Klaus Nomi: Za Bakdaz (Heliocentric)
The joy of popular culture is its ability to occasionally manifest something unique, unsettling, and strange. The Gothic fearsomeness that is Diamanda Galas. The mannered madness that was Leigh Bowery. Candy Darling ghosting through Madonna. These refugees head for the metropolis, fleeing staid suburbia and its stifling confinement. Not mere entertainers, they had an ability to unsettle.
Content wins over context every time with such products of rage and frustration. They are constructs not of artifice, although that becomes part of the manifestation. Their canvas is themselves, distilled from within and exhibited with intent.
Klaus Nomi became a living doll; a breathing, singing, piece of art, an uber-freak, and poster child for the dispossessed. He transcended himself and transported others. Out of this world, he left it all too soon.
Klaus Sperber was born on January 24, 1944 in Bavaria. He grew up listening to Elvis Presley and his mother's Maria Callas records, which gave him a taste for the dramatic, and a strange sensibility equally at home with pop and and opera. Possessed of a fine countertenor voice, he gravitated towards working as an usher at the Deutsche Opera in West Berlin, where he'd treat cleaners, technicians, and anyone who'd listen to impromptu recitals in front of the fire curtain.
By the early '70s he was resident in New York, where his fascination with space and opera, and his innate ability to perform, mutated into Klaus Nomi. Developing the appearance of a white-faced elfin alien -- part Weimar cabaret with bee stung lips, and a hairstyle which harnessed his receding hairline to dramatic effect -- he became a Futurist from the past, a sci-fi mannequin, a renewable shock.
Nomi came to the attention of David Bowie, who invited him and his collaborator Joey Arias to provide backing vocals to his performance on Saturday Night Live. They duly did, and virtually stole the show from the Thin White Duke. Via this association, Nomi inked a deal with RCA France. But this was to prove a poisoned chalice, taking him away from those who understood his modus operandus.
Briefly he was a counterculture star, but fate quickly turned cruel. He fell prey to AIDS at a time when there was little understanding of the virus. The treatments bloated and blistered his appearance. His burgeoning fame disappeared in a haze of illness.
Listening to Nomi's two finished albums is akin to viewing a ruby set in tin. Certainly his version of "Ding Dong," from the Wizard of Oz, with its toy-town-on-acid backing, is witty, knowing, and perverse. His brazen reworking of Chubby Checker's "The Twist" renders it entirely unrecognizable, suggestive of sadistic pleasures instead of an innocent up-tempo dance tune. That he pulls it off, soaring above the session men, is a sure tribute to his powerful performance and the strength of his self-possession. He makes everything work, despite the compromises. It sounds like he meant it to be such, because he meant it anyway.
His rendering of Henry Purcell's "Death" is both eerie and beautiful, impossible to hear without aspects of his sad demise springing to mind. His uncanny ability to tackle serious operatic pieces leaves one wondering what he could have achieved with orchestral backing instead of tinny samples.
Morrissey used his "Wayward Sisters" on his Kill Uncle tour and has long been an admirer. As is Holly Johnson, whose post-Frankie Goes to Hollywood solo videos pay homage to Nomi's surreal visuals. With the Scissor Sisters and the Dresden Dolls hitting the mainstream, it is easy to see Nomi as a crossover in today's climate.
A quarter of a century since his lonely death, abandoned by friends fearful of the new and deadly plague, the wish to know what might have been is placated by Za Bakdaz.
Nomi, always more artful visually, is now resplendent in an aural setting that befits his look. Pieced together from rough tapes, and sampling his voice to replace missing sections, this labor of love by former collaborators George Elliot and Page Wood, twenty-five years after Nomi's death, has been rescued from the shoe box in which the remnants resided. The opera left incomplete by his untimely demise is finally delivered, but it makes one all too aware of how insensitive much of the production on the early releases is.
The album kicks off like a radio broadcast from a visiting spaceship, as Nomi warbles over the manic backing of "High Wire," a touching affair to which his voice lends a spectral disembodiment.
"Enchante´" is a world music travelogue. African drums and Andean strummings collide. If a marketing firm gets hold of this, who knows what it'll soundtrack the selling of. Catchy as hell, it invites copious remixing. The New Age Space Disco begins here!
"Cre Spoda" is a "Ghost Riders in the Sky" confection, the theme to some forgotten 1950s sci-fi gem. Roswell goes rock, and strangely so.
The album is genuinely quirky, the punctuation of visuals only radio of the finest kind can bring to the mind. Nomi's ethereal voice flies through the title track like some beguiling siren, pulling the transfixed ever close to their doom. On "Perne-a-Gyre" there is an apocalyptic edge to the brooding malady, underscored by a strange ethnicity. As the album reaches "Finale," one imagines Nomi with arms outstretched, being delivered skywards and home in a shaft of magical light. The whole affair is hauntingly haunted and maddeningly brief.
What it all means is anyone's guess, but in the end that is of little relevance. The strength of the work insinuates and beguiles. From pastry chef to avant-garde opera new wave diva, Nomi's life has been affectionately detailed in Andy Horn's heart-felt film The Nomi Song. It is an unsparing account that touches upon the great loneliness of a little man who transformed himself into an alien divine. In his real world, he frequented truck stops for the casual sex that placated his need for someone to love. He got an aspect of affection from the audience during performances, but there was no significant other.
There is a touching anecdote in the movie concerning Nomi in full regalia at a party. A little girl approached him and inquired about what it was like on Mars. A conversation of length ensued, the kind in which old ladies specialize, as he explained to her the finer points of life on a planet far, far away. Both were transfixed and entirely at home in each other's company. Iconoclasts are rarely icons, their weirdness precluding them from the membership of mundane celebrity.
Klaus Nomi succeeded in making the bizarre seem everyday, by taking it there. It now seems odd to think of this apparition having ever breathed. But on the records, flawed or otherwise, you know he that he did, and just how unique his vision and talent truly was. No wonder he called an album Simple Man.