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Klaus Nomi
"Some people think I'm not human. That's why I can't eat, can't have sex, I can't burp, I can't do anything really." - Klaus Nomi, Soho News, 1979.
In the late 1970s, Klaus crashed into the New York New Wave/art scene, where - amid a cloud of dry ice - he first mixed 17th Century opera with rock, and dazzled onlookers with his attire of pointy blue hair, black painted lips and fingernails, plus wide shoulder pads - all of which he also sported in the daytime, of course. (In 1980, People magazine paid homage to his remarkable dress sense, writing: 'Anybody who walks through the streets of Manhattan with waxed blue hair, jet black lipstick and clothes secured from a Vincent Price garage sale isn't canvassing for the Salvation Army.’)
Unfortunately, while the Bowie bandwagon trundles ever on, his new 'tracks' increasingly dull and plodding, and Numan samples (as heard in last year's chart smash Koochi) keep Armand Van Helden in gilt-edged goatee clippers and beanie hats, Klaus - who died a horrible death in 1983 - tends to be swept under the pop carpet, like forgotten space dust.
Although, now that the filmmaker Andrew Horn nears completion of a feature-length documentary about him - and interest in all things New Wave and early 1980s reaches fever pitch - Klaus could finally gain more mainstream recognition.
The man himself liked to tell people that he was an alien who 'came from outer space to save the human race’. In fact, he was born Klaus Sperber in Essen, Germany in the 1940s and, even as a child, had developed a passion for extreme genres of music.
On the one hand, he dug the newly emerging, dirty rock'n'rollin' of Elvis Presley; while on the other, more manicured, mitt was a penchant for opera. Much later, via an interview with the Soho News in 1979, he recalled: '1 always loved rock 'n' roll. I bought a (Presley) EP, King Creole. I hid it in the basement to make sure, but my mother found it. She went to the record store where I bought it and exchanged it for Maria Callas' operatic arias. Well I was very agreeable to that too. So I got into that, but every time I bought a rock'n'roll record, at the same time I bought a classical record. That was the point of my confusion because I like each as well as the other. So I was constantly freaking out.'
As a young man in the late 1960s, Klaus worked at the Berlin Opera as an usher. Here, his earlier dalliances with Callas came in handy when he did impersonations of her, to entertain the bored technicians. In 1972, however, it was he who was bored, and decided to move to New York, where he took lodgings in the (then) most bohemian part of the city, St. Mark’s Place. Regrettably, stardom did not immediately beckon, and Klaus secured modest employment as a pastry chef at the World Trade Centre - a task at which he was impressively deft.
He would even go on to form his own freelance baking company with a clubbing friend, Katy Kattleman. She recalled her first-ever meeting with Klaus in Stephen Hager's 1986 book Art After Midnight: '1 met Klaus at an uptown disco. He was wearing a beret and a woman's jacket from the 40s.
I'd never seen anyone quite like him. He was so shy and quiet. We both had two different lives: a straight day job and a real nutty nightlife. We started going to Max's and CBGB together.' Away from his rolling pin and pinny, Klaus gradually became a fixture on the East Village art scene and a first real taste of on-stage notoriety occurred when he appeared in a production of Das Rheingold, with Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatre Company.
Klaus was a taught singer, and his voice was utterly astonishing in its range. He could hit the shrillest of falsetto peaks and the deepest of spook-germanic warbles. But, by 1976, he was unsure of what direction he should move in. He sought the advice of a professional voice coach, Ira Siff, who was also renowned as the mouthful-like Vera Galupe-Borszch, of drag ensemble La Gran Scena Opera Company. In 1994, journalist Rupert Smith wrote about this meeting in Attitude magazine, quoting Ms. Siff thus: 'I'd seen him around opera events in New York that only die-hard opera queens would go to. He came to me for advice on what to do with his voice, because he had a beautiful lyric tenor but could also sing falsetto. At that time there was no interest in men singing in high voices; the countertenor revival hadn't begun, and it was long before Le Gran Scena. So I advised him to concentrate on his tenor and forget the soprano, because no one would take him seriously. Fortunately, he didn't listen to my advice!'
Klaus began to hone his new Nomi persona in earnest - (the name Nomi was an anagram of his favourite sci-fi magazine OMNI) - and scaled new heights of dressed-up theatricality, slicking his hair up, up and away and donning women’s slacks and tailored jackets. He collaborated with a dancer friend named Boy Adrian, who - pre-body-popping era - honed bizarre robotic-like moves, which would later accentuate Klaus' live stage performances. One morning in 1978, on the way home from yet another night on the tiles, a friend overheard Klaus singing and - impressed - persuaded him to take part in the forthcoming New Wave Vaudeville show in the East Village. Needless to say, Klaus didn't need a great deal of coaxing.
The New Wave Vaudeville took place at a closed-down club venue on 15th Street. It was organised by an artist called David McDermott and comprised a gathering of New York's more out-there performance artists, singers and musicians - lasting for four consecutive nights. Aside from Nomi, acts such as Man Parrish (of subsequent Hi-NG fame with Man to Man - and their Male Stripper paean), Lance Loud, and a singing dog would all have their moment under the spotlight. But it was Klaus who truly stole the show.
Following an introduction from McDermott ('Ladies and gentlemen, what you are about to hear is not a recording! This is real!'), the house lights were lowered and, as Stephen Hager explains in Art After Midnight: ‘The curtains opened and the spotlight fell on a strange, unearthly presence wearing a black gown, clear plastic cape, and white gloves. As the orchestra refrain from Saint-Saens's Samson And Delilah was played, this strange Weimar version of Mickey Mouse began singing in an angelic voice. (Meanwhile, Boy Adrian did his robotic thing with gay abandon.) After Sperber finished the aria, smoke bombs were lit, strobe lights began to flash, and the sound of a spaceship launching was played at an ear-shattering volume. Sperber bowed and stepped backward. The crowd stood and screamed for an encore, but Sperber just kept backing up into the cloud of smoke.'
Legendary NY drag performer Joey Arias - who was at the time a PR for Fiorucci - was in the audience that night. He recalls: "Everyone became completely quiet until it was over... I still get goose pimples thinking about it. It was like he was from a different planet and his parents were calling him home. When the smoke cleared, he was gone." Arias was so enthralled that he and another fan, the neo-pop artist Kenny Scharf (at one time as famous as Keith Haring), both promptly joined forces with Klaus for future live shows, while Boy Adrian - it seems - got the robotic boot. Offers of work came thick and fast: They regularly appeared at Warhol-hangout Max's Kansas City, plus The Rock Lounge, the achingly bohemian Mudd Club and even one time in the swank Fiorucci store (under the title 'Fiorucci Celebrates the New Wave'); the act was becoming bigger - including versions of The Twist and Falling In Love Again - as well as more visually extreme. "Klaus had a lot more confidence now," confirms Arias. "He did eight songs. He had me and Kenny with our faces painted blue and huge shoulder pads, looking like football players from outer space, and he had taken his own appearance even further. It made quite an impact."
Nomi’s reputation as darling of the NY demi-monde was now firmly established, and he gathered around him a motley crew of the downtown scene's prime movers and shakers - among them Jean- Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, John Sex and even a skint young lass existing on a diet of popcorn, named Madonna Ciccone. His notoriety spread beyond the Big Apple, however, following an encounter with David Bowie. Ever a moth to the latest flame, Bowie - who had just emerged, bleary-eyed from his Berlin-dwelling/Lodger album phase - spotted Klaus performing at The Mudd Club, and they got chatting. Bowie duly invited Klaus (and Joey Arias) to be his backing singers and dancers on the Saturday Night Live TV show, in December 1979 - a big deal by a budding star's standards - which would propel him from the relatively closed world of clubland into the living rooms of an aghast US public. In 1999, an article in Uncut magazine reminisced about this momentous small-screen occasion: 'When at last he makes his entrance, David is imprisoned in an inverted plastic triangle like some human Dairylea, carried on by two similarly spiky freaks who, having planted him centre stage, take up position as backing singers. One of them acts permanently startled - but with a bleached white face and jagged Toblerone hair-do, who wouldn't? As Bowie launches into a radical treatment of The Man Who Sold The World, the same three-pointed clown has the audacity to drown out the main man in a piercing, crystal-cracking squawk. It seems like, this time, the lad has really gone insane.'
Thanks to Bowie’s almighty influence at the time, Klaus, who would enthuse of his mentor: 'He's fabulous - he gives me all the freedom I need to be creative’ - soon secured a deal with RCA Records. They released his debut, self-titled album in 1981 - featuring cover versions of The Twist, Lou Christie's Lightning Strikes, a makeover of a Saint-Saens aria and the OTT pomp rock-meets-opera track, Cold Song, from Purcell's King Arthur. RCA sent him off on a global promotional tour, but US sales of the disc were rather poor. Nonetheless, he became popular in Europe and the French division of the label pumped much money into their latest star. In 1982, Klaus was busy with the recording of his second album Simple Man (which boasts a wonderfully ludicrous treatment of Purcell's Sorcerer's Song, mixed into Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead from The Wizard of Oz), but - increasingly the prima donna - had by now dropped his one-time collaborators Joey Arias and Kenny Scharf, opting to work with a regular session band and professional dancers instead, in order to hog all the attention for himself.
Alas, before his career could take off like a rocket ship, Klaus became seriously ill in 1983. He lost a huge amount of weight, suffered constant flu-type symptoms and experienced severe respiratory problems. It emerged that his immune system had collapsed, and an unfamiliar form of skin cancer started to spread across his body... he had AIDS, but as yet the illness was not even properly recognised by the medical establishment. The last few months of Klaus' life were hellish; confined to his apartment he would gaze sadly at photos and videos from his too-brief glory days - trying everything from macrobiotic diets to hardcore prescription drugs to improve his lot, and battling with ever-more severe symptoms of the disease. Joey Arias visited him in hospital the night before he died, aged 39 (the first reported music industry figure to succumb to AIDS), where they cackled at the idea of Klaus getting back on stage and performing, wearing a veil - Phantom of the Opera-style - to conceal his woeful appearance.
An obituary by Kristian Hoffman, in the East Village Eye, acknowledged that Klaus, 'did not end life at the end of his career, but in the middle of it’, and honoured him as; 'A master performer - a master of theatrical gesture. Above all he was a visionary.' At his funeral, a mystery black-caped woman screamed and flung herself headfirst at the casket... just as a massive thunderstorm broke out overhead. It was precisely the sort of high camp moment which kooky Klaus himself would have surely appreciated.