Planet Pussy had been invaded by a dreary Garbo movie, and then metamorphosed via Brando’s shaven crown from Apocalypse Now into a 1½-hour documentary on open-heart surgery. Nico had worked out how to use the video recorder.
Two honest English yeomen, John Cooper Clarke and Echo, were holding target practice in the kitchen. The targets were small black flies on the ceiling, the missiles were jets of blood squirted from hypodermic needles.
The brand new leatherette sofa had already become pock-marked with cigarette burns. Tea had been constantly made, rarely drunk, mostly spilt on the off-white electrostatic nylon carpet. The paper light shade had been torn down and mutilated by Echo, as it reminded him of a ‘student gaff’. A naked lightbulb exposed the bare walls. There had been a small mirror, but that had also been removed. There were two armchairs, the brown plastic type covered with cheap foam cushions; your neck stuck to the back whenever you tried to get up. No cooking had ever been done in the kitchen, but the place was filthy. The walls splattered with blood, putrefying takeaway cartons stacked on every available surface. In the fridge was a slow, sad, pink effluent waterfall of melted ice-cream.
There were no proper curtains (Echo was using them as bedding), just nicotine-yellow nets.
The toilet seat had been destroyed (Echo preferred the squatting position as he was prone occasionally to ‘a touch of the Michaels’). There had never been any toilet paper.
Demetrius had the back room downstairs as his bedroom. On the floor were heaps of dirty laundry, an overflowing half-abandoned suitcase, bottles of pills, a stack of hardcore porno mags within arm’s reach of the bed, and a box of Kleenex … scrunched up, semen-cemented tissues were dotted everywhere, like dead carnation-heads.
Upstairs on the right was Nico’s room. You entered at your peril. The first thing that hit you was the smell of burnt heroin, hashish, and stale Marlboro smoke – it veiled all other odours, which was probably just as well. Heaps of junk had been deposited everywhere like a fleamarket stall – Nico T-shirts, duty-free bags and empty cigarette cartons, ashtrays piled high beyond overflowing. Nico had a severe catarrh problem, exacerbated by her chainsmoking. (She maintained that she never really started smoking until her habit began – before that she was the singing nun.) By her bed was a Coke tin. The Coke tin had a special function – as a repository for all the phlegm she was continually coughing up. Demetrius had once blindly taken a swig. It’s the real thing.
My room was locked. With a chain – until Echo managed to pick his way in. It took him the best part of a weekend. While Nico and I went north to play a gig at the Blackpool Beer Keller to an audience of six (the owner said he didn’t care if we went on or not), Echo moved in his entire family, plus pet punk poet pal John Cooper Clarke.
Clarke had just come out of an expensive, intensive, detox clinic – a posh Chelsea sanatorium for addicts of all persuasions, the Charter Clinic. He’d been there to clean himself up at the great expense of his record company. He emerged vulnerable, yet confident, ready to pick up his career. However, Demetrius thought it would be interesting to reintroduce him to Echo. His reasoning was that he felt sorry for Echo being ousted from Nico’s employ, he felt somehow personally responsible for him. He thought maybe he could team Echo up with Clarke and together they would make hits – which is exactly what they did. What else are two junkies going to talk about? What else does their whole beleaguered belief system revolve around? Within a couple of hours (as long as it takes to cab from Brixton to Jackie Genova’s place in Stoke Newington) they were back on the gear.
Demetrius couldn’t bring himself to kick them all out, so a compromise was reached. Faith and the children were put on the first Intercity back to Manchester and Echo and Clarke would sleep in the living-room. Not that it could be actually called sleep, more a kind of stoned somnambulism.
John Cooper Clarke
His own creation. A slim volume. A tall, stick-legged, Rocker Dandy with a bouffant hairdo reminiscent of eighteenth-century Versailles and Dylan circa Highway 61. Black biker’s jacket with period details, in the top pocket a lace handkerchief, a diamanté crucifix, and a policeman’s badge pinned on to the sleeve. He wasn’t gay or even camp, his tastes were what you might call School of Graceland. His favourite music was Rock’n’roll – big guitars, whacking great beat. His favourite eatery was any Little Chef. He particularly enjoyed the cherry pancake with whipped cream – it was consistency of product standard he relished as, without such little oases of sweetness, each day could be an endless series of disappointment, threat and anxiety. He and Echo were almost interchangeable. They both came from the same part of Manchester, they were both Catholics, they were both pure Rock’n’roll, and they both shared the same needle. The difference being, Clarke had a career.
He performed his poetry in a rapid-fire style taken from the Italian Futurists and a youthful predilection for amphetamine sulphate. His droning Maserati vocal technique sometimes blurred the brilliance of his writing, but everything he did or said had the mark of an individuality born of a true, self-inflicted suffering. Like Echo, he believed in Original Sin. And the Catholic sensibility is capable of nurturing the most original of sins.
He rarely liked to leave the flat, as he had a public persona to maintain. If he did venture out, then he had to prepare the Grande Levée. Hair back-combing could take an hour in itself. Leaving the house was like going on stage. (Echo once delayed his entrance on stage by a whole hour when he commented adversely on Clarke’s choice of trousers. Since all his trousers were the same black drainpipes the choice seemed immaterial.) Both of them lived in a world haunted by superstitions and taboos of their own making. Clarke couldn’t bear to be near things that weren’t manufactured. The ‘natural’ world was a source of intense dread and disquiet. To tread on grass meant to come into contact with ‘the world of worms’, a potential holocaust under every cuban-heeled step. He was so like Echo, except his fame had projected him even further out of reality. With commitment and effort he might have become one of our finest People’s Poets.
But another poet resided at 23 Effra Road.
Dr Demetrius was taking it all in his ambling stride: gold discs, silver discs, picture discs, black-and-white post-abstract expressionist Soviet constructivist St Martin’s College of Art ’81 tastefully depressing covers.
Miss Poutnose, the switchboard queen, showed us downstairs, through racks and racks of endless, imperishable product. At last, we were in the Hallowed Halls of Vinyl. To Demetrius it was like a private tour of a bank vault. He’d already planned, before artists and budget had even been discussed, to hit the record company for hundreds of promotional copies which he could use as tour merchandise.
Miss Poutnose brought us a glass of Evian water each. Demetrius’s eyes followed her miniskirted behind as it tick-tocked enticingly out of reach.
The good doctor finalised an agreeable, though not profligately generous, budget. Master Jonty of the good old family firm Beggars’ Banquet was cautious, aware of Nico’s unreliability and limited marketability. What, he wanted to know, would be my role? I reassured him of my lowly, yet indispensable status, as arranger. This satisfied him – no one, not even Nico, was to distract John Cale, the producer, from his lofty purpose.
Dids
There was rarely a fixed personnel working with Nico at this time, except for a vague nucleus of myself, Toby, and a manic percussionist from south London called Dids.
Dids had actually emerged on the Manchester scene, banging bits of metal with post-punk art groups. He was a vicious, Puck-like creature, a bit like the kind of thing that used to vomit boiling oil from the towers of medieval cathedrals.
Dids had a haircut that resembled more a piece of topiary than anything one might recognise as a familiar style. It was a cross between convoy hippie and Bauhaus formalism. The sides were shaved completely, while at the back, hanging down his neck, was a raggedy mane. It added further to his elfin appearance. Dids had been brought up in East Grinstead, the south coast holiday resort that houses the H.Q. of the Scientology movement. Dids’s dad had been a pal (though not a disciple) of L. Ron Hubbard, the ‘Barefaced Messiah’ himself. Uncle Ron used to come round for Sunday tea when Dids was a kid. With such a charismatic figure parking his shiny new ’61 Thunderbird outside his parents’ inauspicious little semi Dids felt an early rapport with showbiz. ‘Ow yez. Showtime starts when I leave my front doorstep.’ He’d precede every remark with the self-affirmation ‘Ow yez’, his chest swelling like a bantam cock as he described the unique charms of Balham, his ‘manor’. His friends were all car dealers, car repairers and car thieves, and they would give him bits of cars to play with on stage. Anywhere north of the river Thames was suspect to Dids, and as for Das Kultur, ‘Ow yez. You can really push the mo’or on them or’abahns – nowha’amean?’
Nico modeling in French Elle 1961
Nico, (third from left) at age 16 in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (Archives Malanga)
Original invitation to The Blue Angel Lounge, 1964 (Archives Malanga)
A party at The Factory (Fred W. McDarrah)
Nico plays the tambourine in Velvet Underground publicity shot (Archives Malanga)
The Velvet Underground: Nico, Sterling Morrison, Maureen Tucker, Lou Reed and John Cale (Gerard Malanga)
Andy Warhol accompanying Nico, who was the host for a late night horror movie series on a local TV station in Boston. (Archives Malanga)
Nico and Lou Reed at Filmmakers Cinematheque (Fred W. McDarrah)
Nico, (far left) at Filmmakers Cinematheque, February, 1966 (Fred W. McDarrah)
Outside the Dom, April, 1966 (Fred W. McDarrah)
Nico (far right) backstage at the Dom, 23 St. Marks Place (Fred W. McDarrah)
Paul Morrissey holding Ari, Nico’s son by Alain Delon (Fred W. McDarrah)
Nico modeling Andy Warhol paper dress stenciled by Gerard Malanga at A&S Department Store in Brooklyn, New York (Fred W. McDarrah)
Nico singing from behind the bar at the Dom, April 11, 1967. (Fred W. McDarrah)
The Warhol entourage 1968: From left to right, top row: Nico, Brigid Polk, Louis Waldron, Taylor Mead, Ultra Violet, Paul Morrissey, Viva, International Velvet, unidentified person. From left to right, bottom row: Ingrid Superstar, Ondine, Tom Baker, Tiger Morse, Billy Name, Andy Warhol (Archives Malanga)
Nico with The Velvet Underground at the Dom (Fred W. McDarrah)
Publicity shot for Chelsea Girl (Billy Name)
Nico sitting next to Taylor Mead at Max’s Kansas City (Billy Name)
Nico’s The Marble Index LP cover, 1968 (Guy Webster)
Nico, 1985 (Jill Furmanowsky LFI)
Nico on her final tour (London Features)
We’d done a few things together with Nico. It all sounded a bit like a blind man trying to kick his way out of a scrap yard. What with Toby’s thumping great piledriver beat and Dids’s clanging old hubcaps, there wasn’t much room left for a mere ivory-tickler.
‘Ow yez. Industrial groove, mate,’ was how Dids described it. Not even Nico’s voice could cover that horrendous din of clanging metal. And she had the loudest female voice in Rock’n’roll.
‘John Cale will sort it all out,’ said Nico. ‘He knows exactly what to do with my music.’
Consistently lazy, Nico still hadn’t come up with any new songs, not even a lyric or a line. Demetrius packed her off to a hotel in the Lancashire moors near Pendle Hill (a legendary meeting place for practitioners of the Black Arts). The hotel was located in an area called the Trough of Bowland (it’s near the Slough of Despond, close to the Vale of Tears, above the Back of Beyond).
I got a call from Toby.
‘It’s balderdash, Jim. I’m Rock’n’roll, yer know – I’ve just ’ad an offer from Auto Da Fé – ’eavy metal satanists from Birmingham. One-month residency in Bermuda, then on ter the American circuit … more bollox, not the real thing, but I’ll be quids in. Got ter do it, sorry, the wife … yer know.’
Toby had just got married to a Bruce Springsteen lookalike from Copenhagen. Real tough girl. She could whistle through her teeth and had a knockout punch. Her father was some famous Argentinian primitivist. She was ugly-beautiful, but the ugliness had been in the ascendant, the more smack she used. She and Toby had got themselves fixed up with a nice little habit, as well as a domestic routine. He had to go to Bermuda to get away from himself.