I just had to track down this mural of Nico while we were in Manchester. Her stay in the city was one in which she said she felt most accepted and loved by her friends and neighbours. Had her cycle accident happened here instead of Ibiza, where the locals largely shunned her and where she was refused medical treatment, she might still be with us. 🖤🤍🖤
#BooksAndMusic
I love Nico, & loved Bickerdike's biography, which I read earlier this year. I love Patti Smith, & enjoyed Rose's biography, which I recently finished.
I was excited to read in the latter that Patti collaborated on an album, Killer Road: A Tribute to Nico, which I had to buy! Experimentalists, Soundwalk Collective, created a soundscape of recordings from Ibiza, where Nico lived the last years of her life, intertwined with ambient music developed👇
Having a major book-hangover from the tagged Nico bio and, ruminating on the desperately few albums she recorded, I ordered "Fata Morgana: Nico's Last Concert", which I was well overdue doing. It's a live album produced in 1988, six weeks before her death, comprising mostly new songs commissioned for a Berlin cultural festival. The shows sold out, and I assume the material would have been taken to the studio had time allowed. ??
"Cease to know, or to tell, or to see
Or to be your own
Have someone else's will as your own
You are beautiful, and you are alone
You are beautiful, and you are alone
Often the adolescent play
Reward your grace
Confuse your hunger, capture the fake
Banish the faceless, reward your grace"
- "Afraid", from Desertshore, Nico, 1970
#booksandmusic
“A twenty-two room castle can be awfully lonely place for just one person."
- Nico
I'm only 44 pages into this 400- page book (which has a further 100 pages of notes, references, sources and index), but it feels very different to the other Nico biographies I've read, undoubtedly because this one is written by a woman. Bickerdike says in her introduction that as she researched the received wisdom about Nico, "what emerged was a didactic example of apathetic misogyny and stereotyping...an often one-sided narrative was created ??
"You don't have to be you to be you."
- Nico
"Always have an onion."
- Nico
Do I *need* a third Nico biography? Probably, yes, but only one way to find out for sure ... 📖
#booksandmusic
You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico | 
so-so
