Chapter 40 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

Manchester proved to be an ideal home base for Nico. She had management, friends and a place to stay. ‘Alan Wise did a pretty good job – the band played to packed audiences,’ says her friend and former lover Lutz Graf-Ulbrich, ‘though she wrote in her diary that she’d much prefer to play at the opera house for an opera audi­ence, instead of all these punk clubs.’ Phil Jones asserts that the lack of recognition was an ongoing vexation for the singer. ‘She under­stood she was doing something very different, and that was her frus­tration. When she sounded her best was with the Blue Orchids. She could get that “Velvet-y” thing which pleased the punters, and then she could do all her dramatic bits at the end,’ he notes.

Una Baines recalls, ‘We’d become her backing band and also opened for her, so we did two sets. I loved it. I think she realized I was a bit of a fan. She used to let me soundcheck her keyboard, which I just took as a fucking amazing honour! She was very dis­ciplined, she always did a really professional performance. The cli­chés about her aren’t fair. I think because she was a woman and she was so beautiful, the fact she took heroin is the focus, not her music.’ Baines says that Nico’s shows were always done ‘to a very high standard. When she got a new band, she had to teach all of the material to everybody. That’s hard work, doing that.’ One time, Blue Orchids’ drummer Toby experienced Nico’s tutorials first-hand. ‘She didn’t really suffer fools very gladly,’ says Baines. ‘We were working on the song “Vegas”. The drums are so complicated, and she really put Toby through his paces to get it right.’

Baines sees a great disparity between a woman whom she describes as a consummate performer and the drug-addled mess portrayed by the press. ‘When it came to the music, she was really kind of strict,’ Baines asserts. ‘You really had to do it exactly how she wanted it to be done. She had pride in her work, and that never wavered. She was very, very professional.’

Though Baines and others found a connection with Nico through music, this could only go so far, as drugs seemed to form the core of Nico’s life. ‘To become emotionally close with Nico you would have to share something with her,’ James Young said. ‘That was usually a form of addiction. She lived in a dream world, you know – and it’s not just because of the opiate. She did live in a different dimension. It all went back to her violent childhood. She couldn’t move on from the shock of being brought up in Nazi Germany. That experi­ence closed her up emotionally.’

Having met Nico on the day the Orchids performed with her at a club called Scamp’s Disco in Oxford, Young quickly found him­self enjoying the same turbulent touring life. He had never been on tour with a rock band, let alone a group composed of several drug addicts. It was a shocking experience for the young pianist. ‘I had no real understanding of what went on in that kind of world,’ Young said. ‘I was a library creature, I was a bookworm. So sud­denly seeing people shooting up in the van with the needles stuck in their ass … The guys were drinking and driving and doing all these taboo things, things that are forbidden, illegal and dangerous. Nico would sit there, kind of chain-smoking Marlboros, occasion­ally she’d have a shot. So the van was just kind of a bog of everyone smoking, of everyone smoking hashish, the smell of heroin cook­ing. It was just this incredible toxic stew. I tried to open a window once, and Nico said [does impression of Nico], “Are you some kind of fresh-air freak?” She could take over any situation. You know, she was an alpha female. She didn’t like other women around, she only liked really the company of men. She liked to dominate and get her way, and I guess we all accepted that. The only way we could survive Nico’s absolute self-absorption and selfishness was through humour and absurdity.’

Sound engineer Michael Wadada describes the shows themselves as ‘really amazing’ yet often riddled with problems, as the group played in cities and countries that did not put on many, if any, rock shows. ‘Her gigs were very unusual,’ he recalls. ‘For instance, the one in Czechoslovakia, we had to get into the town centre in Prague and look for a red car [with the organizers in it] because it was illegal to do gigs. We couldn’t find it. Alan Wise just said, “Come on, we’ll just check into the big hotel here and wait while they find us.” They eventually contacted us and then took us at the time of the gig to the place. It was some kind of college. We got there and everybody was sitting, waiting. There was nothing there. We had just arrived and had to set up in front of them. I was asking, “Where is the PA?” and somebody pointed to something that looked like a home stereo. They were just patiently sitting there. They loved it. We were doing something that was very dangerous. In fact, after the show we were told that the police had found out and were hitting the guy who had put it on.’

Responsible for sound on the tour, Wadada often found himself battling Nico’s dual use of the harmonium. ‘She used to use it as an ashtray. It was always squeaking. She’d sometimes put an ashtray on top of it, and other times when it wasn’t there she’d just do it directly into the harmonium. It was always, “These notes aren’t working!” and then I’d brush all this cigarette ash out of it, because harmo­niums are very mechanical.’ The instrument was equally trouble­some for Phil Rainford. ‘This squeaky old harmonium leaked all the time, so mic’ing it up was a real problem. She’d be pumping this thing, going [hums a tune], and you’d just be hearing [makes whooshing air sound]. The air! It was old, so all the air would be leaking out, making it really hard to amplify.’

It was sometimes a challenge separating the substance abuse from the talented individual. ‘Could I trust Nico? Ultimately, no. And if that sounds hard, well that’s how it is, because heroin addiction or alcoholism reduce your needs to a very simple thing,’ said James Young. ‘It’s kind of like a religious conversion. Could I have trusted Nico artistically? Yes, absolutely. Nico, the pure artist, was deeply inspiring. When I first went on tour with her, I would stand at the side of the stage, because she used to do a twenty-minute solo spot – just her and the harmonium. I’d watch from the wings of the stage and I just remember thinking: “Yeah, I get it. I absolutely get this.” Because it was something unique.’

Between episodes of debauchery and madness, a softer side of Nico sometimes emerged. One such memorable event happened during Young’s very first tour with the singer. ‘The van was parked near a tree with some blossoms on it. She picked these blossoms off the tree, I think it was forsythia or something: long, slender, thin branches with these little yellow blossoms all the way along. She broke these off and stuck them all around the interior of the van. I thought, “This is rather nice! Who knew?” I’d rehearsed with her for a month and she had only shown me the darker side. Then suddenly she’s putting all these blossoms around the van. What a lovely thing! It was just a contradiction of who I’d seen her to be. I liked that, the fact that she could surprise me.’

Despite the constant touring, Nico still found herself with very little money. ‘We were very poor, all the money was spent on drugs,’ recalls Ari. ‘I remember that miserable Christmas in London in 1981. My mother was on tour.’ Una Baines met Ari during this time. ‘We went to London and we stayed at this very ostentatious flat that had a big gold Buddha in the hallway,’ remembers Baines. ‘Nico’d run out of money, and we were just so in love with her we wanted to put all our money together and buy her some heroin. And Ari was going, “No, this is what she does. You cannot do that!” He was telling us off and saying, “Do not do that, this is what my mother does. Don’t fall for it.” He was such a handsome young man. I don’t think he was into drugs at that time. I think he was more trying to look after Nico, be the parent, but he knew what she was like.’

From 1982 through to 1988, Nico was to play more than 1,200 shows, travelling back and forth between gigs and Manchester con­tinuously. ‘When I joined, it was like being recruited by Alan to what he called “the good ship Nico”,’ says Young. ‘At first it was chaotic. There were some ad hoc dates in England, to sustain Nico’s habit. Then we went to Italy in March of 1982, just as the Falklands War was on. The promoters were asking why she wasn’t blonde.

‘We did a six-week tour of America in 1982. That was a bit of a baptism by fire. Didn’t get paid; East Coast to West Coast and back again with no air conditioning, squabbling all the way, vile motels with cockroaches, Nico withdrawing … it was just nuts. I was naive enough to think I wasn’t naive. What the fuck was I doing, this col­lege boy, wandering around the Tenderloin district in San Francisco trying to score heroin?

‘When I look back on it, when I knew her Nico was somehow renouncing everything in her past. Paul Morrissey said it was a renunciation of everything, of all the glamorous model stuff, so that she could become an artist. That took guts.’

Spider Mike King recalls that it was less Nico the artist, more her as a relic from the Velvet Underground that attracted fans to the shows. ‘People would go to the gigs out of a weird curiosity. They wanted to see, to have a taste, a flavour of something they’d only heard about that was a such a dynamic circumstance of the ’60s. By this time, Lou Reed was a great solo artist. I think people saw Nico as being part of that. They would not buy a record necessarily, but would go to a gig to check out that vibe because they’d heard her on the “banana” album. It’s just about as simple as that. It was curiosity.’

On the road, Nico was rather quiet. However, the long stints in cars led to contemplation, which sometimes caught up with the singer. ‘There was a time when Nico was in the back of the car with me,’ Spider Mike recounts. ‘We’d been travelling for hours, and she started gently sobbing to herself. I put my arm round her and said, “Are you okay?” “Yah,” she said, “I just think of things from the long ago.” That was the only time I had ever seen her express herself with any sadness or emotion – she was very stoic. We never talked in the car. Well, the guys would, but her, absolutely not, no. She would just sit by the window.’

Nico’s choice of songs for her set list could be a source of con­troversy, according to sound engineer Phil Rainford. He would often try to get an idea of the crowd before Nico took to the stage. ‘Sometimes I used to try and gauge the temperature of the gig and who would be there. Sometimes I’d say to her, “Don’t do ‘Deutschland über alles’ tonight.” She’d say [does impression of Nico], “Why? Why? It’s just a song.” But she knew what connotations it had for some people. Sometimes she was quite a bit of a devil’s advocate in that way. I tried to talk to her a few times about it, and she would just say, “I like the song.” It actually really suited her doom-laden voice. In a way, I sort of saw it as how Jimi Hendrix did the national anthem of the United States on guitar. Some people thought he was making fun of it and some people thought, “Oh, look, a new modern version. That’s great.” I think she just saw it like that. As an artist, she was allowed to do what she wanted, and it was up to other people what they thought of it. They had to inter­pret what she meant. Whether she was making fun of it or whether she thought it was just a good song or whether she knew it would cause controversy at some concerts, I don’t know, because she would never say. She saw it in the way that Jimi Hendrix did: “I’ve got the right to do this and I’ve got the right to do it how I want it. It’s up to other people how they interpret it.” I thought, “Well, that’s fair enough. I can’t argue with that.”’

It was that song that Nico decided to play at a show in Naples, Italy, leading to a near riot. The country was deeply divided at the time between anarchists and fascists, some of whom thought a Nico gig would be the perfect place to protest. ‘The fascists were throwing coins at Nico,’ says Spider Mike. Showing her steely resolve, Nico stayed on the stage, continuing to perform while she was pelted by a constant stream of items. ‘She went up to the mic and said [does impression of Nico], “You are all fucking arseholes – fuck off!”’ laughs Spider Mike. ‘In the midst of this the cops arrived, and the show was stopped after about half an hour. She was still performing through it all.’

The fascists and the anarchists then started fighting each other, with Nico and her band eventually given a police escort back to their hotel. The pandemonium of the previous day led to Nico hav­ing to hold a press conference in Rome, the location of the next show. ‘She was at one end of this room, and the paparazzi – the press – were interviewing her,’ recalls Rainford. ‘I was stood at the back, watching her hold court. She had ’em in the palm of her hand; she was great, so charismatic. They were saying, “What does it feel like to be a living legend?” That was one of the questions. Her reply [does impression of Nico]: “I feel like I have stepped out of an oil painting!” Great, fantastic, brilliant!’ At the show that evening, police with guns lined the balcony, as local law enforcement did not want a repeat of the insanity in Naples.

Rainford has many memories of simply having fun with Nico on the road, revealing a silly, human side to the singer that is not often discussed. ‘We used to sing together quite a lot,’ he says – you can hear a smile in his voice even over the phone. ‘Both of us were big fans of the American songbook: Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. When we were travelling, quite often she’d sit in the front with me, driving everybody else mad in the bus, and we didn’t care! “Fly Me to the Moon” and “My Funny Valentine” and stuff. We had that sort of connection. Even in her room we would do it: “Do you remember this song, Nix?” and we’d start a song and we’d both sing it. But it was only the American songbook which we both really loved.

‘Once we were in some hotel in Italy. I don’t think we had any money to pay for the hotel bill, so, if I can remember it rightly, we said, “We’ll put on a wee concert.” It had a little hall as a din­ing room and there was a piano in there. It was me, Nico and Jim [James Young]. She and I got up and sang “My Funny Valentine”. It actually went down really well. Italians love Frank Sinatra songs, though I don’t know if they particularly liked Nico’s doom-laden middle European angst.’ Such glimpses under the ‘Nico’ facade offer a softer, arguably more authentic persona and an insight into what might have been, if not for the addiction issues.

The high jinks continued as the band made its way across various countries. ‘In Naples I was drinking late at the hotel bar. I had a tab, on James [Young’s] room,’ Spider Mike laughs. ‘I was really getting hammered after the gig. I eventually struggled from the bar to my room and threw myself on the bed. This voice goes [does impression of Nico], “Spider, what are you doing in my bed?” I said, “Nnnna – what? No, this is my room.” “No, Spider, you are in the same room but a floor above.” She was in bed with her boots on and her big handbag on the floor. Apparently, the hotel had accidentally given me the master key, which opened all the rooms!’

Fun aside, Nico’s drug problem always seemed to hinder any real progress for the singer. She was her own worst enemy in this sense. ‘The regret is that she didn’t make more music in Manchester,’ said promoter Nigel Bagley. ‘She had signed some messy deals which prevented her recording. We put her in the studio with Martin Hannett,6 who shared certain behavioural habits [a heroin addic­tion]. A single, “Procession”, worked well, and “All Tomorrow’s Parties” on the B-side was sensational. So we gave her £1,000 to do an album and she ran away to London. It turned out that she didn’t have any songs but didn’t want to admit it. Heroin stopped her writing.’

People were still drawn to her, perhaps because she seemed so insular. ‘She was perceived as a strong female artist doing her own thing, but on the other side of that was her vulnerability,’ says Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire. ‘She could never work with other people. Probably the only way she could work was if she was performing to herself, singing to herself. You get the feeling that there was a necessity for her to do this, to perform, probably as a way of verifying/reassuring her existence, but it wasn’t ever some­thing you got the feeling she particularly enjoyed. In some ways, I don’t think she needed an audience or other members of a band to articulate what she did. The strangeness of her music – she was like a lost, mournful figure. Her gigs felt like a cry in the dark. You get the feeling she would’ve done it if there was no one else in the room, because it felt like she was exorcising demons.’

Nico was aware of how powerless her addiction rendered her in nearly every way; she was at the mercy of Alan Wise to book her shows to pay for the needed heroin. ‘Had I more money, I would have more power, but somewhere along the line there would be compromise,’ she says in her journal. ‘Everything that I do has to be true. The slightest upset would bring bad luck; of that I have had enough lately. The Karma that seems to turn on me faster than my worst enemy. My own karma, a different environment would do her good, Ibiza for one month after the German Tours, for Christmas that would be. As long as I can sing and not get tired of it I will be happy.’

‘Nico was in a man’s world,’ says Barbara Wilkin, ‘especially when it was about the music, but she needed her money. [The men in the band] could be mean to her. Some comments made about her when the boys were all together I thought were really horrible. Sexual comments like, “She’s had so many men you can throw a plate in there.”’ Graham Dowdall was one of the bandmates with whom Nico had a good relationship, and he knew a person who was much different from the cold, disconnected persona repeated so often in the media. ‘People see Nico, the ice queen – the sort of utter darkness that she lived in this world of coldness. I’m always eager to disabuse that as it was Nico’s stage persona. She would paint on the white face to go on stage because she knew which way her bread was buttered. That’s the way people viewed her, the way they wanted to view her. She wasn’t entirely like that. She was my mate and she was actually a very warm person at times – a lot of the time. She was, to some extent, in control of the creative stuff around her, though she was also very happy to delegate some of that creative process in a knowing way. She worked with people that she trusted and believed in as creative musicians. It wasn’t just, “Al Wise knows this person, and they’ll work with me because they’ll work for peanuts.” I was kicked out of the band on numerous times, from working with Nico in the early days, because of some of the people around her, because of the idea of playing gigs for nothing, and all that sort of thing. And each time, after a certain amount of time, I would get this call [does impression of Nico]: “Oh, Dows! It’s Nico! Things are much better now. I really would want you to join the band again and play with me.” It’s like that! She wanted certain people to be around her, and luckily I was one of them. I quit three times, and she asked me back twice, and Al [Wise] asked me the other time.’ Unlike the myth that she was a negative, malignant presence, Dowdall describes a supportive musical mind. ‘She was actually really positive and encouraging to work with.’

However, being on the road constantly was a grind. ‘She had a pool of musicians,’ Wilkin notes. ‘It wasn’t always the same. Tours were different, depending on who was with us. Normally, it was a hired van with equipment, and everybody chipped in. Nico liked to sit behind the driver. At one point, we had a van which Alan bought. A nice Talbot. She was dead jealous that I was driving. She said, “I used to drive the Velvet Underground!” I don’t do her voice well [deepens voice]: “I used to drive! I can drive!” Alan wouldn’t let her, but I think for some reason she thought I would. She started putting her knees in my back. Finally, I let her take the wheel at one point. We came out of a tunnel, and she says, “I want to drive now! Okay?!” We stopped the car. Nico was trying to drive and it was going [makes surging noises and gestures]. Then she killed the engine and she just cried. She couldn’t do it any more, but I’m sure she could in the past. Maybe she hadn’t driven in donkey’s years.’

Journalists often preyed upon the obvious changes in Nico, openly crowing with palpable delight at what they framed as the demise of a former world-class beauty. An especially disturbing example of this is an NME review from 1983, written by a female contributor. She seems incredibly happy at seeing Nico’s very pub­lic, unapologetic transformation from the blonde bombshell of the 1960s to the mature performer. ‘I mean that there was something unbearably pathetic about a once-beautiful woman, now around 40, conducting a public search for some vestige of her former self,’ Cynthia Rose writes. In tearing her down, nothing is off limits, from Nico’s voice to her appearance, as Rose continues her annihi­lation: ‘In this situation, every phrase Nico sang or mumbled took on an irony that might have been awful if it hadn’t by now become so truly banal. There she stood, intoning “All Tomorrow’s Parties” in a voice an octave deeper but with no increase in its three-or-so note range – wearing her own “hand-me-down gown” of sheepskin coat, sloppy black polyester pantsuit and cowboy boots.’ Rose even seems to deride Nico for daring to look like herself, crucifying her for not still being the cool muse of the Velvets. ‘One by one, the motley company blundered through those simple, churchy folksy tunes once rendered perverse by Nico’s sliding delivery, deadpan dramatics and former hard white-blonde giant-German self,’ she asserts. ‘The only result was a messy, uninteresting demonstration of how sorry a sight vices from cough syrup to self-pity can produce in the flesh.’

Rose is exactly the kind of audience member that Barbara Wilkin despised. ‘There were many gigs we were at and the crowd only wanted to hear the Velvet Underground stuff. As soon as she sat there with the harmonium, people started talking loudly over it. I often felt like going, “Shut up and listen!” But I didn’t. Now, I prob­ably would. Then, I didn’t. Sometimes she would just [makes sighing noise], stop, have a drink. She would start again because she didn’t have a choice. She could just hear the audience talking so loud.’

Nico knew her heroin problem had destroyed many of her pre­vious relationships but still could not stop. In her diary, she even seems to almost accept that she has no other choice but to continue the spin cycle of touring, scoring, using and poverty, writing, ‘In every human journey there’s a point of no return.’ Dowdall saw this for himself. ‘I think she felt that her conspicuous addiction caused a lot of her old, American-based people to distance themselves from her. I think a lot of it was men who’d used her, but they’d moved on. There was a lot of that. They’d claim they don’t want to look back at the junkies and stuff like that. Or they didn’t want people to know that they were still users. They just wanted to distance themselves. There was something scurrilous about Nico that they just didn’t want. A lot of them were trying to paint a cleaner picture. In the ’70s, it was okay to be a bit scuzzy, but in the early ’80s I suppose even Lou Reed was trying to maintain that he was clean.’ However, Dowdall disagrees with the claim that the drugs extinguished her artistry. ‘It is incorrect to say, “Oh, it’s such a tragedy that heroin destroyed her creativity,” he says. ‘Heroin didn’t destroy her cre­ativity. A lack of heroin at times made her not the nice person that she could be when she had it! And I think the period before we met her, it probably slowed up her creativity and allowed her to be influenced by some horrible characters. I don’t think heroin actually diminished her creativity.’

He also has a problem with the assertion that Nico was a com­pulsive liar. ‘She would embellish the truth to the press, because the truth is never always a good story for the press,’ he recalls. ‘She used to have this character that she would put on. It’s not dishon­esty, but there’s a hiding behind something in that. She never said anything to me that I was able to say later, “Nico, that wasn’t true, what you told me. You lied to me about this. You lied to me about that.” None, actually. I can’t think of a single example.’ Phil Jones also had issues with the allegation of Nico systematically making up stories. ‘If she told you something personally, it tended to be true,’ he said. ‘In Oliver Stone’s Doors film, there’s a scene where she gives Jim Morrison a blowjob in a lift. She would have been really affronted by that. She’d read this sort of thing in books and tell me: “That never fucking happened.” She never was a femme fatale. She just got hit on a lot by very famous people. I think she was abused along the way. She told me five times: “Jim Morrison was the only man I ever loved.”’

Most of her unsavoury acts were related to drugs. ‘I can think of lots of examples of her behaving badly – but not lying,’ says Dowdall. ‘Most of her bad behaviour was to do with heroin. When she was short of heroin, she was a monster! I had to physically throw her out of my house – not that she was being particularly hor­rible, but because she was going to be. We always used to stop off at my place on the way back from European tours because I was south London, and always by the time she came back she was sick [from withdrawal] and she’d be trying to ring her dealer in Stoke Newington. He was often not there, so she would say, “Can I just sit in your house and wait for him to ring?” I am thinking to myself, “I really don’t want a sick junkie in my sitting room.” “Oh, it’s so warm and nice in here! You have tea and a fire!” And it’s like [makes groaning noise]. So I have actually had to throw her out: “Nico, sorry. Go home.” This is the Nico that I knew, as a person. She’d come down here, we’d smoke a joint in front of the gas fire and we’d drink tea. She was a warm and friendly mate.’