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up it was a different picture. The long blonde hair of the Chelsea Girl was now a greying brown, her facial skin puffed and slack, her hands and arms scabbed and scarred by needletracks, and her eyes like a broken mirror. It wasn’t necessarily the years that had been unkind to her – she was only forty-two – but the woman herself. She had simply traded in her previous glamorous image for something altogether more unappealing. Yet she didn’t seem to care, insulated from self-appraisal by the warm, nullifying reassurance that heroin provides. She’d locked herself in so deep that she hadn’t surveyed the exterior in a while.
    I couldn’t work out how to talk to her. She spoke her own language … dreamy, cryptic. It was pointless trying to engage her with anodyne topics like current events or even music. But then, I was beginning to learn that musicians don’t talk much. It’s not that they’re enigmatic or interesting. They just have nothing to say.
    I didn’t know if she was particularly unhappy, just strangely absent. Occasionally she’d throw out a casual remark like, ‘I haven’t had a bath in a year, you know.’ What was I supposed to say? From day one she remarked on a certain fastidiousness.
    â€˜You’re like a girl,’ she’d say, ‘always preening.’
    My academic preoccupations amused her as well.
    â€˜How’s life in Ox-foord?’ she kept on asking, knowing perfectly well that ‘life’ and ‘Oxfoord’ viewed each other with mutual distaste. ‘Such a pretty town …’ and then she’d laugh. ‘Pretty’ meaning exactly that to her: ornamental and useless. Girls were ‘pretty’ … and a nuisance; she made it clear they would not be a welcome addition to our company with their ‘squeaky little voices’ and ‘teeedious love lives’. Then her mouth would take on a sneer and she’d lapse once more into silence, her thoughts pursuing themselves in a tumbling morphine rush …
    â€˜Ah, poor Nico,’ said Demetrius. ‘Down what dark and empty avenues must the nightingale fly?’
    After a week of near-total inertia, broken only by the sporadic tuning of guitars, I began to realise that a future with Nico was in fact an invitation to the land where time stood still and where lost causes returned to inert promise. I knew the territory. It was just like a library.
    Demetrius had pulled us all together from different corners of his life, expecting some sort of golden alchemical reaction. But we remained a bunch of base metal misfits, hitching up our rusty wagon to Nico’s celebrity in the hope that it might take us somewhere, anywhere. As her ‘manager’ he tried to keep a grip on things, but his authority was undermined by his appearance. Fatter than a cream cheese bagel, undersize trilby perched precariously on his bald head, he lumbered around Echo’s place, crushing the children’s toys, tripping over lead-wires, Caliban in a Burton suit.
    Even when we got down to some serious attempt at a rehearsal, it was hopeless. No one knew what to do. It didn’t matter how clever or proficient you might be (in fact, in Rock terms these are negative qualities), you couldn’t fake the stuff. Either you felt it or you didn’t.
    A group of musicians have to find some purpose that unites them, apart from money. Pop groups are only gangs of preadults huddling together, finding a mutual coherence or security in the same two-chord language. Once they start to become individuals, curious and critical, then the thing falls apart and they grow up. It’s a way of prolonging adolescence. We were all grownups except for Toby, and Nico wasn’t really a team player.
    Nico had ideas in her head but she couldn’t communicate them, at least not precisely enough to convince everyone. But she knew when it worked and when it didn’t, and