Nico

The Grünewald-Forst cemetery is situated on the outskirts of Berlin, by the Wannsee Lake. In twentieth-century consciousness Berlin has been synonymous with a kind of claustrophobic angst, a landlocked Madagascar of bizarre hybrids. So it’s strange that Nico should be buried in a pretty, almost rural setting, within the perimeters of a city renowned for its monsters, but one for which she no longer felt much affinity.

Like many of her generation, born shortly before or during the war, she felt, at best, an unease towards her country and its guilty past. She no longer saw herself as specifically German. She spoke in English. She dreamt in English. She sang, mostly, in English. And although it saddened her to see the country divided geographically and politically, she never liked to stay there very long. Now she’s a permanent resident.

From the start, Nico seemed destined for a life of strange tensions and weird scenes. Her father came from a rich background, her mother from a humble one. Needless to say, his family deemed it an unsuitable match. Nico was born Christa Paffgen in Cologne on October 16, 1938. Her father insisted on her being brought up a Catholic, with all the attendant mysteries and miseries.

When the war began, Nico’s father was conscripted. He was apparently a poor soldier, unable to respond with convincing obedience to the military and ideological discipline of the Third Reich. In 1943 Nico’s mother received a letter informing her that he’d been wounded in the head and had been taken to a military hospital. His injury resulted in brain damage, and he had become subject to bouts of insanity. The Nazi authorities had one simple, expedient solution for the treatment of the mentally ill – extermination.

Nico and her mother then moved to Berlin to stay with her aunt, but the Allied bombing was so intense they sought refuge with Nico’s grandfather, a railway man, in Lubbenau – about ninety kilometres east of Berlin. There Nico would play with her cousin in the local graveyard and watch the trains (those trains?) go by. At night she could see the burning red sky of Berlin in the distance.

After the war they returned to the city, her mother making her living as a tailor, dressing her daughter as finely as she could. She was a beautiful child and her mother was anxious that she should always look her best. Nico disdained the rigours of conventional German education, and at the age of fifteen, with the encouragement of Ostergaard, a Berlin couturier, she left school to become a professional model. Initially her mother was reluctant to allow it, but Ostergaard managed to persuade the doubtful parent, and by the age of seventeen Nico had become the best model in Berlin. Then, inevitably, she went to Paris, where she worked for, among others, Coco Chanel, who took a personal interest in her androgynous protegée.

To further her career, and to escape Chanel’s attentions, she went to New York to work for Eileen Ford. There, energised by the city and liberal amounts of amphetamine (‘They used to give it us so we’d stay thin’), she earned $100 a day, enough to buy the house in Ibiza that became her European base for the next decade. It was in Ibiza that she became ‘Nico’ – taking the name from a photographer friend in memory of his ex-boyfriend.

Nico moved from scene to scene. In Rome she became involved with the Cinecittà set and found herself conscripted into Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. It was a walk-on part that became extended into a definite role, due to the director’s fascination with her phantom-like presence on the set. Not much real acting ability was demanded of her, more the skills of the catwalk. Fellini, though, was keen to develop her and use her for more pictures, but he became irritated by her habitual laziness. When she failed, after repeated warnings, to make an early morning camera-call, he fired her.

She pursued the idea of becoming an actress a while longer, taking part in Lee Strasberg’s Method classes in New York. Later she would claim that she had been in the same class as Marilyn Monroe.

Then came the music scene. Initially it involved a lot of hanging out. She took lessons in narcissism from Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. He loved those Germanic blondes (though her hair was bleached and her blood mixed). Arm-in-arm they would pose for the adoring crowds at the Monterey Pop Festival or float regally down the King’s Road, King and Queen of the carnival. At this time she cut her first record, a Gordon Lightfoot song called ‘I’m Not Saying’, instantly forgettable, and also had her first meeting with her future mentor – Andy Warhol. He had just dropped in on Swinging London en route to New York after a holiday in North Africa sampling the tight delights of Moroccan youth.

In 1965 she did a spell as a cocktail singer at the Blue Angel Lounge on East 55th Street and soon found herself in the company of Bob Dylan. At that time the scene was divided between the Dylan camp – straight – and the Warhol camp – camp. Nico’s temperament was more suited to Dylan’s circle, she loved the man and his work, but Dylan’s romantic attention was engaged elsewhere and there would be no real place for her except as an acolyte.

Warhol, on the other hand, had found a group at the Café Bizarre, playing curiously titled songs like ‘Heroin’ and ‘Venus in Furs’. The Velvet Underground. Warhol decided that Nico should become their figurehead, much to the reluctance of the rest of the group, Lou Reed and John Cale in particular. Still, they acceded to their patron’s demands – new instruments, free rehearsal space, food, drink, drugs, instant chic, in exchange for letting Nico do a couple of numbers. Nevertheless they delighted in giving her a bad time, bullying her into singing their way – which depended upon whatever caprice the drugs dictated. They’d torment her with tricks like switching off her microphone, or blasting her out with guitar noise – anything to make her feel more paranoid. Paranoia was the dominant theme of the Factory floor.

Lou Reed wrote a few tunes for her, which they got her to sing in that bleached, throwaway style – ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’, ‘Femme Fatale’, ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ – but there was always a problem about who was doing what. Nico was not an instrumentalist, and therefore couldn’t reintegrate with the rest of the group once her songs were over. Besides, Lou Reed was the leader, he wrote most of the material, he was the real singer.

‘Lou never really liked me,’ she once told me, ‘because of what my people did to his people.’

The truth was perhaps more banal – he resented being upstaged by her.

Although they only sold a modest amount of records in their time, the Velvet Underground exerted a potent influence and found their true apotheosis in the 1980s. They were perfectly in tune with the dominant themes of the decade – cynicism, careerism, amorality.

With the encouragement of Jim Morrison, amongst others, Nico went on to become a solo artist, accompanying herself on harmonium and reverting to her real singing style – dark, European and deeply melancholic. John Cale, though antagonistic to her as a member of the Velvets, produced her best work: Marble Index; Desert Shore; The End; Camera Obscura – the last with myself as arranger.

She was never better than when sitting alone at her harmonium, singing one of her disturbing little songs with its hints of folk melody, German Ländler and Bach chorales – all in a voice so unbelievably deep it bordered on Wagnerian parody. There were times, intermittent to be sure, when even the most blasé of audiences, saturated with the gimmickry of the modern pop spectacle, were held in its dark embrace.

The scenes shifted – initially according to the dictates of her career, latterly according to the demands of her heroin addiction. In the early eighties there had been a huge influx into Britain of high-grade heroin from Iran. (Heroin is a useful commodity in times of political turmoil – five times the value of gold.) For a junkie Britain was the place to be, and Nico found herself a niche in Manchester, where there was, and still is, a thriving drug and music scene.

Nico was not a pop star. ‘Famous, not popular,’ was how one Japanese promoter described her. In fact, she wasn’t even that famous. She never made much money as a singer, and what little she did make she spent immediately. She didn’t own a house or a car or a TV or even a single copy of one of her own records. She had a handful of friends who would visit her occasionally with cakes and biscuits, and a few crumbs of gossip that would sustain her interest for a little while before you sensed your presence was no longer necessary.

It was a way of life she’d followed since she was a teenager, a life without any of the more familiar creature comforts that people acquire to fend off boredom and loneliness. The Chanel suits she’d been given in her days as a Vogue model had long since been jettisoned in favour of the more androgynous black trousers and jacket. Her heroin addiction had, at one time, provided some sort of psychic refuge – filling her days with the traditional junkie routine of trying to score – the inexorable search for a good connection.

But even these squalid adventures began to lose their special frisson; towards the end of her life, she turned her back on the drug that had become synonymous with her name and persona. Or