Every once in a while, you might hear ‘These Days’ through your radio and find yourself bewitched by Nico. The same goes for Jennifer Otter Bickerdike who decided to take things further and explore the story and career of one of pop’s most mysterious female icons. Jen’s book You are Beautiful and You are Alone is just published and so, we celebrate the book and the pop myth that is Nico.
Words and curation: Jen Otter Bickerdike, cover art by Lina Moon
I was very, very late discovering Nico. My first introduction to her solo work came via the soundtrack to Wes Anderson’s 2001 film, The Royal Tenenbaums. The art house favorite revolves around the title’s clan coming together when their father claims to be terminally ill. In an establishing scene, we learn that son Richie is in love with his adopted sister Margot. Twenty minutes into the movie, he anxiously awaits a long overdue reunion with his beloved relative. The frame speed dramatically slows to reveal a bus pulling into the depot. Camera shots flick between the approaching vehicle and the despondent Richie. The motor’s doors gradually open, revealing Margot, in all of her heavily eyelined, long-fur coated, red-hair-catched glory. As she slowly and deliberately approaches her waiting brother, Nico’s ‘These Days’ kicks in. The song perfectly matches the purposefully languid cinematography, Nico’s singing style of drawn out vowels mirroring the anticipation of the two siblings seeing each other again. It also heart-wrenchingly encapsulates unfulfilled longing, the weight that such drawn out melancholy can bring.
I went out and bought the movie soundtrack, and, eventually, also purchased Chelsea Girl, Nico’s first solo record, released in 1967. I loved the album. However, listening to it as a whole, start to finish, side A to side B, I found very uncomfortable and I was not sure why. Nico’s voice, lyrics, the heavy strings, and even the flutes (the addition of which in the final mix she claimed drove her to tears) captured in audible form a longing, a sadness, a deep-rooted yet unexplainable wistfulness. I would dip in and out, listening to a track or two before moving on to something lighter. The album’s cover art is unarguably beautiful: a shot of Nico from the waist up, wearing a simple black, long sleeved shirt, gold rings complimenting her cascade of blonde locks, eyes cast down. This image is super imposed over a black and white shot, a close-up profile of her face: all swollen lips, heavy, thick lashes and long fringe. On their own, each picture is brilliant in providing the visual accompaniment to the cool sadness emanating from every track on Chelsea Girl. Together, they provide a complete portrait of what the Nico myth was to become, for in neither image is the artist looking at the camera. Her eyes are downcast and averted from the viewer, as if she is both hiding her true self from the audience yet is scared of fully confronting who she is or her future legendary status. The LP sleeve also encapsulates much of the Nico story in one 7” x 7” space. Nico used her most sellable commodity, her appearance, to escape war torn Nazi Germany, and create her own myth, from various renditions of her past to being one of the first celebrities to go by just a singular name. Yet her beauty also became a prison as she found herself trapped by other people’s expectations - or lack of - based upon her stunning face.
I did not think much more about Nico until almost fifteen years later. I was sitting with a friend, discussing our personal female rock heroes. The usual suspects for any Generation X woman were brought up: Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, Siousxie Sioux, Chrissie Hynde, Stevie Nicks, Tina Turner. I of course lamented the lack of visibility for one of my childhood favourites, Laura Branigan. It may have been the bottle of wine that we had already consumed, or that compared to all of the men in music that we love, the list of women we could come up with was woefully short, but we soon decided to turn to professor Google to see who we had sadly not named on our own. ‘Oh! Of course!,’ we said as we read off names: Kim Deal (LOVE HER!), Cher (Duh!), Annie Lennox (Legend!). Then we came to Nico. She was in the Velvet Underground for that one crucial record. And she had that Chelsea Girl album. But what else? Though both of us prided ourselves on being walking pop culture encyclopedias, the coffers where coming up empty on Nico beyond those two facts. I made a note to (soberly) do a bit of research on the singer to see why she was considered one of the greatest, alongside other familiar rock icons.
I assumed I would find one of the now well-worn narratives of rock and roll: the usual story of highs, lows, comebacks and eventual tours of county fairs, nostalgia nights and heritage gigs, repeatedly dusting off ‘These Days’ and the ‘hits’ from the Velvets songbook for an ageing fan base longing for their own youth of swinging London or hippie optimism. Maybe Nico was on the B-list content circuit, making the rounds on the vast array of omnipresent reality TV shows that feature an endless parade of has beens and use-to-be’s. Maybe the former chanteuse had been on a season of Dancing on Ice that I had missed. However, my jaded and cynical mind, admittedly warped by the 21st century’s constant bombardment of vacuous simulacrums, was humbled by the story of Nico. What I found instead of the cliché was a life, a career, a myth that became more surreal the further I dug into it.
Nico is one of the only artists I can think of who truly made art for arts sake. Now records like her second solo outing The Marble Index are considered modern classics; at the time, they were massive commercial flops, with the press suggesting that they would be a great soundtrack for the suicidal. Returning to songs like ‘Frozen Warnings’ and ‘Lawns of Dawn’ plunge the listener into an icy soundscape that goes straight to the bone. Nico spoke seven languages; English was not her native tongue. Her lyrics reflect this, as she uses the specific words and idiosyncrasies of the vernacular as tool itself, creating meaning in unexpected and often startling ways. ‘Janitor of Lunacy,’ her track about former lover Brian Jones, features the creepy yet descriptive verse: “Paralyze my infancy / Petrify the empty cradle /Bring hope to them and me.” Completely different and equally beautiful is the track ‘Afraid,’ an arguably autobiographical track for Nico herself: “Have someone else’s will as your own / You are beautiful and you are alone.” Accompanied by John Cale on a haunting piano, Nico’s vocals capture the yearning of a woman who, in the words of Johnny Marr, was “always disappointed”. Not all pop music has to be cheerful though, and disappointment can translate to some beautiful art, and Nico is proof of that.
You are Beautiful and You are Alone by Jennifer Otter Bickerdike is out on July 15th in the UK on Faber & Faber and Hachette in the US on August 20th. Lina Moon’s artwork can be found via her Instagram.