Chapter 34 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

I am a pagan. But I am religious too. I guess religion also exists in a ­pagan, like pagan exists in religion, because it was there first.

Nico                      

I was in fashion too long. Every year or so, something else is fashionable, I like to be an innovator.

Nico                      

In 1975, two young British teens, Steven Bailey and Susan Ballion, met at a Roxy Music show in London. Glam rock was fading out, and there was a void for music that reflected the frustration and lives of young people. In the UK, punk rock soon filled the chasm, with the Sex Pistols leading the charge most visibly. The band were notorious for causing controversy and grabbing headlines with their foul mouths and rebellious attitude towards conventional British norms. Ballion and Bailey started following the group. Inspired by the Pistols’ lack of any traditional prowess on musical instruments, and possessing the chutzpah but not necessarily the virtuoso skills to get up on a stage and perform in front of an audience, the duo, having rechristened themselves Siouxsie Sioux and Steve Severin, decided to form their own group. At the same time, another band dropped out of the upcoming 100 Club Punk Festival, giving Sioux the opportunity to approach Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren and suggest she and Severin should fill the spot. McLaren agreed. Though having no other musicians and no band name, the two quickly recruited some friends to create a line-up (including Sid Vicious on drums), and on 20 September 1976 they performed a twenty-minute set – consisting mostly of an improvised interpret­ation of ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ – as Siousxie and the Banshees.

Though Severin and Sioux had viewed the gig as a one-off, they soon found themselves being asked to perform at other shows. They quickly found a permanent drummer and guitarist, and by November 1977 were appearing on Tony Wilson’s So It Goes, on Manchester’s Granada TV. The following month, they recorded a session for John Peel’s BBC radio show and were featured as the cover stars of the UK weekly music magazine Sounds.

By early 1978, the band was selling out venues in London. Sioux’s lyrics, make-up and clothing, crossed with the desolate musicality of the Banshees, created an aesthetic that up until now had rarely been heard or seen in pop music. For Sioux, Nico was the foundation of her inspiration. She often cited the German singer as an influence, from her vocal stylings to her pronunciations. ‘Nico had an other-­worldly character which was enhanced by the choral quality of the organ she used,’ Sioux said. ‘I was struck by the pictures on the records, how beautiful she was. It was the first time I’d heard such a deep voice and that made an impression on me. She was a mature dark angel.’ Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro echoes this sen­timent, having been ‘a huge Banshees fan’, and can similarly trace his own musical education back to both women. ‘I know Siouxsie was a huge Nico fan; you can hear it in her voice. That low, overly mixed sound, where the vocals are a little bit too loud in the mix, but it’s good,’ he asserts. ‘When you have a singer like that, some­one who has so much personality, you want to capture as much of it as you can, so you crank that shit up. I had a small love affair with her [Nico] that she’s unaware of.’ Nico’s trailblazing music, Navarro argues, created an opportunity for artists like Sioux to experience more mainstream success, by providing a blueprint for the explor­ation of unconventional subjects and singing styles. Looking at the album charts from 1978, this is true. In the UK, there were a few other off-centre artists making a dent in the male-dominated mar­ket, with Kate Bush, Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Patti Smith all appearing in the bottom half of the top 100 of that year. In the US, though, it was a bleak landscape for anything other than the omnipresent disco and classic and adult-oriented rock (AOR). ‘She [Nico] opened the door for a lot of singers who had an unusual take, a darkness to them. People were discovering that they were identifying to those feelings and emotions. Even if you’re not lyr­ically following along, there’s a sentiment – a melancholy – that goes along with just the sonic part alone that can take you into a different space,’ Navarro tells me. ‘Some days you can get lost in the story; some days you can get lost in your own head; some days you can reflect on morbid past experiences; and other days you can have hope for the future. That’s the beauty of music. Whatever frame of mind you’re in dictates how you hear the song at that time.’

It was not just her albums that made Nico distinctive; it was the entire package, ‘the way she presented herself, all black clothing’, says Mark Lanegan. ‘I read something by someone who a lot of people give credit to as the first goth musician. I think it was Peter Murphy [it was]. He said, “Nico was Mary Shelley Gothic; every­one else was Hammer Horror movie Gothic.”’

By April 1978, with punk rock now entrenched in the rhetoric and culture of the disenfranchised youth, two of the movement’s original architects, John Cale and Lou Reed, toured the UK separ­ately, heralded as heroes. Soon Nico managed to land some gigs, as venues and promoters assumed the songstress would be met with a similar reception to that of her former Velvets bandmates. They arranged for her to open for several buzz bands of the moment, including the Adverts, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Cabaret Voltaire, in what was sure to be a hugely successful combination of punk forefathers and post-punk provocateurs.

First up was Nico playing with the Adverts and the Killjoys at the Music Machine in Camden, London, on 28 April. Among those present was Peter Clarke – otherwise known as Budgie, the drum­mer for the Banshees. We exchanged several emails in which he told me about the shows with Nico. ‘Amidst those awed by her returning presence lurched the kind of pug-ugly bottle-throwing punks,’ he recalled, as Nico sat ‘alone on stage with her harmonium and voice’, before being ‘forced to beat an undignified retreat as her perform­ance was punctured by flying cans and glasses’. Journalist Kris Needs was also in attendance, writing later in ZigZag, ‘They threw glasses at Nico when she played her first British gig in nearly four years at the Music Machine. For her, it must have been a striking contrast to the blissed-out hippies in deck-chairs who rippled apa­thetically at her last London performance; supporting Kevin Ayers at a Hyde Park free concert.’ Needs was a Nico fan and saw the gig as both a musical triumph for her and a bewildering indictment of the burgeoning post-punk scene, noting, ‘The annoying thing was [that] the Music Machine gig was a success. She went down a storm, with Nico-lytes coming from as far as Scotland. It’s just the punky morons who left any sour taste, probably plucking up the guts to throw glasses at the single female sitting onstage.’ Needs notes Nico’s incredible bravery throughout the whole experience, saying, ‘No one else could have held a crowd like that with so little … Of course it’s easy to criticise Nico and some did. But what she’s doing isn’t easy. It’s unique and strange. And deceptively melodic. She is unpredictable, erratic, a law to herself.’

Undeterred by the horrendous reception she had received in London, Nico soldiered on to play with the Banshees that September. The band had just crossed over from the punk under­ground to the charts, with their debut single, ‘Hong Kong Garden’, scoring a UK top 10 slot. With their success came a less anarchist, more conservative fan. Severin summed up the punters, saying that they were all confronted with a crowd ‘who had never been to a Punk concert before. Nico was the last thing they expected to hear.’ Once again, the hapless chanteuse was pelted with rude epithets and bottles. She finally left the tour in Cardiff. Giving a death stare to the audience as she prepared to walk off the stage, she pulled her­self to her full near six foot height and said, over the ranting crowd, ‘If I had a machine gun, I would shoot you all.’

As this unfolded, a horrified Budgie sat backstage, disgusted by what he saw. ‘I stood on the stage at Hemel Hempstead Pavilion and watched her sitting alone and bewildered as these Neanderthal cowards pelted this lone woman with abuse, missiles and phlegm. She fled the stage in tears and the Banshees, enormous fans who were trying to help her, were incensed.’ While this sort of experi­ence may have been so traumatizing as to make other artists never want to perform in public again, Nico was fearless. Just a few weeks after the Cardiff show, she was booked again at the Music Machine, this time with experimental electronic band Cabaret Voltaire, the Pop Group and Linton Kwesi Johnson. ‘It was probably one of the best line-ups I’ve ever been on,’ Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire tells me over a cup of coffee in Brighton. ‘Nico created a small explosion in the hinterlands of culture.’

Regardless of how bad her drug addiction had become, Nico never missed a show. Cosey Fanni Tutti recalled attending a gig and watching a clearly smack-sick Nico attempt to perform: ‘We went to meet her at the Marquee. She was in a really bad place. The drugs had taken their toll on her. We went backstage to meet her, but she was totally out of it. Because she had to go on stage any minute, we thought we’d catch up with her afterwards. We just said, “Hello,” but she was nowhere. Then she went on stage and she had one of those moments where she starts and then drifts and then stops and then has to start again. I think it was about three times that she sort of started and drifted off and stopped again and started again before she got going. The audience weren’t very kind to her at all. I was so upset by that. Nobody’s taking any notice of her struggle! The bands backstage were just drinking and ignoring her. I thought, “Do they not know what she is? What status she has here?”’

At the end of 1978, Nico played a gig in Paris. It was notable because it was here that she met Corsicans Philippe Quilichini and Antoine Giacomoni. The pair made a striking duo. Quilichini was a white-reggae bassist, while his friend Giacomoni was a young, attractive, gay photographer. Both were taken with the singer and pledged to find an opportunity to collaborate together. Giacomoni even charmed a hesitant Nico into posing for a series of photo­graphs,24 most famously featuring her posed in a graveyard. But new friends were not enough to make her stay in Europe. Lutz Graf-Ulbrich had decided to go back to New York to pursue his music career. With no other options presenting themselves, Nico followed him. ‘I winced because that meant I’d have to pay for her ticket as usual,’ he recalls. ‘She said, “Don’t worry. After two weeks there I’ll have a gig and everything will be all right.”’ On the plane ride from London back to the East Coast, Nico was told that Sid Vicious had died of a heroin overdose. She had got to know him through Siouxsie and the Banshees and had been contemplating getting him to play bass on her next album. The news upset her. She had lost another friend, one she felt close to, as the deceased punk had also spent time at the Chelsea and had an all-encompassing drug problem. ‘She was really shocked,’ Graf-Ulbrich recalled.

Soon after landing and getting settled back in the hotel, Nico connected with Jane Friedman. Friedman was managing John Cale, and she took the newly arrived Nico under her wing, booking her to play with her former bandmate at the hot club in Manhattan, CBGB.25 The venue, which had originally opened in 1973 as a dive bar, had recently become the place for the emerging punk and new wave scene, with bands like Talking Heads, the Ramones and Blondie all using it as a launch pad for wider mainstream success. The gig was announced in the Village Voice and tickets sold out within two hours of going on sale. With a few weeks to go until the 19 February show, practice commenced, with Cale bringing his viola to the Chelsea. Even their old friend Andy Warhol was excited about the mini-Velvets reunion. After seeing the singer backstage at a Clash gig two nights before she made her New York return in Cale’s show, Warhol wrote in his diary, ‘… we got backstage there was Nico! With John Cale! And she looks beautiful again, abso­lutely beautiful, she’s finally thin in the face.’

The night of the gig, the whole entourage was forced to take a public bus to get to CBGB, as heavy snow had made it impossible for cabs to navigate the streets. Graf-Ulbrich was not impressed by the neighbourhood that the club was located in, saying, ‘The area around the CBGB was not the finest. There were bums all over the place and the houses were looking rather desolate.’ The soundcheck was rocky, with Nico having problems remembering the start of a song. Unable to read music, she depended solely on touch and sound to find her way around the harmonium keyboard, but this technique was failing her, as ‘She tried with both hands on her key­board, but bass-line and melody just would not come together,’ Graf-Ulbrich remembered.

Nico harboured resentment at being what she perceived as the warm-up for Cale’s main event. She would often have several drinks before gigs, and the CBGB show was no different. The pre-­performance pints were followed by alcohol ordered from the stage during her turn. By the time she came off stage, after several encores, Nico was fairly drunk, bordering on incoherent. Unfortunately, this was when Friedman asked her if she would be okay to play the second of the two performances scheduled for the night. Nico was not aware of the additional engagement and was not pleased with this news. She told Friedman, ‘No one has told me about two shows. The fee is much too low for that. No way!’ Somehow, amidst much crying and shouting, Graf-Ulbrich and Friedman got Nico back onto the stage for round two. Graf-Ulbrich recalled the night, saying, ‘The audi­ence welcomed her with a huge applause and she began singing. She was still so upset that her long notes turned into long sobs, although she kept trying to get herself under control. The concert was about to become a disaster. The audience laughed, cheered, booed and encouraged her. In the middle of a song she stopped and shouted all her rage into the mike: “Nobody told me that there would be two shows. I am sick of being the Opening Act of Mister John Cale! The money they pay me is not enough for two shows anyway!” And she left the stage right away, leaving behind a stunned audience.’

Cale and his band took to the stage, but Nico was far from calmed down. Once Cale had finished and the crowd was dispersing, she exploded. She could become violent and unpredictable when she was mixing alcohol and methadone. Graf-Ulbrich remembered, ‘She screamed, ran from table to table and pushed down the chairs which had been put on the tables to clean up the hall. She asked for the owner, to beat him up. Nobody could stop her. Several security guys tried to calm her down, but they all were scared, because Nico really got going and seemed uncontrollable.’

Despite her atrocious outburst, Friedman still managed to book Nico three nights back at CBGB, from 8 to 10 March. These were heralded as her official comeback shows. Not having to share the spotlight with anyone else, Nico was on fine form, even shouting down a disorderly audience member, as captured on a bootleg:

Nico: This is a song from my album that has not been released.

Heckler: Yeah!

Nico: Some of you people seem to be pretty drunk. Well, so am I.

Heckler: We wanna hear some rock’n’roll!

Nico: You shouldn’t have come to see me then.

Heckler: Funky. Get funky, baby. Yer funky but chic!

Nico: I don’t think I want to continue unless some people shut up.

Heckler: Why don’t you get off?

Nico: Oh shut up, will you? If you have anything to say, go out of here, get out of here, will you?

Heckler: Can’t we talk?

Nico: No, you can’t, damn it!

Off the back of the successful CBGB shows, Cale forgave Nico’s outburst, bringing her along to play further gigs with him. By this time, Joe Bidewell was performing in Cale’s band, which was known as Sabotage. ‘Nico joined that outfit for a brief period and just did dates with us,’ says Bidewell. ‘We hit it off from the very beginning. I thought she exuded a lot of class. She wasn’t at a great spot in her life for a lot of reasons that are documented, but she always was a lady.’ Bidewell did several gigs with Nico and Cale, but one was a favourite. ‘A memorable gig was at the Mudd Club.26 Nico was playing by herself on the harmonium, and it was very dark. Just what you know Nico to be. At one point, people were making so much noise that she looked out into the audience and in her thick Germanic accent said, “Shut up, you little punk-heads!” The whole history of what she represented was lost on a lot of these club kids who had come to the Mudd Club simply because it was “the” place to go. They didn’t realize the gravity of the moment, because it was Nico! By herself on the harmonium, playing before the John Cale band … It was lost on them.’

Jim Tisdall also attended Nico’s first solo CBGB show. ‘She asked me why I had not brought my harp; apparently she expected me to be part of that concert. Later, when Lutz went back to Germany, she invited me to fill in at some gigs that she needed an accompanist for around NYC. Her vocal performance, full of irony and deep pain and anger, seemed to evoke the ghosts of all the victims of the murderous Nazi regime. It always gave me chills to be on stage with her then. It was musically interesting, emotionally honest, polit­ically brave and, in short, a real performance event.’

Sparked by the excellent press reaction to the initial CBGB show, a new set of Nico dates was put together, with Tisdall again in the mix. ‘In addition to accompanying her on almost all of her songs and playing solo between sets, I helped interact with the club man­agement, “counted the house” and got the show to start and end on time, got us to and from our lodgings, and [other] such typical details,’ recalls Tisdall.

It was not a glamorous affair. ‘The whole thing was on a budget – just a van between cities, and usually staying at someone’s house who was a fan or friend of the venue,’ he says. ‘These kind people were uniformly interesting and artistic, so they made the rigours of the tour much less exhausting and much more fun. The show was easy to set up – just two musicians requiring a few microphones. Nico would do a set, I’d do one to three numbers, and Nico would do a second set. The audience seemed to know her work pretty well and would often applaud a song they recognized just from the first few bars of musical introduction.

‘Backstage was sometimes just a little tense, as Nico would suffer a bit of the jitters before going on. But nothing extreme. Often we would have met some new friends, and they would be invited to spend time with us backstage, which helped keep the atmosphere friendly, relaxed and interesting. Usually, fans also would want to meet after the shows, so it was a nice social atmosphere.’

Despite the resurgence of interest in her career, drugs were still at the centre of Nico’s daily routine. Her dependency continued to impact on new as well as old relationships. She had added alco­hol to her nightly annihilations, further compounding her mood in  stability. ‘Drinking was one of her addictions,’ says Tisdall, ‘and addiction is torture. On the last night of the tour, in Cleveland, when we were surrounded by fans after the concert, Nico suddenly and very publicly accused me of having withheld money from her, of cheating her out of her earnings. This so outraged me that I announced then and there that I would take nothing for myself. I handed over my own earnings to her and I left, returning to NYC on my own. In retrospect, that was a young man’s dramatic reaction to having his honour impugned. I know she was having withdrawal symptoms at that point. At this distance in time, I don’t really hold it against her or take it personally.’

Tisdall also remembers the daily hunt for opiates, saying, ‘The hard part [of the tour] was Nico’s inability to reliably get the drugs – methadone especially – that she needed at that point to function at all well. To the outsider, opioid and alcohol addiction is a lot of unpleasant emotions and activities in pursuit of a dubious and potentially permanent rest. One hates to see the addict in such dire distress, and one cannot help but dislike the turmoil that comes with the addiction.’

In Please Kill Me, poet and musician Jim Carroll revealed his own run-in with Nico during a gig in San Francisco, most likely on the tour Tisdall played on. ‘I was at the Mabuhay Gardens, which was like the CBGB’s of San Francisco, and I was trying to hit on one of the girls in the Go-Go’s,’ said Carroll. ‘I had this really good coke, so I’m doling out some lines in the manager’s office, and we’re doing some and then all of a sudden Nico comes in. She sees the coke and says, “Is that cocaine?” Then she says, “Oh, you are Szhim Carroll. I read about you. You are so skinny. I am so fat.” She was really large and she looked pretty bad. I said, “You sounded great. Here, have some coke.” She was really thankful. She said, “Oh, this is very good cook.” I said, “Thanks. Coming from you that’s a real compliment.” It was that period when she was really on junk.’

Amidst the tour dates and the drugs, Nico still managed to shoot another movie with Philippe Garrel. The project began filming in 1978, with Nico enthusing about their newest collaboration across several press interviews. ‘This film is very special because it’s a revival of the first movie ever made: La Lumière,’ she told Kris Needs in June 1978’s ZigZag. ‘It’s a silent one. It’s amazing. I’m the lead role this time. It’s a very unusual film … When I stand on the roof of the opera it’s amazing I don’t fly off because it was such a wind, such a storm that it might just have taken me away with my cape. It was spreading out almost like Batman. If I had let it go … but I didn’t. I wrapped myself in it!’

The end product, titled Le Bleu des origines (‘The Blue of the Origins’), is a silent black-and-white piece, lasting forty-nine crack­ling minutes. Filmed on a hand-cranked camera, the movie has a decidedly and purposefully primitive look to it, harking back to the days of the first silent films. One synopsis summarizes the action: ‘At the top of a neo-classical building, a man looks at the sky, a woman reads, hair in the wind.’

Nico seemed to fluctuate in interviews between ambivalence and resentment towards Garrel. Her former stark enthusiasm and praise for the film-maker had evaporated, replaced by unmistake­able resentment and anger. ‘He’s being very good to himself but I couldn’t say that he’s being very good to myself. Because I could do better without him. I mean, he can not do better without me,’ she told Sounds in April 1978. Le Bleu des origines was the seventh and last film Nico and Garrel worked on together. It also marked the end of their off-screen, decade-long relationship.

*

While Nico was making movies, nursing her heroin addiction and trying to land a new recording contract, Ari, having now been legally adopted by the Boulogne family, was struggling to come to terms with his parentage. The taking on of his grandmother’s sur­name started a lifelong battle within the young man, as he tried to figure out who he was and where his allegiance lay.

Ari’s memories include one of Nico’s ‘legendary’ visits to Bourg-la-Reine, where the Boulognes lived. It illustrates the dilemma of a young man who wants to see and know the mother he has been taught to fear by his grandparents, who were most likely trying to shield the vulnerable boy from what they thought was a damaged woman. ‘I was busy doing my homework when she rang the famous door of Avenue du General Leclerc,’ he writes. ‘My grandfather walked along the long corridor leading to it from the house, he glanced behind the small shutter, closed it, did not open the door and, coming back to us, let it go: “It was Nico.” He went back to sit in tense silence. I had been unable to react. Subsequently, my grandparents surrounded their fortress with a pit of silence and invisibility and did not hesitate to make the same blow to her at a time when they had deprived her of any news of me.’

The young teen was caught in the middle of an unwinnable war between the mother he wanted to know and had been taught to fear and the proposed stability that Edith offered – uncertain, as it came with the baggage and rejection of his father, Alain Delon. He claims that his mother sent him letters, though his grandparents maintained they rarely, if ever, heard from the singer. In one piece of correspondence that Ari says he received, Nico tells him that she had known where he was for months and claims not to have known of his adoption. His grandparents put the adoption between them, reminding Ari of the stability they had provided. However, this had the opposite effect, instilling not comfort but further feel­ings of confusion and isolation within the boy. ‘I was beginning to be frightened … of the abyss of my abandonment,’ Ari writes. ‘According to them [the Boulognes], there was no other way out [than to be adopted]. I was overwhelmed: it was in my own “inter­est” to reject my mother.’

Meanwhile, Ari’s infrequent communications with Nico only fuelled his internal turmoil. Desperate for any form of solace, Ari began shooting up smack. ‘This bewitchment helped to blunt my resentment towards my mother,’ he reveals. ‘My obstinacy in dis­avowing it [heroin] vanished. The ritual of heroin addicts was then still new to me and exercised irresistible charm. The spell began with the attraction of the syringe itself, before the flash. The pleasure continued with … the proud contemplation of my dilated pupils in a mirror.’

Now seventeen years old, Ari finally reconnected with Nico. Most of the details involved are blurry, if they are even recalled. ‘I do not remember the sequences that led to our reunion,’ he says, though it happened in ‘the winter of 1979 … I found her in an apartment where Ernest Hemingway had lived.’ An entire childhood’s worth of questions, animosity and rejection lay within the young man. ‘What were our first words?’ he asks himself. ‘Have we talked about adoption? Did she tell me about all her vain attempts to talk to me on the phone or to see me? Have we together sought to understand what has happened to us? Or, on the contrary, did we instantly erase all this disorder in this complicit silence that enveloped us afterwards? Describing this moment is impossible. I just know that the dream reality became the reality.’ None of these issues were dis­cussed. Nico’s state, however, may have played a part in the lack of any airing of emotions. ‘My mother was “smashed”, and I was not shocked,’ Ari recalls. However, he, too, may have been high, as he notes: ‘No doubt I was myself.’ After all the years of hurt, loss, resentment and grief on both sides, heroin provided a shared field of experience and a source of bonding for the pair. ‘Without feeling the need to tell [each other] anything, we found ourselves on the same ground, somehow equal,’ Ari confides. ‘A child and a mother merged. Neither solemnity nor affectation nor drama. It was as if we had never left, as if we knew each other perfectly well. No verbal overload was necessary.’

In Nico: Icon, Lutz Graf-Ulbrich also remembers this poisonous sacrament between mother and son, saying, ‘She gave him heroin. You can only shake your head. I mean … what can you say to that? A mother giving her son heroin, I don’t understand that.’ While it does seem horrifying, it may also be understandable. Nico did not have much experience as a parent and was presented for the first time in over a decade with her child, who was almost a fully grown adult. The drug provided, as Ari astutely recognized, a mutual bond, without them having to dissect the tangled, complicated and messy emotional baggage, the very thing that had driven both of them independently to take up the substance in the first place. Graf-Ulbrich said that ‘Nico had told me that she got Ari hooked on smack. That’s why I recounted this in the film Nico: Icon and then this information was out in the world.’ Later, Ari told Graf-Ulbrich that someone other than his mother introduced him to the drug. However, the teen and his mother had a relationship that was bonded further by the use of opiates. Nico’s only child admitted to Graf-Ulbrich that he and his mother did use heroin together, often even sharing needles.