A rock’n’roll woman: Nico in a hundred interviews.

Book review: You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone by Jennifer Otter Bickerdike.

People told me I’d like this book but my first response on opening it up was: Does it really need to be 500 pages? My heart sank a bit when the author (a “cultural historian” first and writer second) declared that she had done over 100 interviews for the book. It felt a bit “I’ve suffered for my art, and now it’s your turn.” 

I’ve read, or given up on, a lot of books where I wished the author had left out some of the research; an information dump is not fun to read, however much you like the subject. And I don’t even like Nico that much. Well, I had no strong feelings before I read the book and I still have none having read it. The writing is so even-handed that it’s hard to get a clear picture out of all the conflicting descriptions. 

Obviously, I didn't give up reading this, or I wouldn't be writing this review. I still think it could have been shorter, but it's interesting nonetheless. 

The book avoids the danger of information dump by allowing the interviewees’ actual voices to be heard (more so than the author’s, who keeps in the background). The bulk of the book is quotations from interviews, but they do contradict each other. So if the aim was to bust the myth that Nico was an enigma, that hasn’t happened because she remains an enigma. In the end, you are left with just what’s in the title of the book: beautiful, alone. (It comes from Afraid, a song on her Desertshore album.)

Nico is described in clichés (“goth Garbo”), in generalisations (artist, bohemian), and even, occasionally, as doing normal things (playing pool in the pub). 

There are some things that make her seem more human. Like many traumatised people, she sounds like hard work, but friends also describe her shyness, her sense of humour and her creative seriousness. Living in Manchester in the 1980s, she seems to have found a community with people who accepted her for herself and describe her as warm, intelligent, even fun.

The book concludes with a summing up from Nico’s son Ari, in which he describes his mother as “a rock’n’roll woman who seized the stage like a lioness”. That raises an interesting question: what actually is a rock’n’roll woman? 

Is it about the type of music you make? Is it about the way you perform? Or even, about the way you live?

Over the years, I’ve always seen the notion of “rock’n’roll” as the epitome of cool, and the adjective “rock’n’roll” as something to aspire to. But I’ve never been really sure what it means. And I’ve often wondered about what a “rock’n’roll lifestyle” involves. Too often it just seems to be about men behaving badly, like the anecdotes that we’re supposed to admire in the TV documentary about Rockfield Studios or any of Peter Hook’s books (incidentally, he is a minor character in this one). It does make me go: Is that all there is?  (And yes, Nico should have done that song.)

Is a “rock’n’roll lifestyle” just bohemianism with added electricity? Is it just about drink, drugs and debauchery? Are women allowed to do it? Nico’s life as described here certainly fits the bohemian archetype: uncompromisingly unconventional, moving in artistic circles, sleeping with glamorous men (Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Iggy… well, you would, wouldn’t you?). Not to mention long-term drug addiction, and being perpetually skint. 

That’s all allowed, for women. Especially the last bit, because who doesn’t appreciate a female victim? What doesn’t seem to be allowed is doing your own art. 

There are a lot of people in the book who don’t want Nico to be a rock’n’roll woman. She doesn’t get recognised as a real part of the Velvet Underground, despite turning that first album into something as beautiful as herself. She’s driven offstage by abusive punk fans while supporting the Banshees. Male bandmates snigger about her sexual history. 

There’s a particularly nasty anecdote about her live solo debut where Frank Zappa undermines what she’s doing by taking the stage in between sets and caricaturing her performance. “Rock’n’roll theatre” says one interviewee admiringly. No. You don’t take the piss out of another artist like that. But if you’re a bloke and they’re a woman, maybe it’s allowed. 

Her solo work rarely gets taken seriously, especially as years pass: reviewers seem to take “has she lost her looks?” as the starting point for an assessment of the art. A few interviewees acknowledge her place in the world of “experimental music”; for most it’s more important to talk about her in terms of drug addiction. Something, like mistreating people close to them, or making bad art, that men get away with all the time.

As musician and friend Cosey Fanni Tutti points out in the book: “People tend to look at male musicians or artists when they’re drug addicts [and think] that’s part of their creative streak… I don’t think they offer that to women in that situation.”

On the same subject, another musician friend, Una Baines, is quoted as saying: “She just fits into those fears that men have of women who are outside the norm.” Compared to her male peers, “She knew she would never be treated on the same footing.”

Baines and another woman friend, Barbara  Wilkin, both quote Nico as saying “The only thing I regret is that I wasn’t born a man.” It would, after all, have been much easier just to be a rock’n’roll man.

Here's some info about the book on the publisher's website. Please don't buy it from Amazon.