Bibliographie romancée
En puisant à diverses sources, et surtout un extrait du livre
suivant (1), on peut romancer la vie de Klaus Nomi de la façon
suivante : Klaus Sperber naît en 1944 (on trouve également 45 ou 47)
dans les Alpes bavaroises, en
Allemagne, pas forcément
la meilleure époque (rapport à la guerre).
Il est élevé par sa mère, seule.
On le retrouve plus tard à Berlin, à la fin des années
60. Là, les versions divergent (et divergent, c'est énorme) :
Nomi aurait plus tard prétendu (à la presse) avoir travaillé à l'Opéra de Berlin.
S'il y a travaillé, ce serait comme portier, ou placeur [ou hôtesse d'accueil, ndlf], en "petit boulot". En fait, il aurait plutôt travaillé en face de l'Opéra (c'est déjà ça).
Il avait cependant déjà un double goût pour le pastiche (sec) et les vocalises, et entretenait ses collègues en reprenant des airs classiques,
et en imitant Maria Callas ou Presley, entre autres.
Il part à l'aventure en 1972 à New York (du côté de St. Mark's Place),
où il exercera divers petits boulots, surtout comme cuisinier et pâtissier,
en particulier au World Trace Center. Le jour.
La nuit, il hante le New York festif, les boîtes de nuits et les clubs d'East Village. Il commence à apparaître dans de petits spectacles, cherchant sa voie, et sa voix. Cette dernière couvre assez un large registre, de base ténor, mais avec des possibilités de falsetto. Il demandera conseil vers 1976 à Ira Siff, plus connue sous le nom de
Vera Galupe-Borszch dans La Gran Scena Opera Company,
qui lui conseille d'abandonner le soprano.
C'était peu avant le renouveau du contre-ténor masculin.
C'est à New-York qu'il rencontra David Bowie (qui aurait assisté à l'une de ses
performances étonnantes), qui lui demanda, ainsi qu'à Joey Arias, de
l'accompagner sur la scène du show Saturday Night Live TV. Les deux compères
firent les choeurs surles chansons de Bowie, "The Man Who Sold the World",
"TVC15" and "Boys Keep Swinging" en 1978. C'est l'endroit où un monde
plus grand le découvrit enfin. David Bowie l'aurait introduit auprès
de sa maison de disques de l'époque, où il enregistra deux disques.
Il meurt du SIDA (ou plutôt de ses complications) dans la nuit du 5 au 6 août 1983.
Ces cendres auraient été dispersées au-dessus de New-York
Textes à consulter
Quelques textes originaux
| Klaus Nomi, by Kristian Hoffman, for East Village
Eye |
 |
Klaus Nomi appeared on the NYC scene suddenly, leaping from his spectacular
debut at the New Wave Vaudeville show (where the astounded audience had
to be told repeatedly that the voice was truly live) to spearhead a futurist
movement of militantly fashionable avant-misfits before and beyond any
new romantic notions occurred to Spandau Ballet and after Bowie abandoned
the future as an archaic concept.
Klaus was a face - elfin and painted as a Kabuki robot. He was a style
- a medieval interpretation of the 21st century via Berlin 1929. He was
a voice, almost inhuman in range, from operatic soprano to Prussian general.
He was a master performer - a master of theatrical gesture. Above all he
was a visionary. He said the future is based on the needs of the artist,
deciding how to live and living that way every minute. Klaus, the man from
the future, lived that way in the present, and held out his hand saying,
"Come with me. You can do it too."
His vision was naive, quaint, almost foolish, but forceful in its purity
and innocence. Even at his most wildly ridiculous ("Lightning Strikes")
or quaveringly sublime (Purcell's "Death") there was an acknowledgment
of impending apocalypse that lent it conviction. For Klaus, apocalypse
was a metaphor for purification, and as the oddball optimist surrounded
by cynical detachment and resignation, he dared to believe in a better
world.
Klaus rose quickly, independent of the critical machine. He was never
"cool," and was resented by some who thought Fame should have
hipper tastes. He gained a following in New York and used it as a springboard
to even greater success in Europe. He dearly loved New York, felt it was
his true home, and was distressed that he couldn't work here more. He requested
that his remains stay here despite family ties in Germany.
He did not end life at the end of his career, but in the middle of it.
His biggest accomplishments were ahead of him. He was on the verge of Canadian
and American deals, and was full of ideas and plans, positive and humorous.
He was tortured by impossible and endless management complications and
a disease whose myth exploded through thoughtless babble and media saturation
until the only sensible solution was to move far away.
His was always a message of great instinctive hope.
|
|
| Steven Hager, Art After Midnight: The East Village Scene1986
St. Martin's Press, excerpts |
| Chap. 2, New Wave Vaudeville |
|
"Toward the end of the show, the lights dimmed and the room was
filled with a thundering musical ovation. The curtains opened and the spotlight
fell on a strange, unearthly presence wearing a black gown, clear plastic
cape, and white gloves. As the orchestral refrain from Saint-Saens' 'Samson
And Delila' was played, this strange Weimar version of Mickey Mouse began
singing in an angelic voice. "I still get goose pimples when I think
about it," remembers Joey Arias, who was in the audience that night.
"Everyone became completely quite until it was over." The act
was billed "Nomi by Klaus," but the man's real name was Klaus
Sperber and he was McDermott's only true competion as star of the show.
After Sperber finished the aria, smoke bombs where lighted, 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. "It was like he was from a different planet and his parents
where calling him home," says Arias. "When the smoke cleared,
he was gone."
An only child who was raised by a single mother in the German Alps,
Sperber worked as an usher at the Berlin Opera in the late sixties, where
he'd entertained the maintenance crew with his Maria Callas imitations.
He had a stiking puppet like face, with a high forehead and sharply pointed
nose. He heightened these features by plucking his eyebrows, wearing dark
lipstick, and combing his hair into a crown with three points. He moved
into an apartment on St. Mark's Place in 1972 and appeared in a camp production
of Das Rheingold with Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theater Company.
A self-taught chef as well as a self-taught singer, Sperber took a job
as a pastry chef at the World Trade Center and later formed a freelance
baking company with Katy Kattleman. "I met Klaus at an Uptown disco,"
says Kattleman. "He was wearing a beret and a woman's jacket from
the forties. I'd never seen anyone quite like him. He was so shy and quite.
We both had two different lives: a straight day job and a real nutty night
life. We Started going to Max's and CBGB together."
Magnusen lured Sperber into New Wave Vaudeville after hearing him sing
on the way home from Max's one night. Sperber was friends with a young
dancer named Adrian Richards, who had perfected a mimelike robot dance.
Orignally scheduled to perform with Sperber, Richards backed out at the
last minute, leaving only the name he'd invented for the act, an anagram
of his favorite magazine, OMNI. Later on, Sperber took the name Nomi for
himself.
In two short years, Nomi went from his position as a poor pastry chef
to become New York's leading New Wave performer. He created a cabaret style
that is still being imitated today and assembled a group of promising young
artists and performers around him, a list that at various times included
Kenny Scharf, Keith Haring, Jean-Micheal Basquiat, John McLaughlin, and
Joey Arias. (It was during a period of rampant promiscuity that Arias renamed
McLaughlin "John Sex.")
|
| (about three paragraphs deleted about Kenny Scharf's arrival
from the west coast) |
|
Scharf was friendly, handsome, and incredibly naive. Having recently
arrived from the University of California at Santa Barbara (where he'd
studied art for one year), he was studying illustration at SVA and was
obsessed with television, Pop Art, and outer space. He talked insessantly
about his favorite TV show, "The Jetsons." He had also invented
his own religion in which he worshiped the element hydrogen as god. Nomi
was impressed with Scharf's paintings, particularly with a large one of
a Cadillac flying through space. "You and I are working on the same
thing," he told the young artist.
"I could tell Kenny was baffled by Klaus," recalls Arias.
"We were getting really stoned and Kenny said: 'I want to be like
you guys.' So we gave him a Nomi hairdo, with triangle ears and a triangle
back. We took photographs of it and Kenny was so excited. He felt like
a Nomi person. I put on shoulder pads under my shirt and Kenny put on a
space helmet. Klaus thought it was great. He wanted us to be in his next
show."
The next scheduled performance was a Max's Kansas City, where Nomi had
been invited to open for the Contortions. Arias and Scharf appeared as
go-go dancers. "We painted our faces green," says Arias. "We
were completely puffed up with green helmets and shoulder pads. Klaus sang,
'The Twist', 'Falling In Love Again', and his aria. I was into the robot
dance, while Kenny was more into just go-going. People went completely
crazy over the act."
Arias introduced Scharf to the managers at Fiorruci, who organized an
exhibit titled Fiorruci Celebrates the New Wave, which combined an art
show by Scharf with a performance by Nomi. Scharf created a series of paintings
detailing the misadventures of a jet-set woman of the future named estelle.
The next to last painting showed estelle seated seated inside a spaceship,
loking at a TV set that showed the earth exploding from a nuclear bomb.
"She looked really pleased because she was the only survivor,"
recalls Scharf.
"Around this time Klaus and I decided we were the future,"
says Arias. "We formed the Nomi family. We lived as if we were on
the spac shuttle. We ate little bits of food- space food." The lifestyle
added alot to the shows, which where becoming an increasingly stylized
mixture of New Wave, Kabuki, and Bauhaus. Scharf's dancing no longer fit
in with the style and he was booted out of the group. One night at the
Mudd Club, Nomi met his idol, David Bowie. After discovering that they
had mutal friends in Germany, Bowie invited Nomi and Arias to appear with
him on "Saturday Night Live." Soon afterward, Nomi signed a record
deal with RCA.
"Then Klaus and I had a falling out," says Arias. "I
was writing songs on my own and Klaus got pissed about that. He said,'You're
starting to do your own thing and I think you should move out.'" As
his self-importance increased, Nomi beganing alienating many of his former
friends. He dissolved his group and hired a professional band to back him.
His first album was released in 1981, and it sold poorly.
|
| Chap. 6, "Fun Gallery": |
|
Unfortunately, in 1982, another plague appeared, one even more deadly
than heroin. Acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS, had been spreading
anonymously for several years, primarily through the gay population. The
disease was barely identified when Klaus Nomi was diagnosed and hospitalized.
"They made me wear a plastic bag when I visited him," recalls
Arias. "I wasn't allowed to touch him. After a few weeks, he seemed
to get better. He was strong enough to walk around. So he left the hospital
and went home. His manager was making him sign all these papers, like we'll
give you $ 500 if you sign your life away one more time. He developed
kaposis [lesions associated with Kaposi's sarcoma, a rare skin cancer linked
with AIDS] and started taking Interferon. That messed him up real bad.
He had dots all over his body and his eyes became purple slits. It was
like someone was destoying him. He used to make fun of it. He'd say 'Just
call me dotty Nomi.' Then he got real weak and was rushed back to the hospital.
He couldn't eat for days because he had cancer in his stomach. Herpes popped
out all over his body. He turned into a monster. It hurt me so much to
see him. I talked to him on the night of August 5th. He said,
'Joey, what am I going to do? They don't want me in the hospital anymore.
They pulled all the plugs. I have to stop all this stuff because I'm not
getting any better.' I had this dream of Klaus getting strong and singing
again-only he's be a little deformed, so he'd have to stay behind a screen
or something. 'You'll be the phantom of the opera,' I told him. 'We'll
do shows together again.' 'Yeah, maybe,' he said. But Klaus died in his
sleep that night."
In retrospect, it's unfortunate that Nomi's career began before the
rise of MTV. At the time of his death, he was just getting established
in Europe and the the help of MTV videos, he certainly could have pushed
into the American market. His first album contained an interesting mix
of sixties pop, opera, and ethereal space music, but it fell between so
many stylistic cracks that it had difficulty finding an audience. (A year
after Nomi's death, however, Malcolm McLaren succcessfully released a dance
rock version of an aria from Madam Butterfly.)
|
|
| Rupert Smith, from Attitude, Vol. 1, Number 3,
July 1994, London, England |
|
Klaus Nomi
Like a shooting star, he exploded into the world then fell from the heavens
after a glittering, all-too-brief career. Now largely forgotten, Nomi remains
rock music's queerest exponent, who outshone the many acts following in
his wake. |
|
Text: Rupert Smith
ONE NIGHT IN 1980, during an otherwise routine episode of BBC2's The Old
Grey Whistle Test, a strange vision was beamed into British living rooms.
A stark, angular figure -- heavily made up, his hair teased into three
points and wearing a high-fashion Blake's 7-style outfit - was dancing
robotically in front of a nondescript band. Then he opened his mouth, singing
in a heavy German accent about nuclear mutants. When the chorus came, he
lifted his arms to heaven and soared into an ear-splitting operatic soprano.
The song was called Total Eclipse, and the singer was Klaus Nomi. Nomi
was even more exciting than that first glimpse suggested. German by birth,
he had moved to New York to become a star of the burgeoning new-wave performance
scene of the late Seventies. There he'd also worked with David Bowie and
secured a recording contract with RCA Records who put out his first, self-titled
album in 1981. It was extraordinary: light-weight pop ditties were followed
by droning ambient tracks, outrageous cover versions (Lou Christie's Lightning
Strikes, Chubby Checker's The Twist), the melodramatic Total Eclipse and,
as the climax, a wildly histrionic rendition of a Saint-Saens aria. Nomi's
soprano swooped through each song, his precise German enunciation jarring
in the rock setting. The outstanding track, Cold Song, lifted from Purcell's
King Arthur, brought opera and pomp-rock into bizarre collision, beautiful
and hilarious. Nomi's whole stage act was built around the idea that he
was an alien dropped down from a more glamorous galaxy to do earth-pop.
In fact, his real life story was only marginally less peculiar. As young
Klaus Sperber, he had worked front-of-house at the Berlin Opera in the
late Sixties, and would entertain colleagues with his renditions of the
great arias as they swept up after performances. (Later, Nomi would tell
the press that he had "worked at the Berlin Opera".) He moved
to New York in 1972 and became a fixture in the East Village, where he
got a job as a pastry chef and pondered his artistic future. In 1976, Sperber
went to visit voice coach Ira Siff, now better known as Vera Galupe-Borszch,
prima donna of drag divas La Gran Scena Opera Company. "I'd seen him
around opera events in New York that only die-hard opera queens would go
to," recalls Siff. "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 La 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!"
The East Village was overrun with talented eccentrics about to break out
into punk stardom, and Sperber fitted in perfectly. Gravitating towards
like-minded souls, he played a Rhine maiden in Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous
Theatrical Company production Der Ring Gott Farblonjef (1977), a comic
reworking of Wagner's Ring cycle that he would perform after shifts at
the restaurant. Stalking the streets with his hair slicked back to accentuate
his angular features, wearing a woman's tailored grey jacket and slacks,
he made a profound impression on performance artist Joey Arias, then working
as a publicist for the Fiorucci boutique. "He was introduced to me
by the designer Katy K," says Arias. "She became Klaus' friend,
collaborator and eventually executor. She told me she'd met this chef opera
singer who had a great look and had been in shows, and when we finally
met we hit it off and hung out together." By 1978, Sperber was plotting
his own debut on the New York art scene. With his dancer friend Boy Adrian,
he had been devouring science magazines like OMNI, reading cyber-punk sci-fi
and pushing his already striking look to more garish extremes. When they
saw an ad in the press calling for acts to appear in a 'new wave vaudeville
show', they decided this was their chance. Under the name 'NOMI', an anagram
of their favourite magazine title, Klaus and Adrian prepared their number.
New Wave Vaudeville ran for four nights at Irving Plaza, a disused club
on l5th Street. Organised by the artist David McDermott, the show featured
over thirty acts including Man Parrish, Lance Loud, a stripper and a singing
dog. Towards the end of the evening, McDermott announced, "Ladies
and gentlemen, what you are about to hear is not a recording! This is real!"
The lights went down, thunderous music began and Klaus stepped onto the
stage wearing a space suit, his hair sculpted into a point. While Adrian
performed his robot dance, Klaus sang Mon coeur s'ouvre a ta voix from
Saint-Saens' Samson et Dalila. The performance finished with bombs and
strobes as Klaus backed off the stage, disappearing into the smoke. NOMI
was a smash, and Klaus was immediately invited to perform the act at clubs
all over town, including the hyper-hip Mudd Club. He asked Joey Arias to
join the act, and together they recruited another member to the Nomi family,
painter Kenny Scharf, who was already painting his science-fiction canvases.
"We went over to Kenny's house and did a photo session with space
helmets and shoulder pads, pretending we were the space police," says
Arias. "Kenny was completely turned on by Klaus' image, and he was
eager to become part of what we were doing." When Nomi was booked
to play at rock club and Warhol watering-hole Max's Kansas City, he included
Arias and Scharf in the chorus line. "Klaus had a lot more confidence
by now," says Arias, "and the act became much bigger. 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 became
a focus for other new-wave hopefuls: at various times the 'family' of dancers
and backing singers included Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and even
Madonna. Nomi was a star in New York. After a performance at the Mudd Club,
he discovered that David Bowie had been in the audience, and managed to
bypass Bowie's security staff to effect an introduction. Bowie had just
released the Lodger album, was emerging from his Berlin phase and was attracted
by Nomi's Bauhaus appearance. The two got talking about mutual acquaintances
in Berlin, and Bowie asked Nomi to appear with him on Saturday Night Live
in December 1979. Nomi and Arias performed as Bowie's backing singers/dancers
for three songs (The Man Who Sold the World, TVC15 and Boys Keep Swinging),
while Bowie himself whisked through costume changes including a Chinese
airline stewardess' outfit. Such was Bowie's influence at the time that
Nomi soon found himself in the studios recording his first album for RCA.
In 1980 and 1981 he was whisked round the world on a tour, made videos
and promptly returned to the studio for his second album, Simple Man (1982).
European audiences took Nomi to their bosoms, and RCA France began to plough
a lot of money into their new star. The original Nomi family had split
up: Arias and Scharf and the rest of the New York crowd were now kept at
a distance while Nomi worked with session musicians and hired dancers.
But if he was moving away from his roots, his music remained truly eccentric.
Simple Man pushed the Nomi style even further, managing to segue the Sorceress'
song from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas into Ding Dong (the Witch is Dead)
from The Wizard of Oz. The final track, Dido's death aria from Dido and
Aeneas, is Nomi's finest moment. Straining heroically to reach the high
notes, he sings the Iyric 'Remember me, but ah forget my fate' in a way
that defies belief. That song, the last track on his last album, was soon
to take on a sad, ironic immediacy. Returning to New York at the beginning
of 1983, Nomi shocked old friends with his appearance. "He was always
thin," says Arias. "But I remember him walking into a party looking
like a skeleton. He was complaining of flu and exhaustion, and the doctors
couldn't diagnose what was wrong with him. Later he had breathing difficulties
and collapsed, and he was taken into hospital." The doctors discovered
that Nomi's immune system had collapsed, and also found a rare form of
skin cancer, Kaposi's Sarcoma, breaking out on his body. The condition
was not yet known as AIDS. Throughout 1983, Nomi's health declined. "He'd
sit in his apartment watching videos and photos of himself, saying 'Look
at this, this is what I did - now it's all gone' ," says Arias. "He
went on a macrobiotic diet. He went on Interferon, which puffed him up
like a rat, but nothing helped." In the summer he went back to hospital
and faced the fact that the doctors were powerless to help him. "He
began to look like a monster: his eyes were just purple slits, he was covered
in spots and his body was totally wasted," says Arias. "I had
a dream that he'd recover his strength and go back on stage, but that he'd
have to veil himself like the Phantom of the Opera. He laughed, he liked
that idea, and he actually seemed to be getting better for a while. That
was on a Friday night. I was going to go and see him again on the Saturday
morning, but they called me and told me that Klaus had passed away in the
night." Nomi was one of the first public figures to die from AIDS,
and his death brought the health crisis to a wider public. His career was
terminated with much of the promise unfulfilled; now he is barely remembered.
The albums are available on CD, there are three promotional videos, some
paintings by admirers, and a few clips of Nomi's hilarious appearances
on cable TV demonstrating his skill as a pastry chef. The funeral arrangements
went off in bizarre style. At the memorial service, an unknown woman in
a black cape ran screaming down the aisle and mrew herself on Klaus' casket.
During the eulogy, a storm broke out and contributed loud claps of thunder
in suitably Wagnerian manner. At a retrospective exhibition that followed
soon after, rabid fans from Paris stole everything that wasn't nailed down.
Klaus Nomi may now be little more than a footnote in the rock history books,
but during his brief, glorious career he realised a vision of fabulous
comic absurdity that still managed to be deeply moving. The manner of his
death may have eclipsed his achievements (RCA's London press office could
provide no more information than that "he was one of the first people
to die of AIDS"). But for those with a taste for the ridiculous, Klaus
Nomi outshines the hordes of over-made-up Eighties acts who followed in
his wake. Track down the albums and marvel at the queerest thing ever to
step onto the rock stage. "He was a very sweet man, very sincere and
shy," says Ira Siff. "He's the only person who ever made sense
out of crossing opera with pop, who understood both styles and made them
work together. He took his voice to places and people who had never heard
that sound before." |
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