As I found out years later, this
intuition proved to be correct: Sudden by stagename, Sudden by nature,
the guy never slowed down for a minute. We swapped small talk for a few
minutes, yakking about the groups we liked, then went our separate
ways. I moved to New York in 1979, where I formed my post-punk band
Khmer Rouge, and though Nikki also spent time in the Big Apple we were
destined never to meet there.
Khmer Rouge came and went, and by
the time I moved back to London in 1984 I was living in heroin hell.
Much of that period is a blur to me now, there are a lot of black holes
in my memory. But when I next ran into Nikki in 1993 I’d finally
managed to kick the monkey off my back, and I remember the occasion
well. It was at a party in west London, in the flat of Annie
Nightingale, the Radio One DJ whom Nikki was dating at the time. I’d
just released my second solo CD, God Is The Other Face Of The Devil,
and the Jacobites’ Howlin’ Good Times was about to be released on the
same label. Dave Kusworth was also there, and I recall that at one
point Annie had a tantrum over something or other. Nikki tried to calm
things down – not too successfully, as it happens – but with that
expression of arch humour in his eyes that I came to know so well a few
years later.
It’s 1996, and I’ve relocated to
Prague. I’m standing in the audience at the now-defunct Bunkr Club,
watching Nikki play a blinder with his Czech backing band the Golden
Angels. With an ash-laden cigarette dangling from his mouth, bandanas
and bangles everywhere, he looks like the ragamuffin younger brother of
Keith, Johnny and Marc. A Rock & Roll Gypsy; the last bandido on
the block; the living embodiment of the scatter-gun polemics of Lester
Bangs and Nick Kent. I’m impressed, I’m jealous, I’m blown away, I
wanna play in his band. His guitar solos are ripping through the air,
raising the hairs on my arms and neck. If this ain’t nirvana, then
nirvana ain’t worth having.
Later, I go backstage to get
reaquainted and we end up hanging out. Plans are made to write some
songs together, and a few weeks later Nikki shows up at my place in the
Prague suburbs. My wife Jolana christens him The Little Prince, and
while we get down to work she cooks some goulash then goes out to buy a
bottle of Jack. Only it isn’t work, it’s a game. He writes one line, I
write the next, and it’s a big competition to see who can come up with
the most outlandish images. It’s a little like that game school
children used to play before they discovered Playstation and MTV. Nikki
throws out lyrics and chord progressions at an amazing rate – between
thought and expression just a momentary flash – and after two days of
this we have about twenty songs written down. Some of them are great,
some not so great, but we’re having a lot of fun. On one of his
subsequent visits Nikki plays as special guest of Southern Cross, and
we try a few of them out in front of 20,000 people at the annual
Trutnov festival.
Another
memory hits me. Nikki has booked some recording time at a studio in the
back room of a pub on top of a Moravian mountain. God knows how he
found this place – probably through the Golden Angels – but we drive
down there in my old green Škoda which overheats all the way up the
mountain. Finally it breaks down a kilometer short of the pub, so we
end up lugging the guitars the rest of the distance. We record a few
songs and Nikki does a quick mix onto DAT, and all things considered
the session sounds pretty good. One of the songs, Broken Glove, ends up
on Egyptian Roads, a rare Sudden CD released by the Czech label Indies.
I don’t know what happened to the other songs, and I guess I’ll never
find out now.
November 1997, and I’m on tour in
Germany, playing guitar in Nikki’s band. Carl Eugene Picot of the
Jacobites is on bass, and Berliner Robbie Schmidt is behind the drums.
By now Nikki has moved to Berlin on a permanent basis and is touring
constantly. It’s madness, it’s mayhem, it’s Rock & Roll excess –
sex-mad women everywhere, all of them trying to get a piece of the
action. Mad Frau Disease, as Carl charmingly calls it. Robbie has a bit
of a drug problem, though. This means we have to stop at the train
station before each gig, so he can jump out of the van and cop
something to get himself straight for the concert. One night there are
20 people in the audience, the next night there are 300. Nikki doesn’t
seem to give a damn as long as there is some kind of crowd, a gathering
of people who know his songs and are willing to join in the party. And
they do. Everywhere we play there is a great outpouring of love, even
when we’re totally destroyed and ramshackle. Nikki remembers every face
he’s ever met, and strikes up conversations with obsessed fans he
encountered on some previous occasion. If they want to buy a totally
obscure demo tape he recorded in his bedroom ten years ago, no problem.
He jots down names and addresses, takes orders, and promises to post
the stuff on when the tour is finished.
Each night we return to the hotel
totally smashed. That is, when we can find it. Sometimes Nikki
disappears into the night with the map still in his pocket, having
neglected to hand it over before being kidnapped by some exquisite
young beauty. Up in the morning at 8am for another 700 km drive, all of
us half dead and nursing devilish hangovers. All of us except Nikki, of
course, who claims he never gets them. While the band tries to grab a
bit of sleep, he’s working away on his laptop, writing up his tour
journals for the day before or working on his novel-in-progress, Albion
Sunrise. This is a huge sprawling tract set in eighteen century London,
and somehow Johnny Thunders and Jerry Lee Lewis keep turning up in the
narrative – by time-travel, I guess – swapping gory tales in some low
East End dive with the notorious hangman Jack Ketch. I can’t follow the
plot, it keeps mutating all the time, each day there’s another 10,000
words that Nikki insisits I read and pass comment on. He wakes me up
out of a troubled dream and encourages me to record my impressions of
the previous night’s gig while he gets to work on some chord charts.
Yet more songs from his extensive back catalogue to be learned in
soundcheck and performed at tonight’s gig. And so it goes, and so it
goes, you get the general picture. As an artist Nikki was totally
driven, never allowing the pace to falter or slow down, and he pushed
himself to the limit in order to communicate his vision to others.
Right
at the end of this tour Nikki gets news that his brother Epic
Soundtracks has died in London. The exact circumstances surrounding his
death are unknown, and remain so to this day, but as the body wasn’t
discovered for over a week it all sounds pretty horrific. Nikki jets
out of Berlin to comfort his distraught parents and to organise the
removal of Epic’s possessions from the flat in which he died. I can
only imagine what that must have been like. Sitting there in the room
of death, sorting through the thousands of LPs, CDs, demos, books and
diaries that his beloved sibling had accumulated over the years. He
takes it upon himself to organise Epic’s estate, compiling and sifting,
cataloguing and enumerating, choosing songs for future release on
labels he’s already begun to contact. There’s legal shit to sort out,
copyrights and publishing deals, agreements and record contracts to
negotiate. But he’s determined that his brother’s name will live on,
that one day the whole world will be made aware of the wonderful music
he left behind.
Then it’s January 1998 and we’re
back on the road for another three week European tour. No one knows how
many tears Nikki has shed in private, but he’s not the type of guy who
expects tea and sympathy. Apart from Johnny and Keith, Marc and Jerry
Lee, his other main role model is Captain W.E. John’s "Biggles", the
World War II flying ace familiar to schoolboys of my generation.
Biggles would never have allowed personal loss to stand in the way of
what had to be done, and Nikki is of a similar turn of mind. Very
British somehow, in an old-fashioned kind of way, very stoical and
self-contained. Nevertheless, it’s hard going this time. Nikki is
tired, worn out in fact, which means he’s a little less insistent about
us filling in the infernal tour diary. He still keeps himself busy,
though. There’s an achingly beautiful new song, Elizabethan Balladeer,
that I assume is about Epic, and gradually it becomes the centre piece
of the set.
Nikki has already organised a
memorial concert in London, and now there’s to be another one at Roter
Salon in Berlin. Swell Maps reunite for the gig, with Robbie sitting in
on drums, and the place is packed out with friends past and present who
have flown in from all over Europe. Nikki is emotionally drained after
the concert, but he insists on setting up a recording session in a
Berlin studio to capture the vibe of the tour before it’s lost. Two
days later we start laying down tracks with Dugald Jayes as engineer.
The standout piece, for me, is a 26 minute version of Hanoi Jane that
mutates into Can’s Mother Sky by way of Midget Submarines. It’s all
recorded at deafening volume, and Dugald is in despair as Nikki pushes
the faders to the max. But to my ears it all sounds great, huge howling
maelstroms of guitar feedback interspersed with heavy riffing and solid
basslines from Carl. The drums are a bit out, it’s true, and Nikki
isn’t happy with his vocal performances, but what the hell, this is
Rock & Roll! We record quite a few of the songs we’d written
together a year or two before in Prague, and again Nikki isn’t happy
with his vocals. We agree to wait until a later date and see what the
great John Rivers makes of it all, then mix it at Woodbine studios in
Leamington Spa. Of course this doesn’t happen, and Golden Vanity is put
on indefinite hold. There’s no money to re-record the vocals, to do all
the editing that needs to be done and to mix the monster into a
coherent whole. And anyway, Nikki is already writing new songs for the
next CD, maybe a Jacobites reunion album. As someone once said, Nikki
Sudden has made more unreleased CDs than most other artists make in a
lifetime.
The
last installment of this odyssey for me is the gig in Athens on
February 26th 1998. Southern Cross has been booked to play the AN club,
and Nikki is to fly down with us and play a set of his songs with
Southern Cross as his backing band. Both of us love playing in Greece.
The audiences there are so passionate about the music, and they know
all your songs backwards. The first time I played there, at the Rodon
club in February 1996, I was totally taken aback. About 800 people
showed up, huge posters were everywhere, and I wasn’t aware that my
song "Only You" had become something of a hit on Greek radio. I hadn’t
even bothered teaching the song to my band. We’d only just started
playing together a couple of months before in Prague, and for some
reason that song had got left off the list. Emilios from Hitch-Hyke
Records was shocked. "For God’s sake, you have to play it," he
announced, "otherwise the crowd will lynch you!" I ended up playing a
solo acoustic version, which wasn’t ideal but at least served the
purpose of saving my skin.
This time the AN club is packed
to the rafters. Demetra from the booking agency has a private fantasy
about seeing Nikki in full make-up, so she spends a couple of hours
before the show applying pancake and nail varnish, mascarra and
eye-shadow. All this, together with Nikki’s golden frock coat, makes
him look like an eighteenth century rake, straight out of Peter
Greenaway’s "The Draughtsman’s Contract". Either that, or some kind of
Rock & Roll Mozart. Nikki plays a great set, then I take over the
proceedings to do my own thing. At the end of our set a completely
inebriated and ecstatic Nikki clambers back onstage, picks up my spare
guitar, and proceeds to completely massacre "The Gambler". That song is
a little depressing anyway, and his contribution certainly livened
things up.
As I arrived back in Prague,
completely exhausted, I said goodbye to Nikki and crawled into bed to
recover for a few days. He, meanwhile, went back to Berlin to continue
on his never-ending, multi-faceted, ever-evolving world tour. I never
played in his band again, though I’d see him frequently in Berlin
whenever I was up there playing with Fatal Shore. Quite often he’d get
on stage and do a few songs as special guest, because that’s exactly
what he was: a very, very special guest that the angels had allowed
down to earth to visit us all for a while, to bring a little cheer into
our humdrum lives. Nikki was probably the purest soul I’ve ever met in
my life, he didn’t have a mean bone in his body. He was charming and
urbane, with a wicked sense of humour, competetive in the best sense of
the word, and immensely supportive of anything he thought worthwhile.
He wrote a wonderful recommendation for my novel Junkie Love went it
came out in English a few years back, and was also instrumental in
getting it published in Italian. He also wrote some great sleeve notes
for my double compilation CD Deep Horizon, referring to me as "The
Parfidad of Prague", whatever that might be.
But
I’m just one out of hundreds of people all over the globe that he spent
a little time with, collaborating on some project or other before
taking off again on his own preordained trajectory. I haven’t met his
parents yet, only spoken to them on the phone a few times, and I can’t
begin to imagine how they must be feeling right now. But they must be a
remarkable couple indeed to have produced two such special people, two
wonderful sons who generated so much love and affection in everyone
they came into contact with. My heart goes out to them, and to Dave
Kusworth too, Nikki’s long-time cohort and musical collaborator. And to
all the far-flung friends across the world who feel, like me, that a
light has gone out from their lives. Writing all this has somehow
calmed me down, but now I’m feeling like I’ve been kicked in the guts
again. I think I’ll finish now and go off to cry a few more tears,
confident that Nikki is up there with Epic looking down on this sad
earth and laughing his ass off.
Phil Shoenfelt, Prague, 31/03/2006
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