Nico
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Christa Päffgen (✦16 October 1938 – †18 July 1988), known by her stage name Nico, was a German singer, songwriter, musician, model, and actress. She had roles in several films, including Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) and Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls (1966).
At the insistence of Warhol, she sang four songs of the Velvet Underground's debut album The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967). At the same time, she started a solo career and released Chelsea Girl. Nico's friend, Jim Morrison, suggested that she start writing her own material. She then composed songs on a harmonium, not traditionally a rock instrument. John Cale became her musical arranger and produced The Marble Index, Desertshore, The End... and other subsequent albums.
In the 1980s, she toured extensively in Europe, United States, Australia and Japan. After a concert in Berlin in June 1988, she went on holiday in Ibiza to rest and died as the result of a cycling accident
Early life
Nico was born Christa Päffgen in Cologne to Wilhelm and Margarete "Grete" Päffgen (née Schulze, born 1910). Wilhelm was born into the wealthy Päffgen Kölsch master brewer family dynasty in Cologne and was Catholic, while Grete came from a lower-class background and was Protestant. When Nico was two years old, she moved with her mother and grandfather to the Spreewald forest outside Berlin to escape the World War II bombardments of Cologne. Her father enlisted as a soldier at the onset of the war and died in 1942. His precise cause of death is unknown because Nico gave several contradictory accounts later in life.
According to biographer Richard Witts in his 1995 book, Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon, Wilhelm Päffgen was gravely wounded when he was shot in the head by a French sniper while serving in the Wehrmacht. With no certainty that he would survive, his commanding officer, following standing orders, ended his life by gunshot. Another story is that he sustained head injuries that caused severe brain damage and ended his life in a psychiatric institution. According to unproven rumors, he was variously said to have died in a concentration camp or to have faded away as a result of shell shock.
In 1946, Nico and her mother relocated to downtown Berlin, where Nico worked as a seamstress. She attended school until the age of 13 and began selling lingerie in the exclusive department store KaDeWe[Note 1], eventually getting modeling jobs in Berlin. At 5 ft 10 in (178 cm), and with chiseled features and pale skin, Nico rose to prominence as a fashion model when still a teenager.
Personal life
Nico had an affair with French actor Alain Delon and, on 11 August 1962, gave birth to their son, Christian Aaron Boulogne, whom she called Ari. Delon denied paternity and Nico had difficulty raising Ari, so the boy was raised by Delon's parents. Ari became a photographer and actor and had a son, born in 1999, and a daughter, born in 2006.
Nico saw herself as part of a tradition of bohemian artists, which she traced back to the Romanticism of the early 19th century. She led a nomadic life, living in different countries. Apart from Germany, where she grew up, and Spain, where she died, Nico lived in Italy and France in the 1950s, spent most of the 1960s in the US, and lived in London in the early 1960s and again in the 1980s, when she moved between London and Manchester.
The final years of her life were mainly spent in the Prestwich and Salford area of Greater Manchester. Although she was still struggling with addiction, she became interested in music again. For a few months in the 1980s, she shared an apartment in Brixton, London, with punk poet John Cooper Clarke but not as a couple.
Addiction
Nico was a heroin addict for over 15 years. In the book Songs They Never Play on the Radio, James Young, a member of her band in the 1980s, recalls many examples of her troubling behavior due to her "overwhelming" addiction – and that Nico claimed never to have taken the drug while in the Velvets/Factory scene but only began using during her relationship with Philippe Garrel in the 1970s. She also introduced her son to heroin. Shortly before her death, Nico stopped using heroin and began methadone replacement therapy as well as a regimen of bicycle exercise and healthy eating.
Racism
Nico's friend Danny Fields, the American journalist who helped her sign to Elektra Records, described her as "Nazi-esque", saying: "Every once in a while there'd be something about Jews and I'd be, 'But Nico, I'm Jewish,' and she was like 'Yes, yes, I don't mean you.' She had a definite Nordic Aryan streak, [the belief] that she was physically, spiritually, and creatively superior." According to Fields, in the early 1970s, Nico attacked a mixed-race woman at the Chelsea Hotel with a smashed wine glass, saying "I hate black people". However, Fields also stated in a 2002 interview with David Dalton, "She was so far from being a Nazi—except maybe all Germans are Nazis."
In 2019, Nigel Bagley, who was Nico's co-manager and promoter in Manchester, said he never saw Nico express racist views: "She was in a multicultural city and was good friends with Yankee Bill, our American-Jamaican doorman." Her drummer Graham Dowdall said: "She played an Indian instrument, worked with north Africans, and brought that to her music. She was certainly capable of very casual racism about Alan [Wise], who was Jewish, but that was a way of having a go at A1."
Death
On 17 July 1988, during a vacation with Ari on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza, Nico hit her head when she fell off her bicycle. A passing taxi driver found her unconscious but had difficulty getting her admitted to local hospitals. She was misdiagnosed as suffering from heat exposure and was declared dead at 8 pm. X-rays later revealed a severe cerebral hemorrhage as the cause of death. Her son later said of the incident:
- In the late morning of July 17, 1988, my mother told me she needed to go downtown to buy marijuana. She sat down in front of the mirror and wrapped a black scarf around her head. My mother stared at the mirror and took great care to wrap the scarf appropriately. Down the hill on her bike: "I'll be back soon." She left in the early afternoon on the hottest day of the year.
Nico was buried in her mother's plot in Grunewald, a forest cemetery in Berlin. Friends played a tape of "Mütterlein", a song from Desertshore, at her funeral.
Legacy
Nico inspired many musicians including Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Cure, Morrissey, Elliott Smith, and Björk. Siouxsie and the Banshees invited her as a special guest on their first major UK tour in 1978; they also later covered "All Tomorrow's Parties". The Cure's leader Robert Smith has cited Desertshore as one of his favorite records, as has Björk. Joy Division's Peter Hook cited Chelsea Girl as one of his favorite albums. Bauhaus' singer, Peter Murphy, considered that "Nico recorded the first truly Gothic album, Marble lndex or The End. Nico was Gothic, but she was Mary Shelley to everyone else's Hammer Horror. They both did Frankenstein, but Nico's was real." Morrissey cited Nico when asked to name artists who had a lasting influence on him: "The royal three remain the same: the New York Dolls, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, with Nico standing firm as the first reserve." Morrissey also said of the song "Innocent and Vain": "this is my youth in one piece of music". Elliott Smith covered "Chelsea Girls" and "These Days" in Portland, Oregon in October 1999; he also cited The Marble Index as one of his perfect 2.45 am albums. Marc Almond recorded a cover version of "The Falconer": she was one of the "things I was obsessed about at school" due to her "wonderful intriguing voice, icy and remote yet warm at the same time". Patti Smith did a concert tribute to Nico in 2014 in which she covered "I Will Be Seven". Low wrote a song titled "Those Girls (Song For Nico)" and Neko Case covered "Afraid" in 2013.
Two of Nico's songs from Chelsea Girl, "The Fairest of the Seasons" and "These Days", both written by Jackson Browne, were featured in Wes Anderson's film The Royal Tenenbaums.
Several biographical works on Nico have appeared, both in print and film. The first, in 1992, was Songs They Never Play on the Radio, a book by James Young that draws on his association with Nico in her last years. In 1993, Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon by musicologist Richard Witts covered Nico's entire life and career. The 1995 documentary Nico Icon by Susanne Ofteringer examined the many facets of Nico's life with contributions from those who knew her, including her colleagues Reed and Cale. In 2015, Lutz Graf-Ulbrich, Nico's former partner and accompanist in the late 1970s, published Nico: In the Shadow of the Moon Goddess, an account of his time with Nico. In the 2018 biopic Nico, 1988 directed by Susanna Nicchiarelli, Trine Dyrholm portrays Nico on a journey across Europe during her last tour.
Biography from imdb.com
Model and singer Nico was born in Cologne, Germany in 1938. She was a part of the Andy Warhol "scene" in the 1960s. A member of The Velvet Underground experimental rock band (with John Cale), circa 1967, she made several solo albums during the 1970s. A heroin addict for the latter part of her life, she finally had kicked the habit and become clean before her death. On July 18, 1988, while bicycling in Ibiza, Spain, she suffered a minor heart attack which caused her to collapse and fall from her bicycle, resulting in a head injury that led to her death. She was 49 years old.
Notes
- More information is available at [ Wikipedia:Nico ]
External links
- Habits of Waste, Pt. 1 Evaluation of Nico's early work
- Habits of Waste, Pt. 2 Evaluation of Nico's later work
- Nico, the Voice of Disaffected Youth – Audio story from National Public Radio
- Nico (BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour audio item)
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