ALT BBZ

Extra-terrestrial countertenor. New-Wave freak. Performance artist. Pop sensation. Whatever frame you choose to put around Klaus Nomi, nothing quite fits. His singular campiness was too weird for him to be duly appreciated within his brief lifetime – his futuristic queerness too innovative, his iconic image too jarring. 

 


Born in Germany at the dawn of WW2, Nomi became a New York City girl in the summer of 1972. Working as a pastry chef to pay rent and fund singing lessons, he exploded onto the East Village art scene with his now legendary performance at ‘New Wave Vaudeville.’ In a skin-tight spacesuit and clear plastic cape, he sung an aria from the 1877 opera Samson et Delilah’ before disappearing from the stage amidst a thunderstorm of neon lights, laser beams, dry ice and manic electronics.

Nomi quickly became a notorious figure on the NYC party scene and regularly invited the likes of Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Joey Arias to perform alongside him. Before long he was drafted to perform with a certain David Bowie on Saturday Night Live.

He dragged a giant pink poodle with a television screen in its mouth around the stage during ‘TVC15’. That’s called perfection. A newly found fame brought with it a brief period of fame, with Nomi appearing on the cover of Japanese Vogue and recording two studio albums.

These records balanced bombastic original compositions with campy covers of queer classics – ‘Ding Dong (The Witch is Dead)’ and Lesley Gore’s ‘You Don’t Own Me’. But the true majesty of Klaus Nomi was to be found in his operatic pieces, within which ice-cold synthesisers sat behind his otherworldly, virtuosic countertenor. ‘Cold Song’ uses synth pads and plastic harpsichords to sublimely mash the medieval with the space age.

Klaus Nomi was one of the first victims of the AIDS crisis, dying in 1983 in a tragic smog of loneliness and misunderstanding. Ahead of his time in life, in art, and in death. If you are a weird queer with a hunger for the beautiful, Klaus Nomi is going to become your newest hero.

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