Chapter 14 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

In the autumn of 1965, Andy Warhol made a bold statement: he was going to leave painting behind altogether and concentrate on other projects. This decision would ultimately allow the artist to become a multimedia provocateur across various platforms. It was also a shrewd business move. ‘He withdrew from the art world for a number of years to put his price up and make the earlier stuff more collectable,’ said Paul Morrissey. Already bringing in thou­sands of dollars a week from his past successes, Warhol did not want to be burdened with any additional tax, so, using the excess money, he financed the making of short films. He had just completed a successful run of eight movies featuring his newest Superstar, Edie Sedgwick. ‘An hour’s worth of developed 16 mm black and white film cost $200. Well, for $200 we weren’t exactly going to com­pete with Hollywood,’ Paul Morrissey confided. ‘These films were truly experimental, no one in their right mind thought there’d be an audience.’ Warhol’s films were unconventional, ‘quickie under­ground movies, shot in shaky black and white with a single hand-held camera; the action on the screen takes as long as the action in real life’. It was at this pivotal moment that Morrissey came into his own as an integral member of the Warhol machine. ‘I really became his manager in the sense that I did all the talking,’ he recounted.

The Cinematheque was the weekly Monday-night event held by young film-maker Jonas Mekas at an off-Broadway theatre. Mekas offered Warhol a venue to show his movies, including putting on a retrospective starring Sedgwick. From an upper-crust New England family, Edith Minturn Sedgwick, known simply as ‘Edie’, was the seventh of eight children. Though having wealth and access, at just thirteen she started exhibiting various eating disorders, descending into anorexia, which eventually led to her being institutionalized at a private psychiatric clinic in Connecticut. Upon release, she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, looking to study sculpture alongside her cousin. On turning twenty-one in 1964, Edie received her $80,000 trust fund,1 provided by her maternal grandmother, and moved to Manhattan. It was there that she met Warhol.

For Warhol, ‘Superstar’ was a mantle bestowed upon the newest face du jour who caught his fancy. The title was ‘handed down’, says Factory insider David Croland. ‘Our crowd was photographed a lot; the pictures went to the highest order: American Vogue and the New York Times. You can’t get better publicity than the New York Times worldwide. It’s like you didn’t have to do anything because of the way you looked, you were just photographed all the time.’ Warhol’s assistant Vincent Fremont concurs, pointing out how an association with the artist provided anyone in his orbit with a global stage. ‘Andy was very good at launching people or giving them opportunities to launch themselves. Whether they could handle it or not was their problem.’

But it was not an endless gravy train of fame. The reigning Superstar would escort Warhol to parties and dinners and often be the focus of his current film or project – only to be unceremoni­ously discarded once they no longer intrigued him, another, new, fresh face taking their place. ‘He liked to possess them,’ said friend and photographer Jerry Schatzberg of Warhol’s attitude towards his ‘creations’. The vulnerable, rich and stunning Edie – with her ema­ciated frame and huge, innocent eyes – was the perfect candidate for the title. After all, as Warhol once said, ‘A girl always looks more beautiful and fragile when she’s about to have a nervous breakdown.’

Edie became a fixture at Warhol’s side, snapped constantly by the press at various functions and public outings. She often picked up the tab for meals for the entire Factory entourage, and had herself and Warhol chauffeured around New York in a Mercedes. Her saucy smile and model-perfect poses made her a press darling and saw her dubbed an ‘It Girl’ and ‘Youthquaker’ by both paparazzi and magazines alike. Her signature look of leotards, oversized, shoulder-­dusting earrings and Mod make-up – heavy liquid eyeliner, fake eyelashes to accentuate her already large eyes – made her the perfect companion for Warhol. She even coloured her naturally brown hair silver blonde, cutting it to mimic Warhol’s trademark wigs. He later said of Edie, ‘I could see that she had more problems than anybody I’d ever met.’

Around the same time, the pop artist received a new proposition. Always on the prowl for a means of bringing cash and visibility to the Factory, Warhol and Morrissey were intrigued when they were approached by theatre producer Michael Myerberg. Myerberg was opening a seventeen-thousand-square-foot club in Queens and wanted the glow of über-cool that Warhol and the Factory pro­vided. He suggested calling the venture Andy Warhol’s Discotheque. Warhol countered with Andy Warhol’s Up. Morrissey quickly real­ized that to both make it financially viable for the Factory and get people to trek out to an outer borough of New York, there would have to be some added elements besides just hearing records being played. He proposed that they use the films they had already shot as moving backdrops at the event. He also suggested that Warhol add a house band to his repertoire, to which the artist replied, ‘Ooh, that’s great.’ Now Morrissey had to find a group to complete the bill. Gerard Malanga had recently been to a Velvet Underground show and suggested that Morrissey go check the band out.

Recalling his initial encounter with the Velvet Underground, Morrissey later said, ‘The first thing that registered to me, and I think to Andy later, was the drummer Maureen, because you could not tell whether she was a boy or a girl. This was a first within rock’n’roll because The Beatles all looked like little girls but you knew they were boys. You had no idea what Maureen’s gender was. The second thing was John Cale’s electric viola. And the third thing was they sang a song called “Heroin”.’

Morrissey felt he had found the band to feature at the Warhol event, and wanted to officially sign up the Velvets for his propos­ition. There was one issue, though, that made him hesitate: frontman Lou Reed. ‘The first thing I realized about the Velvet Underground was that they had no lead singer, because Lou Reed was just such an uncomfortable performer,’ he revealed in the legendary book Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. ‘The singing was done by Lou Reed, and he just seemed not a very good singer. Not a good personality. There was something too seedy about him. He was not an actual performer.’

Having existed only for a matter of days before their meeting with Morrissey, the newly formed band were still working out their kinks at the residency their then manager Al Aronowitz had booked for them at the beatnik hang-out Café Bizarre. Despite any mis­givings, Morrissey took Warhol and part of the Factory entourage – including Malanga and Sedgwick – to see the Velvets. There were no more than a dozen people that Thursday evening at the club; a distinct separation was still apparent between the art and music scenes, and the Warhol crowd went unnoticed upon arrival.

During the Velvets’ set, Warhol became animated. As they sat watching the band, he asked Sedgwick what she thought of the idea of the group playing while her movies were shown as a backdrop at the upcoming Cinematheque retrospective. The Superstar was hesitant about the proposition as the band would take away interest from her movies. Though they left after the first set, for the rest of the evening Warhol reportedly kept saying, ‘We have to think of something to do with the Velvets. What can we do? What could it be? WE HAVE TO THINK OF SOMETHING!’

Illustrating her seemingly infallible ability to be in the right place at the right time, Nico was also in attendance at Café Bizarre that evening, an event she later referred to as ‘the most beautiful moment of my life’. Aronowitz takes credit for bringing her to see the band, proclaiming in Please Kill Me, ‘Nico never had any taste and she had the immediate hots for Lou Reed – because she had visions of being a pop star herself.’2 Nico later recorded seeing the group in her diary, though it is her melancholy about not receiving love from either Dylan or Delon that reverberates in her passage:

One night we went to the Café Bizarre to see a new group, the Velvet Underground, who played there last night … people couldn’t dance to their music, and they had to go. I had told Bob Dylan about them too, but he was busy … I was probably getting on his Nerves, being in Love with him the way I was. In my heart, I still loved Alain but he did not even think about me now.

Malanga introduced Morrissey and Nico to each other before the Warhol entourage set off. While Nico may not have fixated on the Velvets that night, Morrissey had. He needed that interesting element to prop up what he saw as a bland Lou Reed. He immedi­ately identified his solution in Nico. In Victor Bockris’s Lou Reed: The Biography, Morrissey recalled, ‘I felt that the one thing the Velvets didn’t have was a solo singer, because I just didn’t think that Lou had the personality to stand in front of the group and sing. The group needed something beautiful to counteract the kind of screeching ugliness they were trying to sell, and the combination of a really beautiful girl standing in front of all this decadence was what was needed. That very night, right away I said, “Nico, you’re a singer. You need somebody to play in back of you. You can maybe sing with this group, if they want to work with us and go in this club and be managed.”’

Like Morrissey, Warhol saw potential in Nico, whom he described as looking ‘like she could have made the trip over right at the front of a Viking ship, she had that kind of face and body’. Her aesthetic made her stand out from the other women on the Factory scene, her ‘very mod and spiffy white wool pants, double-breasted blazers, beige cashmere turtlenecks, and those pilgrim-looking shoes with the big buckles on them’ creating an immediate impression on the pop artist. ‘She had straight shoulder-length blond hair with bangs, blue eyes, full lips, wide cheekbones – the works,’ Warhol later wrote in POPism. But it was Nico’s unique voice that completed the package for him: ‘She had this very strange way of speaking. People described her voice as everything from eerie, to bland and smooth, to slow and hollow, to a “wind in a drainpipe,” to an “IBM computer with a Garbo accent.” She sounded the same strange way when she sang, too.’

Warhol and Morrissey both saw Nico as the missing element to complete the Velvets, and they would not move forward without her as part of the band. ‘Andy always liked to have beautiful women around, even though he wasn’t interested in them in a physical way – it was just the whole look of presenting yourself,’ recalled Fremont. ‘Andy’s persona – there was a public and private side – but his physical look was part of his art, so he was always adjusting what he looked like, so he understood that in other people … and going out with a beautiful woman made sense because he loved glamour. She was part of that.’

Nico was ready to use her appearance to get her further into the Warhol universe, and to take Morrissey up on his offer. She was tired of modelling and ‘only wanted to be with the underground people’. Her timing was flawless. Seeing the past few years as a succession of missed opportunities, Nico viewed Warhol as the solution at last to her quest for stardom. ‘I have always been in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ she said. ‘But when I was with Andy Warhol, I seemed to have got it right.’

Just days after meeting Warhol, the Velvets were fired from Café Bizarre. The artist suddenly became an attractive – and also their only – option. Morrissey was eager to make things official with the band. ‘After we met them, they came to the Factory and right away I proposed that we would sign a contract with them, we’d manage them and give them a place to play. They said yes. Andy immedi­ately bought them some new amplifiers and they started rehearsing at the Factory,’ Morrissey says in Uptight: The Velvet Underground Story. Morrissey was also determined to bring Nico into the mix. ‘We wanted her to have a starring role in what we were doing and since she was a chanteuse, we thought it would be great to have her sing with the band. Which of course was the totally most wrong thing you could say to them at that point in their development, when they are going to be the stars!’ remembers Billy Name. ‘They’re supposed to work this other person into their musical arrangements and set-ups? It was like, hey, what more wrong thing could you say to a group? But because they were new and fresh in the scene too, it just squeezed together and worked out, and turned out to be sort of magic.’

Time was not wasted getting the Velvets and Nico together in a legal sense. Contracts were signed, with management duties offi­cially handed to the Warvel Corporation – the name a mash-up of ‘Warhol’ and ‘Velvet’. The company directors were Warhol and Morrissey, who were set to get 25 per cent of both the Velvets’ and Nico’s earnings from the work the corporation got them. Band practice began promptly on 3 January 1966 and was captured in the seventy-minute film The Velvet Underground and Nico: A Symphony of Sound, shot at the Factory by Warhol. Featuring casual chatter, nonchalant playing around on instruments and unstructured jam­ming, the tapes have Reed teaching Nico the lyrics to ‘Venus in Furs’, while the rest of the group strums away in the background. There is also an attempt at a full song, ‘There She Goes Again’, with the chanteuse on lead vocals. Other highlights of the movie include the New York Police Department interrupting the jam session at one point, citing a noise complaint.

Nico is visible in one scene slapping a single maraca against a tambour­ine, while another shows her playing Cale’s Fender Precision Bass. The reels were originally shot for posterity, with a view to possibly using them as background visuals for performances or during band set-up and tuning.3 Critiques of the Nico-led ren­dition of ‘There She Goes Again’ have seemed to ignore the fact that English is not her native language, that she is just learning the words and melodies for the first time – in contrast to Reed, who has not only written the tunes, but has been playing them regularly. One review sums it up, saying, ‘She doesn’t do too bad a job with the song, especially when you consider that she’s probably barely familiar with it, but her rendition throws up an immediate red flag to whatever plan Warhol and Morrissey might have in mind.’ It was easier for many reviewers to stay with the theme that Nico was a poor singer and frame her as a simpleton, as another writer claims: ‘They [the Velvet Underground] try several times to find a key that suits Nico’s voice,’ and the band ‘even seems to try it with both Nico and Reed singing it together, although it could be that Reed is guiding her along as she learns the words’. According to another write-up, ‘Nico tries many times to vocalize lyrics that prove to be too fast for her broken English to master.’ But regardless of the real­ities facing the new band member, ‘the simple fact is that the song sounds far more convincing and confident when sung by Reed’, writes one author. While this may be one opinion, it was not held by everyone. Morrissey, for example, was pleased with his addition to the group. ‘Most of the songs were sung by Lou, who had no personality, and I thought that could be remedied,’ he later said. ‘She [Nico] could actually sing in a beautiful deep German voice.’

Morrissey’s early support of Nico raises the possibility of the nega­tive reviews being a product of her heritage – tinged with a bit of misogyny – not a lack of talent. ‘She got her share of ridicule from the press with her deep Germanic voice, which I always tried to get her not to sing with,’ the Velvets’ guitarist Sterling Morrison said in retrospect. ‘She could sing high and sweet if she wanted to. But Nico could sing, she could sing the songs that we had her do and sing them well.’ What cannot be ignored watching Nico on film is that the camera loved her. Just as Warhol and Morrissey had envisioned, she provided a stark contrast – tall, blonde and almost noble – to the black-clad Velvets, with one writer saying, ‘She did not steal the limelight so much as absorb it.’

Besides possible issues with the songs themselves, another prob­lem was already apparent, in the shape of a disgruntled – and dis­placed – Reed. ‘I realized from the start that Lou didn’t like it one bit. He made that obvious,’ Morrissey concluded. In the documen­tary Lou Reed: Rock & Roll Heart, the singer confirms his initial dismay, saying, ‘We didn’t really feel we had a choice. I mean, we could have just walked away from it, or we had a chanteuse. So we had a group meeting and said, “All right, we’ll have a chanteuse, and Lou will write a song or two for her, and then we’ll still be the Velvet Underground.” You know, why not?’ In the same film, John Cale notes, ‘When Nico was introduced as sort of the great headline-maker, that was when I started thinking about Andy as the media manipulator, the master of all that.’ Nico’s appearance, once again, was a quality to be exploited – not only as a part of the fledgling group, but as integral to maintaining Warhol’s glamorous image in his ever-revolving PR machine. ‘Her appearance was spec­tacular, tall and very feminine, very elegant, and she didn’t jump up and down and wave her hips … [she could] also be the girl that can replace Edie for Andy’s photo opportunities. It was a perfect idea,’ Morrissey recalled.

From the start, there seemed to be a miscommunication of what exactly Nico’s role within the Velvets would be. Early on, Morrissey thought that he and Warhol would ‘put her in the band because the Velvets need somebody who can sing or who can command atten­tion when they stand in front of a microphone, so she can be the lead singer, and the Velvets can still do their thing’. Though Warhol offered the money, space, potential fame and associations that the Velvets – and Nico – were looking for, there were immediate clashes of personalities, taste and expectations. Nico interpreted the offer as her chance to front a group and become an integral part of the Warhol/Factory scene. She wanted the Velvets essentially to be her backing band and for her to sing all of their songs. This, however, was not an option for the multi-instrumentalists and composers. In Nico: Icon, John Cale remembers, ‘The idea of having her in the band in the first place was really offensive … especially to Lou and I … It was a very good publicity move from Andy. And no one could understand the value … of having a beautiful blond lady standing there doing not much more than playing tambourine for the show.’

The other Velvets felt similarly. ‘Andy suggested we use Nico as a vocalist,’ recounted Sterling Morrison. ‘We said fine, she looks great, and just gradually tried to work her in.’ But ‘there were prob­lems from the very beginning’, he said, ‘because there were only so many songs that were appropriate for Nico, and she wanted to sing them all – “I’m Waiting for the Man,” “Heroin,” all of them. We said, “No, no!” She wasn’t very egotistical; I always explained it by saying she’s not very good at English.’

Drummer Maureen ‘Moe’ Tucker also had issues with the new addition, proclaiming that Nico ‘was a schmuck, from the first. She was this beautiful person who had travelled through Europe being a semi-star. Her ego had grown very large. I kept to myself until she wanted to sing “Heroin”. But then I had to speak my piece.’

Lou Reed ‘was hostile to Nico from the start’, said Morrissey. He was especially upset about the reasoning behind the Warhol/Morrissey proposition. ‘Of course, Lou Reed almost gagged when I said we need a girl singing with the group so we could get extra pub­licity,’ Morrissey said. The singer did not want to fold Nico into the Velvet Underground, so the annexation of the Velvet Underground & Nico was created. ‘I didn’t want to say they needed somebody who had some sort of talent, but that’s what I meant,’ Morrissey concluded. ‘Lou was very reluctant to go with Nico, but I think John Cale prevailed on him to accept that as part of the deal.’

‘Andy Warhol persuaded Lou Reed to have her in the front as a singer. It is such an extraordinary thing to do, it is hard to believe you could do that to Lou Reed. Andy had the power,’ said Victor Bockris, who has penned several biographies on Reed and Warhol.

Nico seemed completely alien to the Velvets, an appendage rather than an addition, from the start. ‘No one knew what to make of her, but we were far too self-concerned to either argue or refuse. Here was this formidable woman, the world’s first supermodel. We were awed by her style,’ recalled Cale. ‘She was quintessentially the person that Andy used to make us aware of another dimension to music: publicity and image making.’

Nico’s own talent and her drive to make the arrangement work are rarely discussed. Despite the hostility around her, Cale claimed that she did want to be a part of the band. ‘She was much more ready to adopt new ideas,’ he said. ‘She had a thirst for it. I don’t think particularly that she and I got along any better than anybody else in the band. They all thought that she was a little bit of a fly in the ointment.’

Regardless of her desire to contribute to the project, the bottom line, at the end of 1965, was that Nico was already well established in certain arty circles, while the Velvets were virtually unknown. ‘Nico was sort of the bigger of the two,’ said Morrissey. ‘She had had one record released in England, and she was in La Dolce Vita, and she was a famous model. Nico was somebody, they were nobody.’ Even Playboy magazine waxed poetic over Nico, calling her ‘the most ethereal and lovely of Warhol’s superstars; seeing her in her floor-length cloak and listening to her musical, remote talk, one gets the impression of a medieval German Madonna glimpsed in a dream full of images of spring and sunlight’.

*

Though initially unconvinced about Nico’s presence in his band, Reed quickly changed his mind. He was not immune to her allure, and found himself falling in love with her, confiding to his friend Richard Miskin, ‘Nico’s the kind of person that you meet and you’re not quite the same afterwards. She has an amazing mind.’ Miskin also claimed that ‘Lou loved the fact that Nico was big.’4 Reed spoke publicly of the undeniable appeal of the model to journalist Vernon Gibbs, saying, ‘If you get into Nico, there’s always the danger that you don’t want to leave.’ In describing the dynamic between the two, he seemed almost to worship Nico for a time, considering her far out of his league: ‘I was this poor little rock-and-roller … and here was this goddess.’ However, Sterling Morrison saw the ­emerging relationship as a sly manoeuvre by Nico to gain status and control within the band. ‘You could say that Lou was in love with her, but Lou Reed in love is a kind of abstract concept,’ Morrison later said. ‘She would try and do little sexual-politics things in the band.’ He continued, ‘Whoever seemed to be having undue influence on the course of events, you’d find Nico close to them.’

As a woman with little education, even less family mobility and living in the context of the pre-1960s women’s movement, Nico’s sexuality would have been one, if not the only, tool she knew she could use to find a place in the world, outside of the expected home-maker matriarch that she often played in print ads. Within this framework, it seems unfair and arguably misogynist simply to cast her as either a femme fatale or a woman looking for a man to define her. Nico’s remarks about her relationship with Reed could be seen to back this up, as they are fairly innocuous, suggesting almost a brotherly love rather than a rabid affair on her part. She described Reed as ‘very sweet and lovely. Not offensive at all. You could just cuddle him like a sweet person when I first met him, and he always stayed that way. I used to make pancakes for him. Everybody loved him around the Factory; he was rather cute, you know, and he said funny things.’ She also admitted that ‘I fell in love with him. He was so beautiful,’ describing him in words that were often applied to her, saying he was ‘very tough. Tough like a statue.’ Yet she con­fessed that the two ‘quarreled a lot’, and he made her cry. But Nico was willing to take the crumbs of affection offered by the frontman, saying, ‘But he could be nice to me.’

At the end of 1965, Reed, Morrison and Cale all moved into an apartment at 450 Grand Street in the Lower East Side. However, Reed started being noticeably absent, instead choosing to spend the night at the apartment Nico was subletting on Jane Street in Greenwich Village.5 It was here that Lou wrote a song for the tall blonde. ‘One night Nico came up to me and said, “Oh Lou, I’ll be your mirror,”’ he recalled. ‘A close friend of mine always said that I bring out the idiocy in people, but I can also bring out something in them which is the best they’ve ever done. It’s like with Nico and John Cale. They were fantastic with the Velvet Underground. They helped produce a great sound then. When I gave Nico a song of mine to sing, I knew she would totally understand what was being said and perform it from that standpoint.’ Gerard Malanga stresses the importance of the relationship for Reed, saying of ‘Mirror’ in Uptight, ‘Lou must have been in love with Nico when he wrote this beautiful, tender love song.’ Warhol encouraged Reed to write more songs specifically for Nico to sing. ‘Andy said I should write a song about Edie Sedgwick. I said, “Like what?” and he said, “Oh, don’t you think she’s a femme fatale, Lou?” So I wrote “Femme Fatale” and we gave it to Nico.’6

It is very likely that Nico experimented with drugs during her time with Reed, though manager Paul Morrissey actively tried to persuade her not to. Victor Bockris believes that it was the uppers popular with the Factory crowd that were most likely passed around recreationally. ‘Nico has a little time living with Lou, then a ­little time living with John. Both those guys are drug users. When you are living with someone, you get high together. She obviously took drugs with Lou Reed. She obviously took drugs with John Cale. I don’t think these drugs were heroin. I can’t say for a fact they ­weren’t, but I think it is more likely they were amphetamines,’ Bockris tells me. ‘It’s a rock world thing, in those days. Andy was famous for the amphetamine rapture sensibility that went into a lot of his work at the Factory, from 1964 onwards. It was pretty much fuelled by that. That is true.’ Bruno Blum recalled a much different vibe, noting a distinct change in his friend Nico once she entered the Factory orbit. ‘I have a couple of interviews of Nico in the Factory in the 60’s, and the way she’s speaking shows evidence that she’s completely spaced out, that she was on drugs,’ he claimed. ‘The way she speaks is very hazy and she doesn’t really know what she’s doing there … She’s completely on a cloud, and that’s the impression I always got with her … she was always on this cloud looking at the world and she’s not part of it.’ Either way, the drugs cannot have helped the budding amore between her and Reed, and the camaraderie provided by the pair’s romantic infatu­ation quickly crumbled.

Cale labelled the duo’s affair as ‘both consummated and consti­pated’, Reed’s odes for Nico being ‘psychological love songs’. ‘It was very much a love–hate relationship,’ Cale says in Nico: Icon. ‘Lou’s affection for Nico quickly faded.’ Nico’s warm, almost maternal love for Reed also turned cold, with her later claiming that ‘Lou liked to manipulate women, you know, like program them. He wanted to do that with me. He told me so. Like computerize me.’ Tension between Nico and the band also revolved around her vocal delivery – or what they saw as the lack thereof. ‘I don’t think anyone was impressed with her musical ability,’ said Cale. ‘Singing in tune was the first objection that was brought up. But then we didn’t play in tune.’

The Nico/Reed break-up during a band rehearsal at the Factory was very public. Nico’s ability to deliver one-liners was perfectly illustrated when she decided to call it quits officially with Reed. ‘Nico came in late, as usual,’ Cale recalled. ‘Lou said hello to her in a rather cold way. Nico simply stood there. You could see she was waiting to reply, in her own times. Ages later, out of the blue, came her first words: “I cannot make love to Jews anymore.”’ According to Cale, Lou was ‘absolutely torn up about it all’ and did not take the break-up well. Nico’s anti-Semitic comment, however, did not faze the frontman, as racy and edgy quips were de rigueur with the Factory crowd. Cale points out that Reed was not the most pleas­ant person to be around at the time, recalling that ‘Lou wanted to be the queen bitch and spit out the sharpest rebukes of anyone around.’ In an interview with The Times, he highlights this, saying of the comment, ‘All the revisionist speculation about her [Nico] being a racist is ridiculous. She told a joke, at least partially at the expense of her own national stereotype, and people chuckled and got on with their chores.’ Nico was simply trying to assert some control within the parameters of a band that she had been foisted upon and get the upper hand within the often catty environment of the Factory.