The Girls of Rock and Roll

Nico

The first time I heard Nico’s voice was on the Velvet Underground’s first album, aptly titled The Velvet Underground and Nico. I was deep in my Lou Reed obsession, and after listening to a few solo albums I decided to hear where it all started. On first hearing ‘Femme Fatale’, the first song Nico sings on the album, I was a little confused. Her incredibly deep androgynous voice fascinated me, and immediately I had to know more.

Brian Eno once said that while hardly anyone bought The Velvet Underground and Nico when it was first released in 1967, all of those who did seemed to go on to form a band. While Nico was only a guest star on three of the tracks on the ‘Banana Album’, it was largely due to her involvement that the album was ever recorded.

Born Christa Paffgen, the iconic actress, model and singer spent the early years of her life in war-time Germany and post-war East Berlin. At the age of fifteen she was ‘discovered’ outside a department store in Berlin and became a model. She met Andy Warhol in Paris while he was promoting Poor Little Rich Girl, and early film starring Edie Sedgwick. Nico had also worked in films, namely Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, where she played herself. When Nico moved to New York, she became one of Warhol’s ‘Superstars’ and a regular at his Factory.

Warhol then suggested (read, insisted) that she sing with resident band The Velvet Underground in his Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a travelling show which combined music, film and theatre. While she intrigued audiences, Nico often complained that she had to struggle to gain any respect in the band. ‘They played the record of Bob Dylan’s song ‘I’ll keep it with mine’ because I didn’t have enough to sing otherwise. Lou wanted to sing everything. I had to stand there and sing along with it. I had to do this every night for a week. It is the most stupid concert I have ever done’ (Nico in McNeil and McCain 1996: 12-13).

Her involvement with the band at this stage led to her recording of three songs on their debut album.
In fact, it was Nico that brought the Velvet Underground thir recording contract, as recalled by their former manager Paul Morrissey: ‘Verve/MGM only bought the albums from me because of Nico’ (Morrissey in McNeil and McCain, 1996). Yet they had little commercial success. The Velvets chose a rather unfortunate time to record an ‘arty’ album. The year was 1967, best known as the ‘Summer of Love’. Audiences weren’t interested in songs about heroin and S & M. The majority of music was coming out of San Francisco, and the Velvet Underground’s music was as far from the popular folk style as possible.

Later that year, Nico went on to record her first solo album with Andy Warhol, titled Chelsea Girl, which was the first of six solo recordings she made until her death in 1988. Nico struggled with a heroin addiction in the last 20 years of her life.

Surprisingly, despite her underground success and her involvement with one of the most influential bands of the 1960’s, Nico is best known for her bedhopping. The amount of writing on her affairs with Lou Reed, John Cale (also in the Velvet Underground, Nico was blamed for Reed and Cale’s creative split), Jim Morrison (The Doors), Iggy Pop, Tim Buckley and Bob Dylan, just demonstrates the point of this whole blog.

Nico is constantly represented as a beautiful (and somewhat scary) non-musician who was carried along by the more talented musicians that surrounded her, the girl who stood to the side of the stage playing a tambourine because that’s all she could do. But her career reveals more than that. Nico completed six solo studio albums in her lifetime, plus her work with the Velvets. And while in her early career her peers wrote songs for her, by her second solo albums The Marble Index, Nico was writing all her own music.

Her bizarre singing style and the dark subjects she sings about led Rolling Stone to name her as the founder of Goth rock in 2003.

Sources
McNeil, L. and McCain, G. 1996, Please Kill Me: the Uncensored Oral History of Punk, Grove Press, New York.

Author Unknown, 2007, Nico’, Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio 4, 30th September.

By Alex