Chapter 42 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

If I was writing my book, I wouldn’t really spend much time on Nico. In my world, she didn’t loom that large. She was just a neighbour. Famous, so interesting because she was famous.

She was a bit of a casualty

John Torjusson                 

In 1984, Alan Wise decided it would be a good idea to rent a house in London. It would be a base for any shows in the capital and save Nico and the ever-changing entourage of musicians around her from having to drive the four hours it took to get to and from Manchester. Brixton was picked as the location, with the contingent moving into an imposing residence at 23 Effra Road. The landlady, Mrs Chin, was not made aware of the nefarious character of some of the artists and drug addicts that she had taken on as tenants. ‘I think Alan got the flat here because of the Fridge nightclub,’ asserts John Torjusson, referring to a venue nearby. Torjusson lived two houses down from Nico.

Brixton was still recovering from the well-publicized riots that occurred in the area in 1981. The largely Afro-Caribbean commu­nity had been deeply impacted by the recession and was suffering from high unemployment, poor housing and a higher-than-average crime rate, leading to serious economic and social issues. An on­­going combination of perceived lackadaisical policing in dealing with crimes against the black community and police brutality towards them culminated in what became known as the ‘Brixton uprising’, leading to protesters and police clashing between 10 and 12 April. The main riot – dubbed ‘Bloody Sunday’ by Time magazine – took place on 11 April and resulted in almost three hundred police and forty-five members of the public being injured. Over a hundred vehicles were burned, with more than half of those belonging to the authorities. Thirty buildings went up in flames, with almost a hundred and fifty being damaged. A Guardian report claimed that up to five thousand people were involved in the event.

The disturbances meant prices for would-be renters were low, the area now an urban wasteland of charred architecture and boarded-­­up residences. ‘A room was rented to us by a housing association. It was supposed to be £2 each a week, but hardly anyone ever paid it,’ admits Torjusson, giving a flavour of the time. ‘It was a bit bad of us not to pay it, but that’s the way it was in those days. A lot of Brixton was empty; nobody really wanted to live there. There were a lot of building sites, a lot of ground zero-type areas with demolished houses. All along the railway, it was just wasteland. You’d get a lot of Rastas sitting around the fire. It was great. Brilliant. They weren’t intimidating or anything.’

Torjusson met Nico via her sometime housemate, Mancunian poet John Cooper Clarke. Clarke had amassed a cult following during the late 1970s and early ’80s via regular live performances, building a reputation as a ‘punk poet’. Torjusson first ran into him at the local art-house cinema, the Ritzy. ‘In those days, it was show­ing late night double-bills,’ recalls Torjusson. ‘They served noth­ing except carrot cake, home-made by one of the staff. We thought this was a real extra, because normally you’d never see that sort of thing. No popcorn, just carrot cake. My sister worked there, so they would often let us in for free. We’d watch a John Waters movie or some German films. Hardly anybody was in the cinema, but then we noticed Cooper Clarke: his silhouette and his big hair. I just shouted at him, “How are you, Clarkey?” He turned around. I’d never met him before that. He’d been seen walking around Brixton, so people knew that he was a resident. He came and sat with us and had a chat, and he was very good company. Witty. He came back to our house that night and stayed up all night. Then he showed us where he and Nico lived. We met Alan [Wise], the manager. In the house was anybody who Alan was working with.’ Torjusson has a vivid memory of his first glimpse of where Nico lived. ‘I remem­ber the bloody bedsheets in her room,’ he says. He would quickly become friends with the singer. ‘She would come round in the mid­dle of day and say, “Let’s go to the pub,”’ he remembers. ‘She was sort of slow-moving, slow-speaking. Quite an Amazonian figure, tall and quite big.’ Torjusson was impressed by her total mastery of English. ‘She spoke it like a native. It wasn’t like a foreign-language speaker.’ However, he remembers his neighbour as being ‘a little bit zombified’. ‘Cooper Clarke would sometimes tease her just to get a reaction from her. Something like, “If we don’t sell enough records, we’ll have to put you on the street,” and stuff like this. She’d get angry. Most of the time they just sort of jogged along okay, those two. They were friendly enough, but not matey. They were both using, which is 90 per cent of why things were like that, I think.

‘There were a few other people who used to come round to our house, who were into the same kind of thing. Once they heard that Nico was living nearby, they’d quickly run over there. I remember feeling a bit bad about telling them that she lived there because then they hooked up. She didn’t really look beyond having twenty quid to go get some smack. I thought she was a drug casualty. I thought, “Here is somebody who has been in the Velvet Underground and has been famous and made records. You should have something to show for it.” That’s one thing. Another thing was her way of talking: half a sentence, and then she’d sort of drift off into her own world. Both her and Cooper Clarke would fall asleep all the time with a fag and then burn themselves, watching some TV programmes. But Cooper Clarke could still be witty and funny and tell jokes. He was supposed to be writing a book at the time based on Moby Dick. He never got past the outline. I never remember Nico doing anything artistic like writing or anything, or even talking about music, really. I think she was trying to do methadone, but if there was any heroin around, she’d do that as well. I never saw her quit, really, but I saw her on methadone, so I presumed at that point that she had run out of heroin or that maybe she was trying to quit. To me it was always on–off.’

Nico’s appearance shocked her neighbour. ‘She’d never show any skin apart from her face. She was quite portly, but not fat. Long brown hair, not dyed. Brownish face. Not much movement in the face. Long sleeves, leather trousers, motorbike boots open. She never changed her clothes,’ recalls Torjusson.

‘She didn’t like to bathe too often,’ Barbara Wilkin affirms. Outward embellishment was not a priority to Nico, who mostly saw it as an impediment to being taken as a serious artist. ‘She didn’t want to be pretty. She always said, “The only thing I regret is that I wasn’t born a man.” She felt as a woman, she didn’t count,’ Wilkin concludes.

‘I think that her appearance was a way to facilitate her art, and she didn’t want any distractions from that,’ says James Young. ‘I think she figured that glamour was a surface thing. Ornamental and useless. I think she worked that one out – she was smart enough! Why else would she suddenly start wearing very plain things, very dark things? Because she wanted something else to resonate and for people to focus on. I think that was what it was about. It was quite shocking as a young guy, when you’re with this woman who was obviously stunningly beautiful when she was younger, and she wasn’t old, but who was seriously neglecting herself.’

Danny Fields agrees with Young. ‘Her relationship to her own beauty is so conflicted and damaged,’ he says. ‘She loved having rotten teeth – oh, I mean, that says it all. She did one show in 23rd Street at the Squat Theatre [in New York]. I went backstage and she was really big and fat and her teeth were all gone. And I saw her just enough to say, “Hello, I love you,” and then that was it.’ Wilkin’s memories parallel what Fields saw. ‘Nico looked bad at times because of the drugs. Especially when she was still on the her­oin. I think that if you’re on heroin, you don’t care so much about bodily hygiene. Her teeth were pretty bad. She actually lost one at one point. She wouldn’t go to the dentist properly.’ Yet regardless of her appearance or addiction, Wilkin underscores that Nico ‘would always turn up for her concerts and gigs, so that’s not lazy. She would also be on time, unlike John Cooper Clarke, who when I worked with him I had to tell him an hour and a half before to get him on time!’

Wilkin also called 23 Effra Road home for seven months. ‘Alan [Wise] lived downstairs, and Nico had one room. I remember one time we came back from tour and the phone was cut off. People came, junkies came and used all the spoons. The carpet looked hor­rible in the living room, with all the tipped drinks. I did clean the place quite a few times, and Nico appreciated it. She didn’t like all that mess and stuff, but she would not clean.’ Wilkin also noted how few possessions Nico owned. ‘She didn’t have many clothes either. All she had was a little bag and a little red radio. She used to tune in to stations on the short wave, trying to find some Arabian music and stuff. We liked that. Or Indian music. You didn’t get that in those days, you didn’t have the internet. I once said to her, “You have nothing, Nico!” She replied, “It’s the only way to be really free. If you have more, you’re not free any more.” She did stuff which was not going to be popular, but she did it because of art. She was a true artist.’

Just as in Manchester, when not on tour Nico preferred to stay in. ‘Whenever you went to her room, it was always really hot and muggy and stuffy, with loads of Marlboros and the smell of hash,’ says Young, who also stayed at the Brixton abode. ‘Never a window open – no way! She liked that cocoon feeling: TV glowing in the corner, no fresh air, no “I’m going out to the park.” No. No inter­est. We’d sit and watch TV; you’d make comments with the TV on. Instead of the fire glowing in the corner, it would be the TV. It would be on till close-down. It wasn’t twenty-four hours like it is now; at midnight, it would switch to white and [makes static noise]. They’d leave it on for that! In Brixton, I got back late once. There’s John Cooper Clarke [makes nodding out gesture], so I switched it off by mistake. And he’s like, “I was watching that!” [makes static noise]. Nico was the same. It just used to be on, and you sat around.’ Mornings were not a popular time either at 23 Effra Road. ‘She wouldn’t get up in the mornings, no way!’ laughs Young. ‘She was nocturnal. She wouldn’t appear until late afternoon.’

Nico would occasionally socialize in Brixton, which was a very racially mixed area. ‘We sometimes used to go to the pub together. She liked to do that: drink a beer and play pool. She wasn’t only wine, wine, wine,’ says Wilkin. ‘She even tried to fix me up with a boy. She said, “You’ve been single for long enough! He’s very nice!” She confessed that it was the owner’s son from this pub. They were Rastafarians. Nico always gets accused of being racist, but she was not.’ Torjusson agrees. ‘I don’t think she had a big racist philosophy or anything, she’d just be irritated by people. She wouldn’t bite her tongue and say, “Oh, these people!” She wouldn’t mind saying, “Oh, these black people!” or something. Most people wouldn’t say some­thing like that.’ Graham Dowdall also has issues with the constant accusations of racism levelled against Nico. ‘I think it’s become part of the legend,’ he says. ‘She chose to have a Jewish manager. Alan is very Jewish. He didn’t find that that was a compromise for himself. We had a security guy that was black, Yankee Bill. Nico was very friendly with him. I’ve seen her hanging out with black people. She lived in Brixton, when Brixton was very black! I don’t think she was a racist. I think that politically she was very complex.’

Nico also had her routines in the neighbourhood. ‘She would go to the separate Greek shop to get her yoghurt. She liked Greek yoghurt,’ says Wilkin.8 ‘Then she would go to the West Indian baker to get the West Indian bun. She loved eating that, so she lived on that for a while! I think when she was a model she had to always look perfect and she had to starve herself. She once said to me, “All we had to eat was an apple and an egg in the morning, and then we had to wait all day to get little bits in the evening.” She also said, “I only have to look at food and I put on weight.” When I knew her, she was a strange eater. She never would eat in public. She would eat by herself in her room and she might eat very unhealthily – just have chocolate and white wine when she was on the heroin. She would cook sometimes. When we were in Brixton, she said, “Okay, I’m cooking,” and she’d make what we called the Nico Soup, which was a stew with red lentils, carrots, potatoes – just a stew. She was vegetarian. She wouldn’t eat meat. I don’t know when she became a vegetarian, but she was a vegetarian all the time I knew her.

‘She liked to have somebody around at times when she needed something,’ Wilkin recalls. ‘When I would be back up in Manchester, she would say, “When are you coming back?” She used to come into my room frequently. One time I told her, “I can’t sleep,” so she gave me some methadone. It poisoned me! “Try some of this. It tastes like cough medicine,” she said. The next thing I know, I thought I was dying! I managed to keep it down but was not in a good place. She stayed around and lit a candle. She was meowing at the window at a cat for ages [meows] to distract me. Then I was okay.’

Wilkin thinks that the combination of drugs and heartbreak were detrimental to Nico from an early age. ‘Slimming pills, which are basically speed, will do your mind in. I think the thing which happened with Alain Delon was very upsetting as well. She honestly was in love with him, or thought she was in love with him. I think she had a deep, deep loneliness inside.’

Wilkin also speaks of a practical side to Nico. ‘She would always say, “You always have to have an onion in your house,” just in case you have to cook something. Another time when we were on tour in Barcelona, she said, “Come on, let’s go out.” We liked to just sit on the boulevard. She liked Campari and ice. Campari was like fresh orange. We were people-watching, speaking only in German.’

‘I think the people around her amused her,’ says Young, ‘our lit­tle tour party: Alan and the musicians, we were a little tableau of freaks and weirdos! She saw our little games and our strategies, fall­ing in and out of love with unsuitable girls. She’d seen it all before a thousand times. She was mean about anybody’s girl. Or if anybody invited a girl into the van! Or invited their girlfriend along! The looks would be like [growls]! She was the queen, and there was no competition – no other women allowed. Didn’t want them around, didn’t trust one of them. What the basis of that was, I wouldn’t know. Whether or not that went back to the modelling years and that competitive thing … I wouldn’t know what the reason for that was. But she did say many times that she didn’t like women.’

‘I think she was a bit contemptuous of the world and thought people were soft,’ says Torjusson. ‘You live in a place with no elec­tricity, no heating – that’s all right as long as you’ve got a bit of smack. When I went to her place, it was barely furnished. My place was barely furnished as well, but I thought, “She’s an older woman, she might have a bit of comfort or something.” Also, I thought, “She’s a famous person, so where’s the reward for fame?” Nothing except a pair of leather trousers and a harmonium. No place of her own.

‘Nico would get on well with masculine types. I think that’s why she liked Una [Baines]. In those days, Una would compete with the men in anything and would think nothing of hitching across Europe with macho lorry drivers. Alan was a bit like that, he was a bit old-school sexist and stuff, and I think Nico thought that was fine. She relied on Alan for organizing everything, and I think Alan quite liked that, he liked looking after her.’

Wise would go between Manchester and Brixton. There was only one bathroom for all of the rotating roommates, and Nico ‘used to complain about Al’s smells’, says Young. ‘[does impression of Nico] “I’m not going in there, he’s been in there! You go in! You go in!”’

Torjusson has a less odoriferous memory of Wise, saying he was ‘a good guy’ and ‘a doer’. ‘He’d organize things. In those days, none of us drove, but he’d go, “Let’s drive out to the New Forest or some place in the countryside to some Buddhist retreat.” We would just have a meal and a chat. He liked to drive and talk. That was the really good thing about him. He had quite a number of different people turning up in the flat. He would be quite keen to have girls around.’

Wise and Nico’s relationship continued to be ‘really, really com­plex on so many levels’, says Graham Dowdall. ‘Al worshipped Nico. Al wanted to be with Nico in a sexy way.’ He then recounts an incident which ‘sums up their relationship better than anything else’. ‘Nico was in London and went to the Brixton flat. Al Wise was in Manchester. Nico spoke to Al on the phone and – she told me this story, so no doubt that it’s true – she said to Al, “Al, I’m staying over in London, is it okay if I use your bed?” He said, “Yeah, Nico. That’s fine.” So she goes to bed. Al Wise jumps on the last train from Manchester to London, arrives in Brixton. “Oh, there’s only one bed, I’ll have to get in bed with Nico.” In her words, “I woke up, and he was just masturbating between the cheeks of my arse, the disgusting pig!”’

Another resident of the Brixton pad was John Cale. ‘I remember him coming up the stairs with two crates of beer, and I was think­ing, “He’s really sorted out for beer!” I’d never known anybody who buys beer by the crate before,’ laughs Torjusson. Young describes his former flatmates’ – Nico and Cale’s – relationship as ‘very affec­tionate … He was someone she trusted,’ he says. ‘Old friends. They knew each other before they were really famous. It’s different. If you’re a famous person, you can only be with famous people and relax with them, because other people might want something from you.’

John Cooper Clarke claims to have been ‘star-struck’ by living under the same roof as ‘two-fifths of the Velvet Underground … As a housemate, she was very tidy. No trouble at all,’ he claimed. He was not overly close with the singer, however. ‘I can’t remember ever having any kind of searching conversation with her. There’s noth­ing I can relate that would puncture her mythological status. She was the kind of artist that people project a lot of themselves onto, very self-contained. Self-possessed. She moved around in her own micro-climate of glamour.’

Ari would also make visits to Brixton. ‘She was so proud of having Ari,’ Wilkin recalls. ‘She said, “I was the most organized that I ever was. When I was pregnant and knew Ari was coming, I got everything sorted out for him and bought all his clothes and everything.” Then Ari was taken away from her. Alain Delon’s mum took him, and then she missed a lot of his childhood. When he came as a young man to Manchester, he was nineteen. He was very green behind his ears. He soon also became a drug addict. I’m sure they slept in a bed together, they just cuddled. Maybe it’s strange for other men to think, “How can you cuddle a young man?” but I think they just cuddled to make up for lost time.’

Torjusson once spent New Year’s Eve with mother and son. ‘I think Ari was a very lost kind of person,’ he says. ‘Their relationship was very close and quite intimate in terms of body language, but strange as well. The usual chatting or talking about things didn’t seem to be there. It was quite silent, but quite close as well. He would lean against her on the sofa. Ari was obviously more ani­mated and alive because he was still young then, but Nico was quite silent and quite happy to watch telly. Both in their own worlds, but I think they were both under the influence as well at the time. It’s not exactly a great way to grow up, with a mum like Nico. She was a bit incapable of looking after herself.’

Young offers a different view. ‘She had a strong sense of self and identity. There’s a kind of regal thing. A lot of people were afraid of her or felt uncomfortable with her or felt they kind of had to creep around her, and she didn’t like that. She used to say, “Most people are afraid of me.” Because she did give off this air of real self-­containment and a kind of inner strength. I wouldn’t say she was lost at all, but there was no master plan. She instinctively knew where to go! It wasn’t an ambition; it was more an immediate sense of “the next thing is this”. But I don’t think she saw further than one step ahead. I don’t think she thought, “In twenty years, I’m gonna wear black and write my own songs with a harmonium,” or “I’m gonna be a singer-songwriter.” It’s “I’m gonna try singing.”’

It is understandable why people – like Torjusson, who repeatedly said he was just a neighbour, not necessarily an insider – would get the idea of Nico as a distant personality. It was a common opinion. ‘I think she really had the measure of people. That’s why she kept her distance, I think. She could really see a fool from a distance,’ Una Baines asserts.

James Young agrees. ‘She was an intelligent woman,’ he says. ‘Her mind worked on a different wave. I wouldn’t even say she was slower, she just existed in a slightly different dimension to the people around her. People would think that she was stupid and say rather cruel things. She wasn’t fast and smart, but she could read people very intuitively. She had a kind of street savvy.’ Though she never received any formal education as an adult – and incredibly aware of this seeming flaw in her character – Nico ‘was an autodidact. She liked to read’, says Young. ‘She was “unschooled”, as it were, but did like to read serious literature and didn’t read trash. People like to caricature her as being morose – not really, no. She did like dark stuff, but it wasn’t the corny goth thing either. I think just tempera­mentally she was melancholic and heavy. But I wouldn’t say that necessarily meant a death wish or an obsession with death. She’d always be lugging around some enormous volume of something or other. For about three years it was the complete Oscar Wilde! Or she’d have [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge or [William] Wordsworth or William Blake. She was really into Blake. It’s not light reading, all that stuff.’ Indeed, Nico’s love of books and reading is evident throughout her interviews, as well as in her own notes. In her diary, she says, ‘The book I am reading is so well written. Sanctuary by William Faulkner, after Light in August it is rather stimulating.’ Ed Sanders of New York band the Fugs also recalled often seeing the singer at the Peace Eye bookstore in the 1960s: ‘Nico used to hang around the Peace Eye in the afternoons. She would sit and read books.’

*

Wilkin says that Nico rarely spoke about her years with Philippe Garrel as it had been ‘not a very nice time. All about drugs and not very safe.’ In Torjusson’s memory, Nico had consigned any physical intimacy with men to the past. ‘I played music all the time but never professionally. I played Nico a song of mine, and she got the wrong idea. She thought I was coming on to her. She was like [does impression of Nico], “I’m too old for this kind of thing.” She did say to me, “I’m past relationships,” or “I’m past that kind of thing,” because she thought I might have been interested in her myself. I wasn’t there 24/7, but my strong impression was her sex life was behind her – she was not a sexual being. Not the energy for it. Not the appetite for it.’

Dowdall shares a memory from touring that perhaps reveals Nico’s view on sexual intimacy at the time. ‘So Nico wasn’t having sex. In the early days, she was pretty fucked-up with heroin and she wasn’t really eating a lot. She’d eat cheese rolls and custard. But a couple of times when we were on long boat journeys somewhere in Scandinavia, she had a cabin. She was bored. She’d come up to myself and Eric [Random] and she’d say [does impression of Nico], “Why don’t we go to my room and we can have a partouze?”9 I didn’t know what a partouze was, to be honest. She quickly explained what a partouze was, and I declined. There were several moments, several of those kinds of experiences, where she was bored and thought she’d fill the boredom with having sex, with either me or Eric or both of us.’

*

As 1984 wrapped up, Nico signed a new record deal with indie label Beggars Banquet. ‘There was no big ceremony; it just happened in an office,’ recalls Phil Rainford. ‘We talked to Martin [Mills, founder of Beggars Group] for ages. Then we went and had a bit of lunch at a pub down the street. That was it. A lot of the excitement about getting signed was that the money would facilitate buying more drugs – heroin was the focus. At that time, she’d hit rock bot­tom. It was a way of building up her self-esteem again. It was good for her and good for everybody else because we all got bits of work out of it.’ A celebratory Marlboro cigarette was raised to the career resurrection. ‘Marlboro fags! She always had Marlboro fags!’ laughs Rainford. ‘She also liked a beer. She wasn’t a big drinker usually. I don’t remember her thinking, “I’ll have a Martini on the rocks, shaken, not stirred.” She just liked a beer. If you see a lot of the pictures of her, you’ll see there’s a beer on the table.’

*

After a lifetime of experiences shared with icons and notables, Nico seemed happiest surrounding herself with locals in her Manchester neighbourhood and people she met through Alan Wise. ‘She didn’t really socialise with the Manchester glitterati or hang out in clubs,’ said Nigel Bagley. ‘Hooky [Peter Hook from New Order] would occasionally turn up … her heroes were from a previous gener­ation; the Bob Dylans and so on. She once asked me round for din­ner, and there was this bizarre scene of Nico cooking couscous with one hand and cooking up heroin with the other. I was thinking: “I hope she doesn’t mix them up.” She has such a dark image, but there was so much funny stuff, and she was wonderfully deadpan. We met the film director John Waters who asked if she would sing at his funeral. She said: “Call me when you’re dead.”’

Hook had been a Nico fan for a long time before she lived in the northern city. I caught up with him between sessions mentoring young artists at a British university. ‘I used to do the sound for the Stockholm Monsters,10 and we ended up doing a tour supporting Nico,’ he says. ‘Nico was pretty bad. She was barely eating. She was a mess, and she looked a mess, to be honest. [Her addiction] made her very miserable, very grumpy. Alan Wise was such a dirty old fucker that just used to plague her. She had hit rock bottom. In the concerts and stuff, she wasn’t good. Alan Wise always used to say, “Nico is the only act in the world that can only play anywhere once.” I’d go, “Why?” And he’d say, “Because she’s so fucking bad and so miserable nobody’ll ever have her back.” It was actually really, really sad. She used to do that cover version of “‘Heroes’” [does im­pression of Nico singing it]. It was the most miserable fucking thing you’d ever heard in your life. I did feel exceptionally sorry for her at that point. But, in her defence, she kept going. She had stamina. Nothing could keep her down, which was absolutely incredible.’

The state of Nico’s health and career was a sobering example for the young artist. ‘As a musician, to watch Nico come down as much as she did, it wasn’t something nice to witness. I’d say, “Hello, Nico. How are you?” And she’d say [does impression of Nico], “I’m so fuck­ing miserable, Hooky. I am so fucking miserable. I live in fucking Prestwich. I live with addicts. Alan Wise is always trying to fuck me up the arse.” I was like, “Oh God, I’m sorry I asked!” She really did wallow in it. A great character despite it.’

Though Wise has been heralded as Nico’s saviour by some, Hook saw an unsavoury side to the relationship. ‘I remember she did a tour of eastern Europe because Alan Wise … he didn’t help her career, let me put it that way. He ended up taking her round all these really odd places in eastern Europe because they were the only gigs he could get her. He ended up taking her further and further afield. She nearly ended up at the North Pole under his guidance, God bless them both.

‘He was telling me this wonderful story. They came back from Berlin on a coach, and there were fifteen men and Nico, all the band and the roadies and Nico. When they got to the East German border, the East German soldiers pulled the truck over and pulled them all off. They put the men against the bus like they were going to line them up and shoot them, and they kept Nico with them. All these East German soldiers were there, all armed, and they put Alsatians on the bus to search for drugs. Nico, first she just started patting all her pockets like she was looking for something, and they were all staring at her. And then she found something in her pocket and she pulled it out, and it was a heroin joint. She lit it, stood in-between two East German border guards, and smoked it. The fifteen of them were cacking themselves and she was just laughing. I just thought, “What a woman.”’

Hook’s bands shared the same studio as Nico, and he recalls how ‘She couldn’t pay for a session once, so she gave the owner her har­monium, the one she used to play with her feet.’ The instrument ‘wheezed like an old bloke that smoked sixty fags a day for fifty years. We always used to laugh as Joy Division, and then as New Order, at this harmonium. But no one ever disturbed it as it was Nico’s harmonium.’ Hook eventually bought the studio, but by then the instrument had disappeared. ‘It’s so sad,’ he concludes, ‘as now you’d obviously treasure it.’