Short appearance in a Lothar Lambert’s film in 1972
A look back: Almost exactly ten years earlier, in 1972, Nomi, who was born in the Allgäu and grew up mainly in the Essen area, was given a barely noticed short appearance as a mezzo-soprano, namely in the first longer work of the gay filmmaker Lothar Lambert, whom he knew according to the director's statements "from a gay restaurant or from the Deutsche Oper". But Nomi was still called Klaus Sperber, had long hair and had a full beard. He had moved to West Berlin to avoid conscription on the one hand and to study at the Musikhochschule on the other. He really wanted to become an opera singer. But that turned out to be more difficult than hoped. For the most part, Klaus Sperber kept himself afloat with his modest income as a usher (or more precisely: as a box closer) at the Deutsche Oper, where he occasionally created a good atmosphere among the staff with his singing after hours.
In the relevant film scene in Lambert's "Ex and hopp", he performs a Wagner aria at the Schöneberg bar "The Lighthouse". It is also feared that he may be accused of trickery. "I told him to sing a few notes wrong on purpose so you wouldn't think it was a playback," Lambert recalls in the recordings on his homepage. At this time, Klaus Sperber is also said to have delighted the scene audience of the historic Schöneberg gay pub "Kleist-Casino" with his singing.
Moving to New York City
But all the little performances don't get him any further. He feels called to higher things and thinks he is in a dead end. And so, in 1973, Klaus Sperber takes the bold step of moving to New York, where he finds an apartment on St. Mark's Place in the trendy East Village district of Manhattan. The area is relatively run-down at the time, rents are low. For a while he can make a living with smaller jobs and a "baking business". He supplies cafés and restaurants with lime pie and Linzer torte, and he also gets a place on New York Cable TV for a show in which he can prove his amateur skills as a pastry chef. He has never completed any training for this. He cannot boast of a professional degree in anything at all. But he is an expert in self-education - and in the art of reinventing himself. Despite this, he finds Siff with Ira, who, among others. at the Metropolitan Opera Guild teaches singing, for the first time a professional counterpart who recognizes the potential of his falsetto voice. In 1977, he gets a role in Charles Ludlam's comedic musical drama "Der Ring Gott Farblonjet", a gay opera parody of Wagner's ring cycle, accompanied by a four-piece band.
The first success, which attracts the attention of a larger audience, came in 1978 with an appearance in a motley Vaudeville number revue at the Irving Plaza Theatre. He performs at the very end, gets a stormy cheer. From that moment on, Sperber irrevocably transforms into the unearthly fictional character Klaus Nomi, surrounded by an aura that can perhaps most aptly be described as hyper-queerness. The photographer Anthony Scibelli describes in the documentary film "The Nomi Song" (Amazon affiliate link), shot by Andrew Horn in 2004, how fascinated he was by Nomi's "degree of androgyny": "It wasn't even about sexual androgyny, but rather about the question: was he a human being or not? This was an androgyny beyond androgyny."
Stylization of the alien
Nomi cultivates the myth of the unapproachable by keeping his fans at a distance, disappearing immediately after performances and avoiding interviews as much as possible. Once, as the journalist Alan Platt tells in "The Nomi Song", Nomi is surprised by a little girl who rushes towards him and attacks him with the question whether he is from another planet. "Indeed I am!", Nomi responds spontaneously and engages in an empathetic conversation with her.
But the stylization as an alien not only serves Nomi marketing, but also reflects a biographically consistent dilemma of Klaus Sperber: the impression of being misunderstood and alien in this world. According to his own statements, this feeling haunts him from an early age. And even during his time in New York, Nomi is said to be unhappy and frustrated again and again, although he experiences exuberant moments in the circle of a few science fiction fans: they call themselves "the Nomis" and are especially enthusiastic about films from the 1950s and 1960s, in which aliens make contact with people. In private video recordings you can watch how they parody the stories with a lot of creativity and also have a lot of fun doing it. Among them are the new wave artist Kenny Scharf and the performer Joey Arias, who is hired together with Nomi as a backing singer for David Bowie on the NBC show "Saturday Night". But with his homesickness for Europe and his preference for Old European musical theatre, Nomi sometimes feels like a freak even among the nomis.
The name "Nomi" is an anagram of "Omni" – the magazine, which he enthusiastically devours. It is a US science fiction magazine that was first published in October 1978, two months before becoming a nomi on the occasion of the groundbreaking Vaudeville show. However, "Nomi" also serves him as a pun in his "Nomi-Song", because in English it is pronounced in the same way as "know me". The lyrics can be read as a more or less encrypted message:
Now I'm all alone
It's like some kind of test
My, how I have grown
Will they know me now?
Klaus Nomi longs to be seen as a human being in all his quirkiness, but he is trapped in a cocoon. In the few TV interviews that are circulating, he seems shy and reserved. However, attributes such as "superficial" (Alan Platt) or "over-controlled" and "robotic" (Anthony Scibelli) are also attributed to him.