1966 saw the first incarnation of Velvet Underground serenaded by the deep alto wails of Nico and resulting in more of a performative shock value prank than a musical act.
From the get go it was clear that what Nico brought to the table fundamentally altered the DNA of Velvet Underground and added an idiosyncratic melange of melancholy, gloomy glamour and a chilly otherworldliness.
Pop music scholar Jennifer Otter Bickerdike’s biography of the woman born as Christa Päffgen starts off by shedding light on her trauma ridden life before joining Velvet Underground and her work as a model and actor. Dissatisfied and underwhelmed on the intellectual front, she deliberately chose to branch out into an artistic existence, of which the twelve months with Velvet Underground were only the start.
Detailed and methodically researched, the strength of the tome lies in Otter Bickerdike setting the record straight by clearly positioning Nico as a veritable artist in her own right merely than a sexualised mannequin and arrestingly beautiful muse, yet does not shy away from her less flattering attributes, such as her self-destructive drug dependant lifestyle and volatile temperament.
As especially her solo twilight emissions remain enduring even close to six decades after they were released, the book brings to light the significance of Nico as a phenomenon that keeps reverberating through underground music and has had a tangible influence on artists such as Bauhaus, Patti Smith, Morrissey and Björk as in the 1980s she became a godmother for new generations of musicians.
