Andrew Horn is the creator of The Nomi Song, the acclaimed new documentary that won the TEDDY Award for Best Documentary in 2004 for its “remarkable depiction of a queer pop icon’s life and his substantial influence on the zeitgeist”.

More information on The Nomi Song can be found on the film’s official website, while this website offers a comprehensive look at Klaus Nomi’s life and career. The Nomi Song is also reviewed on outrate.

Andrew spoke with Mark Adnum via email in August 2004.

MARK ADNUM: My impression of Nomi was that while he understood that his bizarreness was the key to his appeal and played up to it wholeheartedly, he was also a classically trained and quite gifted opera singer who may have wanted more traditional, mainstream success. What's your understanding of Nomi's ambitions, and his sense of how his career panned out? Do you think he reveled in his fame for what it was, or do you think he saw it as a stepping stone to something else?

ANDREW HORN: Unfortunately, I didn’t know Klaus all that well when he was alive, but my impression when I first met him - which was when he replaced someone in a sort of camp version of Wagner’s The Ring being done by Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company (needless to say Klaus was the only one on stage who actually *could* sing) - was that he was, if not an actual opera singer, certainly a serious opera queen. When I saw him perform for the first time as Nomi at the New Wave Vaudeville show, he also sang opera and, space suit and smoke bombs notwithstanding, he did it totally seriously and sang - as you can see in the movie - fabulously. So when I met him on the street one day and he told me he wanted to work with some synthesizers and a rock band, I was kind surprised since I just assumed that he was serious about the opera stuff.

I know when I interviewed the rep from RCA France, who traveled with him on tour, and I would guess got to know him pretty intimately, he said that Klaus was very serious about the opera and wanted to go more in that direction. Interestingly enough as he says in the movie, the thing that broke Klaus in France was not the pop music, but the opera.

That being said, opera was certainly the “pop” music of its day with the big musical extravaganza with audiences who had a lot of wild adulation for the stars, so in a way it’s maybe it all sort of goes together. From what Klaus said in an interview, he felt it did. So I guess you could call it a stepping stone in a way. Certainly the way he chose to use his voice was at that time not going to get him onto the opera stage, so I guess when he realized that the young pop audience was going to be knocked out by him, he certainly took advantage. But as I said, I think he felt in the broad sense it was all part of the same thing, and maybe in a sense he eventually thought he could somehow get to, sort of, bring the opera up to date, if that doesn’t sound too pretentious, or make it valid in some way for a young audience that ordinarily would know about it or even give a shit. If it would have worked - who knows, but he certainly seemed on his way.

MA: I guess why I'm asking is that, of course, we'll never know how Nomi's career may have panned out, should he have lived.

AH: We won’t, but a few people I interviewed had some ideas about that. Of course some people just assumed he was going to wind up doing some form of classical opera. However, one person felt that he would have become a kind of cabaret performer, while someone else imagined him ending up in Las Vegas with his own extravaganza theater like Siegfried and Roy. (Oddly enough one of Klaus’ closest collaborators, Joey Arias, actually ended up himself with the Vegas scenario, performing with Cirque de Soleil.) Personally I think Klaus might have become more like a high art performance artist and it’s likely that Robert Wilson, or someone like him would have gotten a hold of him at some point - I can really see him going in that direction. And then of course there’s always a chance that it would have eventually just run its course and he would be a pastry chef again. His cakes and such *were* really good.

MA: The film is quite sketchy about his final weeks - do you know more about Nomi's death?

AH: There’s one thing not mentioned, mainly because in the film I chose not to go too much into the whole “business” aspect of the Klaus story as it was too serpentine to explain without getting bogged down in a lot of “he said-she said” detail, but from what I heard there was a lot of ugliness and resentment between him and his management regarding their contractual relationship, and it was the feeling of many people that he was being circled by vultures so to speak regarding the rights to his music and image.

Needless to say, this added an extra layer of unpleasantness to put it mildly. But, as mentioned in the film, I think the important thing was all the surprise and fear it generated. In fact both his management and the record company were in denial for a while, not believing he was really sick. Joey Arias was one of the very few who just tried to ignore it all and be there for him but even one person who was helping take care of him told me that as much as he loved Klaus, he always had the feeling he had to wash his hands every time he touched him. But the one thing I wish I had been able to deal with more in the movie - this was it’s own scene that unfortunately got cut, but hopefully will be on the DVD- is the overlay of another horrible irony that Klaus, whose look was such an important part of his whole “effect”, was physically devastated by the carposis which in the end not only took his life, but robbed him of his ability to be beautiful. While the death part is by far the single theme that gets the most screen time, I didn’t want to focus the movie on his death but rather on his life and music, because if you don’t understand and appreciate that - what was lost - you can’t really get the tragedy of his death.

MA: I found Nomi's act very sexy, while most saw him as robotic, asexual. Do you think the new-wave, Bowie style freak/androgyny persona may have had more sexual capital if AIDS hadn't emerged at roughly the same time, and made such personae personae non grata?

AH: I think Klaus was so unique in what he was doing, it’s hard to say if he was just one of a kind or his death did, as you say, sort of short circuit a certain direction. On the other hand, what Klaus was doing - although it came from what, to you or me is an obvious gay aesthetic - did come across, as you say, as sort of asexual (and some said even non-human) so maybe didn’t get so easily pegged as “gay” in that it wasn’t overtly camp or drag, as just theatrical. I have to tell you that the former president of his fan club told me that a vocal part of his fan base were mooning young girls who were maybe just as attracted to his alien-ness - in the sense of being alienated, not from another planet - as they were to what they assumed was an accessible sexuality. One thinks that if he were still around he might have been adopted by the whole Goth scene, which maybe if you think of it might be an anti-future backlash expression of what you call the new-wave Bowie style freak/androgyny persona. Did I just say that?!

MA: I love how your film doesn't wallow in sentiment or try to trace some psychoanalytic line through Nomi's identity. When I saw The Nomi Song, the collage Aunty brought the house down in the theatre every time she appeared and I think part of the fun was how she typified the film's irreverent attitude towards Nomi's childhood, and his inner life in general. Did you set out to make a film that had such a chilly, future-focused New Wave heart?

AH: I set out to make a film that I though would be true to Klaus and communicate his aesthetic just as his shows - and everything about him, really - did. I think Klaus himself had a chilly, future-focused New Wave heart so that’s what the film had to have. I think it’s a thankless task to try and get inside a person who doesn’t want to let that “inside” out, particularly when he is no longer there to be himself questioned or challenged, and I think instead of falling into a trap of trying to overlay an idea on him, I felt it important to recreate him as he wanted to be seen and as he was seen by those around him. As one of the film interviews said, “deep down he was very superficial, on the surface he was very profound.” And Klaus did say in a magazine interview that says he took this surface seriously and meant it to be important. Someone else said that Klaus was deliberate in sort of “un-defining” himself and his work, making a sort vacuum that drew people in and made them imagine him however they wanted. I think where the human-ness comes in was in his sense of play which was always there, however serious he was about his art there was always a childlike element. Which is a good connection to your remark about the aunt.

One of the things I heard about him was that he used to make paper dolls of himself and do little puppet-theater-like maquettes of his shows with the various performers and props and such. (I wish I could have gotten my hands on that!) I had had a great time meeting and talking to his aunt and she totally *had* to be in the film but at the last minute she got cold feet about being on camera and just out and out refused to be in the film. I had her interview on tape and so I thought to built this dollhouse for her would be a cool solution - it really is just like her house - and it became a way to get this sort of puppet idea into the film and also a way of making his childhood maybe more childlike without being corny or as you say overly sentimental. Though I do find her scene in the garden to be very touching. And I find myself also touched by the way he could draw other people into his work and communicate a sense of optimism and inspire them to put into the shows to the extent that he could be in some way a means for the various people he worked with to express themselves through him. And in the way I approached the film, I tried to respond to that also.

MA: Thanks for bringing such an unusual gay life to a bit of prominence. The Nomi Song is welcome in such a p.c., coffee-clutch gay cinema period - how about a documentary on Christine Jorgensen or Brad Davis next?

AH: You’re very welcome and thanks for the suggestions. Isn’t it amazing that even 20 years after his death Klaus is still considered to be too far out for some people? I guess he must be doing something right.

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