The music of Camera Obscura was complicated and illogical. Structures were there, but they weren’t easy to remember: they mostly defied the remorseless logic of the traditional pop song, i.e. intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight, brief jazzy squirt of wine-bar saxophone, verse, chorus, fade to sax and repeated hook – sax player collects cheque. The songs had been only half written to begin with, then recomposed in the studio, assembled, like a collage, but without the use of pre-existing material. Every musical detail had been engendered spontaneously under studio conditions and although alcohol and drugs are a cheap form of inspiration (at merely financial rather than spiritual cost) I felt chances had been taken. Rock ‘musicians’ often forget they’re in the Image Industry and get cosmic delusions of grandeur, imagining they’re in the same lineage as Beethoven and Mozart. For all her doom-laden seriousness, Nico spared us any nauseating prattle about her ‘art’. And all we were doing was just ganging up around her name. It was only a little thing. Just enough to get us out and about.
Occasionally she would hint at a more exacting creative purpose. She wished she’d made a success of acting – but, she was the first to admit, it required a diligence and an intellectual discipline she didn’t possess. It wasn’t exactly a regret, she’d made her choice and allowed Warhol to add his signature to her persona, but, back then with Fellini, ‘if only I’d got up on time!’
The sporadic bursts of fame or notoriety would, in the meantime, sustain her in the knowledge that, unable to get out of bed, she’d done what she could. Essentially, she loved to do nothing more than lie in her room, smoking and listening to a Mahler concert on her tinny radio, hypodermic reassuringly within arm’s reach. It was a life measured out in Marlboro butts.
We previewed the album at Ronnie Scott’s. As we’d only just left the recording studio it was a tense occasion, no one knew the material that well. This meant that we underplayed and, I think, considering the kitchen-sink nature of previous concerts, our inhibitions worked to the music’s advantage.
The real showcase for Nico’s new progeny, its relaunch into the artocracy, occurred at Chelsea Town Hall. It was an inspired setting, chosen by Demetrius. Just a short walk from the Charter Clinic and thus within easy access of the celebrity junkies. It was an occasion whose significance would inevitably reverberate throughout the drug community. Lots of ‘lovies’ and ‘darlings’ and ‘poor Georgina had a terrible fix this afternoon and puked all over the kilim’.
Demetrius had been persisting in his courtship of the Beat Literati and had forged an attachment to Carolyn Cassady, the wife of Neal (who, as Dean Moriarty, was the hero of Kerouac’s On the Road). Although she was twenty years Demetrius’s senior, she had a young female companion with her who might provide the ideal literary (and erotic) muse for his poetic soul.
The debts had been mounting. Not counting the whole U.S. tour, I still hadn’t been paid for a whole succession of shows, plus there was a percentage share due on the advance for Nico’s album. Demetrius and I came to an agreement that there would be a settling of accounts at the Chelsea show.
Nico gave her best performance yet and at last her accompaniment sounded convincing. Her authority on stage was absolute and the gig proved to be a landmark that reaffirmed her legend and, for the druggists, vindicated a whole way of life … you could be a really bad girl and still get away with it. I no longer felt ashamed or embarrassed for her or myself. The music was an integrated whole – it managed to be a summation of her past and a direction for the future.
The past was the hardest aspect of her repertoire to deal with – those Velvet Underground songs that people, naturally, expected to hear. How to revitalise them? Nico had become so utterly bored with them, locking into automatic pilot whenever they came up in the set. I suggested she sang ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ a cappella. No other accompaniment could better John Cale’s arrangement – that nagging ostinato octave D on the piano with the relentless death-march tumbril-tread of the drums. Stripped of its ‘blackened shroud’ and ‘hand-me-down gown’ the naked voice resounded about the hall, underlining the hollowness of the subject matter. For ‘Femme Fatale’ we did a kind of Sugarplum Fairy parody with a toy piano. For the first time in a while the tart humour came out from behind those lyrics and the rather earnest art-house solemnity that surrounded the Velvet Underground was briefly dispelled.
After the encores (!) I asked Demetrius if we could settle up. He called me a capitalist. What should have been an occasion for celebration and congratulation turned instead into another pathetic and ugly farce with me diving off the stage on top of Demetrius, even as the audience were leaving and Carolyn Cassady and the future Demetrieuse were lining themselves up for an evening’s Beat-itudes and impromptu free verse.
We made up later, but by then it was too late. The aesthetes were aghast at such rough-house vulgarity and Demetrius’s love-life was forced to take yet another strange twist:
(In the Erotes, written by Lucian in the second century A.D., we are told of how a youth, enamoured by the beauty of Praxiteles’s statue of Aphrodite, contrived to hide himself one night in the temple of the goddess of love, at Knidos. A flaw in the marble of one of Aphrodite’s thighs was interpreted as a semen stain, evidence of the intensity of the youth’s ardour.)
On the top bunk of an Intercity couchette Omega, the Moon Goddess, sleeps soundly. The dull opiate fallen from her hand, she sails her barque of dreams down the winding River Styx to rest her weary head on Hades’s darkest shore.
Upon the other bank her suitor stands – one Demetrius, erstwhile physician to Dionysus himself, the great God of Mischief and Merriment, Appetite and Lust. In leaner years the medicant has been a mere spectator at the feast, looking on with educated disdain as the ignorant and carefree revellers indulge their reckless appetites. Now, cast out for quackery and knavishness from the benign patronage of the Great Gods’ Court, he has vowed to return as Demetrius the Enabler, vanquish those who mock his genius, and claim for his own the hand of the fair Omega, daughter of Morpheus, the God of Sleep.
By his side the Sword of Theseus, the Bullworker; in his hand the Chalice of Valium, the Confidence Builder; he braves the swelling tide of the libidinous waves to stand, at last, upon the pagan shore and bestow his silver testament, the seed of his longing, upon the sleeping form of the beloved Omega.
‘Naturally, I wiped it off afterwards. Wouldn’t wish to leave a stain on her character.’
J. C-CLARKE [quizzically]: I don’t know if I don’t prefer the brown stuff or the white. [Measures a double dose]
ECHO: Generally speakin’ as a regular tipple, I’m more in favour of the brown … it’s warmer some’ow.
J. C-CLARKE: I know, there’s more of a softer glow about the Eye-ranian stuff, it lingers that much longer … with the China white, on the other ‘and, it’s ’arder – I must say I sometimes feel chastened by its astringency.
[Phone rings. Echo picks up receiver, then replaces it.]
ECHO: Plus, the brown stuff is that much more dependable …
I’ve rarely bin disappointed…
J. C-CLARKE: Whereas the white can be bleached ter fuck.
[Echo presses J. C-Clarke’s arm to find a vein. Slips needle in gently, at horizontal angle. Then administers himself a shot.]
J. C-CLARKE [leaning against kitchen wall, head slumped]: … The brown … [ten-second pause]… or the white?
[They both stare at the floor.]
ECHO: … I must say though …
J. C-CLARKE and ECHO in unison: I could just do with some of the white right now. [Fade]
The Effra Road flat directly overlooked the Fridge. Beggar’s Banquet had commissioned a Nico video, and the director and crew (a couple of trainee directors who’d never even heard of Nico) thought the Fridge would be an ideal location for their big break. The Fridge had been an unprofitable theatre until it had been gutted by fire. Now that it was a burnt-out ruin, stinking of charred wood, soot and ash, it had become a favoured nightspot for the Brixton crowd. Nico had to mime and lip-synch the vocals for a breezy little number called ‘My Heart Is Empty’. Try as she might, she could barely remember the words, let alone mouth them.
The director was obsessed by my watch.
‘It’s all about the concept of Entropy … the erosion of beauty … the inexorable march of time.’ He’d point his stupid camera at my wristwatch, then pan across to Nico’s face. In the end she just kept opening and closing her mouth, more, it seemed, in an effort to breathe (the soot and the dust) than to stay in synch with the song.
Blop. Blop. Blop. When I examined the rushes, I could just see her mouth doing a fish-like blop, and a look of increasing hopelessness creeping across her face. She resembled a giant carp in a sushi bar, just selected for the table.
Then, a few weeks later, came the Velvet Underground documentary for the South Bank Show. Nico had remembered why she left modelling, why she was an unsuccessful film actress … she hated the camera. Idiots pointing lenses into her, poking away for some corny truism. Nico had a poetic sensibility, the fantastic she could happily bear, Fellini’s wit and charm, her association with Philippe Garrel, an independent French filmmaker, both had allowed her to just get on with it, just be herself. But having to remember lines, even her own … she was just too stoned, too far out.
Nothing came out the same way twice when she was really performing. Now that the music had begun to sound like something, she responded more to it. She actually began to listen occasionally to the people on stage with her. Sometimes she’d get more into listening than singing, and forget her cues. And so we started to make the songs as abstracted and free as possible, so that, at times, anyone could do anything within a certain number of bars. It made her happier and more confident on stage. But those cameras … When Demetrius told Nico they’d be filming her section of the documentary at the Fridge, she fell into a deep gloom.
“Ave some of the brown stuff, then top it up with a China White chaser,’ suggested Echo. ‘It’ll just give yer that extra bit of push.’
‘This isn’t really Melvyn’s kind of thing,’ said the directrice, very keen, very WASP. We had plugged into her for a session fee so that Nico could pick up some of the white stuff, and typed out a phony bill for instrument hire.
Cale was also in town, and had been bugging everyone for ‘a bit of what I like’. We’d just made an album together, a pitiful offering called Artificial Intelligence. The drugs, the booze, the key-jangling manager had all been present to push him to greater heights, but he just sank into a confused stupor for much of the time.
‘Jim says your album’s no good,’ Nico told him, after which Cale had asked me to leave the studio. I was grateful to be out of it. A tired, flatulent mess of sub-Dylan lyrics written by a drinking chum, and half-assed tunes co-written by me and Dave Young. I didn’t get credited properly for the songs which, retrospectively, was a blessing; and I didn’t get paid properly, which was unsurprising.
Here she comes. You’d better watch your step. Nico copped her stuff and did a quick rendition of ‘Femme Fatale’. The Art junkies were satisfied.
Demetrius had pressed the directrice into interviewing me as someone who could perhaps give a brief perspective on Nico’s music now. I prepared a couple of things to say but, instead, they asked what influence the Velvet Underground had been on my own musical make-up. As I was only fourteen during the Summer of Love, which didn’t really shine on Oldham – let alone The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and all the other daffy psychedelic happenings – I couldn’t give them much of an answer.
Nico reprimanded me afterwards. ‘You should always have something to say.’
‘I did … I told them I liked the clothes.’
‘But didn’t you say anything about the music?’
‘No … just the clothes.’
‘Don’t you like the music?’
‘I prefer the clothes.’
Sometimes you have to state your preferences. The brown stuff or the white.