Epilogue - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico
By Jennifer Otter Bickerdike
In 1996, the Velvet Underground was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in the US. Nico was not included. ‘Not everyone bought their album, but everyone who did started a band,’ proclaims the website. It goes on to say, ‘The Velvet Underground was literary but down to earth, schooled in both highbrow culture and the streets. They wrote about life as they saw it – drugs and all – but they saw the beauty in bleakness.’ Just like during her time with the group, Nico was not seen as truly being part of the group and went unrecognized as the brave, trailblazing maverick she was, although all of her former bandmates – Lou Reed, John Cale, Maureen Tucker and Sterling Morrison – received the accolade. Her absence was a glaring omission.
Ten years later, in 2006, local councillors in Nico’s birthplace of Cologne, Germany, denied a proposal to call an unnamed square within the city ‘Christa-Päffgen-Platz’. The reason given as to why they could not move forward with the idea was that it was because of her ‘drug career’.