Chapter 45 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

Besides her book, which she wanted to call ‘Moving Target’, Nico was working on a new record and new projects. She had a small role in the Christel Buschmann film Let’s Kiss and Say Goodbye. Not straying from her track record of art-house esoteric, the movie is ‘A study of the alienated people who frequent the Ballhaus Barmbek dance hall, including an obese groupie, an old man reciting poetry, two young women and a regular dance employee.’

Nico also went into the studio to record guest vocals with synth-pop new wave guru Marc Almond. The track, ‘Your Kisses Burn’, appeared on Almond’s fourth studio album, the appropriately named The Stars We Are. Almond had been a long-time fan and was delighted at the prospect of finally getting to work with one of his inspirations. ‘Nico was a mysterious figure, enigmatic with that great musical and artistic connection to the Velvet Underground and Warhol, which were things I was obsessed about at school,’ he said. ‘And of course that wonderful intriguing voice, icy and remote yet warm at the same time. She made a sound I’d never heard before – maybe some sort of a gothic punk Marlene Dietrich. The first time I heard her music was with the Velvet Underground, but I bought Desertshore, The Marble Index and The End and liked them more. There was also her musical association with Brian Eno, which made her more intriguing. When I became a musician, she was always at the top of my wish list for a duet of some sort.’

Almond used his prior success to convince his record label to let him bring Nico in on his album. ‘I was so nervous to contact her and EMI were not really for it at all, as you can imagine. I wanted to make sure that she was treated like the legend and the star I felt she was. EMI balked at her demands, but I was insistent. It turned out she was lovely if fragile, and we played pool16 and drank tea and talked for ages. The song was a problem, it turned out to be a bit too complicated, too orchestral for her and she began to deteriorate as the day went on and the methadone took effect. She still managed to deliver that wonderful Nico voice. We left on warm terms with plans for a better track more suited to her.’

Nico still had tour dates lined up, much to her chagrin. ‘The last time I put her on,’ recalled promoter John Keenan, ‘she was in her leather trousers, and asked: “Why don’t more people see me? I will be dead soon.” I think she thought that, at 49, she was through; that generation thought everyone was past it when they got to 50.’

Besides some solo shows, Nico played several gigs with John Cale. James Young was involved in these appearances, including those in Japan. Most of the Faction were reunited, acting as a back-up band for both Cale and Nico. Nico would go on before Cale, much to her displeasure. ‘Nico didn’t like the idea of us playing with Cale,’ Young writes in Songs They Never Played on the Radio. ‘It made her feel more marginal, more of a warm-up act. So on the way to every show there were rows about who was doing what, and the order of appearance, and the fact that Cale absolutely refused to perform a number with Nico.’ I asked Young why there was a stark contrast between Cale’s formerly supportive role in Nico’s life and the hard-line attitude during this tour. ‘Looking back, I think it was to do with John’s iron determination to stay clean. He had just got off addiction to both alcohol and cocaine, and he was super-focused on staying fit and healthy. Letting Nico in on any level may have seemed some kind of threat to that, a doorway back to old habits. He relented later on, if I remember correctly, when we played the same bill in Brussels at the Grand Palais [1987/88?] … I think they sang “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” together.’

At the time, Nico’s constant touring had taken away much of the cachet of her shows, as their frequency made each proceeding one less special. Young noted this, saying, ‘Compared with her last tour of Japan, which had been successful both in audience rapport and in financial terms, this was a half-hearted affair. They’d seen Nico the year before, but this was Cale’s first trip to Japan and so there was more of a novelty value attached to his appearances. Novelty is intrinsic to success in Japan … Famous but not popular was the verdict on Nico.’

In June 1988, Lutz Graf-Ulbrich organized a festival called ‘Fata Morgana’, named for the mirage that can be seen in deserts, among other places. It was to be held at the Berlin Planetarium, with five international artists composing and performing music inspired by the desert. Graf-Ulbrich immediately had Nico in mind as a pos­sible participant. Her love for that landscape was well known: from The Inner Scar, which features several different barren terrains, to her time spent with Jim Morrison in Death Valley, it was her favour­ite place. When Graf-Ulbrich asked her what desert she wanted to write about, Nico answered, ‘the Moon’.

Graf-Ulbrich had seen Nico sporadically since her recovery. ‘When I met her in her last years … she was very calm and gen­tle, and soft and not aggressive at all,’ he said. By the time of ‘Fata Morgana’, Nico had been off heroin for two years. ‘She had lost weight and was slim again,’ said Graf-Ulbrich. ‘I had the impres­sion that she felt quite comfortable in this period and that she had calmed down a bit from all her struggles with drugs.’

Faction members Graham Dowdall and James Young joined Nico for the ‘magical performance’. ‘There was a little stage, maybe 250 seats, the Planetarium machines were working,’ recalled Graf-Ulbrich. The absence of heroin made a marked difference to how Nico approached shows. ‘Nico’s new positivism also implied a more self-conscious awareness of the music and it affected me to the degree that, for the first time in a long while, we were both paralysed with stage-fright,’ said Young. Dowdall has great memor­ies of the performance. ‘The gig in Berlin was fantastic!’ he says. ‘It was a glorious experience. She was on methadone by then and she was pretty healthy. She wanted to refocus, to do another bunch of ori­ginal, strong material from a fresh, clean perspective. We thought it was the beginning of a really exciting new period. She was funny. I’ve got a photo of her climbing through the window to get into the dressing room. It was the only way you could. She was just sparky. Her aunt [Helma] was there. She was on form.

‘Lutz had done this brilliant thing of getting us there. We spent three days of writing music in the planetarium. Everything was nice. She was in her home city. It was just great. She was just buzzing.’ He goes on to recall a specific funny memory: ‘She had these boots that jingled. They were really useful because if we were misbehav­ing or talking about her, we could always hear her coming because of the jingling of these boots.’ The last song Nico performed that evening was ‘You Forgot to Answer’, the track she had written for Jim Morrison. ‘I think she felt like it was an opportunity to get back into the fame properly,’ says Dowdall. Young concurs, telling me that Nico seemed to be back on track, ready and wanting to do a new record and get in the studio. He describes her as being ‘really fired up’ to start a new chapter of her life and career.

Young remembers Nico being in pain but refusing to take any medicine at the ‘Fata Morgana’ show. ‘At the last concert, Nico kept saying, “I’ve got this headache, I’ve got this headache!” She had taken to wrapping a kind of turban around her head, real tight. She claimed it really helped with the pain. I told her that she should see a doctor. She just looked at me like, “Oh, come on.” She didn’t want to get medicalized.’

After the show Nico spent the night at Graf-Ulbrich’s, as she was sick of staying in hotels. ‘She counted the money and was happy about the deal, but complained, as always, about the “expensive” musicians,’ Graf-Ulbrich recounted. She confided to her old friend and former lover that she was sick of constantly being on tour and wanted to concentrate on writing, only booking gigs at big ­venues, like opera houses. She announced that she was going to once again seek refuge in her beloved Ibiza, where she would spend three months working on her book and catching up with Ari. Nico then invited Graf-Ulbrich to join them. Graf-Ulbrich turned the offer down, before driving the duo to the airport.

At the terminal, the staff wanted to charge Nico extra to bring along her harmonium. ‘She really flipped out and got very upset,’ recalled Graf-Ulbrich. ‘She kept insulting the entire ground staff of the company. That’s how she entered the plane. One flight attend­ant gave me advice to look after her. “The way she gets furious, she won’t live much longer!” I just shrugged my shoulders.’ Though originally deciding against accompanying Nico and her son on the trip, Graf-Ulbrich later changed his mind and bought a ticket, the plan being to meet up with them in Ibiza. ‘I had this answering machine message from Ari that said, “It’s so nice, come to Ibiza with us!” And so I bought this ticket the next day.’

Reading Nico’s diary, she seems mindful of how vulnerable she was to backsliding into using. She also reveals, again, an awareness of the damage she had done with her substance abuse. She writes on 18 March 1988, ‘I still think that I am rather apt to taking heroin again, my mind does not function like it should, but as soon as a change of Scenery will refresh my Imagination.’

The trip to Spain represented a blank slate of opportunity for Nico, both health-wise and financially. Jane Goldstraw saw her a couple of days before she left for Ibiza. ‘She was actually looking really well when she went on holiday,’ Goldstraw said. Phil Jones and Alan Wise had also finally sorted out Nico’s tangled past album sales, culminating in an unprecedented cash flow. ‘We finally got her royalties for her – a lot of money. So she was able to come off drugs, decamp to Ibiza and live a normal life with her son,’ Jones recalled.

Young also noted how important the trip was for the singer. ‘I think Ibiza meant for Nico a refuge, a place of re-evaluation where she could live a less chaotic existence for a while,’ he said in Helen Donlon’s book Shadows Across the Moon. ‘But it might also be that she was re-imagining and wishing to re-enter the ethos of an era that was now gone. For European intelligentsia as well as bohemia, the Mediterranean, during the immediate post War period, represented something life-affirming after all that horror and destruction: the sun, the sea, fertility, Picasso, Matisse, Robert Graves, Lawrence Durrell, Bardot, Loren …’ Highlighting the complicated and con­flicting parts of Nico, Young continued, ‘[She] was definitely not a party animal … Nico was a bohemian, yes; a junkie, sure … but also a puritan.’