Nico

Legend has it that “The Marble Index”, the first true album by Nico, was born in an American desert, where Jim Morrison and Christa Päffgen used to venture out to enjoy a quiet love story and various fashionable hallucinogenic substances, including certain native cacti capable of making the desolate dunes sing. “The Marble Index” is the Big Bang of Nico’s genius, marking her transition from the cosmetic front-woman chanteuse of the outrageous Velvet Underground, from being a glorified groupie, to becoming the mind that would upend the history of rock music with her superhuman machinations and velvet psychedelia.

In her later artistic maturity, when asked about the events that led her to write her own music and lyrics for the first time, Nico would answer with a dreamy yet embittered “sometimes someone just has to tell you what to do”, showing just how much that deep bond with Jim Morrison had freed her from her aesthetic prison as a post-war European tabloid model, unleashing her true expressive force – it was Morrison himself who insisted that his beloved and spectral Odette find her own personal dimension in that world which had swallowed her up merely as a palliative to mask the greyness of heroin, in those terrifying years straddling the 60s and the 70s.

Every aspect of Nico’s life was tinged with tragedy, and precisely for this reason, no one has ever brought tragedy into music with the same mastery and bitter farewell – she is the siren of the sea of ash, and we bathe in her song. John Cale was the first to see the priestess’s dark spark, and it was indeed he who helped her compose this first, masterful, authentic work, playing the accompanying instruments to the funereal, enchanted harmonium – it is from this very album that the stylistic signature of her entire golden age would be born: Nico’s pedal-driven Indian harmonium, harrowing and unforgivable, seasoned by Cale’s schizophrenic viola, pulsing and convulsive.

We are invited to the theatre by the nostalgic music-box chime of “Prelude”: the sneering, minimal melody is chased by a voracious piano that answers every spontaneous smile with a beat of sad thought, and just as the climax arrives, the tension breaks. In “Lawns Of Dawns”, Nico issues a challenge to the listener (“Can you follow me?”), asking them to stay by her side and keep up the pace. With a melancholy and irony matched perhaps only by her contemporary Robert Wyatt on the colossal “Rock Bottom“, Nico drags the still-sober ear into her garden of belladonna to torment it and show it a pain that burns more violently than a supernova, one capable of colouring the air with psych electric-guitar riffs, obsessive tip-tapping wooden percussion, and synths that feel like false memories and gusts of wind.

The siren points her finger, and we watch: on stage a devil dances its solo, “No One Is There”. Autobiographically, resting on nothing but the lashing bed of Cale’s four violas, Nico lays her weary body down, projecting her torment into a track that bears witness to the tears she has shed for every love that abandoned her, that used her and then disowned her. It’s hard even to put into words what “No One Is There” really is, musically: formally, a Greek lament for voice and strings – pragmatically, the most faithful musical transposition of a cry of sorrow. In the alternate version of “No One Is There”, found on “The Frozen Borderline” (1968-1970) (Rhino, 2007), the bleak void that opens beneath Nico’s voice is contained by the warm tonal embrace of the harmonium – the discarded version in fact embodies compassion towards the Self, while the official edition represents the naked object, suffering stripped bare and put on display, left to be judged and even mocked on the stage of fragility.

The rain prayer of “Ari’s Song” once again tints the desert sky with hope – it is a mother’s beautiful, loving dedication to her son. Breaths, screeches, the full sound of the organ embracing the autumnal yet playful harmonica, responsible for turning Nico’s funereal lied into a serenade to the moon. With “sail away into a dream” the mother takes her hands away from Ari’s now amazed eyes, and with the climax of “let the wind sing you… a fantasy” the cloud ceiling of “The Marble Index” is torn open by a miracle, revealing a molten, magmatic emotion.

Among what remains of Nico, the stories reign supreme: Edith Boulogne, Alain Delon’s mother, recounts the sporadic visits Ari received from his mother. The boy, disowned by his father and kept away from his troubled mother, grew up in the peaceful France of his paternal grandparents, entrusted to two people who would at least try to anchor him to a different, simpler world.

Although a sad fate already loomed over the horizon, when the grandparents saw Nico return from glittering America for the first time in three years bearing a paltry orange as a gift for the boy, they couldn’t bring themselves to hate or blame her as much as they wanted to, or as much as would be rational upon seeing a parent neglect their own child – there was a strange light of goodness in her, an inexplicable glow, which Edith described by saying “she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen”.

The storm of “Facing The Wind” manages to turn the singer’s thermal voice into a robotic hiss, and Cale’s harpsichord slips into a mad psychosis, spurred on by the dreadful harmonium that strips away even the peace of silence. The harmonies are acidic and the tempo is marked out by two searing organ notes, steeped in a cosmic anxiety that paralyses the melody itself – “There’s nothing more to sing about”.

"Julius Caesar" is the album's lyrical peak, but I'd rather just say it's THE lyrical peak. Nico's sublime pen unfurls the fable of Aeolus, who in the liberated form of wind sweeps across the Italian peninsula and sees through his celestial eyes the wonders of a forgotten age: bandits raiding caravans, ponds ringed by trees bearing forbidden fruit, laughing statues of divine marble, glimpsing in the gold the image of a defeated Julius Caesar lost in ecstasy, finally among the flowers and kisses of Aeolus, finally worthy of a god's glory. Viola and harmonium then stop hating each other to celebrate the life of the man whose blood is legend: the sprightly sound of the organ and the baroque fury of the wondrous bow create a sonic Garden of Eden that grows more vivid as the siren, now a goddess, sings her honeyed words.

"Frozen Warnings" is a dawn in an album of sunsets: the viola's screech stops sounding like a curse and starts sounding like a luminous crack of light, accompanied by a harmonic crescendo of organ electronically manipulated through a modulator. For the first time, Nico sings of a world of clarity and possibility, of chance, but it doesn't last long.

"Evening Of Light" is a goth-rock ritual for electric bass, mandolin, organ and distortion devices. On this final track of the original version of the album, which verges on noise-rock, the woman sings of her vision of the apocalypse, her "end of time," and imagines the Earth swallowed by an alien glare while children dance on what remains of the planet.

Two tracks were added to the CD reissue released from 1991 onward, which coincides with the version currently available on all music streaming platforms: "Roses In The Snow," a sorrowful waltz for a man with an impossible soul, and "Nibelungen," a bare, unadorned song that represents a further lyrical flight, a companion piece to "Julius Caesar," drawing on the valkyries' rides of Norse tradition. Nico's exquisite literary taste is proverbial: in a world drunk on LSD and anesthetics and other inhibitors, she nonetheless threw down the gauntlet to Coleridge, Wordsworth and Blake — she wasn't measuring herself against rock's small fry, she wanted to devour the intellectual world whole.

"The Marble Index" is the tombstone bearing witness to the unreachable mind, writing and genius of a woman who has, and always will have, countless imitators and no equal.

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20/02/2026