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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
Summary.
German chanteuse Nico, who
sang with the Velvet Underground in New York before returning to Europe,
invented a style of singing that has little to do with rock music,
a style that belongs to no particular place and no particular time,
a style that may as well be medieval or romantic, Indian or Middle-eastern,
a style that is mainly "enunciation".
a style that sounds by turns like Greek chorus, Shakespearian monologue,
Schubert-ian lied, Gregorian psalm, Elizabethan song, exotic chant.
Her lugubrious litanies (which invented gothic rock more by accident than by
design) sway between the lament of a buried alive and the stately invocation
of a priestess.
The staging of these funereal cries quotes from Goethe's metaphysical
allegory "Faust", from Wedekind's expressionist drama "Lulu", from
Brecht's epic theatre, from French noir cinema, from Dali's surreal paintings.
She straddled the line between aristocratic and prostitute with the elegance
of a ghost.
Her first masterpiece, Marble Index (1968), introduced gothic,
archaic, exotic and neo-classical elements into rock music, but it could not
be farther from being sensationalistic: Nico sang about a childhood trauma,
in the grips of lacerating loneliness, monotonous, slow, too weak to soar,
too weak to add emotional or melodic value to her godless liturgy.
She sang, perhaps, about the childhood trauma of an entire (cursed, doomed) race.
John Cale's arrangements (no percussions, emphasis on keyboards),
whose delicate impressionism transformed each song into a chamber sonata,
and Nico's androgynous look increased the shock.
Her second masterpiece, and one of the greatest albums of all time,
Desert Shore (1970), went even further, evoking the desolation of an
icy and empty universe, as if after a colossal catastrophe.
Stronger doses of urban neurosis further depressed her voice, but also
lifted the shamanic/prophetic tone to another dimension.
The sense of ancient became more than a smell of death: a smell of the
otherworld.
The anemic, moribund, suspenseful atmospheres penned by her church-like
harmonium and Cale's viola belonged to a catacomb.
By now, it was more than fatalism: it was eternal angst.
It was fear, both bleak and majestic, leading to a mental paralysis that
was both childish and cosmic.
Each song was an enigma, and the singer a sphinx.
But she was also an explorer, albeit an explorer of the inner world.
Nico's cadaveric, petrified voice wandered through the labyrinth of a wasted mind,
scouring inner landscapes made of nightmares, visions and nameless shadows for
the ultimate meaning.
Or, better, Nico lived on another planet, and was the Homer who sang about the
apocalypse of planet Earth, as viewed from up above.
Her rosary concluded with The End (1974), Drama Of Exile (1981)
and Camera Obscura (1985) that tried to modernize her sound
(the ultimate oxymoron).
Full bio.
(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)
Nico invented a style of song that had little to do with rock music. It was a stateless and timeless style, one that could draw equally on the medieval passacaglia or on Indian raga. It was, in fact, a style centered primarily on diction, and therefore theatrical. Into it flowed elements of Greek tragedy, the Shakespearean monologue, Faust, Lulu, and Brechtian theater. Nico heightened the tension of declamation by developing a polyglot recitar cantando, moving from Schuberts Romantic lied, from responsorial psalmody, from the "Carmina Burana" and the Elizabethan song, all the way to the chanson noire and the litanies of the muezzins. Her dark dirges of being buried alive (which, purely by chance, invented gothic rock) have no equal in the history of music for their power of suggestion and absoluteness.
Born in Cologne in 1938 and raised amid the ruins of the Second World War,
Christa Paeffgen began traveling around Europe at a very young age:
she was in Rome as an extra in Fellinis La Dolce Vita, in Paris as a fashion model (and already an unwed mother), here and there across the continent as an apprentice folk singer. At twenty-one she recorded her first disc, a 45 rpm single, in London, thanks to the friendship of Brian Jones and Jimmy Page, but, given its lack of success, she set off for New York, where she befriended Andy Warhol, who employed her in his shows and brought her into the Velvet Underground.
After the first album under their name, Nico continued to work for Warhol, acting in Chelsea Girl. The soundtrack to this film (1967) constitutes her solo debut, bringing together five leftovers from sessions with the Velvet Underground and three compositions by Jackson Browne. The classical-music arrangements are a rather paltry substitute for the devastating sonic orgies of Cale and Reed: Nicos singing loses its sinister edge and her icy emotionality finds no dramatic foothold amid pastoral strings and bucolic flutes. Only the hypnotic and dissonant raga of It Was A Pleasure Then allows Nicos expressive potential to shine through, here as an angelic muezzin. After spending another year in Warhols entourage, Nico took a job in a nightclub on Saint Marks Place and met Jim Morrison, who taught her how to turn poetry into music. She avoided festivals and other rock-world social events, preferring instead the less crowded neighborhood theaters. With the help of a few friends, she managed to record the two albums of her maturity, Marble Index (Elektra, 1968) and Desert Shore (Reprise, 1970), seductive portraits of the anomalous personality of this fatal chanteuse of patrician temperament. She settled in Paris, where she also continued her activity as a film actress in underground movies with no commercial appeal. Her appearances grew increasingly rare, but in 1974, following an English concert that was an event for the number and prestige of its participants, she recorded a new album, The End, dedicated to the master of endings. Having once again vanished into avant-garde clubs (in Manchester, her new residence), she resurfaced at the beginning of the 1980s, when critics and the public finally took notice of her. This, in broad outline, is the story of one of rocks most unsettling personalities: beautiful and profoundly alone, stateless, inscrutable, with an enigmatic face worthy of Greek tragedy and the ambiguous charm of an intense life. With two albums per decade, Nico is certainly one of rocks least prolific and most reserved figures. Her entire output does not even amount to five hours of music.
From the very beginning Marble Index presents itself as a traumatic experience. The evocative arrangements by John Cale (with the absence of percussion, frequent references to dissonant and minimalist avant-garde music, and folk quotations from every era and region) and the specter of Nicos voice, wandering restlessly through the labyrinths of a devastated mind, paint unreal and enchanted landscapescertainly inner landscapesmade of air, white light, ineffable visions, and nameless shadows. The atmospheres of the piecestenuous, elusive, apathetic, anemic, moribundare refracted and distorted as in a hall of mirrors. The songs evoke the desolation of a cold, deserted world, as if after an immense catastrophe. And Nico truly seems to sing under the weight of a terrible trauma, in the most total solitude: her voice lacks the strength to rise into emotional inflections and is content with a slow-motion solfge, often marred by sinister echoes. What has driven Nico back to this form of catacomb-like ceremonial music is something deeper and more definitive than urban neurosis: it is an intense worldview, an incurable anguish, a latent and perpetual fatalism.
Cale invents the appropriate instrumental backdrop by drawing on the lessons of the rock-classical music of Academy In Peril. Here too the arrangements form small chamber sonatas, but it is Nicos cadaverous singing that gives meaning to the whole, canceling symphonic ambitions and expanding the horizon toward Eastern folklore. Gothic to the point of nervous exhaustion, the album never indulges in horror. If it is true that every lied is a small danse macabre, it is also true that Nico estranges it by stuffing it with sonic events such as fairground effects, barrel organs, onomatopoeic keyboards (whirls of water, hissing winds), and abstract dissonances. The decadent Nico of the Velvet Underground no longer exists. Having discarded the chanteuses lingerie, Nico takes on the guise of a shaman intoning a funeral oration. Orgies and perversions are infantilisms of the past, here concealed by a sense of the transience of all things that brushes against metaphysics. Nicos vocals adapt accordingly, abandoning the decadent cabaret emphasis of Weimar in favor of Middle Eastern, Indian, and medieval singing techniques, but above all suspending itself in that icy neutrality that remains her true trademark. In Lawns Of Dawn her voice emerges from a tinkling that renders the vortex of sunlight at dawn; a millennial refrain unwinds over the dissonances of the harmonium (almost an accordion) and the organ, and over casual percussion, giving the impression of a mirage fading away. The delicate impressionism of the arrangement marries Brechtian cabaret through the transfigured barrel organ of nineteenth-century street song. Aris Song is pierced by a long, solemn cathedral-organ note that accompanies Nicos muezzin-like elegy, interwoven with distorted hisses of flutes and clavinets. A martial piano rhythm drives the anguished reverberation of Facing The Wind, whose harmonium vibrates in a lysergic haze of metallic beats. No One Is There instead opens like a string quartet: violin, viola, and cello freely confabulate in short, discordant phrases, while Nico intones a high lament of solitude (at times the violin mimics the final notes of the stanzas or marks the beat, as in Stravinskys ballets). The abstract qualities of her singing shine most clearly in Julius Caesar, where the derivation from recitar cantando is evident, sporadically violated by Arab-Persian melismas: the vocal line is entirely independent of the demonic duet of viola and harmonium, and its acrobatic linearity is in fact their antithesis. The solemn progression of the chant of Evening Of Light, amid an obsessive whirl of harpsichord bats and the threatening booms of the cello, and its apocalyptic, noisy, minimalist finale, seal a mute album. Behind every piece lurks a very specific genre: folk ballad (Lawn), chamber music (No One, Julius Caesar), church music (Ari), psychedelia (Facing, Evening); but each is nonchalantly transfigured by some harmonic anomaly (cocktail-lounge pianisms, minimalist organs, fauvist strings). Within the monolithic monotony of her score, Nico manages to incorporate elements from the most disparate musical civilizations.
A wind of antiquity (prehistoric, Greco-Roman, or medieval) blows through all the songs, complementing her visions of apocalyptic modernity. The schizoid and sinister lyrics, which invite a noble and resigned despair, can be read as laments for the useless beauty of every civilization, each inexorably destined to vanish into a sordid Middle Ages already lurking nearby. The pain of the inevitable, the cosmic sense of history, and ultimately nothingness as the meaning of everything constitute the primary drives of her music. That high, neutral singing is an echo hurled to the surface from the depths of time. A universe of pain blocks the view of the afterlife, but that lost echo brings back and foretells all its ferocious emptiness.
Nicos hallucinatory ritual has cadences that may recall, at will, a war requiem, the choruses of classical tragedy, the soundtrack of a horror film, a funeral march, or a Gregorian mass.
Desertshore (1970) is even more tragic and oppressive, afflicted by a dark sense of mystery and anguish. Its cutting statements, its equivocal whispers, its childlike nursery chants seem to be the voices of a patient perpetually absorbed in a stunned mental paralysis, which lends the album an obsessive stasis. Harrowing and immanent, the music adheres to the somewhat snobbish instrumentation of the previous record, with harmonium and electric viola (again Cale) marking out a monumental pulse that is no longer rhythm but a stream of consciousness, with hisses and clangors added to conjure cosmic nightmares.
From Janitor Of Lunacy onward the tone of the album becomes more solemn and Nicos register, firmer and more confident, takes on more prophetic inflections. The combination of Nicos ecclesiastical harmonium and Cales minimalist organ in this track represents the most essential instrumental form of her lieder-like writing. In The Falconer, no less majestic and hypnotic, the powerful and threatening organ barrages are counterpointed by random pianistic hammerings that articulate the rarefied classicism and supernatural tension of the singing; a tension that briefly dissolves in one of the very rare flashes of serenity, when Cale strikes up a romantic piano sonata and Nico intones one of her infantile nursery rhymes. Precisely such gentle childlike chants constitute the most striking trick of her existential horror: My Only Child, a religious a cappella chorus punctuated by pauses of silence marking the rhythm, and Le Petit Chevalier, a child singing in French for a minute with only harpsichord accompaniment, are in fact the most macabre exercises of the work. How far this practice can lead into delirium is demonstrated by the finaleonce again grotesque and apocalypticof All That Is My Own, where a nonsense recitative intersects with a soaring hymn, as pure as it is demonic, set to the rhythm of gong, Indian viola, minimalist keyboards, Renaissance trumpets, and medieval dance steps. The chamber lied is instead sublimated in the triptych Abschied, Afraid, Mutterlein: expressionist-cabaret melody in the first, yet always tinged with overtones of a national anthem or ecclesiastical psalm; a delicate, crystalline serenade to fear in the second; a dissonant sonata in the third, torn apart by funereal choruses and trumpets. All the songs partake of the same dread/torment: an age-old child plays with life and death and hums ancient refrains of extinct civilizations. Like Circe imprisoned on a deserted island or Electra gone mad in her games of death, the androgynous blond figure performs minimal gestures to write her destiny endlessly in the sand. Around her the void expands. More melodic, Desertshore brings into focus Nicos petrified, lunar singing, as far removed as possible from the passion of soul or the theatricality of opera, closer insteadat least ideallyto Elizabethan song and Protestant psalmody. There is something supernatural in the detached yet tragic way she sings the dreadful fate of humankind. It is as if Nico had been observing human tragedy for millennia and were attempting to transmit its pain to the audience of another planet. So abstract and stripped down, pain is no longer pain: it is merely the syntax of painacute moans, sepulchral choruses, mourning cadences, subdued sounds, epitaphs and obituaries, liturgies and processions. Nicos music is hard to assimilate to other manifestations of rock. Her songs, sung in a low, lugubrious, and asexual register, belong more to German lieder and the medieval Carmina Burana than to rock. The sphinx speaks again after four years, and they are words of death: The End (1974), the text on death written by deaths quintessential poet, Jim Morrison. In this double dedication to death lies the meaning of existence for Nico: not an easy macabre to be consumed with a few snobbish thrills, but absolute nihilism, a vertiginous void.
Nico sings as if reading from a breviary; she is cold and frigid, extinguished. She enunciates the words and emphasizes the vowels with an Eastern mannerism, and is particularly lugubrious when playing the child (the la-la-la of It Has Not Taken Long). The panic that makes her ancient, marble-like voice tremble is the fear of a life that is continuous degradation, day after day, a heroic martyrdom without respite (Secret Side). Nico, priestess, angel-demon of the hell-paradise, pronounces the magical formulas of rituals, evokes a slow and solemn black mass (You Forget To Answer), and leads the damned into the vile ceremony (We`ve Got The Gold). She recites with anguish, a minstrel of her own solitude and of the night of the apocalypse (Valley Of The Kings).
Nico on her usual trembling harmonium, Phil Manzanera on guitar, Brian Eno on synthesizer, Cale on percussion and acoustic keyboards, plus a subdued female choir, form a suggestive ensemble, matching the marvelous isolation in which Nico had secluded herself to distill her two previous masterpieces. She had been the lover of Bob Dylan, Brian Jones, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Jim Morrison, and many others. She had certainly had a relationship with Alain Delon, resulting in her son Ari in 1962 (raised by Delon's mother), and a long one with Philippe Garrel, starting in 1969. Nico, a heroin addict since meeting Garrel, tried rehab in 1978. She moved to Manchester in 1981, where she attempted to restart her career but continued to use drugs. The following album, Drama Of Exile (1981), the first recorded with a normal rock band, opens up to exotic visions and electro-pop arrangements (discotheque metronomes, jazz saxophones and electric guitars, filtered vocals, world beat rhythms and sounds). The extroversion and orientalisms do not serve either her cryptic liturgy or her archaic mythology. The electric instrumentation accentuates the alienating effect of Nicos dark recitative only in the hypnotic metallic dance of Henry Hudson. Obscene vestal and exhumed mummy, ghost of an Indian temple, goddess of the Black Forest, Nico lets her aristocratic sigh float in a labyrinth of barbaric sounds, with peaks of suspense and neurosis in dark, dissonant psychodramas such as Purple Lips and Orly Flight.
Camera Obscura (1985) is the collection that, four years later, resumes her inner journey. The ensemble had been reduced to three units (harmonium, keyboards, and percussion), but the sound is still hysterically electronic, and her singing is strangely uneasy, searching for new identities: she moans softly over the dissonant clinking of metallic objects (Camera Obscura), soars in solemn Eastern acrobatics (Tananore), floats weightlessly in film-noir atmospheres (Into The Arena), unfolds in martial religious progressions (My Heart Is Empty), shines with archaic ages and Eastern civilizations (Win A Few), and finally swells with Teutonic weltanschauung when accompanying herself on the harmonium (Konig). Nico has lost much of the fantastic lyricism of her early albums, curling into a paranoid melodrama of incommunicability and relying on highly rhythmic electric arrangements.
Classic Years (Polygram, 1998) is an anthology.
The Frozen Borderline is an expanded edition of The Marble Index
and Desertshore.
Nico continued to do drugs until the end. She died of a bike accident (in July 1988 in Spain) but it is likely that drugs had something to do with it.
Jennifer Bickerdike wrote a biography:
"You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone" (2021).
Her son Ari, who too suffered from depression and addiction, a frequent patient in psychiatric hospitals and detox centers, died of a heroin overdose in 2023.
He had two children: Charles (1999) and Blanche (2006).
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