nico - again

It's summery, I'm back from my holiday and feeling chilled and relaxed. So what music do I reach for?

Nico.

Why on earth do I choose her? Surely some of the least summery and relaxing music I own...

But, bizarrely, and going against all rational logic, that's what I'm playing today. I started with Nico's June 1985 performance at the Chelsea Town Hall, and this was followed by her April 1986 concert in Tokyo. Two gigs, less than a year apart, with virtually the same musicians and set list, but sounding surprisingly different. 

The over-riding impression from both recordings is that there’s lots of slightly bizarre and sometimes inappropriate percussion, gently tinkling piano, and slabs of cheap sounding 1980's synth. And behind it all, ignoring all of the seemingly extraneous music, is the unsteady pulse of the harmonium and Nico’s phrasing, which is sometimes entirely unconnected from the song that’s attempting to be played.

She plays her harmonium and sings in her own sweet time, and nothing can stop her. The rest of the musicians just have to somehow work around her idiosyncratic ideas of timing and rhythm. Sometimes this means simply banging away at a relentless beat in the hope that sometimes Nico might accidentally fall into line with the music – a song like “Tananore” or “Fearfully In Danger” kind of works like this. The band tries to shoehorn the wayward melody into their solid rhythm. Usually this fails and the crashing percussion ploughs relentlessly on regardless. 

Sometimes though, songs with a more obvious sense of melody and a more conventional structure, such as the terrific “My Heart Is Empty” really need Nico to be in-synch with the rhythm of the song. She actually does this in Tokyo, and as a result we get one of the best and most powerful renditions of this track that I've ever heard. The version at Chelsea finds her doing her own thing and Jim Young’s piano is kind of attempting to drag her back to the beat and failing miserably. The result is a muddle of a song where the band and the singer are only occasionally on the same page. Yet it’s still weirdly listenable and somehow even quite impressive. Quite how this is possible is one of the enduring mysteries of Nico's music. There are many of these 1980s live recordings, and frankly many of them ought to be almost unlistenable, but unaccountably that simply isn't the case. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Chelsea show, intended to showcase her then new album Camera Obscura, is the more tentative of the two performances. Many of the songs played were new to the set and there was the extra pressure of the show being at a fairly prestigious location, and attended by the press. The Tokyo gig is, by contrast, clearly more relaxed, the songs have been road tested for some time, the band have worked up some excellent arrangements and the whole set is delivered with more assurance, more confidence. The newer songs come across very well in Tokyo, with a particularly solid "Win A Few" - other highlights include the always wonderful "Sixty / Forty" and the aforementioned "My Heart Is Empty". But for me, the best track of this show is a delightfully jazzy "Das Lied Vom Einsamen Madchen", with Young's sparkling piano and some snappy percussion underpinning an excellent vocal performance from Nico.

At both gigs the oldies like “Femme Fatale” are always more assured, and the straight harmonium tracks like “Secret Side” or “Janitor Of Lunacy” are dependably brilliant. And it’s great that Nico revived one of my favourites, “You Forget To Answer”, which she wrote after the death of Jim Morrison. Good old Nico, always guaranteed to cheer us all up!