nico

I still miss Nico, the foghorned voiced fraulein who I first heard singing with the Velvet Underground. Really weird that I should miss her, because I didn’t know her at all. I'd never even seen her in concert. I’d only ever heard her music, but when she died in July 1988 I felt terribly sad. Can't really explain why, but it felt almost like a personal loss. I played her records repeatedly in the weeks after she died and probably got very morbid... One song that seemed really pertinent was the “Eulogy to Lenny Bruce”, the last track on Chelsea Girl with it's opening line 'I've lost a friend, and I don't know why'.

In retrospect it seems odd that I missed her so much, as by all accounts she could be a deeply unpleasant individual - selfish and spoilt, a desperate junkie for most of her adult life until only a year or so before she died, either utterly lazy or genuinely virtually incapable of looking after herself. Yet for some unaccountable reason she inspired something approaching devotion from her band members, managers and friends.

Born in Cologne just before the Second World War Christa Paffgen grew up a solitary, lonely child. She adopted the name of a male friend when she started modelling in the 1950s. By the mid sixties she was to be found in New York hanging out with the Andy Warhol art set. Andy loved her striking features and Nico appeared in a number of Warhol films. It was his idea to introduce her to the Velvet Underground, a new band he had started managing. Such was Andy's persuasiveness that the Velvets somehow found themsleves agreeing to Nico fronting the band, despite her limited vocal range and inability to keep time. Lou Reed wrote three of his most beautiful songs for Nico to sing, and she would continue to play these songs throughout her career - "All Tomorrow's Parties, "I'll Be Your Mirror" and the song that became indelibly Nico's - "Femme Fatale".

Of course the Velvets soon tired of Nico's lack of contribution to the band and by 1967 she was recording a solo album although she was helped by Lou, John and Sterling. The original Chelsea Girl recordings were simple acoustic guitar songs. The record label, fearing that Nico's limited vocals were too exposed in such bare arrangements, added strings and flutes in order to sweeten the album. Nico was devastated. She vowed to write and perform only her own material from then on and with a surprising amount of self discipline taught herself how to play the harmonium, an instrument that required no outside power source (and was thus perfect for her candlelit existence), yet it could create crashing waves of sound. The constantly shifting rhythmic base provided by the harmonium suited her vocal style which seemed to have its own idiosyncratic sense of timing. Band members, especially drummers, would always have problems trying to play along with Nico's singing as she utterly disregarded any conventional idea of a steady beat. Yet her songs were highly structured and would fall apart if her skewed structure was not adhered to.

The Marble Index was the first album that Nico had written and performed herself. Issued in 1968 TMI is characterised by John Cale's musique concrete arrangements. Wind howls through some pieces, the whole album seems to inhabit some arctic wasteland; it's cold to the point of freezing; it's like no other album ever made. Underpinning every song is the powerful rise and fall of the harmonium, and piercing the gloom and the fog is Nico's lugubrious croon. It was a total flop of course, even the record label boss said that 'no-one wants to buy suicide', not exactly a ringing endorsement... It was so wonderfully out of step with sixties fashions and trends, an album as far removed from the hippy love-ins as it was possible to be. Even today it still sounds like music from another world entirely. And I love it.

Nico followed The Marble Index with Desertshore in 1971, which offered slightly more conventionally arranged songs and then The End in 1974, which didn't. Both contain some stunning, outre arrangements from John Cale, and on The End some synth and guitar work from Roxy Music's Eno and Phil Manzanera. 

By then, however, Nico was a junkie. She had no possessions, no home, she even sold her harmonium. Between 1974 and 1978 she drifted, in a heroin induced fog. No one seems to know where she lived, who she hung out with, what she did. Then she appeared backstage at a Patti Smith gig and poured out such a tale of woe that Patti immediately found her a place to stay and bought her a new harmonium in order that Nico might get her career going again. Perhaps surprisingly, she did, and Nico would always remember Patti's act of kindness. 1979 and 1980 would see Nico frequently performing in New York clubs playing a large number of new songs, sometimes backed by her old friend John Cale.

Then, and for no obvious reason, Nico relocated to Britain. She first recorded what can only be described as an arabic infused rock album. Many of her new songs had been radically reimagined by her new Turkish and French musician friends and the resulting album Drama Of Exile is a true one off in Nico's bizarre catalogue. In fact the album was recorded twice, as the original mastertapes were stolen or something - the true facts are somewhat obscure... Both versions are now available. But some of the songs are stunning - the mysterious "Purple Lips", the miltary "Sixty / Forty", the powerful "One More Chance".

In order to more easily source heroin Nico then moved to Manchester, in the early 1980s a haven for addicts. But despite her drug dependency Nico got herself a new manager and decided to hit the road. backed by various Manchester musicians in various configurations - sometimes she'd play solo, sometimes with a conventional drums, bass, guitar set up, sometimes with three or four drummers only, Nico toured with a vengeance. Not only the UK but all across Europe, venturing behind the Iron Curtain, across the Mediterranean islands, and sometimes criss-crossing the USA too.

Another new album, Camera Obscura, was once again produced by John Cale and showcases a percussion heavy sound that was a feature of Nico's live show at the time. It contains one of my favourite Nico songs, the devastating "My Heart Is Empty". There are numerous live albums, mainly from the 1980s, and most show that Nico could be a spellbinding performer - not always; some concerts display a somewhat indifferent or forgetful Nico. But when she put on a good show, often only with the harmonium for accompaniment, she could be incredible. There is a phenomenal version of “Janitor Of Lunacy” from 1983 on Do Or Die, in which the song is invested with a huge power that is actually very frightening.

Tours across Australasia and Japan in 1986 and 1987 coincided with Nico finally kicking her heroin habit for good. And things were really looking up when when she was chosen to headline a festival at the Berlin Planetarium. She worked hard on a new set of songs. Unfinished and partly improvised though they may be, the new material debuted at the Planetarium displays an improving mastery of dynamics and composition. After this triumphant performance Nico returned to Ibiza where she held a small apartment. 

  

In order to improve her fitness Nico had taken up cycling around the island. No-one actually knows what happened, but on 18th July 1988 Nico was found unconscious at the side of the country road, having apparently fallen off her bike. With proper medical attention she may well have survived, but the first hospital to which she was taken proved to be woefully primitive and due to the slightly bizarre attire in which she was found (heavy black motorbike boots, black clothing and a black shawl - in August - in Ibiza) she was assumed to be some sort of gypsy woman or a homeless beggar. Typically, she carried no ID. Partly because no-one could identify her she was left for hours on a trolley before being given any treatment. When a brain haemorrhage was diagnosed she was moved to a better hospital but by then the bleeding was too severe and there was nothing that could be done. Whether she suffered the haemorrhage and then fell off the bike, or the fall caused the bleeding is something that was never identified. In any case, the result was the same.

She was just 49, and after years of drug abuse and living in utter poverty it seems that simply riding a bicycle killed Nico. She would have found the irony very amusing.