Can you please explain further what it is exactly which you are trying to achieve?
the indirect function will return an error as it's expecting a string containing a range, and 1 is not a range.
indirect(A1) would work if A1 contained a string such as "A2" or "B2:B7" or even referencing another sheet "Sheet2!C21"
Another way it works is to build the string and use the values in other cells also, for example if A1 contained the number 5, and you wrote
=indirect("B" & A1)
you would return the value in B5
You could nest the indirect inside the row command, so for example
=ROW(INDIRECT("A1")) would return 1.
Hope this helps, if not if you could give a little more detail I can provide a better answer for you