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Demetrius had the back room downstairs as his bedroom. On the floor were heaps of dirty laundry, an overflowing half abandoned suitcase, bottles of pills, a stack of hardcore porno mags within arm's reach of the bed, and a box of Kleenex ... scrunched up, semen-cemented tissues were dotted everywhere, like dead carnation-heads.
Upstairs on the right was Nico's room. You entered at your peril. The first thing that hit you was the smell of burnt heroin, hashish, and stale Marlboro smoke - it veiled all other odours, which was probably just as well. Heaps of junk had been deposited everywhere like a fleamarket stall - Nico T-shirts, duty-free bags and empty cigarette cartons, ashtrays piled high beyond overflowing. Nico had a severe catarrh problem, exacerbated by her chainsmoking. (She maintained that she never really started smoking until her habit began - before that she was the singing nun.) By her bed was a Coke tin. The Coke tin had a special function - as a repository for all the phlegm she was continually coughing up. Demetrius had once blindly taken a swig. It's the real thing.
My room was locked. With a chain - until Echo managed to pick his way in. It took him the best part of a weekend. While Nico and I went north to play a gig at the Blackpool Beer Keller to an audience of six (the owner said he didn't care if we went on or not) Echo moved in his entire family, plus pet punk poet pal John Cooper Clarke.
Clarke had just come out of an expensive, intensive, detox clinic - a posh Chelsea sanatorium for addicts of all persuasions, the Charter Clinic. He'd been there to clean himself up at the great expense of his record company. He emerged vulnerable, yet confident, ready to pick up his career. However Demetrius thought it would be interesting to reintroduce him to Echo. His reasoning was that he felt sorry for Echo being ousted from Nico's employ, he felt somehow personally responsible for him. He thought maybe he could team Echo up with Clarke and together they would make hits - which is exactly what they did. What else are two junkies going to talk about? What else does their whole beleaguered belief system revolve around? Within a couple of hours (as long as it takes to cab from Brixton to Jackie Genova's place in Stoke Newington) they were back on the gear.
Demetrius couldn't bring himself to kick them all out, so a compromise was reached. Faith and the children were put on the first Intercity back to Manchester and Echo and CIarke would sleep in the living-room. Not that it could be actually called sleep, more a kind of stoned somnambulism.
His own creation. A slim volume. A tall, stick-legged, Rocker Dandy with a bouffant hairdo reminiscent of eighteenth-century Versailles and Dylan circa Higbway 61. Black biker's jacket with period details, in the top pocket a lace handkerchief, a diamante crucifix, and a policeman's badge pinned on to the sleeve. He wasn't gay or even camp, his tastes were what you might call School of Graceland. His favourite music was Rock'n'Roll - big guitars, whacking great beat. His favourite eatery was any Little Chef. He particularly enjoyed the cherry pancake with whipped cream - it was consistency of product standard he relished as, without such little oases of sweetness, each day could be an endless series of disappointment, threat and anxiety. He and Echo were almost interchangeable. They both came from the same part of Manchester, they were both Catholics, they were both pure Rock'n'Roll, and they both shared the same needle. The difference being, Clarke had a career.
He performed his poetry in a rapid-fire style taken from the Italian Futurists and a youthful predilection for amphetamine sulphate. His droning Maserati vocal technique sometimes blurred the brilliance of his writing, but everything he did or said had the mark of an individuality born of a true, self inflicted suffering. Like Echo, he believed in Original Sin. And the Catholic sensibility is capable of nurturing the most original of sins.
He rarely liked to leave the flat, as he had a public persona to maintain. If he did venture out, then he had to prepare the Grande Levee. Hair back-combing could take an hour in itself,
Leaving the house was like going on stage. (Echo once delayed his entrance on stage by a whole hour when he commented adversely on Clarke's choice of trousers. Since all his trousers were the same black drainpipes the choice seemed immaterial., Both of them lived in a world haunted by superstitions and taboos of their own making. Clarke couldn't bear to be near things that weren't manufactured. The 'natural' world was a source of intense dread and disquiet. To tread on grass meant to come into contact with 'the world of worms', a potential holocaust under every cuban-heeled step. He was so like Echo, except his fame had projected him even further out of reality. With commitment and effort he might have become one of our finest People's Poets.
But another poet resided at 23 Effra Road.
Back in Brixton, Demetrius had given over his room to Cale for the duration. (Cale being too tight to rent a place of his own.) Cale took one took at John Cooper Clarke and Echo:
'Get the fuck out!' He pointed to the open door.
It was 4.00 a.m. TV transmission had stopped and there was just a fizz of white noise - neither of them had bothered to turn it off. Clarke was standing in the middle of the room, bent double, seemingly comatose. I switched off the red-hot set.
'I wuz watchin' that,' said Clarke.
He was, too. He'd probably made the attempt to turn off the TV at close-down, a couple of hours before, but had abandoned such a Herculean task and was locked in a neoparalysis half-way across the living-room floor. Echo, meanwhile, had been playing with the aimer, creating patterns out of the seemingly random white dots. Shoals of electric anchovies were swimming across the screen.
'I thought I just told you to get out!' Cale repeated.
'Who the fook's this obnoxious swine?' Echo asked me. ignoring the irate Welshman, resting his head on a pillow in motionless indifference.
'John Cale,' answered John Cale.
'Oh . said Clarke, still bent double. 'One of our Welsh cousins ... not renowned for their politesse.'
'Where did you get that pillow?' Cale snapped at Echo. snatching it from behind his head. 'You got it from my room didn't you, eh, didn't you?' He marched off to Demetrius's bedroom, pillow tucked under his arm, and slammed the door.
Clarke and Echo left the next day. The ambience shifted abruptly from smack to booze. Beer crates were stacked in the kitchen, six-packs chilling in the once-empty fridge, bottles of vodka abandoned where they dropped.
Over the following few days, Cale rambled a broken monologue, referring to things he may or may not have mentioned previously. Blurred by booze, confused by coke, it was hard to follow the sudden leaps of association. I got caught in his mad Welsh rhapsody. He loved to talk plots and intrigues. Paranoid conspiracy theories were his brain-food. I'd be on the edge of sleep, when there'd be a knock at my door:
'James! Wake up! Listen! It says here that terrorist groups in Europe are being covertly funded by powerful economic interests in the U.S., in order to prolong European disunity and subordination to the power of the dollar. Whatd'youthinkof thatthen, eh?' He'd wait for an answer. A paranoid insomniac with a bottle of Stolichnaya in one hand and a wrap of coke in the other. He tried to blanket his high-toned Welshness under that heavy Manhattan overcoat, but those ringing, singing vowels gave him away - like a rotting sheep or a male voice choir, there was no mistaking their origins.
Cale was clearly nuts, but it made a change to be working with someone who had energy and who was both gifted and dedicated to his profession. Nico had an inherent talent - her voice, her persona - but she was lazy and morose. Cale, on the other hand, possessed a skill that he'd worked at and a set of creative principles that he'd tested and honed down rigorously into one simple aesthetic credo: 'Keep it simple'.