These included the charismatic Irishman Clive Crocker, a famous bar owner and one-time Ibiza playboy, who had been a dear friend of the singer’s, and who was a great help, providing us with carefully selected memories and anecdotes one spring afternoon at the Hotel Montesol. And we’d contacted two of Nico’s most important collaborators, interviewed them and asked them if they’d fly in at our expense and prepare and perform a specially commissioned evening of song, recitals and music. The German musician Lutz Ulbrich (aka Lüül, guitarist with Ash Ra Tempel and 17 Hippies) had been Nico’s lover in the 1970s, and had produced her live album Fata Morgana, a recording of her final gig. Then there was the pianist James Young, who had gone on the road with Nico during her later solo years and been involved in her later recordings including Fata Morgana, as well as writing about those years on the road together in a wonderfully funny and bittersweet memoir of great repute called Songs They Never Play On The Radio.
At the airport the flights coming in were mainly delivering regular visitors to the island, many travelling solo, in from European cities. It was that time of day. From the evening onwards the package flights would be coming in, and by midnight the place would be a circus. But there was still a veil of siesta over the island at this moment and the airport was cool and hushed inside. It was James Young’s first time here. After so many years, here he was visiting the place that had meant so much to his collaborator Nico, from way back in the days when he was just a young college graduate with a flair for the keyboard, and she was an unconventional artist struggling to maintain her singularly insubmissive modus vivendi against the levee of music industry preconceptions that characterised the 1980s. Songs They Never Play On The Radio is still held up as the paragon of books which tell the unusually realistic story of the crucible of life on the road for the vast majority of non-stadium level bands. Equally hilarious and tragic, it portrays a lifestyle far removed from Nico’s halcyon Velvet Underground days or her years as a young model in Europe.
“She talked a little of Ibiza when we were in Manchester in the early Eighties,” James had told me, “and how she had rented a nice cottage there in the late Fifties, and her mother came, but that it was too much the two of them together as they had opposing ideas … about the entire universe. So she ended up renting a separate place for her mother which meant she had to return to Paris to model to earn the rent. In the end she found a bigger place for them both where they could be quasi independent but I’m not sure how successful that was. Nico liked the marijuana and jazz people of Ibiza…the beatniks. Her mother didn’t get along with all that and wanted her to find a rich jet-set type and get married.”
Clive Crocker almost certainly fit that bill. In the 1960s the urbane yet enigmatic young adventurer had established a name for himself as co-owner of the popular Domino bar, a beatnik and jazz lovers HQ set in the transient ambience of the port of Ibiza Town. The Domino had, amongst many other claims to fame, been the first place in the Balearics to preview John Coltrane’s era-defining A Love Supreme, after a copy of the album was brought back from London by Irish writer Damien Enright, himself a resident of Formentera during the period. The owners of the Domino had a prodigious collection of vinyl that was said to include the works of Miles Davis, Billie Holliday, Chet Baker and all the other jazz greats, and many of the island’s more colourful characters would populate its interiors every night until it closed at 2 a.m, drawn by the lure of the trumpet or the tempo. Fired by amphetamines, some of the regular patrons would then wander round town and wait to greet the sunrise, or meet the arriving morning boats in the port. Nico met Clive at the Domino one night, and they began an intense relationship which lasted for many years (he still bears a scar from where she once bit him, although she sent roses round to the Domino the next day by way of apology) and which included trips abroad together and a long-lasting mutual trust and fondness that far outlived so many of Nico’s famously transitory friendships.
After dropping James at the hotel in Sant Antoni, I headed back to my own temporary home. My friend Anja’s old finca, Can Felix, is perched up in the hills that are set back above the golden strand of Platja d’en Bossa. No-one was home when I got there. There was a method of booting the back door of the finca in with one swift kick that did it no damage, and which, at the height of summer, was a lot more effective than trying to negotiate the old rusty lock. Once inside, I stepped through the long cool hallway and into the generous living room, which was designed on two levels and had walls plastered with art that had been collected across the years.
Now in her eighties, Anja had moved to the island several decades earlier from her native Finland, and had married Harold Liebow, the American writer, photographer and author. When I’d first moved to the island in 2003, I had by chance come across Harold’s enchanting columns “I Remember Ibiza,” online, and they had completely mesmerised me. I still find them my favourite day to day tales of Ibiza ever written, albeit that they tell of an idealistic and somewhat utopian former version of the island as it was in the 1960s, and, sprinkled with characters called “Dundee Doreen”, “Chinese Rita” and “Big Mimi”, they told of a simple life of tranquil and basic amenities, sewn together by anecdotes revolving around charmingly picaresque human interactions with locals and internationals all going about their daily existence whilst looking for a way to hospitably accommodate each other.
There was a time when dinner parties at the Liebows’ finca were part of the legend of Ibiza, and I’d certainly witnessed a few myself in the later years of Harold’s life, including his unforgettable 90th birthday party. He’d given a long and unprepared speech, standing bolt upright in the vast living room which was filled on both levels with friends of all ages, and during which, quite unaided by human or microphone, his voice had carried as clear as a bell throughout the finca.
Harold passed away a few years ago, leaving Anja to her wonderful memories, a collection of friends that included Ursula Schroeder (mother of filmmaker, Barbet Schroeder) and the peace of Can Felix, up there in the hills. Anja still swam frequently in the sea, and loved to socialise. She couldn’t wait for our concert. Now, with an empty house, I got changed and headed off towards Sant Llorenç, further north on the island, and had dinner with my friend Kerry, a wedding planner from South Africa with more energy than a hill of ants, and a heart whose beauty is reflected in her gorgeous face.
We sat outside Juanito’s old farmhouse restaurant eating classic Ibiza food; pollo pagès – a local dish made with organic chicken steeped in herbs and served with rice – and drank hierbas, the Ibicenco digestif made with anise, rosemary, thyme and fennel – all typical Ibicenco plants. Although it was midseason, and we were seated alone outside on the terrace in the warm late evening breeze at the side of the one road that connects Ibiza Town with the small but popular town of Sant Joan to the north, the night was dark and almost completely silent but for the sound of cicadas, and farm dogs in the distance, and the smell of rosemary and sage growing around us, which made us feel like we were far from civilisation. Wherever you go in Ibiza, you are never more than a short drive away from this kind of peace.
Halfway back to Can Felix in the car after dinner I realised I’d somehow managed to break one of the straps on my new sandals. I’d bought them especially for the following evening’s event, but I immediately decided, based on vast experience, to place my faith in Ibiza. For some reason when you do that there, things often have a habit of just working out. Everything would be ok. I parked my car outside Can Felix, and quickly discovered that Anja was asleep when I tried the front door, so walking barefoot around to the back of the house, past the cosy outdoor pool under the stars and above the Mediterranean, I gave the back terrace door a swift kick, and snuck off to bed in a quiet room at the back of the finca.
I crept out again early the next morning before Anja was up. I had of course warned her that for the week of the Nico event, during which she had kindly let me stay at Can Felix, coming and going as I pleased at all hours of day and night, we’d only