Nico: the voice and face of a generation

the times literary supplement 14 january 2022

Christa Päffgen was born in Cologne in 1938 to parents of Spanish and Yugoslavian descent and only became known as Nico in her late teens, when she had begun modelling and the fashion photographer Herbert Tobias suggested the name. She went on to find fame via a bit part in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and, later, in Andy Warhol’s Factory and as the frontwoman of the Velvet Underground – much to the chagrin of their existing singer Lou Reed – before becoming a solo artist. Her singing style was once described rather beautifully as sounding like “a body falling through a window”. And she has so often been viewed in relation to the men in her life: “Andy Warhol’s original factory girl” or “Lou Reed’s muse” are two examples. Her life ended at the age of forty-nine when she suffered a brain haemorrhage while in Ibiza with her only child, a son named Ari. Ari’s father was the film star Alain Delon, but the young man had grown up largely with his paternal grandparents, only bonding with Nico as an adult by taking heroin with her.

Nico has long been marginalized. In 1996, her former bandmates from the Velvet Underground (Lou Reed, John Cale, Maureen Tucker and Sterling Morrison) were all inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; she was not. In 2006, local councillors in Cologne refused to grant a proposal to call an unnamed square in the city “Christa-Päffgen-Platz”. The reason given for their refusal was that the square could not be named after Nico because of her “drug career”.

Her beauty (“straight shoulder-length blond hair with bangs, blue eyes, full lips, wide cheekbones – the works”, in Warhol’s description) was used as a stick to beat her with as she aged. The change in her looks, hastened by her heroin addiction, was written about by the music press in almost as much detail as her earlier, otherworldly glamour had been. It is hard not to sympathize with a woman who was initially dismissed partly because of her looks (in 1966, Hitline magazine assessed her thus: “fantastic beauty but no voice”) only to be later criticized for her perceived carelessness in preserving them. In her biography of Nico, You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone, the cultural historian Jennifer Otter Bickerdike quotes a review by the journalist Cynthia Rose of one of Nico’s concerts from 1983: “I mean that there was something unbearably pathetic about a once-beautiful woman, now around 40, conducting a public search for some vestige of herself”. Una Baines, a friend of Nico’s and the keyboard player in the first line-up of The Fall, has also said “She did say her only regret was not being born a man. I think she wanted the same privileges and power that men have. She felt people were only interested in her looks. She wanted something more substantial. She wrote songs in her second language. She was fluent in seven”.

Bickerdike’s book is a serious attempt to examine Nico fairly. She painstakingly pieces together her early life in Nazi-era Germany, whereas even where and when Nico was born has previously been disputed. Bickerdike carefully builds the idea that Nico was brutalized by her early experiences: by the atrocities she witnessed in her childhood, when she also seems to have been placed in an orphanage for seven months, and by her probable rape by an American GI at thirteen. Others have questioned whether this crime occurred, pointing out that no documentation of it exists even though Nico claimed the perpetrator was tried and executed. As James Young, the author of an earlier book on Nico, has said, “why would you make that up?” Bickerdike also reasons that in East Germany at the time it was unacceptable to criticize the Soviet and American saviours who had rescued the country from fascism, hence the crime against Nico not being recorded. But this doesn’t quite explain why there is no record of the sergeant being court-martialled and hanged for it, as Nico claimed he was.

Bickerdike conducted over 100 interviews with acquaintances of Nico to create a more balanced picture of the artist than has ever been attempted before. I am not convinced that all of those interviewees needed to be quoted, however, not least because the testimonies often repeat information we have already been told. And quite what the Doors’ keyboard player Ray Manzarek’s bafflingly detailed account of the oral sex technique Nico used on Jim Morrison adds to our understanding of the woman is beyond me.

Bickerdike goes to some lengths to try to explain that Nico wasn’t racist, in spite of the singer saying “I cannot make love to Jews any more”, as a way of ending her brief relationship with Lou Reed. In 1971, while at El Quixote, the Spanish restaurant attached to the Chelsea Hotel, Nico smashed a glass into the face of a young Black woman named Emmaretta Marks whom she overheard complaining about racism. No one appears to dispute this happening, but Nico’s motivation for the attack and the dialogue leading up to it is contested by various sources. John Cale’s version, although he does not appear to have been present, was that the attacked woman had been saying “How I’ve suffered! How I’ve suffered!” Nico allegedly shouted back “Suffering? You don’t know what suffering is!” Cale went on to say that Marks “needed something like 20 stitches in her face”. Nico’s friend Danny Fields, who is Jewish, has said that to accuse Nico of racism or antisemitism is “kind of comical … She didn’t belong to anything. It was news to me that she even registered what colour people were, she seemed above that. It was a pose, an act”. What is certain is that Nico fled New York after the El Quixote incident.

Bickerdike also works hard to dispel the idea that Nico was cold and humourless. Her best evidence for this is an anecdote told by her former boyfriend Robert King. On the day Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer (July 29, 1981), Nico and King decided to make spaghetti Siciliana, using a can of anchovies for the sauce. They took heroin and two tablets of acid each and, somehow, ended up wallpapering the apartment with the sauce so that the flat stank of rotten fish for months afterwards. King says, “So that tells you how much of an ‘Ice Queen’ she was”. Does it? Nigel Bagley, who was her promoter during her Manchester years, claims “she was wonderfully deadpan. We met the film director John Waters who asked if she would sing at his funeral. She said: ‘Call me when you’re dead’”.

While Bickerdike’s attempts at even-handedness fail to animate her portrayal of Nico to the extent she might have hoped, James Young’s reissued memoir Nico, Songs They Never Play on the Radio is full of fizz and squalor. Young played keyboards in Nico’s last band, formed in 1982 when she was living in Manchester and addicted to heroin. Sadly, Young’s tangy prose style has not aged particularly well (the book was first published in 1992): he is fond of reporting vernacular speech phonetically, which is tedious if the speaker is Cockney but becomes downright distasteful when, for example, he describes a Japanese promoter exhorting Nico and her bandmates to sit under “the chelly brossom” for good luck while on tour in Tokyo. The music journalist Will Hodgkinson has said that Young’s memoir is written with “wry amusement, alongside a fair bit of affection for his icy boss”. I’m not so sure; Young certainly doesn’t accord his subject much dignity when he tells us how Nico’s son tried to sell his mother’s cache of methadone at her funeral. This might be seen as fair game in a warts-and-all account, but Young is also oddly fixated on Nico’s grey knickers – the final lines of his book recount a customs officer in France, north of Lille, allegedly fingering a pair of these knickers among her belongings as Young and his bandmates returned from the funeral in Germany. The tone of Young’s recollections might be somewhat macabre, but he is not without self-deprecation: “If she was a has-been, we were never-will-bes”.

Despite her failings, Nico is now considered by many to have been a great artist. Among those believers is her former lover Iggy Pop. Bickerdike quotes him as saying “It was just a real kick to be around her. I’m absolutely convinced that some day, when people have ears to hear her, in the same way [they] have eyes to see a Van Gogh now, that people are gonna just go “WHOOOAAA!”

This review originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement