After The Party

Still out on their own, Nico and John Cale’s twin towering masterworks get deluxe reissues. By Kris Needs

Nico The Marble Index ★★★★★ Domino REWIG 145 (CD, LP) Desertshore ★★★★★ Domino REWIG 146 (CD, LP)

“The album’s cover will tell you more about The Marble Index than any words I could possibly use,” declared Fusion magazine’s Ben Edmonds in 1970, striking a common nerve in an era when a sleeve could dictate an album’s fate.

Her trademark blonde tresses tinted midnight black, Nico glaring in stark defiant monochrome from my local record shop’s paisley-hued bins in early 1969 commanded this writer buy her second solo album. Not a tough call for a Velvet Underground obsessive who’d loved 1967’s Chelsea Girl debut but not even John Cale’s arranger credit could hint at the foreboding fruit that lurked within. The voice was unmistakably Nico but the music swirling around her sonorous reveries like slow motion fireworks was unlike anything I’d ever heard at a time when musical innovations lurked around every corner, Cale’s avant-splattered European modern classical backdrops embellishing Nico for the first time singing songs she’d written on her newly acquired harmonium.

Predictably, the album’s sheer strangeness puzzled the public after provoking press beyond the few that got it, including Edmonds, who observed, “We don’t burn our witches nowadays, we simply ignore them.” Fifty-five years later, as The Marble Index and 1970’s equally powerful Desertshore receive these welcome deluxe reissues, they sound as uniquely isolated from any other music as ever.

Since the early 70s I’ve rated Nico as possibly the last century’s most misrepresented and undervalued female singer – if her own worst enemy under heroin’s hold – carrying a ton of demons and attitude. That’s the popular image but there was also a steely resolve and girlish sense of fun when this writer encountered her receiving vile abuse from punk audiences in 1978 and we spent a memorable evening together.

She was still beautiful, and it wasn’t hard to see how she’d captivated Jim Morrison more than 10 years earlier in L.A. after famously attending the Monterey festival with Brian Jones. Facilitated by close friend Danny Fields, who then worked for Elektra, their summer ’67 fling was tumultuous and excess-drenched but there were also moments of transcendent clarity tripping on peyote in the desert with Morrison, who suggested she start writing poetry, read Blake and Coleridge and adopt an instrument. Acquiring her harmonium in San Francisco, Nico took this seriously on returning to New York, spending many nights in candle-lit bathtubs writing songs and mastering her organ (sometimes with advice from jazz titan Ornette Coleman).

Nico’s lyrical influences came from her war-ravaged Berlin childhood, son Ari by movie star Alain Delon or, as she told me, simply events and people that grabbed her. Her first song written was Lawns of Dawn, inspired by the first wild night with Morrison at fabled Hollywood rock star hang-out The Castle. Songs ready, next she needed a record company. Having signed the MC5 to Elektra, Fields brought her to Jac Holzman, who okayed recording at Elektra’s west Hollywood studio with former bandmate John Cale, like Nico recently sacked from The Velvet Underground at power-grabbing Lou Reed’s insistence and now a staff producer at the label. According to Reed biographer Victor Bockris,

Cale cornered Reed when The Marble Index was finished, declaring, “This is what we could have done!”

Titled from a line in William Wordsworth’s epic poem The Prelude, The Marble Index unfolds over eight tracks purposefully kept to 30 minutes after its brief, glistening Prelude. Deploying an instrumental array including viola, glockenspiel and bells, Cale essentially complements Nico’s lyrical moods with impressionistic shards that circle her vocal incantations like distorting mirrors in a dream: snaking viola on No One Is There, mutant piping on Ari’s Song, shimmering drones on Frozen Warnings, pumping piano on the disorientating Facing The Wind with Nico’s voice put through a

Leslie speaker. The jangling Evening Of Light (Nico on a child’s toy piano!) has lost none of its ominous terror, building to Cale’s monstrous bass lacerated by shrieking viola against the vocal’s mesmerising purity. The reissue adds two top-notch out-takes: harmonium reverie Roses In The Snow and Nibulengen trailer the next album with its Anglo-german a cappella.

Despite The Marble Index selling miserably and Elektra dropping Nico, Cale was commissioned to produce Fields’ next signing, The Stooges. Accompanying Cale to recording sessions, Nico and Iggy Pop became an item at the Chelsea Hotel before she relocated to The Stooges’ ‘Fun House’ in Michigan, filming a surreal video with Iggy for Evening Of Light.

Her next partner was French filmmaker Philippe Garrel, who used Nico, and later her next album’s songs, in his films. She was injecting heroin and living in Paris with Garrel when UK producer Joe Boyd, who loved

The Marble Index, engaged her and Cale to record for the new Warners-affiliated label, Reprise. Entering London’s Sound Techniques studio (Ari in tow), Cale remarked how he was impressed at the improvement in her harmonium playing and songwriting.

First hearing Desertshore in the Musicland listening booth in Soho, Christmas 1970, Nico’s force 10 entry on Janitor Of Lunacy alone was enough to secure my 29 shillings. If that was a lament for her fallen ex- Brian Jones, The Falconer was written in response to June 1968’s Warhol shooting by Valerie Solanas, Cale’s piano thundering or disarmingly pretty.

“Cale cornered Lou Reed when The Marble Index was finished, declaring, ‘This is what we could have done!’”

My Only Child is her astonishingly pure a cappella for Ari, who disarmingly speaks Le Petit Chevalier. After reverting to discordant viola and harmonium on the German-sung Abschied, Nico lays herself open on heart-shreddingly vulnerable ballad Afraid, including the immortal line, “You are beautiful and you are alone”. Only the German-sung Mutterlein, for her recently deceased mother, recalls the previous album’s jagged onslaughts, steered through blaring trumpets to Cale’s piano climax. Another later-acclaimed masterpiece that didn’t sell, Desertshore goes out on the winter wonderland gallop of All That Is My Own.

As Iggy remarks in Jennifer Otter Bickerdike’s You Are Beautiful And You Are Alone: The Biography Of Nico, “She was a great, great artist… I’m absolutely convinced that some day, when people have ears to hear her, in the same way that people have eyes to see a Van Gogh now, people are just gonna go, ‘WHOOOAAA!’” Hopefully with these reissues that time has come.