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The Times review of Nico live in 1981
Nico wanted to be an enfant terrible, a problem child, and maybe even
thought that was the way you became an artist. And there are plenty of
previous examples to prove that she was right.
The first time I met her was at Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York. It was
1966. It was impossible not to be struck by her. She was so statuesque and
serious. Certainly, we were stunned by Andy’s suggestion to include her in
the Velvet Underground. No one knew what to make of her but we were far too
self-concerned to either argue or refuse.
Here was this formidable woman, the world’s first supermodel. We were awed by
her style – something that we were just beginning to taste the fruits of
ourselves, with Kenneth J. Lane jewellery and Betsey Johnson designs. Of
course we’d seen her in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita – the
first time you see her on screen she is introduced as “that German cow”. She
was quintessentially the person that Andy used to make us aware of another
dimension to music: publicity and image-making.
She was unbelievably dramatic. Along with an already imposing physical
presence she had worked at the Actors Studio, where Elia Kazan had helped
her to hone her timing to a sharp blade. The silences that threw people off
their stride were the result of Kazan’s advice that she “use time to carve a
space for herself in everything she did”, as she described it to me later.
This style of social conduct had hilarious as well as caustic results. She
was a sucker for creating the “perfect storm”.
Being in New York in the Sixties with that kind of sonorous German accent had
specific connotations no matter how beautiful you were. And she played on
that. She wanted to explode the air around her.
On the one hand she was a threat, but it was such a startling threat that
everybody decided to make it work – and, as it turned out, the blonde and
statuesque Nico was exactly what Lou Reed was looking for. I was always
suspicious of blondes, Lou was not. The band had no idea how to deal with
her — the timing, the accent — but Lou rose to the occasion. His songs for
her such as Femme Fatale are some of the most beautiful ballads he has
written.
Being in the late Sixties with Nico was great. From the band’s point of view,
we were all entranced by being on the Exploding Plastic Inevitable tour and
all the kerfuffle and pizzazz that went along with it. Touring the US was
surreal. Nico loved driving the Winnebago and one time we were stopped by
the state police who thought that we had kidnapped the chief of police’s
daughter. They eventually let us go, having spent most of the time in awe of
Nico’s stunning looks.
We were all for her being a songwriter and heaved a sigh of relief when she
left. Although her leaving was not untinged by disappointment, we felt we
had failed her in some way. She had that ability — to make you feel you had
failed her but no matter: she would survive all the stronger for it.
Her leaving New York was typical. One night she was having drinks in a bar
with two women, one of whom was rumoured to have been Jimi Hendrix’s
groupie/girlfriend. This woman was complaining about what a tough life she
had, she was relentlessly going on about it, Nico kept telling her to stop
and eventually she cracked. “You don’t know what a tough life is,” she said
and threw a glass in the girl’s face. It wasn’t pretty. She had to leave
town that night; went to San Francisco and then Europe. That temper had its
cost.
All the revisionist speculation about her being a racist is ridiculous. I do
know she’d try to zone in on the vulnerability of others, so I wouldn’t be
surprised if she “used” the topic to force a confrontation and discomfort.
Really, though, this is someone who grew up in a war zone, hiding from
British bombing raids, whose father had died on the Russian front and who,
if she hadn’t been plucked out of nowhere to be a model, would have stayed
in a German town being preyed on by sleazy managers of the supermarket she
worked in as a teenager.
All Nico had of her childhood was a blurry, tattered black-and-white photo of
her mother leaning against a tank. Nico had made her own way and she
couldn’t take this person going on about what a tough life she’d had. That,
and the liquor and whatever else was going on, that was her perfect storm.
Another story that has been twisted came from when she was dating Lou. She
came into the Factory one time without him and Andy said: “So where’s Lou?”
And she replied, after a silence: “I cannot zleep with Jews any more.”
People chuckled and got on with their chores.
These were explosive remarks done for dramatic purposes. And there was so much
drama of that kind going on. Things like that went on all day long and no
one paid attention. It was outrageous. Life in the Factory went through the
gamut and people don’t ever really want to be put through the gamut.
Most importantly for Nico, she learnt from Lou and Andy how to access a more
freewheeling creativity — independence was Andy’s gift to Nico. She also met
Jim Morrison in New York. He drew her into his poetic circle, from which she
emerged with English as her poetic language. Being deaf in one ear didn’t
prevent her writing songs on a harmonium she picked up in India. She read
Steppenwolf and Siddartha. After meeting Jim and quitting the Velvet
Underground her blonde life was changed. She died her hair red with henna
and then to raven black.
She really related to Jim on an artistic level, if you like, her
“soul-brother”, as she had done with Lou at one point. But despite all of
her lovers, all that the men really did, I think, was remind her of her
imperfections. She felt that they were a danger to her and that she would
never get any respect from them. Really, she never thought of herself as a
woman. It’s what made her relationship with her son, Ari, so difficult. His
father [the actor], Alain Delon, never accepted paternity and Nico didn’t
know how to be a mother. Ari was brought up by Delon’s mother, but ran away
to live with Nico when he was a teenager. She was heavily addicted to heroin
by then and would say, so despondently: “I can’t deal with him, he thinks
he’s me.”
And he did, he went through all of that and hit rock bottom. I believe those
days are well behind him now.
Her first album Chelsea Girls (1967) had featured the Velvet Underground.
Dylan gave her a song for it (I’ll Keep it With Mine), as did Jackson Browne
and Tim Hardin, yet everyone agreed it was too MOR. She was totally
indifferent to it, later saying: “I cried because of the flute . . . There
should be a button on record players, a ‘No Flute’ button.”
Marble Index (1969) was what four days of entrenched self-interest created.
Her view was pre-punk. The sense of impending nihilism was goth before goth.
Most reactions were of shock. In among the murk there was real drama. I
played the LP for the composer Aaron Copland, proud of its Neo-Classical
European style. Copland’s only comment was about her “gravelly voice”.
I always felt somewhat protective towards her music. I felt it needed
presentation that elevated her to the status of a serious female songwriter,
very different from those celebrated at the time. I think she understood
this — felt that I appreciated and “understood” her — although the
“understanding” was focused exclusively in musical terms. Her life made me
depressed. Every recording session I came away from thinking I had seen her
inner self and that it was a little girl trying to reach the daylight.
Eventually I was left to consider that the drugs in her life were stronger
than my attempts to use music to delineate a pathway ahead.
The few times I’d witness her childlike laughter and utter amazement at her
finished work — those were the moments a collaborator clings to. The payoff,
the reward! Those times were so rare, but they kept me on the string that
was Nico’s to dangle — the belief in her, even when she didn’t believe.
ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM, the manager of the Rolling Stones and producer of
Nico’s first single
My Nico story is a short one but, like her life, it’s reasonably star-studded.
Brian Jones brought Nico over from Paris, where she was modelling, in 1965
and said: “How about recording my friend too?” I’d already been through it
with Marianne Faithfull, and I thought that I could tell who could sing just
by hearing their speaking voice — and what a voice Nico had.
I sent her to John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page to audition; they thought she was
quite something, totally scrumptious. We weren’t used to this European
allure. She was no doormat. She was a lethal woman. She was one of a new
breed of woman, like Anita Pallenberg and Yoko Ono, who could have been a
man. Like Carla Bruni is today. Far better that than the silly little
English teacups around at that time.
We got it all wrong on the record, though, I’m Not Sayin’. I made the mistake
of recording her with a big orchestra. It was a Gordon Lightfoot song and it
just didn’t swing. Decca rejected it and I hated it. It was in the wrong
key, her voice sounded like a horse on steroids. But the B-side, The Last
Mile, written by Jimmy Page, was good. [My label] Immediate Records put it
out and we did a tour of the all the recording factories around the country.
She was a trouper, a real laugh. They all loved her on the factory floor.
We were a stepping stone for her but happy to be one. All the drugs and
darkness came later. When I worked with her she was pure Harvey Nichols, and
wonderful for it. Well done, Brian, he certainly knew how to pick ’em.
JAMES YOUNG, member of Nico’s band from 1981-88 and the author of Nico —
Songs They Never Play on the Radio
A favourite Nico anecdote comes from spring 1982. I was in the tour van, at
the back. The air was thick with Marlboro smoke, patchouli and something
else. I pushed open the rear side window. A pocket of air whooshed around
the interior and slapped Nico in the back of the neck. She turned round.
“What are you?” she said. “Some kind of fresh-air freak?”
I’d first heard Nico’s voice as a 14-year-old back in Oldham. A friend had
brought round a copy of Chelsea Girl. What was this? A voice deeper than the
foghorn on the Bismarck but with a strange inwardness; the music folky but
with lyrics that were urban and startling.
I got to hear her voice again, on my doorstep 14 years later. I was living in
Oxford by then. I had a place at the university to begin a masters in
romantic literature. Nico was with an old schoolfriend, Alan Wise, who had
become her manager. She was performing at a local disco, Scamps, above
Sainsbury’s in the Westgate shopping centre. I hadn’t planned to go to the
concert, and I certainly hadn’t planned to abandon the academic life. But
things change. I ended up playing piano for her until her death six years
later.
With a Nico performance, whether you were on stage or at the back of the hall,
you had to be there all the way with her. You had to remember the world she
was born into, without seeing her as a tragic beauty and sentimentalising
it. Nico was a beautiful, dreaming, gifted monster.
ALAN WISE, New Order promoter and Nico’s manager
Twenty years on, it seems as if her little funeral in Berlin, with the help of
the Rev Michael Gartland, an old friend of mine and hers, a weedy tape
player and a few non-famous people, preceded, not followed, the seven years
I had known her.
I’d met her on the stairs at the Rafters club in Manchester in 1981, when she
was 42. I liked her at first, and after a couple of years I loved her. I
made little money with her, just got to travel. The Smiths were just
happening, I promoted the first show, but I ignored them for Nico. I had no
head for business, only for romance. I loved the travel, and the taste of a
faded bohemia.
Looking back I think we undervalued her. Her real stuff was the Germanic
lullaby music, not the rock. She had something, a gravitas, even if she was
not a “musician”. She could speak five languages and was ashamed of her lack
of formal education. But she usually read good books and watched good
black-and-white films.
She was the real thing. Fascinated by drugs, she feared whatever her real self
was; was scared that she might be mad and changed her mood every minute. She
was ashamed of being a German and she was ashamed of being a woman. She was
never an anti-Semite. That was crap. She chose to live among Ashkenazim Jews
when she lived in Manchester and those of a Jewish cultural background for
most of her life, ie, 80 per cent of the music industry here and in New
York. She was no snob. She liked playing pool with bums in the pub.
She was a pretty unusual person — a disaster, but also some kind of angel. I
wanted her to love me and she never could, though she said once: “Of course
I do.” But she loved only one person, her son, Ari. The rest of us vaguely
amused her.
Nico: life of an icon
1938 Born Christa Pfaffgen in Cologne
1954 Is spotted at 16, becomes a model
1959 Appears in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita
1962 Gives birth to son Ari
1965 Records first single in London
1967 Dylan introduces her to Warhol who makes her a Factory superstar
and member of the Velvet Underground. Releases solo album, Chelsea Girl.
1969-85 Records series of remarkable albums with John Cale
1988 Dies of a brain hemorrhage
Life Along the Borderline — a Nico Tribute, curated by John Cale, Southbank
Centre, London SE1 (0871-663 2500), Oct 11 2008. Nico tribute concert
curated by Lutz Ulrich, Volksbühne, Berlin (0049 30 24 065 5), Oct 17 2008
