius. ‘Drummers are another primitive life-form, of littl
e use except as beasts of burden.’
She looked sad and incongruous, standing there in the rain.
‘Why didn’t you wait in the reception?’ asked Demetrius.
‘I just wanted to get out of that place. That guy was an aaasshole.’ She threw a half-smoked Marlboro into the gutter and immediately lit another.
‘I mean, why do they even pretend to be interested? … We could talk about something else … Always the same old shit … Berlin … The Velvet Underground … Who fucking cares? I don’t.’
Demetrius hummed along to the cassette.
‘Please turn that shit off.’ Nico blew her cigarette smoke in his face. Demetrius coughed and switched off the cassette.
‘Always the Velvet Underground … I want to talk about my records.’
‘No one buys your records,’ said Demetrius.
‘That’s because no one plays them!’
‘Not many people are that depressed.’
‘You’ve got some nerve, fixing me an interview with a moron like that … Do you know the kind of music he plays? Disco.’
Demetrius went into a mock-Yiddish routine:
‘She don’t like da Disco music. She don’t like da Country & Western. I fix her an interview vid a nice young Goy … She don’t like da interview … Vat’s da matta mit chew? … I tell her, da Radio 3 people, dey’re busy, dey already booked an interview vid Beethoven … I say to dem “But he’s deaf” … “So vot?” day say, “Nobody listens to good music no more anyway.”’
‘Cra-a-zy,’ said Nico, shaking her head.
We swung into Sunnyview Crescent. Demetrius put his arm around her a little earnestly, like a lover might do, and saw her to the step. They exchanged a few words and, as he gave her a kiss goodnight, he slipped something into her hand. She smiled. Everything would be all right again.
On the way back into town, Dr Demetrius yawned. Every day a new plan and a new problem.
‘Anyone else fancy driving for a bit?’ The only other driver was Echo and he was nodding out on the back seat.
Demetrius clocked him in the rear-view mirror. ‘Pathetic,’ he confided in his booming undertone to Toby and myself. ‘To see a grown man with responsibilities indulge himself like a child. We’re all aware of Nico’s arrested development. But one child’s enough! Either he gets his fingers out of her crib or he gets himself back on the dole queue.’