Massimo Palma

Author: Massimo Palma

Title: Nico and the Tides

Publisher: Castelvecchi

Pages: 195

Price: Euro 19.50

Inevitably, recounting the life and death of Christa Päffgen, known artistically as Nico, is a risky and, at the same time, fascinating undertaking. It's not enough to simply line up the facts of a biography that is dizzying in its own right: something more is needed. What's required is a middle ground between novel and poetry, between prose transfiguration of the material and lyrical visions, because Nico and her voice belong to a dimension that goes well beyond the mere iconography of rock.

Raised under the bombs of a Nazi Germany already on the verge of collapse, having moved to Ibiza while still a teenager, and then, thanks to the far-sighted eye of photographer Herbert Tobias, catapulted into the world of fashion and, subsequently, cinema (she would also appear in Federico Fellini's epochal “La dolce vita”), the blonde, austere Nico (the name everyone eventually came to call her, again thanks to Tobias, who was taken with the name of one of her old flames, director Nico Papatakis) would cross paths with Andy Warhol and his Factory in a feverish, artistically charged New York, finding herself sharing the grooves of “The Velvet Underground & Nico“ with Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker — one of rock's greatest masterpieces, as well as one of the most influential albums of all time.

But inside Nico, tides were churning. Behind her eyes, behind “the enigma of their absence from what surrounds them” (to borrow the words of her friend Cale, who would help her so much in putting together and recording her first solo albums, each more beautiful than the last), there lay hidden a universe in flames, where the ghosts of war, of the rape she suffered at the hands of an American soldier, and of a father who died in an asylum, continued to stir restlessly within an ever thicker twilight, drawing ever closer to total darkness.

And so, after the relationships and encounters, some fleeting, some not, with Leonard Cohen, Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Paul McCartney, David Bowie, Iggy Pop and director Philippe Garrel, after the breakdowns, the heroin addiction, the difficult relationship with her son Ari (born from a relationship with actor Alain Delon), right up to her return to music, in a grey, bare Manchester where, however, her friend and manager Alan Wise once again managed to tap into her inspiration, allowing her to record further albums — less compelling than those of her golden period, yet still partly able to capture the essence of her music, which is that face depicted on the cover of “The Marble Index”, as if carved into the marble of the apocalypse.

That music which filled, and still fills, the spaces of the soul like a desperate cry amid the storm, through the deserts of solitude, recalling the symphony orchestras which, during the final, decisive bombings of Nazi Germany, tried, on the orders of the mad Hitler, to exorcise the decisive hour.

Nico, rock's most sublime and moving voice, who died from a trivial bicycle fall under the sun of her beloved Ibiza, lives again in these heartfelt, touching pages by Massimo Palma, who manages to convey, without a trace of rhetoric, the enigmatic mystery and the deep visionary charge of one of the most fascinating musical figures of the last century.

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13/01/2026