Nico - The Valkyrie of Darkness

Many believe that the goth movement was just another offshoot of the punk explosion of the late Seventies. Yet dark rock already had an ancestor of its own. Her name was Christa Päffgen, known professionally as Nico. Many remember her for her presence as chanteuse on the debut album of Velvet Underground. But Nico's solo career (recently summed up, alongside the classics of her Velvet-era work, in the excellent anthology "The Classic Years") proved every bit as significant, and left a deep mark on the way rock songwriting would come to be conceived. Her stark, hypnotic arrangements, her deep and unsettling voice, her sepulchral, time-suspended atmospheres, all became a key point of reference for every band that would venture into the dark-rock era and beyond.

A high priestess of darkness, then. In every sense. Nico's life has always been shrouded in mystery, starting with her date of birth, variously given as 1938, 1941 or 1943 depending on the source. Then there's her birthplace: Cologne, or perhaps Budapest, Hungary. What does seem certain is that she had a difficult childhood: her father died in a concentration camp, and her mother raised her amid great hardship in the American sector of post-war Berlin. But Christa Päffgen's talent emerged early, in her teenage years. With the lean physique of a valkyrie, platinum-blonde hair and perfectly chiselled features, she began a modelling career at just 16, which took her to Paris for a time. Meanwhile, in Ibiza, she met the photographer who affectionately renamed her Nico, after his late friend Nico Papatakis. Her artistic temperament soon led her into acting, with appearances in Pointrenaud's "Strip Tease" and Fellini's "La dolce vita". It was in Italy that Nico met Alain Delon, with whom she had a relationship and a son, whom she named Ari. Still in the first half of the Sixties, she moved to London, where she recorded the single "I'm Not Saying" for Immediate, produced under the wing of Robert Plant, future member of Led Zeppelin.

But her true debut in the world of rock came in New York, where Nico met Bob Dylan, who dedicated his "Visions of Johanna" to her and introduced her to Andy Warhol. The Pop Art master brought her permanently into his entourage, secured her parts in several experimental films, such as "Chelsea Girls", and above all indulged her musical ambitions, imposing her as chanteuse on his proteges Velvet Underground. At first Lou Reed and the rest of the band resisted, fearing they'd be overshadowed by her charisma. But with John Cale she formed a deep bond, one that would later see Nico performing around the world accompanied by the great American musician's viola.

Out of this uneasy cohabitation came the masterpiece The Velvet Underground and Nico, its cover famously branded with Andy Warhol's banana. An album destined to become one of the most important in the entire history of rock, on which Nico sings some unforgettable ballads such as "All Tomorrow's Parties", "I'll Be Your Mirror" and "Femme Fatale". The band tore through New York's basement clubs and instantly became a cult object for thousands of fans, but a split was looming. Nico left the group and tried her hand as a solo artist, accompanying herself on the harmonium given to her by John Cale, who would also go on to produce three of her albums. In 1975, the singer would reveal: "The Velvet Underground had some identity problems, they wanted to get rid of me because I was getting more attention from the press than they were".

Her solo debut came in 1968 with The Marble Index, an album at once complex and shocking, one that lets her full talent as a composer shine through: her cosmos of spectres and resonances, her conclave of icy muse-hood.

The Marble Index is a ritual in the form of a song-cycle of lieder (complete with a brief "Prelude"), tracks that are, in truth, indecipherable rosaries, vertigos of nothingness harbouring both a terrifying unconscious of ancestral memories turned into suffocating nightmares, and a spectral evil eye that becomes an incurable Elizabethan tragedy, projected onto avant-garde harmonic backdrops.

Musically, every track on the record is a story unto itself. Her former companion-in-arms John Cale, acting as producer, trusted assistant and exceptional multi-instrumentalist, divines the muse's intentions, and the influences voraciously scatter in disjointed directions: Slavic, Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon folklore, Middle Eastern dance, the Baroque cantata, twentieth-century avant-garde and art music (minimalism, gestural music, serialism), even hints of free jazz. Everything is piled up in an enchanting undertow that the singer never pushes up in tone or emphasis, nor dials down; in fact, she often sits at the edges of the spectrum, as if becoming its pure benediction, yet charged with a sorceress's power made of vocalises and modulations tightly knotted together.

Thus, the oratorio-like recitative of "Ari's Song" comes with an accompaniment that opens up a dissonant chasm to house Nico's haughty intoning: keyboards mimicking an icy wind, notes booming like shivers, cacophonous acoustic trails bordering on a carnival whistle. "Facing the Wind" somehow clarifies her compositional method. The track's brief instrumental preamble gathers an expressionist cabaret piano, dense keyboard clusters, tremendous random (Stravinsky-esque) blows and a street organ, before the sensory distortion of her singing sweeps everything into a hallucinogenic saraband. It's her reading of a psychedelic "trip". The malevolent enchantment enfolding the Bartók-like dissonances of "Lawns of Dawne" and the moaning of organs, ticking and screeching, is paired with a weary harmonium counterpoint: each of these elements seems to offer an illusion of rhythm, but none of them truly commits to it, preferring instead to intersect until collapse; the only truly rhythmic references, the percussion, are nerve-racking random beats out of time.

Chamber music for strings forms the basis of "No One Is There", but these are strings dissected and juxtaposed, as lapidary as they are heartfelt, like sepulchral spirits drawing close, piercing, mimicking, echoing the lament of the voice, until it is split in two and sent plunging into an anti-climax of low tones. But it's "Julius Caesar" that best embodies the author's liturgical sensibility. The Gregorian vocal line, the dizzying "canon" of viola and harmonium, and the organ's tireless cathedral-like swirls are the members of this trinity; the funereal struggle of it all, a hopeless fight against death, with Nico's statuesque singing as counterpoint and supreme landing place.

"Frozen Warnings" reverses the process. There is no instrumental prelude; there is only Nico's dawn hymn, conjuring two glacial notes of viola and organ, which immediately summon a cascade of electronic diffractions, the perfect anti-harmony for the mantra of her singing, a refrain that rides, at the slowest possible pace, the mute passage of history.

"Evening of Light" is thus her definitive lied, even beyond "Facing the Wind". The eternal vortex of psychedelic harpsichord in which the strain of Nico's voice gets lost (almost deafened by it) is merely the beginning of a foreboding of catastrophe built from accumulating overtones, and finally cello thunder, growing ever louder until the darkness of the close.

The a-historical, a-temporal and, perhaps, a-spiritual vision of The Marble Index has no precedent, neither in the tradition of chamber lied nor, even less so, in rock music. It would, however, gather legions of direct and indirect admirers who would not always manage to touch its complex depths. Nico's bleak existential philosophy, which gradually surfaces from "Ari's Song" to "Julius Caesar", through to the metaphysical oasis of "Frozen Warnings" and the catacomb of "Evening of Light", certainly carries something cosmic, something terribly Pan-like, but it is in its unresolved angel-demon dichotomy that its true essence lies. An unresolved contradiction that grips the human mind and places it in tense dialogue with the arcane forces of the End.

In 1970, after an appearance in the film "La Cicatrice Intérieure", Nico released her second masterpiece: Desertshore, an extraordinary record that, by some strange twist of fate, went almost unnoticed in rock's chronicles. It's a collage of symphonies of icy music, as unsettling as an abandoned cathedral or a medieval castle lost in the mists of time. It is mesmeric music, evoking alabaster floors and lit candles, rides across the moors and occult rituals. Examples include the nightmare for voice and harmonium of "Janitor of Lunacy", the abstract elegy of "Abschied", the sinister nursery rhyme of "Le petit chevalier", intoned by a child over the mournful notes of a music box, and the hypnotic ballad "All That Is My Own". The songs feel almost like prayers, psalmodies, with solemn vocal lines and the bare-bones design of the harmonium. The arrangements are stripped to a minimum, yet they lend the work the spectral tones of a requiem, while Nico's voice digs into the darkness, conjuring mysteries from an archaic Gothic age and foreshadowing apocalyptic, Orwellian prophecies.

After releasing this album, Nico vanished from the scene and moved to Paris. She performed only occasionally, accompanied by the sounds of her harmonium. Among her rare appearances of the period were an acoustic concert alongside John Cale (immortalised on the bootleg "En concert à l'enfer") and an appearance in 1973 at the Bataclan festival, with Cale and Lou Reed. On that occasion, curiously, the German artist also had the chance to meet a very young Franco Battiato. The following year, Nico took part alongside Kevin Ayers, John Cale and Brian Eno in the famous concert of 1 June at the Rainbow, and reinforced her legend as the "valkyrie of rock" with a spectral performance alongside Tangerine Dream in Reims Cathedral.

In 1974 came The End, an even more enigmatic and desolate record, on which she performs a dirge-like cover of the Doors' classic of the same name, along with a gothic rendition of "Das Lied der Deutschen," the German national anthem. After that, Nico once again vanished from the scene.

Her nocturnal, unsettling music, beloved by devotees of decadent rock, found a sudden burst of rock energy with Drama of Exile (1981), featuring intriguing originals like "Purple Lips" and "Only Flight," alongside covers of David Bowie ("Heroes") and Lou Reed ("Waiting for My Man"). In 1985 came a reunion with John Cale on Camera Obscura, which revisited the icier sounds of "Desertshore." Nico took this repertoire on the road around the world, cementing it with two practically unobtainable live albums, Behind the Iron Curtain (recorded in the countries beyond the Iron Curtain) and Live in Tokyo. The German musician appeared onstage with a spectral look and striking pronouncements. "I came to die with you," she once declared, chilling the audience to the bone. Her concert activity was often troubled, not least because of serious drug addiction problems. "A true artist must self-destruct - I think I'm managing to do that," she stated in 1980. Her restlessness was confirmed by a later statement as well: "I don't quite know how I manage to live. It's a constant struggle between me and myself. It's agonizing to feel like a stranger to myself. I have no point of reference to understand who I am. I live as if in perpetual exile."

During the 1980s, Nico became a sort of "Billie Holiday of the punk generation," and the goth movement paid her tribute. Siouxsie wanted her as a support act on her tours, and it seemed a second youth was beginning for the German singer. But in July 1988, in Ibiza, Nico died under mysterious circumstances. The diagnosis was a cerebral hemorrhage, the result of a seemingly trivial fall from a bicycle. Her ashes were buried in Berlin, in a small cemetery in the Grunewald forest, near her mother's grave. To the strains of "Desertshore."

Like her life, the death of Nico, rock's sepulchral priestess, will forever remain shrouded in mystery.

Contributions by Michele Saran ("The Marble Index").

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google