This month features Nico: Songs They Never Play on the Radio, James Young, Bloomsbury 0747544115, £7.99 |
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A quick history lesson:
In 1998, Alan McGee, founder of Creation Records and discoverer of Oasis, made a direct appeal the Employment Minister of Tony Blair’s government – a government he’d played some small part in getting elected. (The story is fully retold in The Last Party: Blair, Britpop and the Demise of British Rock by John Harris.)
An act of parliament was about to introduce the Welfare to Work scheme, changing the laws relating to unemployment benefit. If it was passed, those claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance would have to prove they had been looking for work. If they couldn’t, their dole money would be stopped.
Alan McGee successfully argued that this would be disastrous for the British music scene – dependent as it has always been upon bands getting their chops, shit, image and demos together over a number of unemployed years. (‘Oasis Manager Advocates Sloth’ as one headline put it.)
The act was changed; there was to be a ‘New Deal for Musicians’. Their slacking would now come with state approval – if that would help, in years to come, with the balance of trade figures.
As the new Employment Minister said when she announced the New Deal: ‘The music industry is vital to our economy and the people that work within it are a key to its continued growth and success. The industry exports an estimated £1.5 billion worth of products every year and employs over 100,000 people.’
(Let’s not dwell on the fact that artists, actors, inventors and, ahem, writers were not granted a similar privilege. Instead, let’s just pause a moment on the word ‘products’.)
McGee’s intervention was an idealistic but belated attempt to resussitate something which had been dying for over twenty years: British Bohemia.
There are some who would confidently say that Bohemia UK had been doomed ever since the Oil Crisis made an aristocracy of the dole impossible. Others, that the cocaine cynicism and opportunism of the 1970s, stomping out the acid idealism of the 1960s, was bound, eventually, to prove fatal. Others still, that la vie Boheme had always been in decline – even before they started writing operas about it.
Which brings us to Nico: Songs They Never Play on the Radio.
Although ostensibly a memoir of James Young’s experiences between 1982 and 1988 as keyboardist in Nico’s band, the book is, on closer examination, an elegy for Bohemia.
Nico, born Christa Paffgen in Cologne on October 16th, 1938, was a veteran of many Bohemias, both European and American. She had appeared if not exactly acted in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Andy Warhol had forced the Factory’s house-band The Velvet Underground to incorporate her into their act. She had been extremely beautiful – an inviolate but vulnerable blonde goddess. Warhol caught this paradox in her screen-test, where she sits and cries, wiping away tears as if they have nothing to do with her.
A long-time junky, by the early 1980s Nico had come to rest in Manchester.
‘What follows,’ Young writes, ‘is the story of Nico’s last “scene” – the whole scene, the weird little universe she inhabited in the middle of nowhere and of which she was the fixed centre. The characters who orbited around her – the has-beens, the could-have-beens, the never-will-bes – are people whose lives are rarely sung in the deafening hyperbole of Rock History. We weren’t especially gifted, or at least our talents were rarely exploited to the full – aesthetic concerns being invariably subsumed beneath the more urgent need to score heroin… We never, for an instant, thought of ourselves as part of the Music Business. We were just there when it didn’t happen.’
At the beginning of the book, James Young (with his allegorical surname) is intending to start a Master of Philosophy course in Oxford. Instead, he meets Nico (‘Hey-lloooo!’) through her manager, Dr Demetrius – a cross between Falstaff and Led Zep manager Peter Green. Within a few months, he has joined the band and is playing his first few gigs on the toilet circuit of Europe. The documenting of life on the B-road is one the book’s great strengths – oh, and Young can actually write, unlike most rock memoirists.
The drugs, of course, are the real story: first few hits, pleasure, addiction, routine, pain, attempts to kick. For some musicians, this is much more of a vocation than their instrument. It comforted Nico to know that her band would always be as desperate as herself to score.
‘That she was a monster became apparent to all those who were with her for any length of time.’
If you can track it down, it’s worth accompanying this book with a viewing of Susanne Ofteringer’s 1995 documentary Nico Icon. This shares the doomed atmosphere of Nick Broomfield’s Kurt & Courtney; some of those interviewed – has-beens, could-have-beens, never-will-bes - die a little before your eyes.
As for British Bohemia, there are still, I expect, very small, very intense little pockets of it left, somewhere. I hope so, anyway.
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Author interviews
