SUNDAY, 15 DECEMBER 2024

I remember very clearly the first time I heard The Marble Index by Nico. I was listening to John Peel on the radio and he played the first song on the album, Lawns of Dawns. Instantly I felt chilled to the bone. My teenage self was very attuned to what later became Goth and I fell in love at once with this music from the graveyard. Nearly sixty years on, I still regularly play both this album and its follow-up, Desertshore.

The familiar public image of Nico is dominated by her relationships with famous men. For most people she is seen as little more than a beautiful model plucked from obscurity by Warhol and transformed into a chanteuse with the Velvet Underground, one of the beautiful people he used to decorate the Factory, along with other women like Sedgwick and his well-known troupe of drag queens. In a way she fought against her beauty all of her life and welcomed the day when it was gone, but she used that beauty very astutely to get where she wanted to go. She was a mass of contradictions as a person, much too complex to slot into any pigeonhole. She said that her only regret was not being born a man and yet so much of her life involved her being seen as a kind of female accessory to various famous men – Warhol, Morrison, Jones, Delon, Fellini, Reed, Cale – or as the glamorous ex-model performing for the benefit of male fantasies in teasing adverts. And while she always expressed a belief that she would have been taken more seriously as an artist if she were a man, she often name-dropped these famous men to whom she was attached in the public eye, as if her relationship to them in some way validated her as an artist.

Most people know only that she sang with the Velvet Underground for a while and nothing about her own music. But her music is what I want to focus on here because for me she was a greater artist than many of the more famous people around her. I will begin with my favourite song from her catalogue, Frozen Warnings. (Not a particularly original choice, I admit.) This is an utterly simple song but very little music gets anywhere close to its bleakness and sense of despair. And there is nothing insincere about this angst, none of the callow teenage posturing of a lot of later Goths who copied her. Many of the songs in both albums share this mood, particularly No One is There and Facing the Wind from The Marble Index, and Abscheid from Desertshore. And this sense of loneliness, desolation and doom perhaps reaches its climax in what was her most famous song at the time, Janitor of Lunacy, as she unleashes a swirl of madness from her harmonium which surges and swells as she wails out the lyrics.

But despite being known for her Germanic iciness and as a monster of a mother who introduced her own son, Ari, to heroin, Nico’s music could be surprisingly gentle and tender at times. Ari’s Song, for example, has been described as a kind of lullaby, but it is far from a comforting one. It is generally thought that it was written at a moment when she believed that Ari would die; it is loving and caring and yet lacks the slightest trace of sentimentality: there is almost an acceptance that Ari will leave and a sense of his release from suffering – ‘Let the rain wash away your cloudy days’ and ‘Now you see that only dreams can send you where you want to be’. Also untypically soft for a Nico song, but equally unsentimental despite its surface sweetness, Afraid, from the Desertshore album, is close in many ways to a traditional love song. (And later in her career, she recorded many versions of My Funny Valentine, a romantic song which I felt suited her perfectly because its romance was quirky and not at all clichéd or saccharine.)

Technically her voice was far from perfect. Apparently she was deaf in one ear and this often made her sing off-key, as the Velvet Underground complained to Warhol when he insisted that she become an important part of their debut album. And she lacked the softness and control when required to sing lighter songs such as many of those on her first album, Chelsea Girls. But when she needed to deliver an aural version of Munch’s Scream, as on Janitor of Lunacy, the voice was a Teutonic howl of terrifying sublimity. This was not only a personal wail of pain, but the wail of existence as Munch had described it when he spoke about The Scream. She was also fortunate to discover the harmonium as an instrument because its morbid drone made it the perfect tool for the spirit of her music and singled her out from other female singer-songwriters. (In contrast, she detested the flute on Chelsea Girls, which she felt destroyed the album – this doesn’t surprise me at all because no one radiates flute lady less than Nico.)

There is a sense in which the music on these two albums could only have emerged in the 1960s, when experimentation was encouraged and funded, and artists who were way outside of the mainstream could end up getting record contracts, but at the same time it has a timeless quality which makes it hard to date, unlike much of the work of the period (a lot of psychedelia, for example, has dated rather badly). Both albums have an almost medieval feel at times and a rather religious quality, especially tracks such as My Only Child, No One Is There and Abscheid. To me, this is serious existential art rather than entertainment. It is in contact with something deep and real in the human soul.

Which brings me to what I want to discuss in the last part of this essay: the role of John Cale as producer and musician in these two albums. Opinions range from those who see his contribution as annoyingly intrusive, a bag of tricks detracting from the gaunt simplicity of Nico’s songs, to others who feel that he really enriched her simple songs with a great sensitivity for, and understanding of, her art. I lean strongly towards the latter opinion.

On YouTube there are versions of the songs on The Marble Index as sung and played by Nico alone on her harmonium before Cale added to them in the studio. I have to admit that I like the version of Frozen Warnings there every bit as much as I like the one on the album: there is a starkness to this utterly simple version where Nico reaches deep into her soul. However, if I imagine every track on the album being simply Nico singing and playing her harmonium, I am sure that it would soon become dreary, a funereal dirge dragged down by a lack of variety. Cale’s task was to avoid this, and in my opinion he did a good job. For example, I feel that in the final version of Frozen Warnings on the album, the icy ambience of the background sound broadens out what is personal despair into a sort of cosmic bleakness, a vision of a universe which is cold and indifferent and inhospitable to human beings.

Cale uses and personally plays an impressive array of different instruments on the two albums to counter any slippage into fatigue or repetition. Desertshore, in particular, has deft changes in mood and aural quality from track to track, from the full-on Gothic blast of Janitor of Lunacy, to the rhythmic patterns of piano on The Falconer, to the use of a cappella on My Only Child, to the nursery tinkle of Le Petit Chevalier, to the grim and weighty seriousness of Abschied, to the romantic piano chords of Afraid, to the expressionist distortions of Mutterlein, to the middle-eastern feel of the final track, All That Is My Own. And throughout both albums Cale’s viola does much to create the classical feel to the music which I have already mentioned, a dark and moody chamber music with its solemn religious tone and its medieval ambience. I’m in danger here of repeating Nico’s ambivalence about being born a woman, not a man and drawing on sexist stereotypes, but the heart of these two albums lies within Nico while the thinking was executed by Cale.

I feel sure that very few people will share my extremely high regard for Nico as an artist, but her music definitely speaks to me in a way that almost no one else’s has. It’s hard to explain why some simple work strikes us as banal while other feels profound, an intangible distinction that Blake, the ultimate Romantic poet, made when writing about Milton. Perhaps my love of Nico’s music reflects my bias towards art that is simple and sincere rather than clever and technically accomplished, and also betrays my personal leaning towards Romanticism, and usually a rather dark Romanticism. I recognise that Nico’s music will never be popular and mainstream, but I hope that in each generation a few people who are in tune with her will continue to discover her work and find that it speaks to them somewhere deep and mysterious inside.