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.