Then in New York, she met Andy Warhol and eventually fell in with the Factory crowd. This turned out to be a perfect moniker for her and all that’s embodied in her voice: the androgyny, the alienation from nationality, the constant nag of something lost. The first was the German photographer Herbert Tobias, who christened her “Nico,” in honor of a man he was infatuated with. Two important men shaped her future around this time. She’d tell her future bandmate James Young, who later wrote a book about his time with Nico, “They used to give it to us so we’d stay thin.” But the industry had darker things to offer, too it was during this time that she developed a proclivity for amphetamines. Modeling, too, offered her people, places: In Paris, she worked for Coco Chanel in Rome, she charmed Federico Fellini enough to give her a walk-on role in La Dolce Vita and when she finally got to New York it was at the request of the powerful agent Eileen Ford. She was a little reluctant at first, but it was one way to keep a family without a patriarch afloat. “Berlin is burning.”Ĭhrista and her mother moved back there after the war, and it was in that city of ruins that Christa and her icepick cheekbones began modeling at the age of 15. Nico, 1988 opens under a red sky, with a child asking her mother, “What’s that light?” “It’s Berlin, darling,” the mother replies.
An air of apocalypse hung over her formative years. Nico’s father went to war and subsequently died around this time, though the exact circumstances of his death are murky (it has been said that he suffered a head injury in battle and then was sent to a concentration camp). She was a child of war some of her earliest memories were of her home country being bombed. Nico was born Christa Päffgen in Cologne, Germany, on October 16, 1938.
“She hated being a woman, because she figured all her beauty had brought her was grief.” “She hated the idea of being blonde and beautiful,” her longtime collaborator John Cale said after her death. In fact, the whole second half of her career was a defiant and fascinating repudiation of everything that had drawn people to the former model and muse in the first place.
#NICO VIDEO VIEWER MOVIE#
One of many things Nicchiarelli’s movie reminds us is that Nico’s later music was darker, deeper, and infinitely richer than most people realize. Although she sang lead on only three songs with the Velvets and departed the group not long after its debut album came out, she’s long been most closely associated with the so-called “Banana Album”-a record on which she had little creative input. Still, that would be news to most people with a passing knowledge of Nico’s music. “My life started after my experience with the Velvet Underground,” she (or at least Nicchiarelli and the actress Trine Dyrholm’s interpretation of her) says in the film. It’s a radical gesture-people love to watch biopics about the party, less so the long cleanup after the party’s over-but it is in keeping with how Nico perceived and told her own story. Susanna Nicchiarelli’s affecting new movie, Nico, 1988, seeks to reframe Nico’s story, focusing not on the heady days of the Velvets and Andy Warhol’s Factory but instead on the last few years before the singer died at the age of 49. Still, it gestures toward more solemn feelings of alienation and misunderstanding that would haunt Nico long after she left the Velvet Underground, for the rest of her troubled life.
#NICO VIDEO VIEWER FULL#
The Velvet Underground and Nico is full of collisions and this was probably the most harmlessly playful one-a couple of American boys pestering the European ice queen with their stereotypically crass enunciation. Naturally, this made Reed and Morrison lean ever harder into their graceless American accents when recording their backup vocals: She’s a femme fay-taaaaallll. “The name of this song is ‘ Fahm Fahtahl,’” the European daughter would scold her bandmates while recording what would become the legendary 1967 record The Velvet Underground and Nico. The German musician Nico had disdain for a great many things, but few galled her as much as the way Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison pronounced the phrase femme fatale.
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