Nico (23 page)

‘Famous not popular,' was the verdict on Nico from Mr Hidaka, Yuki's boss.

As for Cale, Yuki advised us to come to some financial agreement with him, as he'd been paid for a group and we'd accompanied him on every show.

‘Let's have a breakfast meeting and discuss it then,' said Cale, hurrying off to thread up at Yamamoto.

I booked an alarm call for 9.00 a.m. and made it to the coffee and bun for the first time in a while. Henry and Dids were waiting, scowling.

‘Am I late?' I asked.

‘Ow yez. You might as well 'ave stayed in bayed,' said Dids. ‘Cant's done a runner!'

‘Yes,' said Henry, ‘I think it's jolly bad form.'

Cale had taken the six-o'clock morning flight out, to the surprise of the fastidiously polite, quietly furious promoters. Yuki was astonished at such peremptory rudeness.

On the way to Narita Airport Nico rummaged inside her bag.

‘Look! John left me a present … and I thought he hated me.'

She opened the parcel. Why, it was a presentation bottle of vintage sake in the shape of a Kabuki demon mask.

‘Jesus …' She recoiled in disgust. ‘It's horrible.'

She passed the bad magic on to Grief, who drank the lot down.

‘I'm never sharing a bill with that aaasshole again!'

*

Wrong. Three weeks later she had to share a double bill with the tightest coracle in Rock'n'roll at the Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels. The show had been booked by Demetrius.

Demetrius had turned up with the whole of Didsbury, in the shape of Eric Random and his Bedlamites, who thought they were the star turn. Nico, Dids, Henry and I had flown in earlier.

‘I've brought along my fellow free spirits who wish to share the camaraderie of the open road.' Demetrius was in a semi-ecstatic state.

He'd just come out of hospital after two months' incapacitation due to a broken leg. He'd jumped off a garage roof. No one knew exactly why he'd climbed up there in the first place. There was talk that his unrequited love for Nico had finally driven him over the edge. There was also the suggestion that the good Doctor had become involved in certain curious nocturnal practices. His demeanour was certainly different. He now walked with a limp and carried a stick, which he jabbed at the ground to underline his pronouncements.

‘I have knelt before the shining gates of Heaven, and I have crawled beneath the gaping jaws of Hell … and believe me, James, though, in truth, we live upon a dungheap covered in flies, I draw comfort from the close consolation of the human reek.'

Everyone wanted to play, but Dr Demetrius's circus of free spirits wouldn't fit on to the stage. Random was sulking and combing his hair furiously. He'd missed out on Japan, having been there the first time round. In Tokyo were his chosen handmaidens, awaiting their annual dose of Tantric Love Juice.

Cale had checked himself into a separate hotel and had ensured that he was given a private dressing-room in another part of the theatre building. ‘He thinks he's Von Karajan,' said Nico. ‘More cheese sandwiches for us,' said Demetrius.

Nico and I did a version of ‘My Funny Valentine' which, apart from that time in the Signora's basement, was probably the best we could ever do with that song. We just emptied it out into a bare piano waltz for the emotionally crippled.

Amazingly, Cale allowed Nico to duet with him on one of his songs, a setting of Dylan Thomas's
A Child's Christmas in
Wales.
Nico fluffed her lines halfway through, blushed and went shy, but he prompted and carried her to the end, bringing the show to a rapturous close. Later he did his usual disappearing trick and vanished to his hotel the moment he was paid.

Back at our hotel in the Place Roger, Random and I noticed a furtive Dr Demetrius hobbling off down the street. At that time of night, and in the teeming rain, he could only be up to one thing. We followed him. Round the block was a whole street of bordellos. Demetrius was window shopping. He stopped outside one, peered momentarily inside to check the merchandise, then pressed the bell. A few minutes later Random and I followed his example and slipped discreetly into the red velvet night.

June '88:

LOST IN THE STARS

Nico's attic flat, perched high above Prestwich, was immaculately tidy. She sat crosslegged on the bed, typewriter at her knees, working on her autobiography, her life and her house in order. Once a week she'd nip to the local chemist to get her methadone prescription filled and pop it in her bicycle basket along with her groceries, like a Gothic
hausfrau.
But she still disturbed the neighbours. Though she smiled now as she chatted about the pleasures of cycling and the benefits of a healthy diet, the silver skulls on her black leather bracelet, the small ivory death's-head hanging from her
neck and the
ineradicable needle scars all over her hands and arms suggested a less conventional history.

The relentless desire for self-degradation had abated and the all-enshrouding cloak of her addiction had lifted. She was now the middle-aged spinster lady who lived next door, the one with the interesting past.

Although Demetrius had found Nico the flat and had got her on to the methadone programme, now that she was tidying everything up she felt his substantial frame took up an unnecessary amount of room in her life. Though her existence appeared outwardly normal Nico remained devoid of conventional notions of loyalty. Friendship, in the traditional sense, imposed too much upon her privacy. There were those, however, who remained steadfastly loyal to her, despite her lack of sentimentality.

Lutz Ulbrich had been Nico's companion from '74 to '78, when they lived together in the Chelsea Hotel. He'd accompanied her on guitar at her concerts throughout that period. It was also at this time that she'd become addicted to heroin. Lutz chose to break free of the drug scene and so they split up. He became an independent musician, involved in performance projects in Berlin. One such project was a music festival called Fata Morgana he was organising at the Berlin Planetarium. He commissioned Nico to perform a specially written piece and suggested that she do it in tandem with me.

Demetrius still saw himself as Nico's manager, but unfortunately Nico didn't, and she saw no reason why she should pay him a percentage of an independent commission.

My phone never stopped ringing with accusations from Demetrius of disloyalty and subterfuge, but I kept reminding myself of the ‘missing millions' from his
Behind the Iron Curtain
neo-bootleg. I was just pleased that my fee had suddenly increased from £100 to £300.

As ever, Nico only had a few sketches, so we recruited Henry and Dids to lend substance. Nico grew bored with even the idea of a rehearsal and so we were left working much of it out in the soundcheck.

Without Demetrius and the old team there, the whole thing assumed an air of workmanlike quasi-professionalism, something I'd only experienced before in Japan, but without its dazzling disorientation. In other words – dull.

Nico's new positivism also implied a more self-conscious awareness of the music and it affected me to the degree that, for the first time in a long while, we were both paralysed with stage-fright.

‘I think I'm going to have a heart attaack,' she said.

Our nerves weren't helped by the fact that the dressing-room was in an annexe of the main Planetarium building. We had to climb out of a back window, through a fire exit and then walk down a corridor which ran round the building's circumference. We spun on to the stage.

There were two shows. The first was an audience victory. What's great and terrible about the Germans is that they believe in what they do, even when they're just listening. We were unnerved and outfaced. Because the building was a dome the sound kept whirling round the walls so everything would get repeated by a delayed echo. I didn't know who was playing, me or my shadow.

By the second show we'd figured out the way from the dressing-room. We turned up the volume and gave it a go. The Planetarium people switched on the universe and we all got cosmic. It wobbled out of time and Nico wailed out of tune and the asteroid showers could be a little disconcerting, nevertheless the audience could tell we were giving it our best shot.

They demanded an encore. Nico asked me what I wanted to hear and she sang my favourite of all her songs,

When I remember what to say

When I remember what to say

You will know me again

You do not seem to be listening

You do not seem to be listening

The high tide is taking everything

And you forget to answer.

(‘You Forget to Answer')

It was the last song she ever performed.

THE HOT CLUB

Someone dies and you immediately start to flick back through the snaps. Hunting down the clues. The last time you saw that person on the step of an Italian restaurant in Berlin. The last embrace.

I thought she'd see us all out. Tougher than the leather of her boots. I could see her at eighty, a terrifying old bat in a black cloak, swooping down on her latest victim.

Demetrius called me to say Nico had died while on holiday in Ibiza. She'd fallen off her bike, he didn't know the details.

The funeral would be in Berlin. Lutz Ulbrich would arrange to have Nico's body flown from Ibiza to Berlin, where she would be cremated. He'd found an ent
ry in her diary which said, ‘I want to be burnt,' next to a handwritten copy of Blake's ‘The Tyger'.

Demetrius felt it was an injustice to bury her ashes in Berlin, when she'd expressed a desire for her remains to be buried on the moors above Manchester. He had a pal, Mike, who was the vicar of a church up there. Mike was neither a pious cleric nor some trendy priest with an electric guitar. He looked more like a stonemason, with his beard and craggy hands – you could picture him heaving granite blocks into place on a drystone wall, rather than reading the lesson in front of a threadbare congregation of high Tory matriarchs.

Demetrius really wanted his own Nico wake. He was her manager, he'd handled her career for the past seven years, so he'd choreograph her funeral. He informed the
Melody Maker
that there would be a memorial service for a grieving nation up at Mike's church. There, Demetrius read poetry to a captive congregation of me, Eric Random, a couple of Goths and a fellwalker in an anorak and bobble-hat.

While I was up in Manchester I called in on Echo to gauge his reactions to Nico's death. He now lived in a house divided between saints and sinners. He and Clarke lived in the front room while Faith and the children occupied the rest of the flat. Echo had brought all his bric-à-brac in there with him – the Venus of the Fireplace, the broken guitars and religious ephemera. He lay on his sofa wrapped in a blanket, angry that Demetrius had only just informed him of Nico's death with a curt and anonymous note through the door, saying merely, ‘C. Paffgen, deceased 18/7/88.' He also resented Demetrius for having encouraged Nico to go on the methadone programme.

‘She might 'ave bin 'appier, but it still killed 'er when she came off the gear. 'Appens all the time ter junkies, the scag keeps yer young, makes yer 'air look nice 'n' shiny.'

Echo's reasoning remained centred around heroin.

‘It keeps yer under control … y'know, the sex business. If yer need ter fuck then yer'll never be 'appy. Yer see, Jim, women're above us, they'ave ter be. Yer've got yer 'Oly Family, then yer saints 'n' angels, an then yer've got women takin' care of it all down 'ere. They're the 'ighest form of life. So what we do to 'em as geezers'as got ter be beastly, ant it? Nico knew all about that first 'and, an' she wanted out of it. If yer take gear then all the guilt just disappears.' He snapped his fingers. ‘Yer don't 'ave ter
want
or
remember
.
An' yer learn ter treat women with the respect they deserve.'

He propped himself up on the sofa, pulled the door open slightly and shouted down the hall. ‘Purra brew on, pet!'

Funeral No. 2 was a couple of weeks later in Berlin. Demetrius was still perturbed by the idea that Nico's ashes would not be interred up at Preacher Mike's place, so I suggested we should take a raw stone from up on the hills as her memorial. We got the rock and lugged it back to Manchester to find that it didn't conform to the German
Verordnung
, so Demetrius had to commission an expensive, correctly proportioned and racially pure one from a funerary mason in Berlin.

We set off for Berlin in a Mercedes tour bus with videos and reclining seats. On board were me, Demetrius, Eric Random, Dids, Le Kid, Preacher Mike and a blues singer from Oldham called Victor Brox. Victor had brought with him bags of 5p pieces, which he was going to use on German cigarette machines. He had a long mandarin beard with beads threaded in it. He liked a decent pint, a nice piece of ass and a good fart. Amazingly, it was Victor Brox who, hanging out in Ibiza in the early sixties, had first encouraged Nico to sing.

‘I can't work out whether the world owes him a debt, or he owes us one,' said Demetrius, irritated by the delays at every German truck-stop while Victor pumped the ciggie machines with 5ps. Herr Bluesmeister Brox quickly got the nickname from Demetrius of ‘Hans Off' (as in ‘Hands off cocks – it's Victor Brox!')

Though it was a funeral party it still had the feeling and approach of a rock and roll tour: there remained a steady smog of hash smoke around Eric Random, and Preacher Mike happily shared the whisky bottle, letting Demetrius wear his dog-collar. Demetrius picked up his customary bumper set of porno-mags along the autobahn; even Le Kid seemed content, still trying to stick together that eternal jointlette.

However many times we'd made that trip down the corridor to Berlin the sensation was always that of entering a walled city-state. (How often had we driven past the same sentry posts, the same flyblown cafeteria, serving the same flyblown East German food; the same Russian tank atop its memorial column supposedly the first to liberate the city in'45?) It stopped the city from becoming just another Euro-metropolis for steel-eyed techno-Teutons. All the kids who were dodging military service found a refuge there in Kreuzberg and formed the core of Nico's audience.

‘With how many eyes does a man enter a city …' said Demetrius as we bought our visas. ‘In search of the unseen, the perfect memory, the moment set apart from all other moments when a place, a gesture, a woman's smile, will assume a permanent significance in his heart?'

Travel narrows the mind – rock and roll tours especially, vacuum-packed to keep out ordinary reality. Demetrius had a love affair with the road itself, with change as the sole constant in his life, protected from the unwarranted incursion of the unknown upon his nervous sensibility by the company of his conscripted pals. They provided the steady temperature and environment for him to make the occasional probe into alien soil.

‘… And the businessman flying into Berlin or New York – what does he seek or expect? Is he, when he phones for a callgirl, or just chats up a colleague's secretary, is he also trying to let the memory take root?'

Victor Brox answered him: ‘We-e-ll a city is like a worman/ you godda find a way to her heart/ah sayed – a city is la-a-ke a worman …'

16/8/88 Berlin

It was a lovely day for a funeral. Bright blue sky, temperature in the eighties. The Grünewald-Forst cemetery was at the edge of the woods, out by the Wannsee, the lake which provides Berlin with a seaside, where folks go sailing and skinny-dipping in the summer. (And where, at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, Reynard Heydrich first presented the detailed plans for the Final Solution.)

It was an intimate setting, the smell of evergreens and aromatic shrubs hanging in the still morning air. A quiet oasis away from crazy, overheated Berlin.

The memorial stone Demetrius had ordered wasn't ready, so there was just a small marker, a spike with a disc on top which said, ‘Paffgen 16.10.38 – 18.7.88'. The hole was about hal
f a metre square and a metre deep. Demetrius limped over, still using his walking-stick, one leg now shorter than the other. Random and Dids were behind a hedge, pulling things out of their pockets. Preacher Mike called everyone together.

‘Not where she wanted to be,' muttered Demetrius.

‘She wasn't all there anyway,' said Random.

‘She's not all there now,' I said. ‘The best average is only twenty-five per cent of the loved one's ashes actually getting into the urn … they don't rake out the grate every time.'

‘James, old boy,' said Demetrius, ‘I would remind you that this
is
a funeral.'

Le Kid appeared with the urn in one hand and a ghetto-blaster in the other. Preacher Mike said a few words from the
Bhagavad Gita
– he'd met Nico and knew what she was about, so there was no pretence of piety. Then Le Kid placed the urn in the ground, rested the cassette-player at the mouth of the grave, and switched on. It was a recording of Nico singing
‘
Mütterlein
':

Liebes kleines Mütterlein

Nun darf ich endlich bei Dir sein

Die Sehnsucht und die Einsamkeit

Erlösen sich in Seeligkeit.

(Dear little mother

At last I can be with you

Longing and loneliness

Are redeemed by inner peace.)

As soon as the harmonium started up, that was enough for Demetrius, and he staggered off, pale and trembling, into the bushes, inhaler at the ready.

A few people had come on their own, like Philippe Garrel, the film director, the only man Nico said she'd ever loved. A shy, rumpled little guy in a borrowed suit and tie, he'd made the effort to get there from Paris.

After the ceremony we all joined up for a few drinks in a lakeside café. Nico's auntie Helma bought the drinks and told us how pretty ‘little Christa' was as a child, how she was always with her mother and that it was good she was buried beside her. Dids said he'd seen a little shrew jump out of the grave during the service. Demetrius remarked upon the absence in any form of the New York contingent.

‘That Garrel's a decent sort – came all the way on his own from Paris. But that New York lot … not even a bunch of flowers or a message.'

‘Too Cool,' I said.

‘I hate Cool,' he answered. ‘Cool is when you're dead.'

That evening there was a memorial concert back at the Planetarium. Lutz had organised it as a means of paying the funeral expenses. Everyone did a turn – Victor Brox warmed things up with a Death-Rattle Boogie. Then they played a recording of Nico's last concert which had taken place in the same building, and switched on the stars and whirling planets. Again, at the sound of Nico's disembodied voice, Demetrius fled. I also left the weird necrophiliac rite and went to the dressing-room where I found Lutz and a bottle of Jameson's. He told me what had happened in Ibiza:

‘After the Planetarium concert Nico went to Ibiza. I'd planned to join her, but I was worried about all the hash-smoking. Eventually I decided to go but the night I packed my bags Ari (Le Kid) phoned to tell me Nico was dead. So then I don't know what I should do. I still decide to go, as Ari needed help to fix the funeral.'

I asked Lutz how she died.

‘She'd been renting a farmhouse in the woods. She and Ari had been arguing … she wanted to go off and buy some hash. It was the middle of the day,
and
she put on a turban because she had a headache. A witness said he'd seen her on her bike in good shape then, five minutes later, further on down the road, she was lying in the middle of the sidewalk. She couldn't speak or move down one side. The guy didn't know what to do. He flagged a cab to take her to hospital. As soon as she heard the word ‘hospital' she waved her arm to say ‘no'. The cab didn't want to take her anyway, but the guy persuaded him. Then she was taken to a hospital, but they didn't have any doctors. So they went to another – the same story. Then they got her to the big hospital. On the stretcher she was still waving her arm. She had an operation and they found blood on the brain. Nobody knew who she was. She was just some old junkie. The next day Ari wondered where she was and called the police. They had Nico's description and told him to go to the Cannes Nisto hospital. When he got there he found she'd died in the night. The terrible look on her face of …'

Lutz paused to find the right word, ‘ …
aloneness
.
'

Next morning I went for a meeting with the promoters of the Planetarium concert to discuss what should be done with the live recording of Nico's last show, which now belonged to the Berlin City Council. Just before the meeting began Le Kid announced that he had something important to say. More eulogies perhaps? He poked around inside his carrier-bag and produced two large medicine bottles that had belonged to his mother.

‘Ees zere anyone eere 'oo would lak to buy some mezzadone?'

You can't help admiring someone who cuts the crap and gets straight down to business. And Le Kid had been doing good business the past couple of days – what with the memorial concert (the proceeds of which Demetrius had assumed would go towards the funeral expenses, but which instead went straight into Le Kid's wallet), and now Nico's unused cache of methadone, Le Kid was mopping up.

‘Muz be werf two gees, easy,' he said, smiling. ‘I can do eet for a good price.'

We declined Le Kid's offer,
and
discussed what should be done with the live recording. Le Kid was insistent that Nico's estate (i.e. Le Kid) should get all the publishing, so there was an initial impasse. Since it had been more of a collective effort than a solo one, I felt the musicians should get a percentage of any royalties which might accrue from a future record release. A 60/40 split was agreed, in his favour.

(Later, Le Kid gave a cassette copy of the Planetarium concert to a character in L.A. called Joe Julian. He'd done a bit of studio work with Nico earlier in the decade and had a copy of Nico's out-takes in his possession. Together with the material from the live concert – with judicious fades where applause begins – he managed to persuade Enigma Records

that he had some original Nico music ‘produced' by himself. They gave him a pleasant purse and put out a tacky piece of merchandise called
Hanging Gardens
, which was described on the sleeve as ‘Nico's last studio recordings'. Neither Le Kid nor anyone else, except Joe Julian, ever saw a penny from this unfortunate, yet predictable, postscript to Nico's career.)