by James Young
‘Nico, ees a boy’s name, no?’
‘Yes, I think she’d like to be one … the boots, the bad manners …’
Raincoat, carrying Nico’s shoulder bag, interrupted. ‘Not fergettin’ those teensy weensy temper tantrums … Like a geezer? No chance. No matter’ow’ard she tries, she’ll never be able ter sing like Barry White or piss’er initials in the snow.’ He rummaged in her bag for any stray crumbs of dope or money.
Pasquale introduced Raincoat to the sound and lighting crew. They showed him the mixing desk: twenty-four channels, each with different EQs, a stack of effects – reverb, delays, a hundred different ways of taking a sound and placing it anywhere.
Raincoat shook his head: ‘Nah, can’t work with that lot, mate – pots ’n’ pans, no good ter me. I’ve only ever used Trojan mixers … mucho regretto.’
The Italians were mortified. This equipment was the best in Milan. What was this Trojan stuff? ‘Trojan?’ ‘Trojan?’ They kept passing the word around like a hot pizza.
Demetrius loomed up. ‘Does there seem to be a problem, gentleman?’
‘’Ee say ’ee only work weeth Trojan equeepment,’ complained the Italians in an Anvil Chorus.
‘Trojan?’ queried Demetrius. ‘Do I know them? Are they by any chance related to Stag and Featherlite?’
‘Eh?’ Raincoat blanked him. ‘No … yer know … Tro-jan. Built by Trond Jansson, Swedish … They’re the tip-top of the tree, beautiful Scandinavian teak finish. This stuff’s pots ’n’ pans.’
A sudden rage shadowed Demetrius’s face.
‘My dear Raincoat, although the minutiae of public address systems are a matter of deep indifference to me, I am however aware that they operate on universal principles … Must I therefore construe that you are, in fact, an impostor?’
Raincoat shuffled from one foot to another. ‘It’s only pop,’ he said.
Demetrius’s eyes blackened over. Nero in a Lone Ranger mask.
‘Listen, mate.’ Raincoat’s voice was dry, and insinuating. He smiled, a lizard on a hot rock. ‘Listen, she’s the singer an’ she can’t sing; they’re’ – he pointed at me – ‘the musicians an’ they can’t play; you’re the road manager an’ yer can’t travel; I’m the sound engineer an’ I can’t fix me girlfriend’s’i-fi … What’s the bleedin’ diff’rence?’
5.00 p.m.: Echo was trying to assemble Nico’s harmonium. Raincoat was twiddling randomly with the knobs on the mixing desk. Toby practised relentless paradiddles on a bar stool. Demetrius had gone to the bordello across the road to calm his nerves.
The dressing-room measured about thirteen foot by seven. A minimalist paradise. Wall-to-wall white tiles, buzzing strip-light, smoked glass and chrome coffee-table, black wire-mesh foldout chairs facing a wall-length mirror … cosy.
Nico sat there alone, her eyes closed, head resting back against the wall. A splash of blood laced across the white enamel sink, her signature.
Softly I closed the door and went to buy a postcard. Wish you were here.
8.00 p.m.: ‘Sorry, can’t eat.’ My stomach was a twist of gristle. Demetrius took my plate and scooped the contents on to his own.
‘Waste is a symbol of decadence,’ he said.
‘So is being faaat,’ said Nico. ‘Eat. Eat. Eat. What else do you do with my money?’
‘I go a-whorin’, ma’am, as befits the custom of an English gentleman.’
‘Toooorist!’ said Nico.
10.00 p.m.: There were fifteen, maybe more, in the dressing-room. Pasquale, Titz, some bespectacled dwarf with a dictaphone recording everything Nico said, a couple of Versaces and an Armani with cameras and clinging girlfriends, an acne-ridden psycho babbling nonsense in Nico’s other ear, and three people nobody knew at all, sitting on our chairs.
The dwarf asked each of us in turn our musical pedigree. Nico’s of course was the hippest, then Echo and Toby. Eventually he got to me.
‘An’ wheech grups have you played een?’
‘I … well … er …’
‘Jim plays in a Palm Court Orchestra,’ butted in Echo.
‘Napalm Court Orchestra? Eees Trash Metal?’
‘Pure scrapyard,’ I answered. He seemed gratified.
10.30 p.m.: Demetrius kicked them all out. Then Nico kicked him out. She didn’t like the way he ogled her when she was taking a shot. ‘Like I was naaaked.’
We were running late but she had to have one last hit before we went on stage.
I chain-lit another cigarette.
‘Jim, look, yer makin’ me nervous, an’ I’m not in it,’ said Raincoat. ‘Go on,’ave a dab, yer’ll be all right.’
He opened a small white envelope and then from his waistcoat pocket he produced a miniature penknife. It was the prettiest thing, slightly curved, dagger-shaped. The body was ebony, with three diamonds set along the length. He pressed the middle diamond; a tiny blade flicked out, like a baby with a vicious tongue. He trimmed a corner off the pinkish brown powder and scooped it on to the blade. He held it under my nostril.
I heaved into the sink.
‘Shiiit, Raincoat. Such a waste.’ Nico tutted self-righteously, like a kindergarten ma’am. ‘Don’t you know he’s a health freeek … probably a nymphomaniaaac too.’ Moral superiority builds its pulpit in the strangest places.
10.45 p.m.: Perhaps it was the white tiles and the mirrors.
‘I need a piss,’ said Nico. Though it resembled one, there was no WC in the dressing-room and no other way out except through the audience.
Titz was thumping on the door. ‘Can you pleeese be on stage now?’ The audience were slow-handclapping. Nico hoisted herself on to the sink. We all looked the other way.
Pisssssssssss … You could hear it in the pure tiled acoustics. We started giggling. So did Nico.
Titz banged on the door again. ‘Tell that girl to shutthefuckup,’ said Nico. ‘How can I do it when she’s making me nervous?’
Echo opened the door, blocking Titz’s view. Her head peered round to witness a Rhinemaiden perched on the sink with ancient grey cotton drawers flapping down around her motorbike boots. Another illusion shattered.
Titz led us on stage with a flashlight. Echo first, then Toby, then me. Nico was still hitching up her pants.
Echo plugged into his amplifier, slung on his guitar strap, searched in his pocket for a plectrum, then very carefully and very intently he began to play. Maybe it was good, but no one out front could hear anything. He looked over at me. One word registered across his features. Raincoat.
Nico strode on. The audience immediately surged forward. She stood straight, head back, eyes closed, hand resting on the mike-stand, waiting.
Silence. Nico looked round at us inquiringly. Echo shrugged. Over at the desk I could see Demetrius and the Italians gesticulating at Raincoat. The sea of faces was looking mean. They’d paid good money.
Nico pointed upwards, as if to suggest more volume. As she did so a brain-searing whine shot through the place like a hot needle between the ears.
Toby counted 3–4 with his sticks and we started to play, a whizz-bang cacophony. But the more hideous the uncontrollable squawks and screams of feedback became, the more the audience were getting off on it. My electric organ sounded like a buzz-saw. Toby kept ripping into his snare, Echo was laughing and shaking his head in disbelief. Nico was pacing up and down the stage with her fingers in her ears, kicking at the nearest heads in the audience.
Back at the mixing desk, I could see Raincoat smiling, a huge beam of self-congratulation across his face … After all, it was only Pop.
The seven songs were soon over. Nico had dispensed with our services for the time being.
‘What? You play no more?’ asked Pasquale.
‘Don’t know any more,’ said Echo.
‘Wha’appen now?’
‘The funeral begins.’
Disappointing to be back in the dressing-room after only twenty-five minutes. For Echo, though, a relief. He hated any kind of public display of
anything. Toby, being the youngest, still had plenty of adrenalin to work off. He rat-a-tat-tatted his drumsticks on the tiled walls.
‘Gizabreak, and abbreviate the Boys’ Brigade, willyer?’ said Echo, lighting the last of his No. 6. Toby stopped, mooched, and hunted for the beer crate. Plenty of Pepsi and Orangina and a weird Italian Tizer. (Demetrius liked to drink soda-pop. He’d drawn up the contract. Pop it would be. Twenty-four bottles. At every gig.)
‘Maybe there’s some action up front,’ said Toby. ‘Fancy takin’ a look?’
We went sidestage and walked round the back of the audience. (Pop groups are the only practicable alternative for males who are too narcissistic to make the first move.) But instead of a host of Botticelli angels in miniskirts, Demetrius was waiting for us. Imperator. Surveying the scene of battle: ‘There was a time, not so long ago, when people knew of no world other than their own.’ Dr Demetrius was in reflective mood. ‘They were better off for it. Life-connected to the seasons and the stars … Now their heads are full of rubbish, inane fifth-form poetry masquerading as art. They should be listening to Verdi and Puccini …’ He pressed one nostril and Vicked the other. ‘Er, need I mention that you were crap?’
‘What d’yer expect, with a bookie’s runner at the controls?’ said Echo.
‘Why not do something constructive then and fix up a proper sound for Nico’s solo spot?’
Raincoat was still filling the room with weird electric jungle noises. Echo brushed him aside, slid a few knobs up and down, pressed a few settings, the basic stuff. Enough to place her voice somewhere.
We stepped back from the pain threshold. The ringing feedback stopped. The stage was now in total darkness except for a single spot from above. The audience seemed physically to ease up. A different feeling took over. Less mean, more intimate. It was a backstreet Punkerama, but people were willing it into a cathedral. They’d come to be part of some rite. It wasn’t directly to do with the music, or even Nico, they just wanted to be somewhere else. So they were prepared to take her seriously, and she, in turn, was trying her best to take them seriously. A temporary deal had been struck with futility. She was pushing open, with their help, however slightly, the heavy oak doors upon the Mystery.
She sat at the harmonium. The instrument was nothing like a church harmonium – much smaller, about the size of a baby’s coffin. To create a sound, she had to work the small bellows by way of pedals at her feet. With her right hand she played a repeated single phrase and with her left a melody. She’d carefully created her own harmonies, though she had no idea what the notes were in orthodox musical language.
And then of course, there was the voice. Dungeon-deep, where the secret horrors were hidden. It made you listen. No small achievement these days. Sometimes the words were nonsense, her own made-up juxtaposition of rhymes or words that just sounded intriguing coupled together. ‘Nemesis on loaded wheels.’ It made you wonder who was at the flight deck. It certainly wasn’t the voice of a sixties chick in op-art pants, or some emotionally neutral piece of Manhattan window-dressing as had been envisaged by the Factory Funsters.
‘This is the voice of one of those neolithic Venuses with the enormous pelvic girdles, and tiny mammalian heads that they dig up from the peat bogs of northern Denmark,’ opined Demetrius.
Demetrius’s mouth hung open. His glasses were filled with the beatific blue light that emanated from the stage.
Unwed virgins in the land
Tied up on the sand.
Something stirred inside Demetrius’s overcoat.
Are you not on the secret side?
Nico muttered off-mike into the wings. Pasquale appeared with a drink and placed it precariously on a corner of the harmonium. She shook her head and put it securely on the floor by her foot pedals. She started up the harmonium again. Maybe for her it was just that bit more interesting than a pedalo, but we were seeing it for the first time. It was a crazy act. A forty-two-year-old Valkyrie, spaced out in motorbike boots.
She stopped pedalling for a second, reached down for her drink and took a long, throat-saving swig. Instantly she spat out the sickly sweet guck and half-puked an enormous arc that cascaded through the spotlight beam.
It echoed on and on through the sound system from one speaker to another. Laughter in the cathedral.
‘I’m going to fire you aaaall … Assholes!’ She was sitting in Demetrius’s seat in the bus back to the hotel. ‘You’re a bunch of rejects.’ She went round each one of us. ‘Invalids … freeee-loaders … nymphomaniacs … morons … shysters … Don’t bother turning up for the next show … I’ll have you all thrown out!’
‘So … this is the predicament …’
We were gathered around the four-poster bed in Dr Demetrius’s Bridal Suite, minus the bride.
‘She’s out of stuff already, hence the tantrum … although I must say, I find it unlikely that even Nico with her legendary appetite for self-destruction could possibly have cleaned up four grams in two days. I feel she must have had a little chivalrous assistance on the way.’ He sneered at Echo. ‘As for the sackings, I determine who stays and who goes … however, I’m afraid there will have to be a certain stringency regarding your immediate remuneration. I can’t get another lira out of the Eyeties until we’ve done a few more shows. There’s no recourse but to use what little cash we have in order to keep Nico pointing upwards –’
‘’Old on a minute,’ interrupted Echo, ’oo’s payin’ fer this gaff?’ He scanned the Bridal Suite.
Demetrius propped himself up on a pink satin cushion. ‘I have certain personal, private funds at my disposal, but these are exclusively for my own use in an Absolute Emergency. This does not constitute an emergency, but rather a tiresome interruption in our joyous progress towards the golden South … much in the manner of Keats and Shelley, wouldn’t you say, Echo?’
‘What about the beers?’ asked Toby.
‘“With beaded bubbles winking at the brim”,’ continued Demetrius abstractedly. ‘Perhaps something could be arranged with regard to the refreshments, we shall have to see … In the meantime, frugality, my friends, frugality.’ He pulled a tasselled rope and the heavy velvet drapes fell round the four-poster bed.
I had regular sleeping habits, as did Nico, who preferred to sleep all day, fearing disintegration in daylight. I wanted to sleep but couldn’t. Italy was out there – the bars, the bamboozle, the eternal city of flirts, but I felt distanced and disorientated … and tired.
In truth Italy was as far away as it had been back in Echo’s parlour. What we were up to wasn’t work exactly, but it wasn’t a holiday either. As Echo said, it was what you did when you couldn’t do anything else.
I couldn’t seem to connect on any level with Nico. I was used to people who talked. Too much chat seemed to irritate her, too much silence made me nervous. I asked her if she wanted to go and see some frescoes. ‘I can see them in a book.’ A stroll maybe? Too far, too tired – the shows exhausted her.
People would give her things. Once, as we were leaving the hotel, a strange girl, emaciated and stricken, pressed a shell into her hand. Nico immediately passed it on to Echo who made the sign of the cross and threw it away. The girl, in Nico’s eyes a witch, had been waiting up all night since the show, hanging around the entrance, hoping for a glimpse. ‘Anyone who wants to see me that bad has got to be nuts.’
Nico seemed to keep going on a diet of chocolate and white wine. Demetrius would organise great feasts in an attempt at international conjugality. Nico would absent herself.
‘I can’t bear to think of all those lumps of food just rotting inside me.’
She said she hadn’t had a shit in a couple of weeks. Echo said constipation was routine for a junkie. (Though he wasn’t sure if, in his case, it was the smack as he could only go in his own ‘po’.) I imagined Nico, once the gig was done, back at the hotel, curtains drawn, only the ghost flicker of TV, needle emptied, bathroom black, concentrated upon that still stubborn sphincter. Ole Dead Ey
e in the darkness, coldly staring at the stagnant latrine of romance, the Mediterranean.
Northern Europeans go to Italy to relax, to feel human again in a more exuberant and demonstrative culture, more loving and maternal than their own. North of the Alps it’s the fight to stay warm. Nico had devised her own form of insulation – psychical and physical. (I noticed that even on cold days she’d often worn only a light shirt.) But when the smack ran out she soon got the shivers. It didn’t matter in the least that we were beside the golden Mediterranean. Nothing outside really impinged on her terrifying single-mindedness, her obsessive neurological and emotional need for heroin. Even La Dolce Vita turned sour.
In Rome Nico got deep into withdrawal, her nerves scraping her bones. The money had shrunk, the shows were disappointing, the desperados were doing the drugs in very quickly. The promoters had arranged a lunch meeting with Italian Vogue for a possible photo session. Raincoat and Toby practised sucking in their cheeks. The pretty boys and girls dressed in their relaxed classics did not take immediately to Nico wrapped in an old blanket, eyes streaming, concerned only with her fee. I had an idea. Nico upholstered in Renaissance velvet, the needle scars on her tortured hands and arms, the grey flesh hanging lifelessly from those once unassailably high cheekbones. A powerful spread? There was some rapid consultation during which I heard the word ‘pervertito’, then they shook our hands, wished us a successful tour and left. Within seconds I’d blown everyone’s chance of a good lunch.
I felt especially ostracised after that until near the end of the tour in Genova, when I got my big break to go and get the drugs with Echo. (As I knew three Italian words, Ciao, Vaffanculo and Arrivederci, I had a use.) A smooth transaction with some charming Moroccans, marred only by the later discovery that they’d substituted the heroin with salt.
‘A hundred bucks an’ not even enough salt for a packet o’ staffords,’ lamented Echo.
Nico’s reaction was less circumspect. ‘Assholes.’
Things always ended up there.
A heavy black brogue inserted itself into my room – followed by a dark overcoat, beard, glasses, the soft pale skin of one who toileth not in the fields, hummingbird flash of Vick inhaler.