Don't you Nomi?

In the early 80s,operatic singer Klaus Nomi was at the crest of the New York's club scene. However, his untimely death from the Aids in 1983 cut him off in his prime, just before the world truly had the chance to appreciate his vibrant and bizarre performance art.

It’s probably makes sense to begin with someone who witnessed it, because it has to be one of the definitive "you had to be there" moments. For an all too brief time at the dawn of the 1980s, a peculiar phenomenon had New York under its spell. At its focal point was a small thin man who would stand in a pool of light, attired in anything from a painted wooden ball-gown on wheels, to a cellophane cape which twinkled under the half light, or to an out-sized, triangular tuxedo cut out in vinyl by Bowie’s American tailor. And out of this figure’s mouth there was the blistering sound of a soprano, or a short-circuited tenor, backed by synths, ambient noise, delivering, quite perfectly, anything from a mockery of the disco hit ‘I Feel Love’ (I Feel Sick), to an aria from Samson and Delila, to ‘Ding Dong (the Witch is Dead)’ from The Wizard of Oz. The audience had to be reminded that this extraordinary voice was not recorded. Despite its artificiality, lip-synching was not part of the act: the Indian-demi-god arm choreography, the twirling hypnotic umbrellas, the robot dancers twitching in cling-film, the thunderclaps and smoke bombs, were just the unreal accoutrements. The head and the voice were the one constant: the black lips painted and the sharp brows plucked into a Dietrich-style of glamour gone wrong, the hair wrenched up at three points above a white, elfin face. As Alan Platt described for 80s cult magazine Adix: “It would take many visits to the downtown venues on the punk circuit to grasp how utterly bizarre is the sight of hundreds of snotty little drunks standing around in silence listening to this classic piece of High Romance delivered by someone from last week’s Star Trek. It’s the skill of the illusionist. Hypnotism by pure weirdness, out-bluffing their sense of the bizarre, and yet singing so beautifully with the recorded sound of a fifty piece orchestra swelling around the room, that few are not moved by the pure musical experience. It’s Nomi’s big coup. Set them up with weirdness, knock them down with art.”

These epic performances started out in New York’s East Village, where an old Polish wedding hall had been converted into the New Wave Vaudeville theatre. Where everyone else was having a joke and throwing together the most obscenely bad-taste acts they could possibly conceive, it was pretty clear right from the start, there was something much more important going on in Nomi’s performances. Like everything else, it was thrown together from clip lights, grease paint, plastic wrap, bed sheets, tat and bric-a-brac, but Nomi’s full sense of theatrical illusion transcended what might otherwise have been just high-jinks camp. His influences were as stark as they were wide-ranging, from Bauhaus, expressionism, comic books and 50s sci-fi films. The name Nomi was an anagram of the sci-fi magazine OMNI, and the idea of Nomi’s being an alien who had ‘descended from outer space/ to save the human race’ was central to his persona. He would arrive at shows, perform and then leave immediately, maintaining the allure of a visitor arriving and disappearing into outer space. He had arrived in America an outsider; he left America a steroid growth of the bizarre.

Born Klaus Sperber in 1944, Nomi grew up in the Bavarian Alps, the only child of a single-mother. His peculiar blend of pop, rock and opera can be traced to this point, when he stole money from his mother to buy Elvis’ King Creole, only for his mother to discover the album, march it back to the shop and exchange it for Maria Callas. Each equally pleased the young Klaus. After studying at the Berlin Music School and working for some years as an usher at the Opera house, Klaus emigrated to New York in 1972 where he worked a succession of badly paid jobs for five years, eventually honing quite a talent as a pastry chef, and hosting a small cookery slot on a cable network. He developed the tenor and soprano potential of his voice with vocal coach Ira Siff and in 1977, he appeared in Charles Ludlum’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company Wagner-offshoot.

This, and his electric stage performances led to his appearance in Anders Grafstrom’s influential underground film, The Long Island Four, which caught the attention of David Bowie, whom Nomi subsequently met at one of his New York gigs. An invitation to appear with Bowie on Saturday Night Live in December 1979 followed, Nomi appearing as a backing dancer, trundling about a stuffed poodle on wheels and singing accompaniment on The Man Who Sold the World. Such was the pull of Bowie at the time that fame looked certain, as Nomi’s gigs in New York and across America gained momentum and a dedicated following. Nomi’s own backing acts included such New Wave luminaries as Kenny Scharf, Jean-Micheal Basquiat, Joey Arias and, as legend would have it, Madonna. His stark fashion sense and peculiarly eclectic musical fusion almost made it inevitable that France would adore him. And the French duly obliged, his records selling out within days of issue.

But there was a darker, personal side to Nomi’s early isolation in America, and it seems that his astonishing creativity was in part a compensation for an intense inner loneliness. Without long-term lovers or boyfriends, Nomi sought sexual companionship in the most hazardous places; eventually contracting an illness so rare, that at the time it did not even have a name. The last track on his last album contains Dido’s death aria from Dido and Aeneas, 'Remember me, but ah forget my fate' but a few years ago RCA’s London press office could provide no more information about their star than that he was one of the first celebrity casualties of the AIDs virus. At the beginning of 1983, Nomi had begun to look very ill. Joey Arias, his close friend since the opening of the New Wave Vaudeville, describes the sad progression. "He was always thin 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. 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. He went on a macrobiotic diet. He went on Interferon, which puffed him up like a rat, but nothing helped." Klaus died that August, at the height of his powers, and just before the boom in music television, which must have made his idiosyncratic synth-drenched avant-garde opera-pop a worldwide force to be reckoned with.

So today, as in the early 80s, Nomi’s fame resides in small collectives of music lovers going wild over him. JP Bommel, head of RCA in France explained on first hearing Klaus’ work, “We listened to that tape and we were all looking at each other, you know, thinking: “this is wild”, we had never heard anything like that… The record company didn’t have a clue.” The success he achieved in France wasn’t “the media-machine working, it was not the star-system. It was just a bunch of music-lovers, saying we pull out all the stops and make it happen.” Once a music lover falls under the spell of Nomi the results can be radical. Another fan, the artist, Pat Keck, built a life-size, fully articulated doll of Klaus out of wood. His body is laid out on a sarcophagus decorated with lyrics from The Cold Song and when a pedal is pushed, Nomi eerily rises from the dead, jerking his body to one side, moving his arms. It’s a pattern mirrored in his posthumous reputation. He rises up slowly, gaining a steady momentum, and suddenly when a receptive soul is introduced to him, they jerk about, they start going wild, they tell all their friends, and another Klaus colony gets a residence.

Nomi’s resurrection gean when Klaus’ contribution to the cult, bad-taste, new-wave classic ‘Urgh! A Music War’ became essential underground viewing during the late 80s. At the beginning of the 1990s, flyers began appearing once again, all over the East Village, with Nomi’s face upon them, with captions reading ‘Do You Nomi?’ and ‘Never Mind the Bollocks, here’s Klaus’. Klaus homage sites began to spring up over the internet, his albums were re-released, the new interest in him culminating in a documentary by Andrew Horn, ‘The Nomi Song’, which is quickly becoming somewhat of a cult classic itself. Now closet Nomi fans are emerging from the woodwork, and in the strangest places. He has his own corner of mySpace, where musicians as diverse as Italian lounge acts, New York indie bands, New Wave acts, to countless electronic outfits, hip hop kids and yukele players all testify to his enduring influence on the underground scene, his angular originality transcending all traditional boundaries. Morrissey plays Nomi songs before his gigs and made Nomi’s Death the concluding track to his Under the Influence compilation and Antony and the Johnsons are also acknowledged devotees. The effect of Nomi’s music, Antony explains, lies not in just the strange fusion of pop and opera, the weird disco component or the high camp artistry, “but the other element –the almost apocalyptic element to it… it was like he was able to predict the future,” which, it seems likely, is precisely how a man who claimed to have “descended from outer space/to save the human race” would have liked to be remembered: ahead of his time, and relished after.