Nico, born in Berlin in the 1930s and christened Christa Paffgen, was a product of Andy Warhol's Factory. An ex-Chanel model, she briefly entranced Fellini and appeared in La Dolce Vita. Subsequently, Warhol shot her to prominence as a singer with Lou Reed's band, The Velvet Underground, with whom she sang the few songs for which she is still famous. Having enjoyed her fifteen minutes, Nico allowed her career to begin a far longer decline, the last decade of which is recorded in this memoir by James Young, seduced from studying philosophy at Oxford to play keyboards for her. Nico's solo career was never a commercial success; there is a limited appeal to hearing Jim Morrison's "The End" with only an accordion as accompaniment.
In October 1980, Warhol recorded in his diary that he had met a man whose family "owned all the brandy and sherry in Spain, and [said that] in the sixties Nico was the girl in all their advertisements, in all the posters and subways and magazines, that she was famous all over Spain. He wanted to know where was this beautiful girl now, and I said that it was a completely different person, that he'd never believe it, that she was fat and a heroin addict." This is his final substantial statement on his protégée, and it is not entirely unfair.
Nico met Young in his bathroom, where she was satisfying her addiction. She was accompanied by a college friend of Young's, known as Dr Demetrius. This pathetic wannabe had attached himself to Nico as her manager; and as long as he kept the smack flowing, Nico lazily allowed him to organize dismal European tours of small venues. Young joined them, since Oxford seemed, at the time, less attractive than a step into madness, or at least no different. "A future with Nico was in fact an invitation to return to the land where time stood still and where lost causes returned to inert promise. I knew that territory. It was just like a library."
The account which follows is highly entertaining; a trail of mismanagement and chaos, punctuated by grotesque cameos and alarming squalor. To this extent, Young's memoir is a healthy corrective to many books on rock music with their stock formula of Bildungsroman and meteoric rise to stardom. Nico was peripheral to the scene, always bemused that Warhol and Bob Dylan would no longer see her; and Young never fails to emphasize that he and his fellow musicians were peripheral to her. Nico remains an icon for some; the gloomy, Germanic grandeur she lent to songs such as "All Tomorrow's Parties" partly explains this. But Young portrays a woman whose only concern was her next fix, who rarely washed, ate only chocolate and who slowly ran out of veins.
The memoir is not unsympathetic, though, and the tragic banality of Nico's death when she fell from a motorcycle is a poignant finale to twenty years of has-been bathos. Despite her solipsistic hauteur, her manipulative scrounging and the degradation which her habit forced on her and her friends, it is clear that she still enjoyed the affection and respect of her fellow-travellers, partly because she so obviously didn't need them. Nico had retained some talent; idleness prevented her from capitalizing on it. Instead, she surrounded herself with a supporting cast which guarantees the book's humour, together with appearances by the performance poet John Cooper Clarke, Allen Ginsberg and the singer John Cale.