These Days or Janitor of Lunacy

Sometimes I find the connections a bit too overwhelming. Six degrees of separation and all that. Back in the early 80s I had returned from working in Casablanca to Manchester, and I got involved in the music scene there again. I used to do the door at various venues for Alan Wise, a promoter and manager, and for Factory records. I was working on the door the night the Hacienda opened, though I don't appear in 24 Hour Party People. Alan Wise helped Nico rehabilitate her career whilst maintaining her habit, and I saw her play at Rafters on Oxford Rd. James Young documents the whole sad story in his book Songs They Never Play on the Radio. I am glad I saw her, even though she was a long way from her myth creating days with Velvet Underground.I identified with her deep and tuneless voice.I can do a Nico when I want to! Jackson Browne gave her These Days to record - 'don't confront me with my failures, I have not forgotten them.' He was about 17 when he wrote those lines. Even at my age, it's hard to utter them out loud - they are very powerful words. So I sing the song occasionally with my youngest son, a la Nico, for bit of fun, and only in the kitchen.
So when she played Rafters, with her portable harmonium and her Gothic gloom, we felt we were in the presence of a post-punk Valkyrie.
C P Lee describes a slightly more tragic, but ultimately amusing encounter in New York in 1980. Alberto y los Trios Paranoias were there rehearsing Sleak, and they were told that Nico and Anita Pallenberg were going to come and see them. Two sex goddesses by any standards, the stuff of dreams and fantasies. Two women they thought were bag ladies turned up, worn and haggard from the sex and drugs and rock n roll.You can read about this in C P Lee's brilliant memoir When We Were Thin.
Not long after I moved to Bakewell, I bought a copy of James Young's book for a knockdown price in the wonderful bookshop my friends Keith and Sue ran here. I hadn't really acknowledged my past life in Manchester. To all intents I was a single mother of three children living a quiet life in the Peak District. The book gave me a thread back to an old way of life - a view of events I'd half experienced and people I had once known. As my generation write their stories it has become more common for me to encounter my memories through the prism of another's .
Some years later, when my older son was about 16, he made a musical connection with Antony Hegarty, of Antony and the Johnsons. Quite an achievement for someone brought up in Bakewell! Antony had sung with Lou Reed. He was fascinated by Nico, who had been dead for some years of course. I saw him several times when he toured in England, and he very kindly put me and my family on the guest list. I wanted to give him my James Young book on Nico, but I was a bit reluctant to let it go. This was before the days of book buying on the internet. I really wanted to find another copy. On the outskirts of Bakewell was a big discount book shop, full of travel and cookery books. I parked there one day. I wasn't even planning to go in. Under the awning outside was a small book case, with just one book on it, priced at 99p. It was Songs They never Play on the Radio.
So Antony got his copy and I still have mine.