Nico

by James Young

  ‘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.’

  WHAT A LITTLE MONEY CAN DO

  I wanted to get something out of the last few shows with Nico.

  I recalled Demetrius’s weird appearance on stage in Barcelona. When it came to the last number in the set I’d disappear, don a black coat and hat, grab a broom and come back on as a street sweeper. I’d sweep up, over Toby and Random, brushing the dust off them, brushing Toby’s drum kit and interfering with his playing. I’d brush the baby talc off Random’s tablas, finally ending up with Nico. I’d hobble around her while she sang Jim Morrison’s ‘The End’, then I’d shoot her with a toy pistol and she’d collapse on to the harmonium. (‘Don’t yer know – only a silver bullet will finish the job,’ mocked Random.)

  The Italians loved it, the more lunacy on stage the better. Nico and I began to ham it up so much we started to look forward to showtime. At one show I got the support group to bring me in on a bier. On another occasion we accompanied Nico on the first tune, twanging rubber bands. Real amateur-night stuff. The more ludicrous we made it, the more involved the audience became; the more we hammed it up, the more seriously they took it.

  The Japanese weren’t so sure, at first, about the weirdness. They’d come to see a dignified, creative presence; Nico was an art object to them, like Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’. You paid your money and you stared. I’d creep around the stage in my overcoat and hat with a flashlight. Nico would wail about her dead dreams, Random might be combing his hair or reading a newspaper. The punters didn’t know what the fuck was happening. Strangely, though,
it wasn’t just a put-on; for once, we were trying to do something – trying to be entertaining.

  Though I’d told Nico I wanted to leave, she seemed to have forgotten. When the time came and she realised I wouldn’t be doing her next tour she told Demetrius, ‘Just put him in the vaaan.’

  On the quiet, Demetrius had taken a tape of some of our live work to a record company, located in a unit on an industrial estate somewhere in South London. The stuff had been taped off the mixing-desk without any live atmosphere and thus it was only the ghost of what a live performance could be. Plus it had been recorded on to the cheapest cassettes available. It was never intended for anything other than self-reference. Demetrius got £4,000 for it and Nico suddenly found herself with a new album called Nico: Behind the Iron Curtain. Actually it was recorded in a punk club near Rotterdam.

  Then Demetrius got Nico fixed up with a tour of Northern Greece, crazy stuff. Random put his Bedlamites back together, all ten of them, and off they went with Demetrius and Nico for £15 a night each and a chance to play their own stuff as support. They were young Didsbury jazzers and they wanted to blow all night long. Nico, to them, was just a washed-up old relic from a bygone era.

  When Warhol died Demetrius fixed up a memorial show in Brixton, a tacky piece of opportunism for Warholics Anonymous, with a couple of Andy’s riveting home-movies and a disorientated Nico playing with a curried jazz backing, Indian ragas and funk riffs. It was back to nowhere again for the Pop Girl of ’66.

  Then, after a year of playing tavernas and village halls she offered me another tour of Japan … £100 a night. The only drawback being that she had to share the bill with John Cale.

  *

  I’d hardly seen her for the best part of a year, and there was a distinct change in her. She looked older but seemed happier. She was tired of the endless tours and now just wanted to do the occasional well-paid prestigious show. She seemed less burdened than before; though we’d have the usual after-dinner conversations about death, mortality and decay, it was in a lighter vein. She’d quit heroin and was now on the methadone programme instead. To get high she’d smoke pot and to calm down she’d drink alcohol.

  (After Toby and I, the last of Nico’s original brood, had left, Demetrius had desperately wanted to get back on to the Sunshine Tour bus. Nico’s habit had proved to be a grotesque liability. All those crazy scenes and outrageous compulsions. If she had a methadone script it would make her easier to handle, more docile, and there would no longer be the constant anxiety over whether she was about to run out.)

  Nico seemed to be more secure about herself and clearer about what she wanted to do in the future – stop touring, write her autobiography and drop Demetrius.

  ‘I think it’s time, no? It’s not that I hate him or anything, but these tours, carrying all these people around, I’m so tired of all that. It’s not going anywhere. Time for something else, something new.’

  Nico thinking of the future? Glimpses of a serenity beyond despair?

  We were talking about death, as you do after a good spaghetti dinner.

  ‘I’ve got so close to it, so many times … it’s like you begin to see it. First, when you’re young, it doesn’t exist. Then later it’s a shadow, indistinct. Then you begin to recognise it as it gets closer …’

  Though she’d been intimate with the deaths of others – her father, murdered by the Nazis; her mother’s death of cancer in a mental asylum; the execution of the American sergeant who’d raped her; the gravedust-laden air of Berlin – she’d also monitored her own mortality in her songs and in her life. Other people’s deaths are not the same as your own.

  March ’88:

  THE PINK & THE BLACK

  As you head into Tokyo from Narita Airport, you become immediately aware of Tokyo heading towards you. The ever-expanding ingenuity of the city ensures that its dreams are kept within easy reach. On the left, King Ludwig of Bavaria’s castle replicated in superstone and plexiglass for Disneyworld; Love Hotels, fantasy sex palaces with heart-shaped jacuzzis and’64 Cadillac Coupe de Ville-shaped beds. Pinkku. The ultimate, coveted, erotic dream icon for the Japanese male is the delicate pink underflesh of a virgin’s inner labia. Pinkku. For the Japanese as a whole, the precise moment of the highest erotic arousal occurs at the second before loss of innocence. Love Hotels help to maintain that highly-charged adolescent atmosphere … besides, domestic accommodation is frequently so cramped that couples are often obliged to conduct their entire sex lives in such places.

  The traffic slowed to a near-stop. Beyond the Love Hotels and the cathedrals of kitsch was the dirty Sea of Japan, fizzing with a constant rain. Yuki, our interpreter, apologised for the traffic congestion. A truck had gone off the road and smashed into the lane barrier. As we passed we could see directly into the cabin – the driver slumped dead in his seatbelt, the rain beating down on his steaming truck.

  The Ropongi Prince Hotel is built like a Pavlova cake with, as its featured centre, a glass-sided heated pool. It cost £20 a splash. There were no takers. We had a pre-tour conference with the management team to discuss the stage set-up, sound, lighting and so on. Nico was tired and absented herself but Cale, always concerned with the minutiae of performance, was as punctual as ever. I hadn’t seen him much in the past couple of years and I was surprised at the transformation. Indeed the new slimline, calorie-controlled, alcohol-free, no chemical additives, one hundred per cent pure Caleness came as something of a shock to us all. He just didn’t seem like the flatulent Druid we’d known from before, who drank champagne from a pint mug. He must have lost four stone at least, and looked ten years younger and fitter. His hair was dyed a very fetching purple/ black and cut in a Rosa Klebb crop. He exuded health – and wealth. Did I want to come and look at some clothes at Issey Miyake’s? No thanks. I had about £10 in my pocket, and until after the first show it was staying there. Did I want to go for a wander round the Shibuya stores? No.

  The cherry trees were in blossom and the promoters suggested we go and sit under ‘the chelly brossom’ for good luck.

  We went for a walk in Yoyogi Park – Nico, Cale, me, Dids, Grief and a young guitar-player called Henry. Henry was very keen, very capable – but totally inexperienced in the ways of Nico. He was never quite sure which image to adopt. He had on a pair of Chinese slippers, camouflage trousers, black polo neck, green leather Gestapo coat, blue eyeliner and a Nero haircut topped with a black beret, circa 1958 Left Bank Paris. His broken nose gave him an air of toughness that was undermined by a public schoolboy nervousness. Girls were a source of inner panic and perplexity to Henry. He’d blush if introduced to one. Grief suggested a trip to a No-Panties bar, where the floors are mirrored. Henry reflected but didn’t understand. When Grief explained, Henry was horrified. He was a vegetarian.

  Every Sunday at Yoyogi Park there’s an amateur talent show. Down a long avenue there are groups lined up, all playing at once. It’s a living Rock ’n’ Roll Museum. There must have been a dozen Elvises and five or six Beatles, even three diminutive, slightly tubby girls miming to the Supremes. The further down the avenue we went the more esoteric the acts became, until we got to the Japanese Velvet Underground.

  A wa kassu sha da po ga weh

  To ar tomaros patees?

  Though Cale looked a lot younger and more closely resembled the man of his Velvet Underground days, he was concealed beneath a large beaver fur hat and a cashmere overcoat; and Nico was hardly her old physical self. The Velveteens didn’t recognise their role-models staring them in the face.

  Nico and Cale were not getting on well. He objected to her smoking in his presence. Then there were problems about the shows; Nico wanted to go on last; ‘This John Cale – who does he think he is? I’m a star too.’ But Cale was top of the bill. Though he’d been booked to play with a group he’d turned up on his own at the end of a long solo tour. The Japanese were politely astonished at such a blatant breach of contract.

  His act was so sharp and synchronised that he d
idn’t want the stage cluttered up with Dids’s old car parts and he insisted on the piano being tuned after I’d used it. Nevertheless his contract stipulated a group, so he had the idea that Dids, Henry and I should round off the evening with him doing a karaoke medley of Velvet Underground hits.

  ‘I’m not exactly au fait with the Velvet Underground material,’ said Henry. ‘What do you think I should do?’

  ‘Just turn your amp up to ten,’ I said, ‘and look like you don’t care.’

  Nico didn’t like the idea of us playing with Cale, it made her feel more marginal, more of a warm-up act. So on the way to every show there were rows about who was doing what, and the order of appearance, and the fact that Cale absolutely refused to perform a number with Nico.

  ‘Oh go on,’ I said. ‘It’d be like Sonny and Cher getting back together again.’

  Cale always sat in the front passenger seat, the Demetrius seat, taking in every inch of the city space. ‘This is the future,’ he’d say, pointing out a feature of some building none of us could see because his hat blocked the view.

  ‘Johnny Vi-o-la! Johnny Vi-o-la!’

  Cale ignored her. Nico sat behind him, pointing and snickering at the beaver hat and rubbing her fingers together to suggest Cale’s moneyed status.

  It took on a singing, chant-like quality. ‘So fashionable now, so chic … such a transformaaation.’ She whispered in my ear, ‘But still a schmuck,’ and enshrouded him in a cloud of Marlboro smoke.

  Typically, we were inadequately rehearsed, our raggedness emphasised by Cale’s streamlined performance. Dids was deep into his hubcap metal-bashing. You’d hear a conventional drum pattern, then suddenly there’d come this clanking of ghostly chains that threw the rest of us completely. Dids would peer out crossly at us from behind a canopy of broken cymbals and twisted metal, shaking his head and admonishing us before the assembled audience.