Chapter 32 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

During the 1970s, Nico was on a continuous quest for a record label and any sort of artistic advice. Her letters to Fields illustrate a woman who was still attempting to cobble a career together, alone. ‘It annoyed me so much to be told that Nico disappeared from music in the Seventies,’ complained Tina Aumont in Richard Witts’s biography. ‘Music was a part of her daily life, and she made a lot of concerts. It just shows how cut off America is from Europe. Nico’s problem always was that she didn’t have a manager. There was no one to plan her musical life. There was no co-ordination or publicity.’ This drove Nico only deeper into drug use, as getting a fix became an escape from her troubled past and uncertain future. Heroin, however, further isolated her from the few relationships she still had, with people like Fields, who had been her unerring lifeline, becoming tired of her repeated requests for money to fund her addiction.

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John Cale had invited Lou Reed to join him and Nico at a gig in Paris on 29 January 1972 at the Bataclan. The three began practis­ing for the show – a surprising turn for Reed, who was notorious for hating to rehearse.15 According to biographer Victor Bockris, the Bataclan show illustrated ‘just how ambivalent Reed felt about his solo career’. Besides the prep time with Cale, Reed also spent an entire day reviewing songs with Nico in Paris. The show was a triumph, with all three artists presenting old and new material in an acoustic format. While most of the pieces were performed by Cale and Reed, Nico still stood out as a haunting and singu­lar artist. The gig was recorded, eventually being released as a six­teen-song live LP. Reed was ‘so moved by the experience with Cale and Nico that he suggested the three of them get back together, but they turned him down’, said Bockris. Cale was finding success as a producer and solo artist, while Nico had released three solo albums and was starring in avant-garde films with Philippe Garrel. As Bockris explained, ‘At the time, they both appeared to be in a stronger position than Lewis [Reed].’

In a 13 March letter to Danny Fields, it is clear that Nico is once again looking for options, fishing for support, and is not sure what to do or who to turn to:

London March 13th Dear Danny,

What is happening to you & the old world? … I have been here over two weeks giving interviews to all the musical papers, I also sang at the Round House [sic].16 I cannot say that it is a very classical peace [sic] but in spite of that it was refreshing. Joe Boyd had made the arrangements for it against his feelings. He also wants to produce my new album. I don’t know if it is to please me, or if it is to send down the peoples [sic] throats. Have you any suggestions at all? In any case John Cale, where is he? A reporter from Friends magazine seemed to know that you have returned with Elektra. How is Jac Holzman? I would return to NY but I am scared that nobody wants to know me anymore. If you see Leonhard [sic], tell him that if it hadn’t been for him, Philippe would still be crazy, from too many Electroshocks. The movie ‘LA CICATRICE INTERIEURE’ is nearly finished.17 Ari gave a beautiful picture as the little white knight on it.

Please let me know how things are. Yours faithfully, Nico. P.S. I still love you

It is not clear who ‘Leonhard’ is, but one guess is that it is a ref­erence to her old friend and admirer Leonard Cohen. Nico repeats her ongoing fear of coming back to New York, as well as her con­cerns about Garrel’s unstable mental state. Her worry that ‘nobody wants to know me’ indicates some understanding of how the attack, her poor record sales and her notoriety may have damaged her repu­tation as any sort of commercial artist. The heroin problem only exacerbated the worries and made any actual challenges even harder to surmount. In retrospect, Fields wondered how Nico – and Garrel – were  financing their basic existence, let alone a raging drug prob­lem, saying, ‘Who was paying for any of this?’ and throwing his arms up in the air with puzzled despair.

Nico and Garrel continued to collaborate together, releasing the second part of a trilogy that had started with La Cicatrice intérieure. Athanor – meaning an alchemist’s melting pot – is a twenty-­minute silent epic that is as dreamy and nonsensical as its predecessor. Starring Nico and another actress who went by the singular name of ‘Musky’, Athanor is in colour and features shots of an unclothed Nico throughout. Her figure is not the diet-pill sinew of Sweet Skin, but the more filled-out curves of a woman. One synopsis of the film describes the plot:

Athanor (Nico) is searching for fire. A flame is always at the foreground. Nico naked in tombs, looking at herself in circular mirrors, Nico in castles, keeper of the fire. Nico and Musky as medieval princesses. Athanor is a film about fire.

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Psychedelic singer-songwriter and former Soft Machine member Kevin Ayers seemed to have an ongoing infatuation with Nico throughout the 1970s, but he always refused to talk about what relationship he had with her, if any. ‘I never kiss and tell,’ he said tartly, when asked in a 2007 Guardian interview whether he and Nico were ever involved. It is not clear how they first met or if their connection was anything but professional, but Nico was indisput­ably an inspiration for Ayers throughout the latter part of his career. One example appears on his fourth studio album, Bananamour, which features a track called ‘Decadence’ that is an incredibly unflattering depiction of Nico. The damning lyrics read as if written by an embittered lover or a jealous friend, going on to claim that the subject is ‘suffering from wear and tear’ – an obvious dig at what was considered to be Nico’s fading beauty.

It is unclear what caused Ayers to hold his decades-long bitterness towards Nico. It could be that the singer rebuffed his advances dur­ing one of their interactions. Regardless of Ayers, Lou Reed found a different sort of inspiration in Nico. In Dave Thompson’s book Beyond the ‘Velvet Underground’, Reed publicly and rabidly praised her solo records, saying, ‘Those albums are so incredible, the most incredible albums ever made. The Marble Index, Desertshore … you try to get a copy. You can’t get ’em, you can’t order them. They’re in bins someplace. I have orders in five stores. They’ve disappeared off the face of the earth.’

In July 1973, Reed released his third solo studio album, Berlin. Nico loved it, even writing her former bandmate an enthusiastic five-page letter praising the work. Billed as a concept album/rock opera, Berlin’s tracks are centred around topics familiar to Nico: a doomed couple and their struggle with drug addiction, abuse and depression, among other uplifting themes.

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Though she had been marketed on her albums and in the press as a paragon for being alone, Nico was rarely without a paramour of some sort during the 1970s. It was at the Opéra Comique in 1973 that Lutz Graf-Ulbrich first met the singer. It is understandable that Nico was attracted to the young guitar player. He was head-­turningly handsome, with high cheekbones, a tall, lanky build and blond hair. Graf-Ulbrich was equally enamoured with Nico when she took to the stage. ‘Nobody knew who she really was. There was a strange aura, and lots of rumours, and nobody knew what to make of all that. Before we met she was already a mysterious thing,’ he recalled. It is hard to tell if Graf-Ulbrich himself is remembering his own interactions and thoughts from the time or if he, too, has fallen into the abyss of endless Nico myths. ‘When she performed, it was really strange, with her harmonium and the way she sang. The audience was very enthusiastic. I was stunned. And of course we talked,’ he said. ‘There was a party … and she took me aside. She saw my record cover and she said it was strange and frightening. Her aura and personality were just so strong that I felt like a little boy. I was 22 and she was 36.’

In 1974, Graf-Ulbrich’s band Agitation Freedom broke up. Now performing as a solo artist, he stayed in France, and was once again doing the festival circuit when he came back into contact with Nico, this time backstage. After having accidentally drunk tea laced with acid, Graf-Ulbrich found Nico, like a ghostly aberra­tion, seated in front of him, donned in ‘a red cloak like a curtain’. The German singer asked Graf-Ulbrich where he was staying. Upon learning that he did not have a hotel for the night, Nico offered to help him out. ‘I went to her room and said bye and she said, “Oh no, you’re not getting away.” She was naked on the bed and she was very good looking. I was too shy; I went back to my own room. She was amazingly beautiful, the most beautiful woman I had ever seen,’ he continued. ‘Her symmetrical face with her full lips, her big eyes, her perfect body … I felt paralyzed by her beauty and did not know what to say.’ The two were reunited in the morning and found they were both going to the French capital. ‘We sat together on the train to Paris and I played her all of my songs and the whole thing started,’ he recalled.

Upon arriving at their destination, ‘She invited me to her home. She was living together with film-maker Philippe Garrel, who was not really pleased that I appeared with her.’ Graf-Ulbrich’s memor­ies of the Paris space are just as disturbing as others’ descriptions. ‘The dreary four-room-apartment on the fifth floor had black walls and almost no furniture. The flat had been given to him by his father, the renowned actor Maurice Garrel. There was a fridge, a piano, two beds and a mattress. The whole flat was covered by a layer of dust, the kitchen seemed rarely used. Dusty, old dishes were piling up in the sink.’

Neither an in-house lover nor a vile abode were enough to put Graf-Ulbrich off from embarking on an affair with the singer. ‘I wor­shipped her. I was a fan and madly in love. But she was still together with Philippe Garrel,’ he recalls. Graf-Ulbrich’s own admission of both ‘worshipping’ Nico and being a ‘fan’ of hers, on top of the differences in age and experience, must have put them on an un equal footing from the start. Looking back, he says, ‘My years with Nico were the most intense times of my entire life.’ Graf-Ulbrich was young, eager and earnest, in contrast to many of the hardened characters whom Nico usually surrounded herself with. ‘Nico generally liked philoso­phers and drug dealers and gangsters and anything like this. I was an exception to this,’ says Graf-Ulbrich. And though clearly wanting attention from the men around her, Nico was not interested in public displays of affection – at least with Graf-Ulbrich.18 ‘She didn’t hold hands in public. She called me her “German friend”.’

By the time Graf-Ulbrich came into Nico’s life, she was in the clutches of full-blown addiction. He remembered her being ‘so hard to follow as a person, even though we were really close. I could never tell what she was thinking.’ Nico’s substance abuse problems had made it even more difficult to read her, with Graf-Ulbrich recalling, ‘When she was taking heroin, she went even fur­ther away.’ In an attempt to be more intimate with his new lover, Graf-Ulbrich decided to try the drug. ‘After a while, I gave in to her. I only took it for about a year and a half, maybe in ’74, and by ’76 I was done,’ he says now. ‘I was addicted, but more to Nico than to the drug. I took it because Nico took it. She told me, “It’s good, take some.” I wanted to be on her level. I wanted to under­stand her. It’s hard,’ he continues, ‘if you love your partner and you can only watch her drifting into other spheres and you can’t follow. At some point I started to take heroin as well and became a junkie. Our relationship was … well, I adored her. I was incredibly proud to live this life by her side. And, of course, I didn’t feel like I was on the same level that she was. Heroin became an important aspect of our relationship.’

For Nico, the drugs provided relief from her own mind and pres­ent surroundings. She spent a lot of her time ‘sitting around hal­lucinating’, recalls Graf-Ulbrich. It also meant she was incredibly uninspired to work on her music. Gone was the woman writing lyrics by candlelight and practising the harmonium for hours on end. This may also have been the fallout from the sales failure of her two previous LPs, a lack of management and no clear path forward – all of which created a perpetual roundabout of despair, drug use and isolation. ‘I remember she once said, “I wrote already albums with a lot of songs. That’s enough, what more do people want?”’ recounts Graf-Ulbrich. The few shows she did were to keep the threesome – Nico, Garrel and now Graf-Ulbrich – in drugs, not to try out new ideas or revisit old material. ‘She wasn’t working on songs all the time. There were two concerts in a month or some­thing,’ he says. ‘She would rehearse right before a concert or a few notes occasionally.’

Soon the cycle of searching for drugs, scoring and using became the central focus of Graf-Ulbrich’s life. ‘We were always looking for it. I consider addiction to heroin an interesting way to live. It may sound perverse, but you always have a goal.’ Perhaps because of his infatuation with Nico, perhaps because of the short period in which he found himself entrenched in the dependency pattern, his descrip­tion of the time sounds almost romantic. ‘We bought some heroin on the street. You see the weirdest places and meet the strangest peo­ple. It’s like being in a gangster movie.’ However, nerves were wear­ing thin and tensions rising in the filthy apartment. Garrel was not pleased with the addition of Nico’s new lover to the household. ‘He was angry and jealous,’ notes Graf-Ulbrich. ‘I said to him, “Come on. Let’s not fight, this is ridiculous.” He and Nico were more like brother and sister. It was an uncomfortable situation.’

Nico’s downward spiral was trying at best, alarming at worst – especially for old friends and acquaintances. Contact with her was often initiated by her need to ‘borrow’ money to score drugs, put­ting strain on already fraying relationships with former colleagues. Vincent Fremont told me about the singer’s infrequent visits to the Factory post-Velvets. ‘Andy [Warhol] was uncomfortable because he knew the reason she was there was to try and get some money, and he didn’t like to give money to people who might abuse drugs. It was complicated and layered with her sad life,’ he says. ‘She would show up, but she wasn’t part of Andy’s world any more. The drugs really did a number on her. She was still beautiful, but heroin did take its toll physically, besides everything else. Her beauty was fading …’

Though now ruling her life, the opiates only underscored how deeply disturbed Nico was. ‘I remember realizing just how miser­able she was,’ Fremont recalls. ‘She may have thought that whatever she was on would help [numb her pain], but it didn’t really mask the unhappiness.’

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Off the back of Berlin, and proclaiming to the music press that he loved the John Cale/Nico albums, Lou Reed made a bold deci­sion: he would put himself forward to produce an album for his old flame. By this point, Nico had no record deal, was playing shows only sporadically – just enough to barely eke out a living – and was in dire straits. Between her raging heroin habit and lack of income, Reed’s offer was a lifeline. He asked her to stay with him at his small apartment on East 52nd Street in New York for the duration of the recording process, taking the pressure off Nico, who had to pay only for transportation. This was good, as there was not a dime to spare. She somehow scraped together enough money to pay for an airline ticket, packed her few belongings – the harmonium and some can­dles – into a bag and left Paris, the hope of a new start seeming to sparkle on the Manhattan skyline. This could be a chance not only to get her career back on track, but to progress what she and Cale had started with The Marble Index and Desertshore. This could be the big break. Things were finally starting to look up.

However, upon arrival, Nico found that her former bandmate’s generosity had disappeared. Instead, he went about teasing her with drugs, showing Nico how much he had, then declining to share the stash with the befuddled German. Nico’s desperate situation becomes even clearer from an anecdote that Victor Bockris shares. The writer happened to be at Reed’s house during one night of Nico’s stay, and he clearly remembers Reed’s cruel treatment of the chanteuse. ‘One night I go to his [Reed’s] place, and there is Nico. You’ve got this little apartment, with a couch and a round breakfast table with chairs around it. Nico is sitting in one of these chairs. I’m sitting on the couch, looking at her. Lou is sitting in a chair; we are in a triangle. I’m astonished to notice that Nico is giving me the eyes, inviting me over with her eyes to her table in a seductive way. I just begin to move. My ass is maybe one inch above the cushions of the couch. Lou whispers to me across the room, “You don’t have a chance!”

‘I sit down at this tiny little round table. Me and Nico started to talk, and we had chemistry; it’s not so much sexually, just mentally. Lou at that point comes over and tries to get into the conversation. Nico closes him off by looking at me and refusing to acknowledge him. Lou then takes a bag of white powder out of his pocket and waves it in front of her. Her face lights up. It turns out he had been taunting her the whole time she has been there, pretending to offer her drugs but then refusing to give them to her. We are talking about speed … where you shoot it up. Reed interrupts the conver­sation and breaks the contact between me and Nico. Now Nico’s mind is more on getting the drugs from Lou than it is on talking to me. It was very cruel. The next day, he actually threw her out of the house and then refused to ever see or talk to her. He really, really fucked with her horribly. She was very needy of his collaboration for a record, and to entice her all the way across the Atlantic – tell­ing her, “You can stay with me” – and then suddenly just throwing her out … it was one of Lou’s truly horrible things to do.’

Luckily, one of Reed’s people came by and saw her sitting outside his apartment and took care of her. Says Bockris, ‘You see him do this to Nico, who was, at that period, trembling on the brink of not looking so good any more. She had a lot of majesty. Then Lou waving a bag of speed in her face – it was distasteful.’

Bockris stresses how crucial to Nico’s career a Reed/Nico collabor­ation could have been. ‘The reason that what Lou did was so mean is because it was a turning point for her. It was 1974; she could have gone on to go higher [in sales or prestige], or she could have gone on to the track she went on to, which is essentially a ramshackle track. You keep going, but you make records in a couple days, nothing is like it used to be. You are on a different level in the rock business. You are on a lower level. You do not get the same kind of treatment, the same kind of studios, the same sort of musicians.’

Upon hearing of Reed’s behaviour with Nico, John Cale rang his former bandmate up to read him the riot act. According to Bockris, ‘The Nico episode [was] a bone of contention between them throughout the decade,’ with Cale admitting, ‘Right through the seventies, I hoped Lou would write her another song like “All Tomorrow’s Parties,”19 or I would tell him I was working with Nico on her new LP, whichever it was, and he’d just say, “Really?” – noth­ing more, not a flicker of interest. He could have written wonderful songs for her. It’s a shame and I regret it very much.’

Bockris praises Cale for being one of the few steadfast friends and colleagues that stood by Nico through all the trials and tribula­tions. He also argues that not only Nico’s gender but her appearance played a massive role in how she was presented in the media. ‘The way she has been treated by the press is largely dominated by the fact that she’s not just a woman, but she was a world-class beauty. Any independent creative expression by a woman will come with an enormous amount of heavy beating by a male-dominated press. That’s why Cale was so important; he tried to protect her to some extent from that stuff. Cale is really heroic in this story; he really does stand by her.’ Jonathan Donahue of Mercury Rev agrees, tell­ing me, ‘I think that John [Cale] was probably one of the few men in her life that encouraged her and allowed her the space to grow. He watered the plant; the other ones just overshadowed it.’

In her diary, Nico rarely wrote anything about Reed. However, one comment does stand out, especially in light of Bockris’s story. She confides, ‘Lou Reed is a very loyal Person when it comes to Andy’s ideas. When it came to me, there was only jealousy, Refusing of letting him program me.’ She goes on to give a seething critique of one of Reed’s performances, possibly referring to the 31 March 1977 show at the Eissporthalle in Berlin, Germany. ‘One time in Berlin, about fourteen years ago, Lou was giving his second Concert in Berlin, on which occasion I made a Guest appearance, but it all went wrong because of lack of Lou’s musical Arrangements on the songs that were twice too slow for me to sing. The Place was deserted according to the Crew’s Expectations.’

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During this period, Cale was signed to Island Records by Richard Williams, who had left journalism behind to do A&R at the label. Williams and Cale brought Nico on board, with the idea that the record they would make together would be the third and last instal­ment of a series that started with The Marble Index. The resulting album, The End, followed a similar structure as previous Nico/Cale efforts, with Nico first laying down vocals and her har­monium, then Cale coming in to build of layers of sound and texture to com­plete the tracks, with instruments ranging from the electric viola to the glockenspiel, bells and a bosun’s pipe. ‘She only had a limited command of the instrument,’ recalled Williams of Nico’s efforts on the harmonium, adding, ‘Because she played fewer notes, it restricted her singing and it became literally monotonous, but not in a pejorative way.’ Cale also recruited former Roxy Music mem­bers Brian Eno and Phil Manzanera to guest on the album. The new LP included a haunting cover of the Doors song ‘The End’, as well as the German national anthem, ‘Das Lied der Deutschen’. Nico’s decision to perform and record ‘The End’ for her album of the same name was not an accident; the song was part of her ongoing hom­age to the man whom she perceived to have changed her life.

Nico continued to show her support for Philippe Garrel by using stills from their newest collaboration, Les Hautes Solitudes, on both the front and back cover of her LP. Once The End was released in autumn 1974, the reviews began rolling in. Reactions were not unlike those received for her two previous albums; journalists were confused, horrified or downright disturbed by Nico’s newest offer­ing. One writer called her rendition of ‘The End’ ‘far scarier than The Doors’ original’; another penned, ‘It’s her interpretation of Jim Morrison’s “The End” that really chills to the marrow, that song’s “Oedipus” sequence being sufficiently visual to be scary as hell’; while Creem contributor Richard Cromelin noted, ‘If Morrison sang it as a lizard, Nico is a sightless bird, lost but ever so calm, somehow knowing the right direction. She is the pure, dead mar­ble of a ruined Acropolis, a crumbling column on the subterra­nean bank of Morrison’s River Styx.’ Many writers were put off by Nico having the audacity to take on the Jim Morrison classic, showing a special kind of misogyny in their comments. One jour­nalist argued that ‘The End is full of these confused, purposeless characters – each, with the possible exception of Manzanera, expert at that throw-so-much-crap-at-the-wall-and-some-of-it-is-bound-to-stick technique. This time, for me, it doesn’t. This time we’ve got a fair smattering of the proven Nico “weirdness” formula as tried and tested on “The Marble Index” and “Desertshore” and a new “Sing-alonanico” approach where the Ice Maiden, the first of the meta-groupies, takes on … Jim Morrison’s “The End.”’ Even the marketing material played on the dark nature of the record’s con­tent, with advertisements featuring the tagline ‘Why Waste Time Committing Suicide When You Could Buy This Album?’

Equally controversial was her inclusion of the German national anthem. It is likely Nico chose it as both a tongue-in-cheek gesture and an indictment of her home country. Yet these two ideas were often lost on reviewers and audiences alike. Music journalist Peter Hogan called the track ‘truly chilling’, noting that ‘though probably intended as camp cabaret … today [it is] just plain sinister … as it turned out, this wasn’t the end, but maybe it should have been’. At a Berlin gig, Nico’s rendition of the song – complete with passages that had been banned after 1945 on account of their Nazi associ­ations20 – induced a riot. ‘[Brian] Eno making air-raid noises on his synth, Cale pounding his piano, Nico intoning “Deutschland über alles”, cushions flying – it was quite something,’ Williams later said of the gig.

Besides the press’s view of The End as both contentious and completely different to anything else, Nico’s changing appear­ance shocked journalists, who seemed to take joy in critiquing her look. Their commentary frames her as a 1970s version of Miss Havisham, a Dickensian character who is rotting away within her own house-turned-mausoleum. ‘The very high priestess of Weird sips whisky backed by six tall candles and a gold crucifix,’ notes Steve Lake in Melody Maker. ‘They don’t come much more Gothic than Nico,’ adds Peter Hogan in a different review. ‘The wailing ­harmonium, the vampire-priestess voice (like cold marble and cobweb-covered crystal), the chiselled beauty turning to decay, the solemnly intoned tales of madness, desperation and death: her whole act is like Brecht and Weill crossed with Edgar Allan Poe.’

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One day while out at lunch with John Cale and Kevin Ayers, Richard Williams had an idea. What about putting a bunch of Island art­ists – in this case, Brian Eno, Cale, Ayers and Nico – together in a showcase concert and recording the whole thing? The idea came to fruition at the Rainbow Hall in London on 1 June 1974. The LP of the concert – referred to as the ‘ACNE’ album (an acronym of the participants’ names) – was released in a then miraculously fast three weeks, with only one Nico track, ‘The End’, making the final record. Cale, Eno and Ayers all join her on the song, as well as Ayers’s former Soft Machine bandmate Robert Wyatt and Mike Oldfield, fresh from his global success with Tubular Bells.

Journalists did not hesitate to describe Nico in derogatory terms, many of which framed her as a spaced-out freak. For example, though a Melody Maker piece concedes that Nico’s performance style is ‘fascinating to watch’, this is a point-and-stare situation, as ‘her facial contortions and sudden switches of expression [are] often alarming’. The journalist goes on to claim that ‘attempting to actually communicate with her is at times like trying to make contact with an autistic child … Much of the time she seems dis­tant, as though troubled by some half-remembered dream. Often she doesn’t appear to hear the question asked or will counter one question with another.’

For Nico, the ACNE show was ‘very convenient for a certain promotion of a certain album’ – most likely meaning the actual ACNE LP itself. But Nico was no fool; she realized that the tour de force of musicians at the 1 June gig would provide a needed boost of awareness to her own endeavours. She did not like the way that the ACNE LP turned out. Though she never said so, this may have been because only one of her songs featured on it. Publicly, she renounced the production and admitted going along with other people’s plans instead of guiding her own career. In an interview with Melody Maker, she said, ‘I thought it [the LP] was very badly mixed. Going backwards and forwards and together. It sounds like fake Arab music. I was disappointed by the record and the concert. I said to John and Eno that we should not do the show at all. We did not even get a proper appearance, just drifted in and out … I don’t want to put anybody down … but just because we are all on the same record label doesn’t mean that we will accept anything … At the moment I am just being drawn into other people’s happen­ings. I am not doing what I want to do.’

Though Ayers had released an unflattering portrait of Nico via his song ‘Decadence’ the previous year, she agreed to supply guest vocals on a track for his fifth studio album, The Confessions of Dr Dream and Other Stories. However, neither of them was happy with the final version of the song, the hauntingly named ‘Irreversible Neural Damage’. ‘When I sang on that song, “Irreversible Neural Damage,” it was a misconception,’ Nico later confided. ‘I don’t like what they did to it. I don’t think Kevin’s happy with it. It should have been just straightforward, like two children singing together.’ Her appeal to Ayers, Nico contended, was a result of him being ‘very taken with what I’m doing, and the idea of being German. You see, he is kind of attracted to Marlene Dietrich.’

For his part, Ayers once again sounded like a disappointed schoolboy with an unrequited crush, commenting, ‘Nico is a woman you can only use for specific things, her voice and presence. I could certainly use her again, work with her on something. I don’t know if she’d ever want to use me on anything. I doubt it. But mak­ing something together, an album, I don’t think that’s possible. We fight too much.’ Nico does get some revenge on Ayers in the Melody Maker piece. When asked if she liked performing with Eno, Nico aligns herself with the synth player, answering, ‘Oh yes … a lot. He’s great, incredibly talented. But don’t even speak of that terrible concert. I should never have agreed to do it. Because I don’t enjoy Kevin’s kind of music – it escapes me completely … Kevin’s music is just fooling around.’

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Nico and Philippe Garrel’s latest collaboration was first screened in December 1974. Called Les Hautes Solitudes (‘The Outer Reaches of Solitude’), the film was shot in black and white and featured no script, no subtitles – just silence. Summarized as a ‘biographical film about Jean Seberg, loosely based on Nietzsche’s Anti-Christ’, upon release the movie received the same sort of sniggering condes­cension as the previous pieces. In a Melody Maker interview, the tone of withering delusion cast upon Nico is palpable. Her deadpan sense of humour and dry delivery are not considered, her comments being taken, and reported, as straight facts: ‘Much of Nico’s time of late has been spent in planning what she describes as “The Perfect Picture” in conjunction with film-maker Philip Garel. “Philip is doing everything possible to make himself a pile of ashes,” she says somewhat enigmatically. And Nico’s contribution to this piece of celluloid? “Lyrics, sound and my acting ability. I play the role of a person that’s opposed to female emancipation.”’

In her diary, Nico reflects on the way she is perceived by ­others, providing a contrast to – and perhaps an explanation for – her interview commentary: ‘I don’t want to be anybody’s Talisman. Would you ever wish to be, would you ever hope to be, when all the Politics are mistaken.’ She is clearly aware of how the press is pos­itioning her – as a faded, out-of-touch loony – begging the question of why would she want to give revealing interviews to those who had already made up their mind about her, having placed her as the ‘talisman’ for junkie disaster? When Nico does refer to her drug use in her diary, it is always matter-of-fact; she does not glamorize her addiction, though the press often allude to it as being part of her appeal to a certain type of fan. Her answers in the media often show her dry humour and perhaps the same wind-up-merchant exasper­ation that is illustrated by her inclusion on The End of ‘Das Lied der Deutschen’, as a means of holding a mirror up to the very press and public who were so quick to ridicule and judge her.