Chapter 39 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

James Young was a handsome, fair-haired scholar, about to start his Master of Philosophy degree at Jesus College, Oxford University,4 in November 1981, when he received two unexpected visitors who would change the course of his life. ‘There was a knock at my door and I opened it and there was my old friend Alan Wise and a German lady with him.’ Young did not recognize the singer. ‘Big woman … strange eyes. And he [Wise] introduced me and said, “This is Nico. A friend of mine.” The name rang a bell … but didn’t, you know …’ She looked very different to the blonde vis­age Young was familiar with from the 1960s. ‘Nico, yeah. I’d heard the Velvet Underground, of course: “All Tomorrow’s Parties”. This Nico was different. She was not the beautiful blonde in front of the Velvet Underground; she had dark brown hair, she looked kind of tired and a little bit unhappy. Straight away she wanted to use the bathroom. I had no idea what was going on and she was a very long time in there.’

Young became concerned when his guest did not emerge from the loo for over half an hour. ‘I said, “What’s going on?” and my friend said, “This is NICO … you know, from the Velvet Underground.” “Ah, right!” It all made sense then. Then I knew why she was in the toilet for so long. After some time she reappeared, looking a lot bet­ter, looking fresher,’ Young said. ‘She’d colonized the bathroom and then the next thing she wanted to do was take over my kitchen. She carried this saddle bag with her and she’d produced a bag of dried lentils. She then proceeded to give me instructions on how to make good lentil soup. I remember her being quite cross that I didn’t have the right spices. She made her lentil soup and that was a good lesson. And then in her typical Nico way, she took over my life.’ As Young later said, ‘It was the end of my academic life and into something else. Into a time tunnel, from which I never emerged.’

Young found himself drafted by Wise into being Nico’s pianist, and eventually her arranger. The well-mannered academic became part of the motley crew making up Nico’s backing band, a group he described as consisting of ‘a swing jazz be-bop drummer, a kind of a guitar hero playing Pete Townshend, leaping around … a smacked-out bass player and a college boy playing piano [describing him­self]’. Yet in Young, Nico found both a creative collaborator and an accidental biographer. ‘You did have to force her to be creative, but she could do it,’ says Phil Rainford. ‘She would pull it out of the bag, but Jim [Young] did most of the music. That’s when Jim would come in. Jim would write nearly all the music for the stuff and never got credited, which was a rip-off.’ In 1992, Young wrote a memoir of his years working with the singer, the by turns hilarious, snarky and sad Songs They Never Play on the Radio. In Nico: Icon, he con­fides, ‘[I decided to write the book about Nico] for money. And I wanted to celebrate an aspect of my life and other people’s lives that [doesn’t] normally get much attention in rock literature: Failure.’

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In Manchester, Nico began to open up and develop real relation­ships. ‘The thing about myths and about mythologizing people is that actually you don’t get the real person behind it,’ says Rainford. ‘You don’t get that very sad, broken, lonely woman that we first met. We did grow to really love her and feel protective of her. She was just a human like anybody else. She had all the failings of everybody, like you and I have. People forget that. She found within Manchester people that did care about her and were friends with her. I don’t know if she actually ever had friends before, to be truthful.’

Having authentic relationships did not come easily to Nico. ‘There was a sense of a really solid identity of “I’m Nico,”’ says Young. ‘Whoever this personality was, whether it was Christa or Nico or whoever the fuck it was, it was that sense of self-assuredness. She’s not pretending to be somebody else; she’s not trying to blend with other people. You accept her, that’s why most people felt uncom­fortable with her, or guys were afraid of her, because she would not adapt. Her identity was very secure. Which also made it hard for her to make friends.’

Phil Jones describes Nico as being ‘very funny … You could have a real laugh with Nico because she got jokes and used to love people telling her proper jokes,’ he notes. ‘She often didn’t get them straight away, though. She used to like English sarcasm.’

Nico did not have many possessions; she never even had copies of her own records. Everything she owned fitted into a large holdall. ‘She had few clothes,’ recounts Rainford. ‘You know how women have huge handbags so you could go live abroad for a year? Well, she had one of them. This handbag had its own eco-culture in it. It was so big and had so much stuff in it. She had not much more than the clothes on her back and whatever was in this handbag and the harmonium. She didn’t have a wardrobe or a suitcase. In the few places that I’ve seen where she’s lived, she didn’t have dresses or a rack of clothes.’ ‘Everything was in a big leather holdall – her whole world,’ Spider Mike King concurs.

While Rainford was shocked by such minimalism, he quickly learned that such an existence was not new for the singer. ‘As I got to know her over the years, I began to realize she’d lived like that for a very long time. After the war, she described to me how they lived in one room in the basement of a bombed-out house, as everybody in Germany was doing at the time. She was a really successful model in her younger years, and they just moved from one place to the next doing the catwalk shows, staying in hotels. I think that’s what she was used to. She wasn’t materialistic in the sense that she liked a lot of possessions or anything. She was very happy in one room. She very rarely came out of the room.

‘She used to have a couple of silk scarves, and whatever room she went into – whether it be in a hotel or at mine or at Al’s – she’d put one of these scarves over the lamp and light a few candles. She was very happy watching telly. She liked cartoons: Bugs Bunny and things like that. Mine and her favourite were the coyote one, Road Runner! We used to sit giggling at that. She also liked a show called Your Life in Their Hands, where they would actually film a surgeon doing a live operation. They’d do things like lung trans­plants or heart transplants or operations to remove a cancerous ball from somebody’s stomach. We were both quite fascinated by it. We would watch that, usually in her room or in my room, depending on where we were.’

For the most part, Nico liked to stay at home when not perform­ing. ‘You had to force her to go and socialize,’ says Rainford. ‘Once she got out there, she would sit in the corner of the room and hold court. I used to think, “Is she really dumb, or does she just not say very much?” She wasn’t dumb, obviously, because she could speak lots of languages. You wouldn’t have her on a chat show as the enter­tainment. I think she just wasn’t that socially adept. It’s quite often a thing: you hear of somebody being enigmatic; actually, when you meet them, they’re just quite boring, nothing to say. With Nico, I quite liked the silence. We could just sit there having fags and a beer and not say anything. I quite liked it; as much as I’m a talker, I also quite like sitting with somebody and being silent.’

Phil Jones, who attended the opening of legendary Manchester nightclub the Hacienda with Nico in May 1982, recalls a similar homebody. ‘We went to her house, and it stank of the patchouli oil she used to wear and all the incense she would burn. She was always in bed. It would always take ages to get her out of places. If we were going somewhere for a night out, she’d be up and ready; but if we were going to get her for a gig, she’d still be in bed whether it was 7.30 a.m. or 5.30 p.m. She didn’t walk around town. Wise used to drive her everywhere.’

Though she had been both a sex symbol and a fashion icon two decades earlier, Jones saw no evidence of either during Nico’s time in Manchester. ‘She never wore heels, always those flat biker boots. I never saw her in anything else. She was almost six feet tall, but she was broad from the top. She always wore big clothes, never let any of her femininity out. She was very unfeminine.’ Young concurs, saying, ‘She was almost proud that her teeth were rotten, her hair was grey. Her skin was bad; she had needle tracks all over. I mean, she liked that … it was her aesthetic.’ Her fellow former Factory Superstar Mary Woronov even wrote in her autobiography that she was ‘shocked to see Nico’s teeth were rotting away’ when the actress went to the singer’s gig at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles.5

Manchester friends and colleagues sensed that Nico was tired of her looks being her most talked-about attribute, yet she did not see herself as any sort of trailblazer. ‘I don’t think she’d have labelled herself a feminist because she hated any form of ideology,’ says Una Baines. ‘She did say her only regret was not being born a man. I think she wanted the same privileges and power that men have. She felt people were only interested in her looks. She wanted some­thing more substantial. She wrote songs in her second language. She was fluent in seven. The song “No One Is There” was about [US President Richard] Nixon. It’s superbly written. She is still not appreciated for her talent.’ Young agrees, saying, ‘She concluded that taking heroin and wearing black clothes was a renunciation of the world, almost like a nun would do, so she could concentrate on being an artist. Black on black, motorcycle boots, pre-goth, badass.’

Though having had relationships with some of the biggest icons of the twentieth century, during the 1980s Nico did not partake in romantic affairs for the most part. ‘She was not a sexual being,’ Young says. ‘Certainly, I hear stories about when she knew Iggy and those times, but she was very prudish with us. She was quite disap­proving of sexy talk. She would tut us when she thought we were being inappropriate. Fucking hell, there she is shooting up and she’s telling me! Boys’ talk – she didn’t like that kind of thing. Then she would suddenly come out with these things. It would suddenly pop out, and there’d be silence in the van. [does impression of Nico] “You know I prefer it the Turkish way [anal sex].”’

Spider Mike shares similar memories. ‘All the time I knew her, I only ever saw her with one man,’ he recalls. ‘It was on the American tour, with a roadie that we had from New York. He was recovering from a heroin addiction. He had a sponsor or a mentor. All the time we were on the road, he was making phone calls back to New York to this person, because he was trying to keep off heroin. But Nico got her claws into him, straightaway.

‘By the time we hit San Francisco, which was about a week after the tour started, he was sharing her bed. And she got him back onto the junk as well. She was mercenary in a lot of respects, and that mercenary aspect of her was part of her survival instinct. She’d pick and choose who she wanted to be with and where she wanted to go. And she lived that kind of free bohemian life. I’ve never seen her in a relationship with anybody, except that one-off,’ Spider says. ‘She isolated herself, cocooned herself within herself. She wasn’t extroverted, she wasn’t making friends easily, but she chose who her friends would be very carefully. It was partially her natural person­ality, partially the heroin – and it was a nightmare if she couldn’t get heroin.’

Scoring heroin, by any means possible, was a top priority. The mood on the road depended entirely on whether Nico had been able to use that day. Always having the drug on hand became of par­amount importance. ‘We got a certain amount of heroin into the States in the harmonium,’ Spider Mike tells me. ‘It ran out about halfway through [the tour]. It was a nightmare, trying to get her stuff, total drama. If she had her scag, she was fine. She actually believed it kept her younger. I don’t know if she ever ate. She’d perform great – fantastic, charismatic performer. She was fine with heroin, absolutely fine. But if she didn’t get her heroin, she’d start drinking; if she was drinking, she was absolutely useless when she got on stage.’

Alcohol caused many problems at the shows, from lyrics being sang incorrectly to Nico’s ever-escalating erratic behaviour. ‘She’d forget the words, she’d be staggering around, her eyes would be bloodshot – it was the worst thing,’ Spider Mike recalls. The entou­rage would do anything to prevent this happening, as Nico drunk was horrible to behold. ‘Everybody would be mad-panicking to try and score some scag, because we knew what the alternative was going to be. It was best if she junked up [chuckles]. But she was never really high, just maintaining, and she never looked like she was high.’

Nico’s ability to use great quantities of opiates without them seeming to have any outward effect on her shocked the guitarist. ‘In the afternoon before we played the Naples gig, we went for a soundcheck,’ says Spider Mike. ‘There were two junkies in the band besides Nico. There were compartments at the back of the stage – cubicles that were curtained off, makeshift little dressing rooms – and they were sat in one of these cubicles. I looked in. On this little table in front of the mirror I saw an English newspaper. I thought, “Oh, great!” They screamed, “Aaaagh – what yer doin?” Inadvertently, I’d picked up the newspaper upon which they’d put the heroin that they’d just bought on the streets of Naples! I was, “Oh, sorry, mate … sorry about that.” They’re scraping around on the floor, trying to get whatever bits they could recover. About an hour later, one of them was in the emergency ward of the Naples hospital, fighting for his life because this junk that they’d bought was fucking shit. If they’d had more of that junk, they’d both be dead. But they got some for Nico, and she was fine! Her tolerance was astounding.’

Blue Orchids guitarist Martin Bramah highlighted some of the challenges of travelling with Nico, as tours often revolved around scoring drugs for the singer. ‘When we were on the road, there was a lot of waiting around unsavoury parts of town – she would post letters full of heroin to herself at the next hotel – whereas in Manchester, she had a dealer.’

Rainford also has stories of sketchy characters and heroin being delivered via the mail. ‘I’d been thrown in the deep end. I’d never done any sound before in my life. Driver-cum-soundman. We used to have this guy [whom Wise had found] called Baggers. We were doing a tour of Europe, and I’m going to Al, “What are we going to do about the heroin?” “Don’t worry,” say Al and Baggers. “We’re just posting it to the hotel, there’ll be some stuff there.” Sure enough, that worked for a few of the gigs. Then we got to Scandinavia. We got to this hotel and there was no heroin. No letters. The guy on the reception said, “No, it has arrived,” and he was blackmailing us. Baggers paid him some money to get the heroin, but then the guy said, “No, I’ve sold it.” One of the things I’ve always admired about Nico is that even when she was really sick because she’d run out of heroin, she still went on and did the gig. They weren’t great shows, but she went on and did it.’

Even though Una Baines respected and admired Nico, the drugs were ultimately one of the reasons the Orchids decided to stop work­ing with her. ‘We had an experience going through customs after a tour of Holland. Nico OD’d, and they radioed ahead and searched everybody, with sniffer dogs and everything. All me and Martin [Bramah] had was a bit of grass in a pipe, which we threw in the sea before we got back! We knew where she kept her syringes – in her Marlboro packet. We didn’t know where she’d hid her drugs, but … She was as cool as a cucumber. They didn’t find anything, and when we got through, we went to the nearest pub, and Nico said [adopts a deep German voice], “Did you see how I hypnotized the dog?” They searched her clothes and everything and they couldn’t find anything. She’s seasoned – she’s gone through this many times before. I thought, “I can’t go through this, I’ve got a baby at home.”’

Despite these issues, Nico would always ultimately deliver what was needed. ‘She’d write bits of poems on a fag packet and stuff like that,’ recalls Phil Rainford. ‘She would come up with them in the end, with what were really quite deep and profound lyrics. She was really soaked in mid-European mythology. A lot of her lyrics were things she read as a child or as a teenager in Germany. Quite often these deep and meaningful lyrics, or deep and translatable lyrics, were based on the myths of Germany. The myths of mid-Europe.’

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After making many movies with Philippe Garrel, sometime in 1982 Nico decided to work with another director. It is unclear if there was a specific incident that caused a rupture between Garrel or Nico, or if the opportunity to do a film with someone else just came along. Either way, Nico being in a movie made by anyone else but Garrel created a definitive break between her and the film-maker, after more than a decade of on and off co-habitation, col­laboration and shared addiction. The new project was as esoteric as any Garrel film, the new director – the Spaniard Joaquín Lledó – as art-house-friendly as her previous collaborators. The resulting sixty-­five-minute-long drama, La Vraie Histoire de Gérard Lechômeur (‘The True Story of Gérard Lechômeur’), reunited Nico with her Inner Scar co-star Pierre Clémenti. The vague plot outline revolves around workers being hanged during a strike at a steel mill. Nico is cast as the heroine, an ‘ideal anarchist’. Another light-hearted rom-com it was not.