Nico

 Reading a book about Nico so soon after John Cooper Clarke's is almost unnecessary. It's like reading two novels by Dick Francis, or Jilly Cooper. Hard to see the difference. The story of one heroin addict is exactly the same as that of another. It's certainly not pretty and if Nico might look like some glamorous ideal from a distance, such glamour isn't glamorous close up.

I have sometimes thought in recent years that there must be easier ways to make money than that of Gerald Ratner, the High Street's answer to Mr. Bean and my one-time employer, opening a chain of tawdry jewellery shops. But taking a home-made group of ramshackle musicians in support of a clapped-out drug addict on a tour of Eastern Europe in the 1980's is no less madcap, and no more successful than Gerald's misadventure turned out to be.

I listened to Songs for Drella during the episode featuring John Cale. I haven't played that, or any of those in the record collection like it, for years. Quintessentially Lou, one can be struck by some gorgeous guitar sounds on the slow ones, try to judge if his 'poetry' can always manage without a tune to speak of and come away thinking that it stood up fairly well and it could have been much worse returning to it after so long.

Heroin addict isn't the only stereotype that Christa Paffgen represented. She had no sense of humour, as per being German is said to manifest itself in, knew no jokes and didn't understand them. To be fair to her, she seems to have been every bit as brutalist as her cold demeanour suggests. Even John Cooper Clarke, apparently far funnier and unrelenting in private than in his act, didn't register with her as humourous, only as someone who knew the right dealers.

Having just read John's account of himself, there is a comparison to be made with James Young's view of him from the outside. John didn't lack self-awareness but whether he was aware of quite what a state he was in is open to doubt.

But, in spite of it all, one remains in thrall to Nico as an icon of uber-cool and this is the closest one is ever going to get to meeting this heroine, as it were. It's close enough.

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But the reading matter is due to take an upturn in palatability. Eugene Onegin is pushed further down the waiting list with the arrival of Andrew Graham-Dixon's new book on Vermeer. It might turn out, once it's the only thing left, that the Pushkin is brilliant but it's regarded as a duty to be indefinitely deferred at present, like so many books at school and university were.

But C17th Dutch Art is a safe place, an area of such guaranteed excellence as T. Rex singles 1971-2, Bach's keyboard music and Elizabeth Bishop. Having long ago abandoned any thought of overseas travel, Utrecht looks simply gorgeous. I wouldn't at all mind going there with Delft, and Lubeck for Buxtehude, and Leipzig for Bach and maybe even Berlin for Berlin but it's more likely I'll buy books about them.

 

These days I seem to think a lot
About the things that I forgot to do
And all the times I had
A chance to 

Was that really written by Jackson Browne. Well, I never. 

Nico made it so much her own. It reminds me of how I think of Wish You Were Here as a Wyclef song rather than Pink Floyd.