She practised for hours every day and soon began playing at New York’s The Scene. She always had an interest in the exotic.” Her lyrics, meanwhile, betrayed both the influence of the Romantic poets to whom she had been introduced by Jim Morrison, but also the German folk tales and Nazi propaganda of her childhood. It was on this instrument that Nico formed the simple, hypnotic basis of her sound as critic Richard Williams later noted, “Her technical limitations defined her style.” The harmonium was, Cale recounted, “partly to do with Cohen, and partly to do with the Indian side of her.
Nico janitor of lunacy portable#
But her associations with these male musicians, especially Morrison, Brian Jones, and Leonard Cohen (who persuaded her to switch to a macrobiotic diet) led her to compose her own music, and the portable Indian harmonium that she bought in San Francisco proved pivotal. An album of songs by writers including Reed, Bob Dylan, and Jackson Browne, the elegant chamber-folk of Chelsea Girl, was released to little fanfare in 1967. She drifted around California in the Summer Of Love, staying at The Castle with Warhol and taking peyote trips in the desert with Jim Morrison. Post-Velvets life was, in keeping with Nico’s nomadic past and itinerant future, rootless. The Nico/Cale trilogy emerged both as a direct reaction to the powerlessness that she felt in the direction of her career and as a means to express some of the deep anguish she had experienced through an unsettled childhood spent in war-torn Berlin and the guilt that she felt over the guardianship of her son, Ari, fathered in 1962 by the French actor, Alain Delon. When advertising dishwashers began to gall, Nico, a woman with an innate talent for turning up at the right place at the right time, became a cult film actress cut a jaunty Gordon Lightfoot-penned single, I’m Not Sayin’, on Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate label and became a Factory Superstar in Warhol’s New York. Until Nico found her true muse in the late 60s, she had worked her way from the department stores of post-war Berlin to the fashion capitals of Paris and Milan and lucrative photo shoots in Ibiza and New York. Nico is known in pop culture for one or all of three things: her memorable, if slight, appearance in Fellini’s 1960 film, La Dolce Vita, her superstar turn as Andy Warhol’s Factory-approved chic beauty in The Velvet Underground, or her final years as a road-dog, split between suburban Manchester and the seedy clubs of Europe, where she performed constantly to fund her heroin habit.Ĭuriously, and unfairly, the extraordinary trilogy of records that she made with John Cale – 1968’s The Marble Index, 1970’s Desertshore, and 1974’s The End – remain a closely-kept secret of sorts timeless jewels of morbid beauty and neo-classical grace:Ī far cry from her association with The Velvet Underground, where her Teutonic vocals were derided as “tone-deaf” and she awkwardly banged a tambourine onstage as Lou Reed hogged the spotlight.
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