Through a syringe darkly

IT reads like the most gripping kind of fiction, and so it can only be

true: James Young, so-so keyboards player, we salute you for your skills

as a white-hot writer and for having crafted rock'n'roll's most vital,

most graphic memoire of life as it can be mis-spent on the road.

Young's newly-published book* is painfully honest, investing a

hackneyed rock storyline -- to wit, a faded star's wilful descent into

disillusion, heroin-addiction, Manchester's scummier suburbs, and an

early grave -- with genuine love, much gallows humour, and rare acuity.

Yet despite the book's patent warmth towards its central subject --

Nico, sometime protegee of Coco Chanel and Fellini; once of the Velvet

Underground; erstwhile New York luminary of Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol --

it is also a brutal testament to the worst effects that prolonged

drug-abuse can have on human behaviour. ''Nico was a junkie,'' Young's

tome confirms (not that anyone was ever in any doubt), ''and junkies,

any kind, are invalids with criminal tendencies. They can't be trusted.

It's not their fault. Their need is greater than they are.

''But, in order not to succumb, you're forced, as a witness, to harden

your will in a manner ultimately injurious to the spirit. I think we all

loved Nico. But those of us who especially weren't prepared to sacrifice

themselves to smack found it necessary to fix a limit on that affection.

And that's unnatural. The way we did it, mostly, was through humour. It

wasn't meant to hurt her, more to protect ourselves from her predatory

influence.''

Young witnessed Nico's predatory influence at first-hand as a member

of her band for almost six years, from somewhere around 1982 to 1986,

years during which Nico's muse (or, more pressingly, her need to score

heroin) led her to spiral down a doomed cycle of bad gigs for not-enough

money in front of hideous audiences in third-division places. Once a

glamorous screen presence in La Dolce Vita, Nico ended up playing seedy

clubs before increasingly small, baying crowds.

Twenty years after her arrival as a tall, blonde, beautiful, imperious

and blank-eyed Teutonic chanteuse, Nico remained tall, imperious,

Teutonic and blank-eyed -- but she was also unwashed, vague, desperate,

and querulous, two decades of heroin usage having raddled her face and

body and freeze-dried her memory. There was no need for pretence any

more. Her rock-star cred was long blown.

And what a bunch of dodgy druggies in scrofulous clothing there was on

hand to attend upon Nico in her self-destructive devotionals, as Young's

book reveals. There was her teenage son, fathered by Alain Delon, who

once greeted her with the gift of a gleaming

syringe (which he then shared with his dear old ma).

Sometimes out on the edges there was John Cooper Clarke, usually

semi-comatose and once literally bent double by heroin, but always able

to utter dry wisecracks. One of Nico's former tormentors in the Velvets,

John Cale, cropped up to produce an album: by turns he is presented as

chubby, drunk, paranoid, graceless, but worst of all irredeemably Welsh.

Quail, all ye bogus types who enter Young's sights -- for his pen is

never less than accurate.

And then, most touchingly, there are the fetid ranks of the

pseudonymous, the perpetually scagged-up, cheap-to-hire Mancunian

musicians, roadies, and gofers who comprised Nico's band and touring

entourage, and whom Young leaves unidentified partly out of legal

necessity but also for reasons of lasting regard and kindness.

There's Echo, for instance, the guitarist who wields laconic quips as

deftly and regularly as he plunges heroin into his veins. There's

Raincoat: last week he was a hairdresser, this week he's a sound-man,

and underneath it all he's always a lizard, a charmer, and not to be

trusted.

0 Above all, there's the orotund Doctor Demetrius, the Dickensian

rockbiz wheeler-dealer who prised Young away from his educated

middle-class certainty and an Oxford post-graduate philosophy degree,

put him in a ratty Transit van, and sent him sideways to dreadful places

with dried blood on the walls.

AND SO when you get to speak to James Young, a lot of questions burst

out in a rush. How did you avoid becoming a major-league drug addict

yourself? Why did you stick with these people for so long? Why aren't

you dead?

''I flirted with drugs but didn't fall in love with them, you could

say. Then there was the evidence of drug use on all these people for

whom I had a lot of affection: in front of my eyes, they were going down

and down.

''We did scummy gigs and scummy things, and we were scummy people, but

there was a lot of humanity and warmth revealed amid the horror. Does

that sound strange? They were all real people with a strength of

character who were weak in succumbing to heroin, but who were

three-dimensional at the same time.

''I felt a need to tell the world about these ugly, uncomfortable

people, not least because you usually only hear about the music

business's two-dimensional, easily-digestible people.''

And where are these awkwardly-real people now?

''Echo lives in his gloom room. He shielded me at the start, because I

was a real misfit in the band . . . 'a fastidious phoney', as I describe

myself. John Cooper Clarke lives in Ipswich and still does the

occasional gig. He's really gifted, and it saddens me that his voice

isn't heard more often. Other folk have taken drugs and still produced.

''Raincoat lives in Edinburgh, is married to a judge's daughter and is

very happy. At least three others have bands on the Manchester rave and

hardcore techno dance scenes.''

Truth is always stranger than fiction, I suppose. So yes, it's a fact

that Nico died aged 49 in 1988. But she didn't die in a dank toilet with

a needle in her arm, rather she kicked off after having fallen from her

bi-

cycle on Ibiza one sunny afternoon. And although premature, her death

was in many senses too late. Too late to save her reputation. Too late

for her to be a good-looking corpse.

Other odd facts. Two of Nico's band, Henry and Toby, are presently in

Primal Scream. And Doctor Demetrius?

''Doctor Demetrius still puts on gigs in Manchester. Actually, he

might become my next book . . . me and him as a modern Johnson and

Boswell. He wants to go to Russia to find a wife, you see. He replied to

an ad in a magazine and this Russian woman sent a letter quoting

Dostoyevsky and he fell in love with her. He's talking about going over

soon.

''It'll be a travel book. The Nico one was, too: a journey through the

sewers of rock'n'roll.''

And a bizarrely-instructive trip it is.

* Songs They Never Play On The Radio, by James Young (Bloomsbury,

#12.99)