1970s and 80s New York are viscerally evoked in this potent memoir of the ‘no wave’ scene
Y
ou won’t necessarily have heard of Adele Bertei: she was a member of experimental jazz-punk band the Contortions from 1977 and recorded the pop-house single Build Me a Bridge. But her memoir is an essential slice of New York’s bohemian pizza pie, and works in part because she is a relative unknown, not weighed down by her own cultural baggage.
Following a troubled, itinerant upbringing, she arrives in Manhattan in 1977 to find a city on its knees. The big apple was in the red, both literally (fires were a regular occurrence) and monetarily (there was a municipal debt crisis). But pre-Aids and post-Warhol’s avant garde grip, it was also a place that was creatively open.
Searching for her artistic self, Bertei throws herself into the alternative scene, and as she zigzags into future counter-culture icons, her writing recalls the hip, young gunslinger era of the NME: Joey Ramone “resembled an anorexic hermaphrodite, replete with sex appeal”; Alan Vega from Suicide is “Al Pacino dolled up as a gay hustler on 53rd and Third”. She starts hanging out with infamous music critic Lester Bangs and Pere Ubu member Peter Laughner, and her writing nails the deadly dichotomy of their pain and non-stop drinking and drug taking. They are “acutely sensitive to the beauty and terror of life and time,” she writes, “constantly reaching for a blanket of numb to dull the sting of the night.”
