Backlisted - Nico: Songs They Never Play On the Radio by James Young

Episode Date: October 21, 2024

Author Will Hodgkinson and actress and director Caroline Catz join Andy and John to discuss James Young's Nico: Songs They Never Play On the Radio, first published in 1992. This is the story of Nico, former model, film actress, erstwhile singer with the Velvet Underground and darling of Andy Warhol's Factory. After a decade of heroin addiction, by the early 1980s she was living in Manchester, concerned mainly with feeding her habit. A local promoter persuaded her to play a few shows in Italy. Hired straight from university as her keyboard player, James Young was both witness to, and participant in, this tour and those that followed. Fellow spirits including John Cale, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and John Cooper Clarke are among those who appear in his classic memoir of this period, a comedy of tragic proportions and vice versa. As the author of a recent highly acclaimed memoir of an errant would-be rock star, Street-Wise Superstar: A Year With Lawrence, Will offers his insights into the challenges presented to the writer by such a mercurial subject; while Caroline, who directed and starred in a film about neglected composer Delia Derbyshire, discusses the obstacles faced by female artists then and now. Please be aware that this episode, just like the book it describes, contains both strong language and scenes of a sordid nature; fortunately, it is also very funny.  *For £100 off any Serious Readers HD Light and free UK delivery use the discount code: BACK at seriousreaders.com/backlisted *Tickets are now on sale for our LIVE show in London on Wednesday Sep 25th where we will be discussing The Parable of The Sower by Octavia Butler, with guests Salena Golden and Una McCormack * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and get extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a patron at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode of Backlisted is brought to you by Serious Readers, a reading lamp for people like you and me. Serious Readers. I've got one of these lamps and I think it's fantastic. Yeah, it's a great lamp for reading indoors. Perfect now the night's getting darker because it simulates daylight with its HD light. Which means you can read for hours and hours without any risk of eye strain. The great news is Serious Readers are giving Backlisted listeners £100 off any HD light and free UK delivery. Just go to siriusreaders.com forward slash backlisted and use the discount code BACK.

That's siriusreaders.com forward slash backlisted with the code BACK. And there's a 30-day risk-free trial so you can return the light after 30 days for free if you're unhappy with it, which I very much doubt you will be. So without further ado, lights out for the podcast. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books. Today you find us in the back room of a slightly run-down suburban house in southern Manchester. It's February 1982. The curtains are closed and a gas fire wheezes on the wall, and there's a mess of cushions and blankets on the floor.

A tall, pale woman with high cheekbones and greying brown hair clad in black leather trousers and motorcycle boots kneels next to a scrawny young man lying in front of the fire dressed in just Y-fronts and a ripped t-shirt. She jabs a syringe into his thigh, pulls back the plunger, and fills the tube with liquid. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher Unbound, where people pledge to support the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, the author of the year of reading dangerously. And I wished to applaud my colleague for, uh, uh, framing in that metaphor he's just used this episode as a fix, uh, the plunger has been, uh, uh, duly plunged.

So here we go today. We are joined by two guests making their backlisted debuts. Welcome Caroline Katz and Will Hodgson. Hello, both of you. Hello. Hello. Caroline Katz is an actor, director and screenwriter. She trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and she's worked extensively across television,

theater, film and radio. Caroline wrote, starred in and directed Delia Derbyshire, The Myths and Legendary Tapes, which premiered at the London Film Festival in 2020 to critical acclaim ahead of its BBC broadcast, Delia Derbyshire. Of course, who features as a character in Rosemary Tonks's novel, The Bloater, which we featured on that list a few years ago. Did you must have read The Bloater, Caroline, have you?

Yes. Amazing. It was a really interesting research bit of information for me. I had to go to British Library to find it in those days before it had been republished. Thank you for doing that. Exactly the same. The British Library's copy of the bloater that's passed from hand to hand. People trying to find out more about the radiophonic workshop.

I had to buy it for a couple of hundred quid, I think, as well. Did it really cost that much? It was a load of money. And then I gave it to the agent who has not returned it yet, but I'm sure she will. Yes, you need that one back. We're actually, it's one thing we don't get paid for that, but it's another thing to be actually out of pocket. All in a good cause. The film has won several awards, including the South by Southwest Special Jury Prize, the Adam Yorkshire Award and quite right too because it was absolutely fantastic. Thank you.

Other film credits include Peter Strickland's In Fabric and most recently Ian Forsyth and Jane Pollard's latest film The Extraordinary Miss Flower in which Caroline plays the titular role. The first time I met Caroline I explained to her what Peter Strickland's film In Fabric was about. And she very politely said, Oh, Peter didn't mention that. So thank you. That was very nice of you, Caroline. The Extraordinary Miss Flower is showing in competition at the 68th BFI London Film Festival 2024. And Caroline is currently appearing in Nathan Englander's play, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, directed by Patrick Marber at the Murrell & LeBone Theatre.

At the time of speaking, Caroline, have you had your first night or is your first night coming up? We're still in previews, so we have our proper press night on Monday. Wow, exciting. Yeah, it's great. We're on our way. Yeah. It's great. Having amazing audiences already. And it's October 7th audience was the one that we were most sort of concerned about thinking that no one would come, but they did.

And in the end, it was very much, I think acted as quite an interesting way of think acted as quite an interesting way of processing the year, the tragic year that has ensued. And really the play speaks about all of the horrors. We're sort of calling it a comedy about a tragedy. And that's how it is. I've just been reading the memoirs of Jim and William Reid of the Jesus and Mary Chain. They've just published their memoirs. It's a terrific book. And I wanted to add to Caroline's credits to say that she is one of the few people to have sung the backing vocals of Just Like Honey on stage with the Jesus and Mary Chain.

That's true. I can't even remember when it was. What was that like? Can you remember? It was fun. I think, yeah. Well, I didn't rehearse with them. I literally just got went there for the sound check. I'd sort of, um, Phil King had asked me, bass player, he was working with them

on that particular tour. And then I, um, popped in for the sound check and then jumped on stage with them. And it was actually great. I enjoyed it a lot. They were very cool. They were, they were friends at that stage. I was, I was just about to ask how well were they getting on? They were doing good.

And the book is fun. Yeah. Looking forward to reading that. Will Hodgkinson is a writer and critic and the author of Street Level Superstar, A Year with Lawrence Lawrence in which he follows Britain's most eccentric would be pop star as he tries to rebuild his life after four decades of bad luck, bad decisions and missed opportunities. Regular listeners of this podcast will know that that is my favorite book of the year thus far. And I'm not just saying that, Will, you know, it is,

it is a magnificent book and you have achieved something with that book that, that no one, including Lawrence has been able to achieve until now. And what is that please? Um, no, no, what is it? You've given him a hit single, well, hit book, but you've given him a top 20 hits. I was talking to him this morning. I was talking to him this morning. He said that this woman came up to him in the street and asked for his autograph.

It definitely has happened before, but he's now actually dealing with, at the age of 63, he is becoming famous. Anyone who knows Lawrence, and Lawrence was in the bands Felt, Denim, Go-Kart, Mozart, and Mozart Estate will know this is what his mantra has been all his life. He's always said, I want to be famous. Most people don't want to be famous. Most people want to be successful for their, you know, and fame is a by-product. You know, they definitely like to be rich. They definitely like to be acclaimed for their work. No, he wants fame, straightforward fame. And now he's actually beginning to get it. And furthermore, fame of a very particular type, fame as he envisaged it as an eight

year old growing up outside Birmingham and what pop stars were like then. So it's been a long time coming. It's all about that. I mean, that's something I realised throughout the book. He kept talking about the things he wanted. And he'd say, for example, when his album came out, which is January 20, the beginning of the book, I followed him for a year, so this would be January 23. And he's terribly disappointed because the album hadn't done anything.

And he said, I don't understand it. It used to be that you got a review in the NME and then John Peel played you and then you were successful. It doesn't appear to work that way anymore. And I said, he's talking about 1983. John Peel played you and then you were successful. It doesn't appear to work that way anymore. He's talking about 1983. He still hasn't realized that the world has changed. Definitely his idea of fame was based on seeing Mark Boland. It was Mark Boland's, what was it, 71, 72. I think it was Get It On. I think I've tried to remember, it's in the book, it might be Metal Guru, but it's one of those big hits. And that was his idea of pop fame.

And he's all, since then it's turned into a kind of magical talisman, which he's been chasing after, which can never be achieved and never can never really exist in a way. And now you be careful what you wish for because you have granted him a sliver of that. It's a sliver of that. It's a sliver of that. We did a talk the other day and somebody asked him that very question. They said, well, you're now becoming famous. And he said, no, I'm becoming NME famous because he always wanted the cover of the NME. And he was going to get it one time. This is in 1986. And then at the last minute they replaced him with a feature on youth suicide. But to really sort of twist the knife, they used his profile, you know, in silhouette,

which he had absolutely no idea of until years and years and years later. So in a way he's now, he now says, yeah, I've got enemy fame, which is what he saw Jesus and Mary Jane get. He saw Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream get, all of his friends, the Stone Roses, people at bands like that. So it's kind of going back to the thing that didn't happen to him around 27, 28, which is that sort of key age, isn't it? When you're just going out of youth in a sense.

One of the things, one of the reasons we wanted to, we're talking about your book Will and we're here to talk about the book we're here to talk about is you make the point near the end of A Street Level Superstar, a brilliant point in my opinion about and something that fascinates us on Backlisted fascinates me in my writing, why artists choose to do things they do and why they choose to do them in the way they do them, be it in music, film, literature, whatever, answer, well, perhaps they don't choose, perhaps they don't have a choice, perhaps they have to do it, perhaps they're dealing with whatever they're dealing with and it comes out the way it does. And I think that's true of your subject of your book and I think it's true of the person we're going to be talking about today.

I should just say Will is also the author of Guitar Man, Song Man, The Ballad of Britain, and Imperfect Harmony Sing Along Pop in 70s Britain. Alongside the houses full of yogis, a childhood memoir on what happened when his family went from being boring suburbanites to meditating freaks of his father at a Salmonella laced coronation chicken. It's all true. It's all true. Since 2011, Will has been chief rock and pop critic of the times.

The only thing I wish to add before we get into the main thing is Will, I've interviewed you on stage twice now about two of your books. And yet in street level superstar, you describe Lawrence as being the best interviewer you've ever had. Did I really do that? I can't believe I did that Andy. Oh yes. And you haven't forgotten. No indeed. You're a pro, but Lawrence has got a pro in that sense. I want to be a wizard and a true star. I don't want to be a pro. Well, you're that too, Andy.

Thank you. You're one of those things. But also, could I just ask, Caroline, you interviewed both Will and Lawrence together. My experience of seeing Lawrence on stage is very close to Will's, that he has to be led to the stage because he's, you he's not entirely of this world and slightly frail and yet when he's on stage, you're watching someone who knows exactly what they're doing and who has been performing like that for 40 years. You can't take your eyes off him. I wonder, is he a good interview on stage? Yes. I mean, they both are brilliant together because they've obviously, they know

each other well from years, but also this particular bonding, amazing experience of putting the book together, which has had its kind of ups and downs and the book kind of tells the story of them trying to sort of negotiate whose book this is, which I absolutely love about the book. Cause the book, Caroline, let's talk about that. That will never end. So actually have a book where you've got a book playing a character in the book is pretty meta and I think very exciting about it. And I really love that sort of side of it.

But also I think he's a strange paradox, isn't he, Lawrence, in a way, because he's kind of weirdly content and not striving on some level. Yeah, that's a very good observation. Mm. Because he does kind of have this continuum of work and resilience. And I think the other stuff is a bit of a character he brings out exactly as you say sometimes. That's a very good point in relation to the book that we're here to discuss. Indeed. And that's why we've dug into that now. We could not ask for two better guests to discuss this particular book. So John, take it away. The book we're here to discuss is Nico, Songs They Never Play on the Radio by James Young,

first published by Bloomsbury in 1992. It's an impressionistic record of Young's time spent as the keyboard player in the shambolic band of the companies, the singer Nico in the 1980s. Nico had come to prominence in the late 60olic band that accompanies the singer Nico in the 1980s. Nico had come to prominence in the late 60s through her collaboration as a singer with the fellow underground, the band which more than any other spawned what we now call indie music. But Nico's solo career was an odder, darker affair, and the solo albums characterised by her deep voice, elusive lyrics and the drone of a harmonium have grown in reputation since her premature death aged 49 in 1988. By the time Young joined her

band, Nico was both broke and a junkie with a serious habit and the book spares no details in its portrait of the squalid improvised quality of life on the road, what Young calls the universe in a van. Between 1982 and Nico's death, they play over a thousand gigs all over the world, many of them met with bafflement and hostility. In the book, there are memorable cameos from Alan Ginsberg, Nico's former Velvet Underground bandmate John Cale, the poet John Cooper Clarke, and through it all, Blunder's, Nico's manager, the irrepressible Mancunian Svengali, Alan Wise, introduced in the book as Dr Demetrius.

Grail Marcus referred to it as a cool literary masterpiece. While Young was described by Danny Fields as the perfect witness from the nomadic court of the once and future goddess of the musical underground. And if you don't know who Danny Fields is, he was a personal friend of Nico's manager of the Ramones and the Stooges. Has this book stood up to the passage of time? Well, Bloomsbury certainly thinks so as they reissued it as recently as 2021. And Nico's reputation has waxed in the 30 years since this book was published. And both those subjects are ones we're going to explore over the course of the next hour.

But first of all, here's a message from our sponsors. And we're back. So we'll, I'm going to ask you the usual question about, uh, where were you? Who were you when you first encountered Nico songs? They never play on the radio by James young. If it even had that title, it's had about three or four titles. This book anyway, where were you when you first read it? I was in my late twenties.

I heard about it from a guy called Martin Green, who's a DJ at a club I used to go to called Smashing and they play great music. They probably play some Velvet Underground songs like What Goes On, you know, some of the more upbeat ones. I knew all about Nico from same way that everyone else did, you know, just from the Velvet Underground and liking that record and Altamira's Parties and the songs that she sings on it. Beyond that, a massive deal. He said there's this hilarious book which was about her when she's really washed up and addicted to heroin in Manchester, playing these tiny gigs around Eastern Europe before the fall of the Iron Curtain. I was intrigued and I read it and

I just absolutely loved it. I thought it was so funny. It's quite a nasty book in many ways in the sense that James Young is a very clever character who's one step removed from it all. He's coming down from, I think, Cambridge. He's going on to have an academic career. It's not really his world, but he plays very good classical piano. He comes into this really falling apart band. And what I really liked about it is that it had this kind of scabrous energy, but then it reached the conclusion of being incredibly affectionate towards this very difficult person who is Nico. So yeah, that was when I first read it.

It would be late twenties. I'd be living in King's Cross at the time, very broke, not strung out. I can't say I've ever taken heroin in my life. So I have to imagine what that's like. But sort of enjoying a sort of, not exactly a Bohemian lifestyle, I suppose Bohemian lifestyle before my life really got going. Thank you, Will. Now, Nico only sang three songs on the first Velvet Underground album. And if listeners aren't familiar with that record, they'll know the cover because it's the one with a picture of a banana

on it and with the signature of Andy Warhol. And many of us have a kind of formative experience when we first discover that music. Caroline, I wonder when you first encountered the Velvet when you first encountered the Velvet's or the Velvet Underground, Nico or Nico, and began to realise that they weren't the same thing, that they were different artists. Yes, I was about 13 and there was a picture of Nico in Smash Hits and there was a picture of her and the Velvet Underground and there was Lou Reed and there was Andy Warhol. I'd never seen anybody looking like that before. They looked amazing. And I, you know, when you get obsessed with something, when you're a kid, it just sort of like takes you over. It was a tiny photograph and I cut it out and put it on my wall. So like these massive pictures and posters and, you know, bowie posters,

because I really loved him. And then I had this little tiny sort of velvet thing that I kind of like sort of note to self, that looks quite cool. Find out what that is at some point. And I didn't know how to find out what that was. some point and I didn't know how to find out what that was. And then I'd gone down with my birthday money to a record shop in Altringham called Peter Swales, Peter Swales record shop. And I think he was like a manager of one of, I think City or United.

Can't remember which of them, but one of, he was one of the, one of the, you know, football people, but he also had a record shop. So I went in there and it was a cassette actually. It was the cassette of the album. No, it was the banana and it was like, pass that picture on my wall, took it home so excited and it just blew my head off. And she just became my everything. I became obsessed about her and wanted to look like her and shoved a fringe in and tried to, you know, do everything that I could to Nikoify myself like many young women when

they discover Niko. And did that lead you on to, before we talk about the book, did that lead you on to explore the records she made on her own? I feel we need to just state again for people, he may not be familiar with them, what those records represent. Certainly her first three records, Chelsea Girl, The Marble Index and Desert Shore. When did you get to those? Much later. Those bleak, bleak, brilliant records. The first one, actually, I went backwards. I got Camera Obscura, which I- Which is one with James Young.

Yes, with the James Young one. I absolutely loved that album. That was my first one of her stuff on her own. Absolutely loved that. And then the desert shore stuff a little bit later. Absolutely loved those albums. I still play them. I think, John, one of the things that's so interesting about this book is it seems to me to exist in four time zones simultaneously. Yeah. own simultaneously. Yeah. Nico is trapped in the 60s. Yeah, we meet her and James Young in the 80s. James Young writes about her in the style of the 1990s. Yeah. And we are now reassessing what Nico

meant and Nico's achievement as an artist in her own writing in 2024. So it's that fascinating thing about how the events are fixed, but the context really changes their meaning from era to era. And I don't know how you felt about going, I don't know if you've read this book before, had you read it before? No, I hadn't read it before. And I was absolutely fascinated to read it because I mean, my N Niko history is university, fell in love with the Velvets, kind of controversially among my friends preferred the Niko songs to the other songs you know, but then you know life intervened. I'd only really rediscovered Niko because of you, because you played a Niko record. There's a sort of weird medieval quality to the way she performs and plays. So I was really fascinated to read the book. And I think you'd maybe mentioned the book

in passing and you'd mentioned the James Wills biography as well. Yes, we talked about the recent biography, didn't we, on another show? I suppose nothing quite prepares you for the bleakness of the beginning of this book. I was unconvinced until I got about halfway through. You feel a little bit that the bleakness is really slapped on heavily in the early chapters, but he's won over by her kind of utter inability to kind of compromise with the world. She just is herself. And the book actually gets nicer, doesn't it? It really does, I think.

It gets softer as you go along. Less kind of, you know, talking about her strange odour and, you know, things that, we'll probably talk about this, but things now I think you would probably think twice about putting in a book if you're a man writing about a woman. Well, I would go so far as to say what Will's book benefits from the benefit of hindsight of having read in your late 20s this book, because I think Will, one of the things you do in your treatment of your subject is treat them with compassion from the start. Whereas perhaps in James Young's book, he warms to his subject. I think you are kind.

Well, that's nice of you. Yeah, I hadn't reread the book until now, just this week. It made a big impression on me all those years ago, because I remember thinking how funny it was and how, you know, there's a kind of desperate quality combined with a sort of compassion. When I went back and read it, I do think it's a very, very different book from the book I've written actually. It's quite mannered, like intellectual,

slightly spiky, you know what I mean? It's slightly sixth form, the kind of sixth form spiky, in that kind of slightly sixth form, you know, the kind of sixth form spiky. I'm coming up with a clever line here and a clever line there. And there's, there's an acid quality throughout, but like I said, it gets warmer and warmer. So I think it is very different. Let's hear from James Young. Now this is from the mid nineties documentary, Nico icon. And here is James Young, the author of this book and

Niko's keyboard player talking about the first time they met. Suddenly there was a knock on my door on my flat and there was this guy standing there who was an old friend of mine and suddenly I heard this voice, hello, hello, where are you? And there's this woman walked up the steps, big woman, you know, strange eyes. And he introduced me and said, this is Nico, friend of mine. The name rang a bell, but I didn't really, you know. And she said, can I use your toilet?

I said, okay. She was in there for half an hour. I said, what's going on? He said, oh, this is Nico. You know, Nico. I said, you know, from the Velvet Underground. Oh, right. And then it all made sense.

And then I knew why she was in the toilet. So that's how we met. That was the end for me. Academic life and into something else. Into a time tunnel from which I never emerged. A completely crazy but little world. Just a little world in a van. With absolute craziness. It was a universe, you know, this little world.

Why did you decide to write a book about your time with Nathan? Well, money. I wanted to celebrate an aspect of my life and other people's lives that don't normally get much attention. Literature failures. get much attention in the literature. Failures. There's James Young and he says there that one of the things he wants to write about is failure. Failures which don't, or at least then certainly did not get written as much about in a in a classic rock hagiography. Caroline give us just a little quick sketch of what life is like for Nico and her entourage

when we joined them in the early 1980s. Squalor, I'd say. And there's rain, there's Manchester, there's a Victorian backdrop of incredible buildings and architecture and bombed out houses that have just no redevelopment, nothing like Manchester portrait of that sort of rainy landscape with this sort of iconic, glamorous ghost that sort of exists in between these sorts of filthy dive bar venues and sticky carpets and two bar heaters and hypodermic needles and shit stained kitchens and repulsive not, I mean, yes, kitchens, because there's repulsive things on the stove in the kitchen. The first moment you sort of enter into the book, there's like a saucepan of somebody's pus that's been drained from an abscess in their leg. I hope you're enjoying this everyone.

It's like... And only a lemon in the fridge. And a lemon in the fridge, yeah. It's really grim. He paints a brilliant, brilliant picture. I mean, there's this other side of it as well, which I shouldn't... I'm now side barring, but I forgot to say in my initial introduction about how I came to sort of understand Nico, I never knew when I was a kid that she lived in the same city as me.

In my head, she was like wafting around New York looking like that. And yet she was there all the time under my nose. What is the kind of portrait that James Young paints of her creativity at this point? That is related to what Caroline has just said, because who is going to go and see Nico playing a gig in the early 1980s? Answer anyone who might be interested in the Velvet Underground, anyone who might be interested in the velvet underground. And that's it, right? So where, Will, where is Nico into making her music? Is she enthusiastic to work with a new keyboard player from university like James Young?

She couldn't care less. I mean, I think the impression I get is that first of all, she's a massive heroin addict. And my experience of heroin addicts is that heroin comes first before everything else, including themselves. So that has to be taken into consideration of everything. The other thing is there's two things going on throughout the book. There's a real sadness about the feeling that it's over for her because she's playing in front of hardly anyone

often, especially in the States and Australia and London. There's a smattering of Goths and kind of curious and sort of, you know, she's got this status as queen of the junkies and she's completely a million miles away from this incredibly glamorous figure who's in Fellini films, who Bob Dylan went out with, who was course this beautiful woman at the heart, fronting the Velvet Underground for that early period. So that's so far in the background. She's definitely got an artistic vision which I think was formed around the time of that amazing album, The Marble Index.

I think Chelsea Girl was slightly different because it was a kind of rock pop album, almost a continuation of The Velvet Underground. But by the time she made The Marble Index, it's like John said, this medieval quality. There's a song there called Frozen Borderlines, which makes me think of sort of flinty potato fields, frozen potato fields in somewhere in Eastern Europe. It's really cold and bleak and there must be no centre. Northern European. Yeah, exactly.

Very Northern European. Well, Northern European. I think James Young portrays her certainly in the first half of the book. It's a bit like, I don't know if this will mean anything to you, a bit like the groke from the Tuva Yeltsin Moomin books. You know, she's this dark, chilly figure who sweeps across the land accompanying herself well on a harmonium, her famous harmonium, which she pumps away at with her feet. This creaking harmonium.

And to create that drone. Yeah. Also the music, the music is weird in the book. I've never, considering, you know, he's a musician playing a band, there's usually a point, isn't there, it all comes together and the band are all, but you get this extraordinary feeling that there are these musicians just doing their own thing

in a completely incoherent way. They never have, she doesn't like doing rehearsals. They do their thing and sometimes it works, mostly it doesn't, and then she sits down with a harmonium and then that's the bit of the concert that everybody's looking forward to. It's very peculiar. Yeah, he's very, very dismissive of the musical abilities of everyone. I mean, the rest of the band seemed fairly desperate, to be honest with you.

They are junkies apart from him and they're just about holding it together. And there's plenty of humor to be had where she, you know, I mean, there's one point where John Cale, I think comes in and says, um, you know, there's one, some drummer who has a pain in the ass and he goes by the time John Cale arrives and John Cale says, what happened to that drummer? Everyone thinks he's going to be pleased. He's like, Oh, we got rid of him. He goes, well, that's a shame.

He's the only person who could play. So it's, there's a lot of that. There's a lot of feeling that it's, it's a shame. He's the only person who could play. So there's a lot of that. There's a lot of feeling that it's really desperate measures. It's such reduced circumstances. This is the woman from the Velvet Underground. This is the high art maiden and it just seems so, not just squalid, but a bit comical. Yeah. Let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk a little bit about the contrast between who Nico

hung out with in the 1950s and 60s and who she's hanging out with when, when we meet her again at this point. So we'll see you in a minute. So we were just talking about Nico's 1980s, but Caroline, Nico's 1960s. And this is a thing I think that is not explored in this book in the way it would be now. So Nico works with, in short order, Serge Gansbourg, Fellini, Andy Warhol, The Velvet Underground, Jim Morrison, The Stooges. And that's always presented and probably is presented to some extent in this book as she was so beautiful and Bob Dylan, as we said, and Bob Dylan. She was so beautiful and she and Bob Dylan as we said and Bob Dylan she's so beautiful and she

had a series of men fall at her feet rather than she was sufficiently talented to work with half a dozen of the most important artists of the 1960s and I wonder whether how you felt about how she's portrayed in this book compared with how she might be portrayed now. How do we feel about the respect that James Young does or doesn't accord her? KS Well, I don't think he accords her any, hardly. I mean, there are moments where there's sort of increased fondness and their sort of relationship begins to sort of evolve into something where they have an understanding. But yeah, he's very disparaging, incredibly sexist and superior to her. But then I think he's like that pretty much all the way through the book

about everybody. But I think the problem, not to say that he doesn't give her a kind of a harder time because she's a woman, he does most definitely. I think when she says that her only regret was not being born a man, it's because she wants the same power and privilege that men have. And that is something that James Young certainly doesn't seem to have any knowledge or interest in exploring. And that seems pretty typical 1990s thinking. Imagine you'd written a book about a sort of a male star, heroin addict, similar scenarios, icon from the sixties and everything.

It, there would still be a glamour. It wouldn't be of the person that used to be beautiful that now is this. It would still, there would be a gravitas afforded to that person. Absolutely, I agree. And I think that's what he takes away from her. There's one little moment that surprised me that I was like, I'm glad you put that in, where he was talking about they're in the first rehearsal and it's absolute mayhem, you know, nothing sounded any good.

And then she just sort of came in and said, told him that he was playing too many notes and that it wasn't very good and that he had to be as minimal as possible. And he said, and she was right. And that's the kind of first sort of little moment where you go, oh yeah, there is a huge respect for her, but he doesn't, it doesn't really suit the story of the book to kind of start to talk about her vision and the power that she has. That comes a little bit later, but it didn't really sort of suit him to kind of give her that musical credit initially. He's obsessed with her laziness, isn't he? He continually goes on about the fact that

she was indolent, I think. Was it somewhere he says, even in her indolence, Nico had an essential style that was uniquely her own, which is that kind of slightly damning with indolent, I think, was it somewhere he says, even in her indolence, Nico had an essential style that was uniquely her own, which is that kind of slightly damning with faint praise all the way through. But she does said, anything we might add was a superficial distraction artifice. We were merely gatecrashers on her talent. And you do you do also feel that very strongly. That's a very interesting point, John. I think when we've referred to how John Cale is, John Cale, her ex Velvet Underground bandmate and the producer of her records, her collaborator in those

extraordinary records, he is a useful character to James Young. He plays that John Cale for laughs in the book will. But it's Cale who is the person who both in the book and in subsequent decades, who has the most respect for Nico as a musician and as an artist. Cale can't be bothered with any of the other stuff. AO- No, well, Cale, yeah, he's kind of slightly more ridiculous than Nico. He seems so egotistical. Whereas Nico, there's a certain strange dignity to Nico because it's like whatever the situation she's in, it's like she's totally accepted her situation. She's owning her situation, whereas it feels like John Cale's still got these kind of rather silly airs and graces when he's coming into

this situation. All he wants to do is score cocaine and he's in this horrible house in Brixton, but he's still coming in as the great John Cale, which I thought was a really, really good touch. Yeah, John Cale's interesting. He was the guy that produced the marble index and I think Desir Shaw. I think he had a lot of respect for her. Well, Lou Reed maybe not, I don't know, but I think a lot of respect for her. Well, Lou Reed, maybe not. I don't know.

But I think a lot of those people did actually have a strange respect for Nico and a frustration also because of the delights that she really willingly put herself towards. She very much, I think, as I understand it, very much willingly wanted to become a drug addict. It wasn't like a terrible accident. It was, it was the path of kind of icy nihilism that she chose and she wanted to go down and she certainly, I get the impression that she certainly wasn't interested in being objectified as a great beauty as in the way that she had in the early days. So all of that stuff is

kind of coming into the book. Yeah. She wants to strip herself. Yeah, she does. Anything which might give people reason to like her for the thought, in the wrong way. The wrong reasons. Specifically, she goes out of her way to de-beautify herself. Yeah. She's not interested in beauty in that way. I think she's got vanity, but she doesn't have that form of vanity. she's not interested in beauty in that way. I think she's got vanity, but she doesn't have that form of vanity. Yeah. The drug use as well is that she clearly has demons and a past and there's

self-medication that's going on. And there's that whole thing of her saying, you know, the bad thoughts come when I don't have smack and you do wonder what those are. She feels that her relationship with Lou Reed was fractured because of what my people did to his people. And then he dismisses that. Right to dismiss it. You know, she said that. It's incredible that line. Yeah.

Caroline, could you read to us? Is there a section of the book you could read to us? Cause I'm, I'm conscious we've talked about Nico quite a lot. We haven't actually heard much of James Young's prose. Which is a great reason for reading the book. I would love to. Dr Demetrius's musical awareness also convinced him that the American audiences loved English guitar heroes. So he hired Didsbury's very own Spider Mike.

Spider did the Townsend Twirl, the Bowlem Boogie, and the Richard's Raunch. You name it, he could do it. He made up for me, who couldn't do anything. We gave it one last shot at a rehearsal. Smiler, the drummer, turned up in a day glow Hawaiian shirt, pastel blue slacks and a pair of deck sneakers. Does he think he's going on holiday? Nico asked. He finished it all off with a crisp new haircut. He liked to look well groomed, he said. I just lived for that

hour on the stage. He'd always wanted to go to America. What a great opportunity this was. How much he appreciated Nico's choice of him as the drummer. How he'd do a good job for her. Also, he'd heard, in case I was interested, there were some hot spots in LA going for good session men. Top rate, best brass. Echo and Nico kept disappearing to take shot after shot in the hope that the gasliness would recede. Spider turned up his amp and went into a history of riffs. I stuck to playing just one note more or less all the time, shifting only when the harmonic changes absolutely demanded it.

In this way, I kept myself hidden, tucked in between Echo's bass and Spider-Mike's guitar, never ever getting in the way of the vocals. Every so often Smiler would do a fancy little flurry on the snare or a jazzy little rim shot. Nico would slump a bit further on a stool, completely thrown. Spider-Mike dangled just above Smiler, spinning his web around Nico, buying her drinks with money he'd borrowed from me. His meanness was the only legend that preceded him. But no one had told me. That lugubrious hound dog face with a permanent drip of snot hanging at the end of his nose.

He'd made it quite plain that he loathed me as he did anyone who had brushed up against that soft bellied South. I was an overeducated middle class twat, except twat was all he could spare. He was a word miser as well. He openly flirted with Nico. All right, sweetheart. And then he'd wink at her and he'd put his arm around her and she'd look confused. Do you think this is sexual?

She'd ask me later on the sliding scale of contempt. I suddenly moved up a couple of notches above Spider Mike and Smiler below Demetrius and Echo at the exactly halfway point between hate and need, indifference. Oh, thank you. It's brilliant reading and also it's pretty good, isn't it? It's funny, the thing is I think both things we can, you know, we can accommodate to apparently contradictory views on this. I find that very funny. I mean, that is funny. And also very good writing about music, about if you're not musical, about how the bits of the band fit together and they've got to leave enough space for Nico's voice to be

the center of the thing. That's really well done. But at the same time, Will, I was thinking about what you were saying about how it's nastier than I remembered it. And it occurs to me, the nineties element of it is it's a young man's book and a young man in the nineties and a young man who has read a bit too much Hunter Thompson and likes the idea of the gonzo. They are the gonzo character in the narrative, right? Yeah, that's completely true. But I think this is something actually I felt as I got older. You can read a book and you can see its flaws or you can see that the person writing it isn't always being lovely and wonderful. And you can appreciate that. It doesn't take

it away. Do you know what I mean? So that's something I felt. I think when I first read it, I thought it was hilarious and great. When I read it back, I thought, I bet you he wouldn't write it like that now. I don't know how old he is. He must be in his sixties by now, but I bet you James Young wouldn't write it like that. I think in fact, there's a guy I know who tried to do a reprint of it and he was speaking to James Young and James Young said, yeah, I want to take out all the stuff about Le Kid. Now Le Kid is the funniest character in the book. Le Kid is Nico's son, who's also Alan DeLong's son.

He's a really sad story. The guy's now dead. He was a heroin addict himself and Nico basically got him onto heroin. But it's so funny in the book. And the thing is, if you took away the kid, you're taking away. A massive part of the book that makes it what it is. So it couldn't be rewritten. And I think James Young kind of wanted to rewrite it out of guilt. You know, I think he felt guilty about the way he portrayed Nico and felt

that this was a snotty young man kind of, you know, doing all this. You can't do that. Do you want to mean you just can't't you know, you're not you're not That's not the piece of art it is and it you know, it is brilliant But the nastiness is an essential part of it because it shows how we're all flawed even shows how James Young is flawed He's perfect. I think it's very that it has a sort of Cynicism within it that is definitely that yeah young man cleverness the thing as you say Yeah, which is, it can be a bit jarring looking back on it now, but on the other hand, there's

a sort of brutal edge to it that's really true and really, really real. But you wouldn't really want to soften off because it's him at that age inserting himself in a world that he is, he's actually trying to handle. And I really believe that part of it. And you sort of understand why he's there. It's not like, you know, sometimes when you read a book and you go, why don't you just fuck off? Why are you still there? You know, but with this, you sort of like, it's really, really clear that it's somehow important and he's doing a favor and he's curious, but he's not just there because he's trying to get a book out of it. And that's the thing that saves the book. Cause I really truly believe he

didn't think about writing a book when he was doing it. That's what I love about it. I really love the character observations, the way you might feel when you're feeling very lonely and isolated in a world where you're slightly out of your depth and you comfort yourself with thinking that you understand what these people are. But they're just massive projections, cruel, sort of two-dimensional ways of assessing a person without really thinking of them 360, which is something that's another young person's thing, I feel. Yeah. But the thing is, I think all of that is unselfconscious, which is why it works.

I mean, there's an amazing line. So John Cooper Clark is watching static on the television at three in the morning and he comes in to turn it off and John Cooper Clark suddenly wakes up and goes, I was watching that. you know, things like that. That's brilliancy. John, what is that phrase, the phrase recalled in something chaotic, recalled in tranquility or something like that? Emotion recalled in tranquility, Wordsworth, yeah. Okay.

So emotion recalled Tranquility. I think one of the reasons why this book works is James Young has not achieved tranquility when he writes it. There's a kind of post-traumatic element to it, which is still vibrating in the, on the, off the page. And I wondered, Will, without making any comparisons, you know, Lawrence is perhaps not as dangerous a character as Nico, but he can be on his own. He's on his own clock, right though. Well he's on and you as the very much so as the chronicler of that, um, did you have to adopt some kind of, I mean, it's different, isn't

it? James Young is in the band and then when that period of his life is over, he writes about it. Whereas you are knowingly putting yourself in, you know, mild harms way. Yeah, mild. Did you feel that coming through when you wrote the book or did you feel it more when you were experiencing it? If Lawrence was giving you the run around. I was experiencing it and writing the book at the same time. So I felt it very viscerally.

I felt that the only premeditated thing about writing street level superstar was that I was going to spend a year with him and I was going to write about that as he tried to rebuild his life. Apart from that, everything that happened naturally and I didn't try and it wasn't like sort of unplanned in a way. So all the frustrations that you'll read because Lawrence stands me up, nothing is ever his fault. So if he stood me up, I remember one time I planned to meet him and you know I've got my own full-time job and everything, I remember one time I planned to meet him and I've got my own full-time job and everything. It's quite hard to carve out the time. And I was meeting him on a Friday. I went to his local cafe just outside his flat and waited and waited and waited.

And about an hour, texting him. And eventually I went over to his door, rang the doorbell, didn't answer. And for whatever reason, he wasn't coming out. And then the following day, when I was furious and I shouted at him, he said, you meant to call me the night before? I was like, what are you talking about? And apparently it was my fault, even though this has ranged many, many times, it was my fault that I hadn't called him, though I had texted him, the text didn't count apparently, I had to call him at maybe 10pm and say I'm meeting you at 10am the following morning outside your flat.

This kind of stuff, you know, that would drive me absolutely crazy. So all of that went into the book. The difference between the James Young book is that he's written, he did it and like Caroline said, he wasn't trying to write a book about it. So I was trying to write a book about it and I put, I'm trying to write a book about it in the book all the time. You know, so every time he, yeah, he told me, he kept giving me rules all the time he kept saying, right, you're not allowed to use the word just and I'd say, why not? You go, I just don't like it.

So obviously I'm going to put that in the book. I think I know where he gets that from. I think it's a Lennon and McCartney thing. I think they had a pact that they would never use the word just in a song because it was a filler word. That would totally make sense because most of the things that Lawrence has got for his life he's got out of other people's books and films and records. One on Plu, Will.

One on Plu. So I wonder if I could ask John, you know, the way we're talking about James Young talks about a person he believes is to a greater or lesser extent talented and Will is talking about writing a book about somebody talented, but infuriating. And I wonder whether your experience as an editor and a publisher, you know, part of the theme of backlisted as Andrew Mayall, as our former guest and friend, Andrew Mayall says is it really ought to be called their poor agents because nearly every author we cover has a problem or an issue or doesn't like other people. We've never actually talked about this in all these episodes.

John, do you take a philosophical view of how much you'll put up with from somebody you work with? Yeah, it's such a difficult one, isn't it? Cause there are, there are, there are, there are really extraordinary people I've worked with who are adjointed to, you know, they're all, they're fine. And then there are, there are people, there's to, you know, they're fine. And then there are people, there's obviously some sort of horrible Boston Matrix here. You don't want awful people who are talentless, and there are plenty of them. The really tricky ones are the very, very difficult people who,

when you read the work, you think, my God, this is brilliant. This is why I put up with all the other stuff. I think what's interesting in the James Young book is he clearly admires Nico's talent. I think almost the weirdest thing in the book, which I did a bit of burrowing into, was his relationship with Alan Wise, with Dr Demetrius. And Alan Wise said that they basically invented that character together. I mean, Alan Wise was also a bit of a fantasist, so you don't know whether that's really true or not. But when people came and said, how did you feel about your your presentation in the book? He said, oh, I loved it because it was basically, you know, I discussed it with James

and we invented the character of Dr Demetrius together. I mean, I think Young is kind of in love with that idea of monstrous, you know, that in the Clare Deedra that monsters make great art and he makes Niko more monstrous. I haven't read the Jennifer Otter Bichedite book, but you talked about it, Andy, didn't you? As an attempt to try and wrest the Niko story back from misogynist blokes. I mean, it's interesting that book is simultaneously a necessary corrective to lots of the stuff we've been talking about. While at the same time, it's not the whole picture. And we're blessed in a sense that the subjects of Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground and the members of the Velvet Underground

and Nico is so well covered in different books. There's Dick Witz's book, there's James Young, there's the recent biography you're just talking about, there's Victor Bocras' Velvet Underground books, there's all the books that came out of the factory. We do get to see Rashomon style, books that came out of the factory. We do get to see Rashomon style, these characters in the round. And I would argue that's one of the reasons why Nico's work of the members of the Velvet Underground, Nico's work is the music that has grown in stature the most over the last decades. I think as you get to learn more about her rather than just as this glacial ice maiden hanger on, so you begin to understand the layers of the work and the fact that Cale would stand up for his work with Nico more than he would stand up for his own work.

He believes that's his contribution. There's a brilliant thing in Nico Icon where he says, well, the Velvets were great, but really it was a means to an end and the end was it allowed me to make those records with Nico, which is what I will be remembered for. Which is fascinating, right? Now, listen, we're going to hear a clip from Nico herself being interviewed on the radio in the mid 1980s in Melbourne in Australia. She's on tour. And when I first found this, I thought, okay, well, this is Nico slightly otherworldly talking about her work. But I want to contextualize it by reading a very brief part of James's book. So in James's book, he's still in the band in 1985.

So this interview happens when these events are being described. So when I get to the end of the reading, we'll hear from from Nico herself. Bondi Beach offered Nico most of her everyday needs, all night pharmacists and health food shops. Nico was on something of a health kick at the time. She'd settle on one food substance like yogurt, and she'd stick exclusively to it. The idea of planning a menu for herself

and then eating it alone was too depressing a prospect. So she'd just think, yogurt,urt! You don't need to chew yoghurt. At first it seemed the gigs would do well in Sydney. The first night they packed the place and the reviews were on our side. But Dennis had booked Nico in for three shows, and there just weren't enough doom dwellers in Paddington and Bayswater. Junkies there might be aplenty, but the difference was the sun shone all day on their craniums or that melanin produced wallflowers who needed a different

aesthetic climate to Nico's Teutonic fog. Most of the time Nico had to stay behind to do endless interviews. Dennis had tried every promotional angle, TV, radio, newspapers, but still the attendance at shows was little more than a dribble. Our four nights in Melbourne coincided with the Australian leg of Bob Dylan's endless world tour. I'd so like to see Bob. It's been such a long time. Dennis called Dylan's tour management. He got the classic rock and roll run around, call back at such and such a time.

Maybe you will, maybe you won't. Finally Dennis got, maybe Bob will drop in and see Nico after his own show. Nico was so excited like it was a date. She had a bath and bought a new shirt. Throughout the gig, she kept craning her neck, scanning the audience for a glimpse of Lonesome Bob. When he didn't show, I found her crying in the dressing room.

No one comes to see me anymore. Well, then the most recent LP has been Camera Obscura, once again with John Cale, and with a couple of his musicians as well. How did you find recording that LP? It's very much a 1980s sound, isn't it? It's got a big drum beat and a lot of tracks and lots of synthesisers. Yes. Bit of a change? I would have liked to have gone to the Amazon River, just sail along the river and record

my record there, right, with the drumming coming from every direction. Like in Fitzgerald, that's how I… I always have to see a sound. I can't listen to it only. I have to actually see a film. When I don't see a film, I rather see the music and I hear it or both. But I see it more than I hear it. Does that mean when you're writing your songs that they move, they go through that process, that you actually have to… Maybe I'm a frustrated movie director. Sounds like it.

If we didn't know what we know from James Young, it would be very easy to listen to that and think, oh, Nico, you know, she's stoned. She's, she's, she's not with it. Well, maybe she was stoned, but maybe she also had terrible jet lag. Maybe that was recorded the day after Bob Dylan didn't show up. You know, suddenly you have that sense of fragility and strength, Caroline, the bravery of it. The, the same with you were with Lawrence, you know, people don't come to the shows. There's no money in it.

People go, why do you make your records sound like this now? But they keep going. Why do they keep going? You know, as you say, is it because they have to is because they can't do anything else. Caroline, let me ask you, you are a talented and successful performer. Why do you put yourself through it? Well, I don't know. I don't know. When it comes to Nico or Lawrence, from what I can

understand there is just this continuum of a creative life. Lawrence keeps making music because he keeps having ideas. He's never going to run out of ideas ever. That's what makes him a street level superstar, I think. That's the genius bit. And I actually think that's the same with Nico. The idea is the thing that she has and that she she's really trying to tap in and and chase that and all her demons come from the fact that perhaps she hadn't until she gets to this point in her life allowed herself or been allowed to Just prioritize that thing of chasing those ideas because they have to yeah because they have to yeah I mean will you must encounter this as you,

not just with Lawrence, but musicians in general, who go from all sorts of highs to lows in their careers and just keep going because they have something to say. They have that has to be said. Yeah, that's very true. I think with Nico and with Lawrence, they are very damaged people. Um, very difficult people, incredibly selfish, pathologically selfish, actually incredibly vain. You can say all of that about them, but what you cannot deny is that they are as real as it gets. There is no pretentiousness.

They'd love to be pretentious. They both aspire towards pretentiousness, but they can't help but be themselves. The observations that James Young kept making throughout the book, his little frustrations, I recognize so closely as a certain type of person. There's an amazing scene where Nico is frustrated about something or other and Alan Wise is really upset because he's just been to the Jewish ghetto and he's reflecting on 400,000 deaths unnecessarily purged. She couldn't care less because the homonium's out of tune or something. Now, you have to be a certain type of person to not care. Do you know what I mean? With Lawrence, I found that he didn't mean any harm to anyone, but it's like he's so much

on this mission that he'll be his own worst enemy and everyone else's worst enemy. It just has to continue. There's a point where he was talking about when he was really at his lowest. Everything had fallen apart. Denham had been a disaster. He was on the verge of being made homeless. He was heroin addicted. He was really, really bad. And he said that any normal person would have said to me, why don't you just give up? All the people around him were getting jobs. Pete Astor, who'd been in the loft and had been hailed as a great, great kind of possible indie star, had got a job as a lecturer at Goldsmiths University. Douglas Hart, who'd been in the G. Samary chain, was making videos. And all these people were kind of functional.

They get families and getting on with their lives. And Lawrence said, well, I can only compare it to Newt Hampson's character in hunger. You know, he'd rather eat his own finger than get a job. You know, that was me. And he goes the same. She was never going to go. You know, you could, you just couldn't go down the shops and buy 10 of her. And I think that's the thing with these people is that, yeah, I think the way real as it gets is how I describe it.

And the drugs, you know, the drugs are interesting. She says at one point when she said, you know, that she's saying about, you know, he says, do you ever get lonely? She says, sometimes when there's not enough, you know what? She laughed. But even before that thing start coming back at you, like what all the bad things you've done, all the bad things that happened to you, it comes back like a riot.

The heroin calms me down. And you do have a sense of these people that they have that one skin too few thing. They're much more kind of connected to feelings and to the, it's interesting how drugs, it's so often with creativity, drugs become a, what starts as an escape becomes a kind of a problem and a sentence. But through James Young's book, and indeed yours, they find a way through it as well. Kale appears both as a sort of alcoholic coke fiend at the beginning of the book. And then by

the end he's kind of rather annoyingly cleaned up and brusque and doesn't want to have anything to do with any of them. And very self-righteous as well. And Nico too, you know, she gets, she goes on methadone and, and, you know, it seems slightly sad that he says at one point, I thought she'd live forever. You know, she'd be one of those kind of eccentric kind of women in their eighties kind of, but you know, she doesn't, she dies at 49 because of, you know, a brain aneurysm falling off a bike in Ibiza, you know, kind of random.

Now listen, we need to wind up there. So John, do you want to, do you want to take us out? Yeah, we've run out of time, no time for an encore. But huge thanks to Caroline and to Will for joining us in the Batlister touring band and as ever to Nicky Burch for making this roughly improvised group of itinerant players sound like a tight band. If you want show notes with clips, links and suggestions for further reading for this show and the 222 that we've already recorded please visit our website at www.batlister.fm. If you want to buy the books discussed on this or any of our other shows visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose

backlisted as your bookshop and we're still keen to hear from you on twitter facebook instagram blue sky and wherever else you feel compelled to write from even the desert shore. If you want to hear backlisted early and ad free subscribe subscribe to our Patreon, patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Your subscription brings other benefits if you subscribe at the lock listener level for significantly less than the cost of a bag of Manchester skag. You get not one, but two extra and exclusive exclusive podcasts every month. Locklisted features the three of us talking and recommending books, films and music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight. For those of you who enjoyed enjoyed What Have You Been Reading Slot, that's

where you'll now find it. It's an hour of tunes, musings and superior book chat. Also, lot listeners get their names read out accompanied by lashings of praise like this. Esther Brookfield, thank you. Tara Coonert, thank you. Virginia Faulkner, thank you. Jessica Kirk, thank you. Susanna Taylor, Jessica Kirk. Thank you, Susanna Taylor. Thank you. Eilid Troup. Thank you, Brian Howell. Thank you, Carlotta Collins.

Thank you, Karen Cooper. Thank you, Lisa B. Thank you, thank you so much for listening, for everyone. And for those in or near London, please join us live at Foyles in Charing Cross Road at 6.30 PM on Wednesday 23rd October for the live recording of our Halloween episode where we will be discussing Arthur Conan Doyle's Unheimlich collection, Round the Fire stories with our traditional Gullmeisters Andrew Mail

and Laura Varnham. I'll say that again, Andrew Mail and Laura Varnham and you can book now via the backlisted or Foyle's websites. Before we go, let me ask first, Will, is there anything you wish to say about Nico and or James Young and or songs they never play on the radio that we haven't covered? Is there a any last message for your listeners? Look at Nico, look at James Young's book, which he said, you know, the good and the bad of it. And, and Lawrence, these are, these are people who's whatever, however they live their lives, the work they left behind is incredibly inspiring.

I mean, Lawrence continues to leave behind, you know, he's still making great, great records to this day. And it was definitely with the book, I'd say whatever frustrations I had, and, you know, obviously there was kind of comedic value to, to be, I wouldn't have done it if I didn't think that the artistic value was incredibly high. You know, that was at the heart of it. It was the only reason I read the book in the first place is because I find Lawrence fascinating.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Caroline, anything you would like to say that we didn't cover? Two wonderful, wonderful books that I've absolutely loved. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Caroline, anything you would like to say that we didn't cover? Two wonderful, wonderful books that I've absolutely loved immersing myself with. And I just think they both of these characters, positive alternative views of the world and are singular, fascinating people that have generated incredible pieces of art.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, John, he left us these podcasts so we should cherish them. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting when we have a book where we can't give, you know, 100% approbation to. But you've got to love somebody.

This is everything that's right and wrong about this book is in this quote from it. 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. Well, kind of, yeah, it's a good line, James, but actually your whole book is kind of about that. Yes. For all its cynicism, there is absolutely beautiful poetry within it. And I think it's an incredibly vivid book and I love it. Yeah. And hate it. Yeah. I love it and hate it. The last were well said. I wish well for the memory of Le Kid who is Nico's son and is such a great character in the book.

Yeah. Okay. Thanks everyone. And thank you, Caroline. And thank you, Will. This has been absolutely fantastic. I've so enjoyed this and we'll see you in a fortnight. Thanks so much. Thanks guys. Bye. Thank you. Regrets? I've no regrets. No. Except that I was born a woman instead of a man. That's my only regret.