Nico: the icy Heroin Queen turns into a big softie

I nearly didn't buy it because I thought the writing was going to be too knockabout band-on-tour-usual-rock-music-shenanigans stuff (in the shop I'd flicked it open half-way through, read half a page and promptly put it back on the shelf - "not for me"). How wrong I was. Yep, I picked it back up again. Not quite sure why. Anyway, I'm talking about James Young's Nico: Songs They Never Play On The Radio. And I'm glad I gave it a second chance. Because, this book is good in the way that Nico singing Femme Fatale is good. Young, I reckon, found just about the right fit for what he's doing. The book is comic, it's somewhat knockabout, but it's also sharply and sparingly written, and ironically detached without being uninvolved or flatly "journalistic".

Nico's pale blues eyes don't look very friendly

Young's book charts the late period in Nico's career (1982-88), when she'd decamped to Manchester, was horribly addicted to heroin, and, to judge by this book, was a huge mass of self-centredness. The way Young tells it, Nico was both incredibly standoffish and incredibly needy. And also slothful beyond belief - rarely practising or trying to write new songs, wearing the same all-black clothes, almost never washing. With Nico there's clearly plenty to get your teeth into if you're a half-decent writer - and that's what this book demonstrates. Young has sort of worked it out. He writes about Nico with a kind of controlled harshness - almost viciously ripping away the facade of her as an "enigmatic" muse. But - and only very sparingly and with quite a lot of delicacy - he also indicates that Nico has a kernel of warmth and humanity buried deep within her. Anyway, here's how he describes her early on:

"She influenced us all. It may sound absurd but, despite the monstrous egotism and the sordid scenes, there was something almost pure about her. A kind of concentrated will. Not pretty, sweet or socially acceptable, certainly, but intense, uncompromising and disarmingly frank ... none of us wanted to be like her, selfish and ungracious, but she helped us map out a different landscape to our lives ..."

But, before long, you're thrown into quite a lot of sordid scenes. It was never going to be anything else when you realise what Nico's Manchester-era "band" (very roughly speaking) consisted of. First off, the so-called Faction, Nico's touring band, was put together by a shady Manchester wheeler-dealer figure called Dr Demetrius (aka local music manager Alan Wise. In more serious mode, Young eulogises Wise after his 2016 death here). Apart from Young himself (a classically-trained keyboardist of relatively normal-seeming disposition), Demetrius assembled a bunch of Manc ne'er-do-wells - a bass player called Echo ("small, made of wire and rags ... and ... bad teeth from too much amphetamine"), another speed freak called Toby (the drummer) and Raincoat (heroin addict-cum-dealer and supposed sound engineer). Later on, the Nico freakshow would be extended to include luminaries like John Cooper Clarke (going though his intense heroin period while sharing a flat with Nico and others in Brixton) and the mighty John Cale (boorish, rude and ruthless, according to Young). There were also Eric Random (of muse-to-Pete-Shelley fame), Dids, Spider Mike and several other ripe characters. Here are a few snippets of life chez Nico:

"You entered at your peril. The first thing that hit you was the smell of burnt heroin, hashish, and stale Marlboro smoke - it veiled all the other odours, which was probably just as well. Heaps of junk had been deposited everywhere like a fleamarket stall - Nico t-shirts, duty-free bags and empty cigarette cartons, ashtrays piled high and beyond overflowing." (Her room in the Brixton flat)

"Nico was listening to Chopin and eating chocolate. Candle burning in a saucer, coloured scarf draped over the bedside lamp. Smell of paraffin wax, Marlboro smoke and cooked heroin ... I noticed a pile of used disposable hypodermics on the bedside cabinet." (Her room in a hotel in Amsterdam while on tour)

The Nico scene is a heroin scene - getting fixes, anxiety about not getting fixes or meeting "contacts" in new cities, whiny complaints about not having any (or enough) stuff left, methadone, getting across borders with hidden supplies, a disinterest in almost anything else. On and on. Most of the band are users, but Nico is the Heroin Queen. A dark vampire of addiction. Nico apparently used heroin to escape from her demons - a toxic cocktail of memories concerning her father being killed in a Nazi-era hospital after being invalided during the war; of herself being raped aged 15 by a US soldier stationed in Germany who then got convicted and executed; and some kind of general sense of disappointment at life and people (she seems to have had genuine affection for Jim Morrison, whom she still missed, regretted that another old flame - Bob Dylan - seemed to want nothing to do with her, and was upset that Warhol would never return her calls). Or not. Young points out that Nico's stories sometimes changed. She was inconsistent, possibly outright dishonest. To my mind, Young is genuinely funny in his cataloguing of the ups and downs (mostly downs) of the Nico roadshow during these years. It's a narrative played for comic effect, but it's also tempered by an appreciation of more serious things. Like ... the music. If anything, Young perhaps underplays how good Nico's stuff could be (I've been listening to The Marble Index and Desertshore as I've written this blog: austere, hauntingly beautiful music). For sure, he ridicules her and her fecklessness. He makes it clear she was "bone idle" and, with her huge harmonium and gothic sound, almost ludicrous when she was - very ill-advisedly (Demetrius' fault) - touring seaside resorts in Italy or big-but-uninterested venues in Los Angeles. Yet, lurking beneath the banal hopelessness and the druggie degradation, there was real talent. When the band have - very scrappily and hurriedly - recorded Camera Obscura in 1985, they play some promotional gigs in London, including one at Chelsea Town Hall:

"Nico gave her best performance yet and at last her accompaniment sounded convincing. Her authority on stage was absolute and the gig proved to be a landmark that reaffirmed her legend ... I no longer felt ashamed or embarrassed for her or myself."

This is on page 133 of the book. Almost everything preceding this had talked Nico down (often brutally so), and you almost begin to accept that she has virtually no artistic/musical ability at this heroin-addled stage in her life. But no, she had something. Quite a lot, perhaps. Like a lot of people of my age and musical persuasion (in fact like most people), I came to Nico via the Velvet Underground. As far as I was concerned, Nico was Femme Fatale, All Tomorrow's Parties and I'll Be Your Mirror. Very lazily, I never bothered to investigate her other work. I now think some of it is amazingly good. The other week John Cooper Clarke was on Desert Island Discs speaking (briefly) about his acquaintance with Nico. This massive junkie of Nico's Brixton period (the "stick-legged Rocker Dandy" in Young's description) chose I'll Keep It With Mine as one of his "discs". I'd never heard it before. With its melodramatic violin stabs, it's not my kind of thing. But Nico's heavily-accented, creakily-husky voice makes it something else. The infinitely touching way she sings "Some people are very ... kind" makes you wonder whether she wasn't herself a great big softie after all ...