Chapter 36 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

During all of the Drama of Exile tribulations, Nico was at her lowest point. Broke, addicted and reliant on people awed by her celeb­rity status to provide her with drugs, a roof over her head and the basic necessities, the future appeared ever bleaker. ‘I think one of the reasons Nico ended up working in Britain so much was because she was very friendly with Neneh Cherry and her band Rip Rig + Panic,’ Phil Jones tells me over dim sum in Manchester. Jones was a Mancunian booking agent who worked with Alan Wise, managing and booking various bands. ‘Rip were based in Ladbroke Grove. Neneh helped get her into the Rough Trade booking agency, who in turn got her onto one of our nights at Rafters.’

Located in the St James Building on Oxford Street in Manchester, Rafters was a club that showcased new and cult artists. In 1981, it was run and promoted by Alan Wise, one of the music provoca­teurs responsible for championing some of the most iconic artists to come out of Manchester during the 1970s and ’80s. ‘I think Alan is written out of the story,’ says Phil Rainford during our interview. At the time, Rainford was a face in the northern scene, having been the original singer for post-punk band and Factory Records sign­ing the Durutti Column. Rainford worked with Wise, eventually being hired by the promoter to do the sound and help out with any duties while Nico and her band were on tour. ‘Alan was one of the founders of the Manchester music scene. He was putting on gigs for ­people nobody had ever heard of way before Tony Wilson.1 Wilson brought Alan in to help him. Without Alan, hardly any of this [the iconic 1980s/’90s Manchester music scene] would have happened,’ Rainford says. Aaron Sixx’s memories of Wise are similar. ‘Alan was one of the guys who started Factory in Manchester. He was a rich, Jewish, Manchester boy, overweight and very nice. He always had a smile. He was very, very witty and got along with most people.’

Wise cut a memorable figure, being larger than life in stature as well as personality, which helped make him both a catalyst for new music as well as a controversial figure within the community. ‘He was like your cartoon character of the big, myopic Jew,’ Rainford recalls. ‘He could be a real bully because he was big. He was six foot something and fat as well. He had a big physical presence and always looked forty-five from about the age of twenty. He was misogynistic – he was most of the horrible things you could think of,’ Rainford continues. ‘But he was also one of the most brilliant guys you’ve ever met. He was bitingly funny. A lot of people didn’t like him and didn’t like his humour. He and Tony got on quite well, but as far as the media was concerned, Al didn’t fit into that suave and sophisticated thing that Tony was.’

Though having already had a solo career for over a decade, Nico’s name did not immediately ring a bell with Wise. ‘The Rough Trade agency had got in touch with Alan, saying, “We’ve got an inter­esting cult artist called Nico.” Alan said, “Who’s he?”’ says James Young. Young would later be drafted in by Wise to arrange and play keyboards for the singer. Promoter Nigel Bagley also remembers getting asked about the German singer. ‘We were booking artists for the Rafters nightclub in Manchester in 1981 when I got a call from an agency telling me that Nico was in a pub in London, was a mess and was borrowing money off everyone. The person said, “You can book her, but I’ve no idea if she will turn up.” I’d had the Kevin Ayers, John Cale, Brian Eno and Nico June 1, 1974 live album since I was twelve, which led me to The Velvet Underground & Nico, so it was a chance to put on my childhood heroine. I booked her for £200. Then the agency called back, asking, “Can you get her some heroin?”’ Jones remembers how ‘her arms were horrible’, though he notes, ‘but otherwise she didn’t look as if she’d been taking heroin for years’.

Rainford was the one who was sent to retrieve the singer from the train station and bring her to the gig. ‘She had this chap in tow [Robert King]. She’s got this harmonium thing with her; he’s got an amp and a guitar. I picked them up from the station and took them to the hotel we had them in and then took her down to club.’ It was there that Wise first met Nico in the flesh. In Nico: Icon, he recounted, ‘I thought she was quite charming, the day I met her. She was walking down the steps of Rafters. I was walking out. She was travelling around just on her own with a guy called Robert. They had no money, no food, and she seemed a free spirit, looked a bit desperate. So that immediately attracted me. I liked her immediately. From the first second. And I did not even know who she was.’

Everyone who was anyone in the Manchester scene turned up that night for the show. ‘At that first Rafters gig, New Order, Tony Wilson and the Factory Records lot were on the guest list,’ says Jones.

‘I knew the Velvet Underground, but I didn’t really know who she was,’ remembers Michael Wadada during our chat. He would even­tually tour as a sound engineer for Nico. ‘I met her for the first time when she played in Manchester at Rafters. She just seemed kind of relaxed and easy-going at the time, but not wanting to engage with anybody. She was pretty washed out commercially. Nobody would book her.’

Una Baines was familiar with the Velvet Underground through her bandmate, Mark E. Smith of the Fall. ‘I was about sixteen when I met Mark. He was into the Velvet Underground. I just loved them. It was love at first listen. I just thought the songs were so incredible. They had that dark and light thing. All the really strong, powerful stuff, like “Heroin”, and then all these really delicate songs, like “I’ll Be Your Mirror”. That is how I heard of Nico. We used to get all her solo albums. Just think, for English being her second language, she was such an amazing writer. Titles like “Janitor of Lunacy” – what a title! Nobody sings like Nico. I was a totally smitten fan. I learned how to play all the tunes on the piano for lots of her songs.’

Baines had a new band, Blue Orchids, which was being managed by Wise at the time Nico was booked to play Rafters. ‘We went into Rafters,’ says Baines, ‘and I will never forget the very first time I met her, because I was so nervous. She had very long auburn hair, and all we could see was the back of her head. She turned round and just kind of smiled at us. I’d only ever seen pictures of Nico the blonde model; obviously, this was a much older version. She just had this incredible face and these green eyes. I was in awe of her. You could see that face had lived a life.’

Baines may have been one of the only people in the audience already familiar with Nico’s solo work. ‘Nico was really down and out at the time,’ says Young. ‘She had no money; all she had was her harmonium. She had a really serious habit. Okay, she had a name, but it was not a name that would attract a huge following or audience. Because this was just after punk. It was the new wave time. People would reference Nico, but they wouldn’t necessarily pay money to go and see her.’

According to Jones, ‘Everybody had heard of her, but nobody knew what she did.’ He and Wise were immediately blown away once Nico began to perform. ‘Everybody went, “Bloody hell!” Her singing “The End” by the Doors was unbelievable, high drama. Then she did the flipping German national anthem, “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles”, alone at the harmonium. We thought, “Fucking hell, what’s she going to do next?”’ Nico then went on to perform some of the Velvets classics, Jones remembers. ‘She sang “Femme Fatale”, “All Tomorrow’s Parties” and “I’m Waiting for the Man”. Alan Wise was enthralled. She had nowhere to stay, and he said, “We can’t just let her go.”’

Phil Rainford has a more detailed account of what happened at the end of the first Rafters show. ‘I took them [Nico and King] back to the hotel. The next day, myself and Al went to take them back to the station. [King] was in the bathroom, and we were talking to Nico. She started crying. We were a pair of softies, going, “What’s the matter, Nico?” She said [does impression of Nico], “I have nowhere to go. No money and nowhere to go. Nowhere to live in London.” It was like, “Oh.” You don’t expect this. The guy that was with her was a musician. Both heroin addicts. We couldn’t afford to keep her in a hotel for ever. We took her back to either Al’s or another friend of ours who had a spare room. It became obvious within a couple of days that they were running out of heroin. I talked to Al about what we were going to do. By this time, Al was absolutely fascinated by Nico. He had become a bit obsessed. Al always fell in love with somebody within a day.’

Rainford and Wise shuffled King onto a train back to London, then turned their attention to Nico. Her main priority was getting some heroin. She was in luck: at the time, Manchester had some of the highest-grade opiates in the world. ‘By this time, Nico’d moved into the spare room at Alan’s,’ Rainford tells me. ‘He got a bit fed up with her and tried to dump her on me and my girlfriend. We had a really nice house at the time. My girlfriend was a middle-class girl from Northern Ireland, quite Protestant and straight-up really! After a few days of Nico being in the kitchen, jacking up heroin in her feet, my girlfriend said, “I want her out of here!” Nico only lasted a few days. That was the end of her staying at mine. She went back to Al’s. It was clear that we had to get her working so she could live.’

Wise had a slightly different version of events. ‘I found her some­where to live, she’d been touring but she liked Manchester because of the Victorian architecture. Initially she was staying in a Polish hotel in Whalley Range (what do you get for your trouble and pain?), the Polex, owned by a war hero. It was very cheap, she didn’t have much money. After that, she came to live in Didsbury with me, only briefly, then she moved to the other side of Manchester, a beautiful area called Prestwich Park (house was called Moresby), it was Victorian.’

Rainford remembers, ‘She had no money, absolutely no money. She was about forty at the time, but she was a forty-year-old woman who was at the end of her career and at the end of her tether and didn’t know what to do with herself and had no money whatsoever. Al decided it was his mission to resurrect Nico’s career.’

Nico’s life, Wise thought, was ‘the past: Berlin, the war, what she’d done, modelling, why she didn’t like it’. Yet he also saw the complicated and often misunderstood woman underneath the years of mythology. ‘I spoke to Andrew Loog Oldham about her; he said that when they’d met, she’d been very “Harvey Nichol’s” [sic] mean­ing nice clothes, bright attire, fairly upbeat, what you might con­sider a “Lightweight”; but her personality changed because of her opiate use. She got into that culture. Had she not got into opiates she may simply have been a light-hearted German Folk Singer, as “I’m Not Sayin’” suggests. The heavy Marlene Dietrich stance came later. Oldham said her character wasn’t like that at all. She could be moody, but I’d have said it was because of all the drugs she took over the years. Her mood altered every few seconds but she could talk and be charming and witty. She said what she did and got on with it. She was one of the last Left Bank Bohemians. She hadn’t had a formal education in the sense that she hadn’t gone to uni­versity, which she regretted and said was because of the war, she always read good books: Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn, quality English writers. She liked being solitary but she’d also socialise. She wasn’t a snob; she’d hang out at the local pool hall, strike up a conversation with a bum.’

After years of Nico having no proper management, Wise appointed himself to the task. ‘She needed to perform to get money for drugs, and the next thing we knew, Wise had bamboozled her into letting us co-manage her,’ recalls Jones. ‘She didn’t trust any­body, and she had no reason to because she had nobody looking after her affairs, which is why Wise was perfect for her. He put her life into some sort of order, gave her a base and gave her work. The only work she could do was sing gothic songs to a slightly bemused audience. We put her on our books and got her a lot of work, but she didn’t fit in. Everyone wanted to hero-worship her. They were all in awe of her and a bit scared of her. I think a lot of people tried to “woo” her.’

The relationship between Nico and Wise was complicated. ‘He was absolutely besotted with her,’ says Young. ‘It was like a husband and wife, but with no sex! Which is possibly like a lot of husband–wife relationships! A lot of serious rows, a very highly emotional relationship. Not what a typical manager–artist relationship is. There’d be fights and screaming, all that! And at the same time the opposite. It was Alan who gave her the complete [works of] Oscar Wilde; it was Alan who would take her out on the moors to see beautiful bits of landscape and go driving up to the Lake District to see where Wordsworth lived and take her to Haworth, up to Brontë country. They had that. Both sides.

‘It was very intense. Alan wanted a real relationship with her, but nothing ever happened. He said once that she said to him [does impression of Nico], “Oh, why don’t you just rape me?” Because he was staring at her in a lustful way, and she could read him. It was just a very, very intense relationship. But I think most of Alan’s rela­tionships were; it didn’t matter to him that they were highly emo­tional.’ Young continues, ‘She got the management she deserved in that kind of way … Alan, he wasn’t a great visionary manager and he really didn’t understand music, but he really saved Nico. He saved her life.

‘They lived by constantly tearing at each other like a crazed married couple,’ he concludes. ‘At the same time, they were close friends. I would say that apart from Ari, Alan was closest to Nico. I was never that close to her; my relationship was more professional. I realized early on that getting close to Nico meant sharing a propen­sity for addiction. Alan was a Valium addict, and his father had a chain of pharmacies. He understood the chemistry of need, he could facilitate. He responded to people who were ill, whether physically or psychologically. He went under the sobriquet of “Doctor” and took damaged people into his care.’