Reflections on ... Sid and Nancy (1986)

/ Top: Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb as Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. Bottom: the genuine articles. Just to confuse things, I'll be alternating photos of Oldman and Webb and the real Sid and Nancy throughout this post! / 

From the Facebook events page:

Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies is the FREE monthly film club downstairs at Fontaine’s bar in Dalston devoted to Bad Movies We Love (our motto: Bad Movies for Bad People), specialising in the kitsch, the cult and the queer!

Considering February is the month of Valentine’s, we’ll be embracing a romantic theme with … Sid and Nancy (1986)! Hey! It’s a love story! (Well, director Alex Cox himself describes the film as “a horrific love story”. Its original title was going to be Love Kills). It outlines the doomed tragicomic “amour fou” between punk’s Romeo and Juliet: Sex Pistols’ bassist Sid Vicious and his heroin-addicted groupie girlfriend Nancy Spungen … and let’s just say it all ends messily.

So – why not throw on a black leather jacket, stick a safety pin through your nostril and join us on 22 February for a quiet night with Sid and Nancy?

Added incentive: in honour of Valentine’s Day, Fontaine’s is being sponsored all month by the fancy French raspberry liqueur Chambord! So there will be special offer cocktails on the night – and they will be pink!

Doors to the basement Bamboo Lounge open at 8 pm. Film starts at 8:30 pm prompt. Grab a cocktail and come down early! I'll be playing punk music and vintage erotica on the big screen before the main feature.

/ "I'll never look like Barbie. Barbie doesn't have bruises." Chloe Webb as Nancy Spungen /

Happily, we had another full house downstairs in the Bamboo Lounge of Fontaine’s on 22 February for my presentation of Alex Cox’s confrontational 1986 biopic covering the whirlwind, drug-fuelled and ultimately homicidal 19-month love affair between Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious (10 May 1957 - 2 February 1979) and downtrodden groupie Nancy Spungen (27 February 1958 - 12 October 1978). It was great to see so many new faces. And the screening was appropriately rowdy and boozy! Well, until the film’s despairing closing scenes – when everyone was so rapt and hushed you could hear a pin drop.

Sid and Nancy was a key film for me as a teenager (I taped it from cable TV onto VHS and watched it so many times I could probably recite screeds of dialogue from memory!).  Until Wednesday night, it had been a good twenty years since I last re-visited it. How great to see it’s as powerful, scabrous and disturbing as I remembered! Thirty-one years later, Sid and Nancy still packs a nasty punch. The film is like staring into a raw open wound.

/ The real Sid and Nancy (I love Sid's engineer boots) /

The early scenes set in London – covering the rise of the Sex Pistols and Sid and Nancy’s burgeoning romance – are brash, rowdy in-your-face bad taste black comedy. Once the Sex Pistols acrimoniously implode and an increasingly heroin-addicted Sid and Nancy find themselves adrift in New York (especially once they check into their squalid room at The Chelsea Hotel), the tone turns progressively, almost unbearably bleak and claustrophobic. (Bizarrely, one of the most common criticisms levelled at Sid and Nancy upon its release was that it irresponsibly glamorised heroin use. Which raises the question: what film did they watch? It depicts addiction as a nightmare!).

I love maverick director Alex Cox's weird flourishes of romantic, art-y magic realism or poetic realism or whatever you want to call it. I think that aspect confused people at the time who expected something more straightforward. For a brief period, he was a genuinely distinctive and vivid original voice in British cinema. Sadly, like leading lady Chloe Webb, in recent years Cox seems to have entirely vanished off the radar.

Not that Cox doesn’t make some jarring false notes, and Sex Pistols fans could certainly pick holes with the accuracy of certain segments. We catch a glimpse of a band meant to be X-Ray Spex belting out “Oh Bondage Up Yours” and they look wrong, wrong, WRONG. What a disservice to Poly Styrene! The fictional glam rock star Rock Head who crops up in a few scenes (who is he meant to be? Iggy Pop? Johnny Thunders?) feels terribly ersatz and unconvincing. 

To be fair, though, Sid and Nancy was never meant to be a documentary: it’s Cox’s idiosyncratic interpretation of their story, with artistic license. When it was released in ’86, Vicious had only been dead for seven years and his story was still fresh in peoples’ minds. More than thirty years later, we can watch Cox’s film more objectively and appreciate it on its own merits.

/ Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb as Sid and Nancy /

On a purely superficial level, for aficionados of punk fashion, Sid and Nancy offers a bonanza. Sure, Sid and Nancy were stoned, destructive and barely-functioning hot messes, but boy did they have outlaw style. Their wardrobes encompass studded leather bondage belts and wristbands, black leather biker jackets, the unravelling mohair sweaters synonymous with Vivienne Westwood and McLaren’s SEX shop, green nail polish, tartan, laddered fishnet tights and painted-on skinny black Levis. (Special mention must go to Nancy’s sensational gold leather micro-mini skirt. In real life Nancy Spungen seemed to sport a distinctive “gun” necklace in every photo ever taken of her; it’s weird Cox didn’t get Webb to wear a replica). I love the padlocked chain around Sid’s neck (a gift from Nancy. When Nancy lovingly puts it around his neck and clicks the lock shut, Sid says, “Cool! Where’s the key?” Nancy replies, “What key?”). 

Sid’s best accessory, though, is his starved-to-perfection skeletal body straight out of an Egon Schiele painting or Giacometti sculpture. (In later scenes Oldman pretty much entirely abandons wearing shirts. To achieve Sid’s emaciated physique, Oldman reportedly undertook such a drastic diet he was diagnosed with malnutrition at one point).

/ The real Sid and Nancy /

All these years later, the performances of Oldman and Webb still astonish. Both are hilarious in perhaps my favourite scene when Nancy takes Sid home to meet her horrified suburban family. Black tragicomedy at its finest! This was one of the early roles that launched Oldman as one of the best and most versatile Brit actors of his generation. Poor Web was every bit as exemplary as Oldman, but she never seemed to catch another good break after this and seemingly disappeared into obscurity. Read any book about punk history and Nancy Spungen is perhaps the most reviled figure of the whole era. She was profoundly troubled: diagnosed with schizophrenia at 15, expelled from multiple schools.  At 17 she’d run away to New York, supporting herself via stripping and prostitution and embraced groupie-dom (she was already "affiliated" with bands like the New York Dolls, Aerosmith, The Ramones and the Voidoids by the time she met Sid). Webb portrays the damaged Spungen with humanity and compassion. For me, Webb’s two finest moments are her junkie freak-out shouting at her mother in a phone booth ("he loves me more than you do!") and then later Nancy’s rambling, croaky monologue about a dream she’d had, delivered to an unconscious Sid next to her bed. She rasps something about “we had a little dog and we loved it … but it died and we didn’t know where to bury it … so we ate it.” It sums up their toxic love and it’s like an eerie premonition about what lies in store.  

/ Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb as Sid and Nancy/

Anyway, to introduce the screening I quickly Googled and compiled some “fun facts” about Sid and Nancy. Here are a few!

Daniel Day Lewis was short-listed for role of Sid before Oldman got it.

A young unknown Courtney Love unsuccessfully auditioned for the role of Nancy. As consolation Cox gave her a supporting role. It’s fascinating to see Love’s almost unrecognisable original pre-plastic surgery face.

Sid and Nancy was originally intended to be filmed in black and white but the financiers vetoed that idea. I think it would have felt even harsher in grainy black and white!

Cox’s original choice for the title was Love Kills right up until the time of release - when he was advised someone else owned the legal rights to that name and would sue. Calling it Sid and Nancy was a last minute compromise, but I think it works: it’s terse and it evokes Bonnie and Clyde. When it was released on video in Mexico, the Spanish title translated as Two Lives Destroyed By Drugs. My own alternative title would be Baked Beans and Champagne: The Sid and Nancy Story.

/ Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb as Sid and Nancy /

Further reading:

Read more about the Lobotomy Room film club here

Loverboy magazine ventures into the wild, wild world of Lobotomy Room 

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Reflections on ... Nico in Philippe Garrel's Le bleu des origines (1979)

/ Nico in the film Le bleu des origines (1979) by Philippe Garrel / 

“I film women with a soul.” Interview with Philippe Garrel

[I recently had the high honour of being referenced as a source on Dennis Cooper’s blog. OK he didn't mention me by name, but Cooper recently devoted a blog entry to uncompromising French filmmaker Philippe Garrel and the paragraph on Garrel’s ultra-obscure / rarely-seen 1979 film Le bleu des origines was lifted from my IMDb review. I saw the film at The British Film Institute in 2007. It prompted me to post it here in its entirety and make it look prettier than it does on IMDb.]

Le bleu des origines is an uncompromising example of old school avant-garde cinema at its most cryptic, enigmatic and inscrutable. Made by Philippe Garrel in 1979 using a hand-cranked silent camera, bleu represents absolute year zero in film-making, a return to the starkest basics of film's origins in early silent cinema, replacing any trace of narrative or even dialogue with an emphasis almost exclusively on close-ups of women's faces. The film is black and white and absolutely silent for its near 50-minute duration. 

The total silence feels oppressive: silent cinema, after all, was accompanied by music. The silence, though, serves to ensure the focus on the actresses' faces is absolute, with no distraction.

The faces in question belong to the former Velvet Underground German chanteuse, Warhol Superstar and cult figure Nico, and bohemian French starlet Zouzou. By 1979 Nico had been Garrel's lover, muse and collaborator for a decade. Le bleu des origines was the seventh and last film they made together and marked the end of their off-screen relationship as well.

The film's tone is intimate but mysterious and ultimately despairing. It is essentially a portrait of two women, Nico and Zouzou, who are offered up for endless existential contemplation. There is no hint of even the most basic narrative but it is human nature to try to construct one, to try to thread together scenes, which are alternately jagged and brief, and sometimes-long Warholian takes that frankly court boredom. 

Garrel offers hints of symbolism that are probably highly significant but remain opaque: Nico examining a jewel in her hand; many shots of both women reading manuscripts or poetry by candlelight; a glimpse of Nico's passport; Nico pointing at the sky; Zouzou writing; Nico folding a letter and putting it in an envelope; Zouzou wielding a knife; Nico as an angel of death with waist-length hair in a billowing black cape, filmed in high winter on the roof of the Paris Opera House among the stone gargoyles. Most strikingly, Nico in some kind of dungeon or prison slowly climbing a stone staircase, pausing on each step, in jerky zombie-like movements straight out of a lost German Expressionist masterpiece. 




/ Consider this a trailer for Le bleu des origines: eerie dirge "We've Got the Gold" from Nico's 1974 album The End providing a soundtrack to clips from Le bleu des origines /

Nico and Zouzou are mostly filmed alone but sometimes together. What links them? Both women were frequent collaborators with Garrel and had appeared in his films several times separately before. Nico was romantically linked with Garrel: I’m uncertain whether Zouzou was. Like Anita Pallenberg, both women had been involved with the doomed Rolling Stone Brian Jones. In the 1960s both Nico and Zouzou had been glamorous art-y girls of the moment, fashion models turned singers and actresses. By 1979 both women had hit hard times. Nico, Zouzou and Garrel are all known for their heroin addiction. (Later in her life Zouzou did jail time and was reduced to selling the Parisian equivalent of The Big Issue outside Paris metro stations).

Again and again Garrel films them in scenes that emphasise their alienation, anguish, distress, isolation, solitude. Both Nico and Zouzou were great beauties and there is genuine pleasure in lengthily scrutinising them in long silent takes; from shot to shot, though, depending on how the light hits their faces, both can look suddenly, startlingly ravaged, older than their years. Maybe the film is about the hell of heroin addiction? 

There is actually a third woman in the film who appears so briefly she is almost subliminal: Jean Seberg. (Seberg and Nico had already appeared together in the earlier Garrel film Les hautes solitudes in 1974). In some shots a barely glimpsed heavy-set but still beautiful older woman appears, standing behind Nico while Nico plays the piano like the phantom of the opera. Later, and shockingly, Seberg inexplicably slaps Nico hard across the face. Seberg committed suicide in 1979, the year this film was released. This surely represents her last-ever film appearance.

While Zouzou gets equal screen time and is certainly charismatic, it must be said the film belongs to Nico. In her haunting close-ups she suggests the post-punk Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich of underground art cinema. Even in the “talkies” of the 1930s some of Garbo and Dietrich's most mesmerising on-screen moments were silent close-ups of their faces (i.e. the concluding scenes of Queen Christina and Morocco). Their allure was non-verbal, not dependent on dialogue or voices – they cast a spell with just their eyes. In Le bleu des origines Nico does the same. 

/ The famous concluding close-up of Queen Christina (1933) in which the serenely impenetrable Greta Garbo stares into the horizon, her inner world sealed off to us. I’d argue this anticipates the lengthy, unfathomable close-ups Andy Warhol and then Garrel would devote to Nico in their underground art films  /

As the film continues, the mood of distress and impending tragedy grows more overt. Towards the end Nico is shown wrapped in a headscarf, crying genuine inconsolable tears, her breath visible in frosty night air, seemingly not acting. Her depression is tangible. For someone frequently lazily described as an ice queen who sang in a bored monotone, Nico here convincingly projects raw emotion: her presence aches with a heavy sadness. 

Sometimes hypnotic, sometimes catatonic, Le bleu des origines is as bleakly beautiful as Nico's best music and was obviously a heartfelt personal and artistic statement. If the film does represent the end of their relationship, it is certainly a last cinematic love letter from Garrel to Nico.

/ Portrait of Nico circa her 1981 album Drama of Exile /



/ You can watch Le bleu des origines in its entirety on the Youtube link above. How lucky I was to see it in an exquisite sparkling print at The British Film Institute: this is clearly a bootleg (I think someone filmed it sitting in a cinema!) but Garrel has never released it on DVD and for now this represents your best viewing source. For a soundtrack to this silent film I suggest you load your CD player with Nico's essential trilogy (her "gravest hits" if you like) - The Marble Index (1969), Desertshore (1970) and The End (1974) - and crank it up loud /

Further reading:

Read the Dennis Cooper blog for an excellent overview of Garrel's career

Fascinating 2002 interview with the then-58 year old Zouzou in The Guardian. What a life.

I've blogged about the ever-inscrutable Nico (“possessor of the most haunting wraith cheekbones of the 20th century” - thank you, James Wolcott of Vanity Fair) many times: her contemporary Marianne Faithfull reflects on Nico here; the historic encounter When John Waters Met Nico; Nico’s 1960s modelling days; how the old jazz standard "My Funny Valentine" (and heroin) connects Nico with Chet Baker; and  finally, When Patti Smith Met Nico.

Tallulah and Billie

/ Tallulah Bankhead in the 1930s /

/ Billie Holiday photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1949 /

The intimate friendship between dissolute husky-voiced first lady of the American stage Tallulah Bankhead (1902-1968) and the great doomed jazz chanteuse Billie Holiday (1915-1959) spanned at least two decades – from the golden age of 1930s Harlem cafe society until the mid-1950s. “Tally and Lady were like sisters,” as one observer put it. Fierce, stylish sisters with a tinge of incest, apparently.

From Joel Lobenthal’s 2005 biography Tallulah! The Life and Times of a Leading Lady:

Tallulah’s relationships, of course, seldom observed clear-cut boundaries, and it appears that during the late 1940s she and Holiday were also lovers. Perhaps they had been all along.  Holiday later told William Dufty, who ghostwrote her autobiography, that when Tallulah visited backstage at the Strand Theatre, the thrill she took in exhibitionistic sex made her insist on keeping Holiday’s dressing room door open. Holiday later claimed that Tallulah’s brazen show of affection almost cost her her job at the Strand.

John Levy was also Holiday’s lover as well as her manager at the time, and although he was one of the abusive strong men to whom Holiday gravitated, Levy was intimidated by Tallulah and her connections. When Tallulah came around, all he could do was get out of the way. Once at a nightclub he sat at a nearby table watching Tallulah express her affection to Holiday. “Look at that bitch, Carl, look at that!” he exclaimed to musician Carl Drinkard. “That bitch is going out of her fucking mind, she’s all over her.”

A daughter of the patrician Old South who knew a thing or two about breaking taboos, the gloriously hedonistic Tallulah was a bold pioneer when it came to interracial sex – another of her conquests was Hattie McDaniel (yes, Mammy from Gone with the Wind). Sadly, Bankhead and Holiday’s friendship ended acrimoniously around the time of the publication of Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday’s 1956 memoirs. (Bankhead was bedeviled by tabloid scandals at the time and, fearing what dirt Holiday might rake up in her autobiography, abruptly distanced herself from her – probably on the advice of her lawyer). What a shame. Read Holiday’s lacerating and embittered kiss-off letter to Bankhead here. 

/ Bankhead was primarily a stage actress and only made a handful of films. In the early 1930s she was dispatched to Hollywood in the hopes she would become a screen rival to Garbo and Dietrich (in truth, she was the rare American actress who did convincingly exude their kind of heavy-lidded Continental decadence). Unfortunately all her films belly flopped and her Hollywood stint was brief. Here she is in The Cheat (1931), which certainly looks intriguing. I've never seen it, but apparently it’s available to watch in ten-minute segments on Youtube /

/ Sultry Bankhead with delectable leading man Gary Cooper in The Devil and The Deep (1932) – which I have seen and is great, campy fun. Bankhead famously confessed, “The only reason I went to Hollywood was to fuck that divine Gary Cooper.”/ 

/ I think my favourite photos of Billie Holiday ever taken were from this weirdly modern 1949 series by Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) – which include these sensational nude portraits. Young Holiday looks a bit tough and hard-edged but not yet ravaged. I love how they're clearly un-retouched: you can see the little scar on her face. Her golden skin makes her look like one of Gauguin’s Tahitian beauties. See more here /

/ Towards the end: Holiday in 1958 /

/ Rare shot of Billie and Tallulah in happier times, apparently taken at The Strand Theatre circa 1948 /

Me Encanta! Pre-Warhol Nico in 1960s Spanish TV Commercials

The entry from Andy Warhol’s Diary from Monday 6 October 1980 (page 332):

“Went to C.Z. Guest’s for drinks. A guy there told me, “We have someone in common.” He said that his family owned all the brandy and sherry in Spain and 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 this beautiful girl was now and I said that it was a whole other person, that he’d never believe it, that she was fat and a heroin addict. He wanted to see her and I said that if she was still playing at the Squat Theatre we could go see her.”

Warhol was breathtakingly unsentimental and blithely unconcerned about his former 1960s Superstars and their hardships by the 1980s.  In the sixties, when she had been a sensational blonde beauty, German fashion model turned singer and actress Nico had unforgettably fronted The Velvet Underground (the proto-punk band Warhol managed) as husky-voiced chanteuse, and starred in several of his underground art movies (most famously, 1966's Chelsea Girls). Consider his account of encountering a down-on-her-luck, heroin-addicted Nico at an opening party in Paris (where she was then based) on Friday 27 May 1977 (page 46 of Andy Warhol's Diary): 

“Nico was there with a young kid with a big bulge in his pants, she asked Bob to photograph him. Bob already had. Nico looked older and fatter and sadder. She was crying, she said, because of the beauty of the show. I wanted to give her some money but not directly so I signed a 500-franc note ($100) and handed it to her, and she got even more sentimental and said, “I must frame this, can you give me another one, unsigned, to spend?”"

/ Below: Nico as she would have looked in the late 1970s - early 1980s /

/ Above: Portrait of Nico on the cover of her Drama of Exile album (1981) / 

Kudos to the consistently excellent Dangerous Minds blog for reminding me about the wonderfully kitsch Spanish TV ads the gorgeous young Nico made for Centenario Terry cognac in the early 1960s in her pre-Warhol fashion model days. (You see some brief glimpses of them, too, in Susanne Ofteringer's excellent 1995 documentary Nico Icon). I especially love the one where Nico purrs “Me encanta!”, her instantly recognisable German-accented voice obviously dubbed by a Spanish actress. 

When Patti Smith Met Nico

/ Two punk heroines: Nico and Patti Smith in 1977 /

From Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon, Richard Witts’s authoritative (and sadly long out of print) 1993 biography of the alienated, enigmatic Garbo of punk. In her own words, down on her luck Moon Goddess Nico (mired in heroin addiction and poverty) describes her late 1970s encounter with Patti Smith (then a young punk poetess-turned-rock singer on the ascent):

“I had met Patti in New York, when she was a young poet on the scene. She was a female Leonard Cohen, when she moved from writing to singing, and I liked her because she was thin but strong. John Cale produced her first album, which was about heroin (Horses, 1975). Then I met her in Paris, and got to know her better. I felt like she could be a sister, because anyway she was the double of Philippe Garrel (Nico’s French underground filmmaker/ lover/artistic collaborator of the time. They made several films together: Nico was the Marlene Dietrich to his Josef von Sternberg), and I liked to be together with her. But she has become boring now and married. She should have married John Cale and they could live in a gingerbread house and make gingerbread children.

“Patti was very kind to me. Early in 1978 my harmonium was stolen from me. I was without any money and now I couldn’t even earn a living playing without my organ. A friend of mine saw one with green bellows in an obscure shop, the only one in Paris. Patti bought it for me. I was so happy and ashamed. I said, “I’ll give you back the money when I get it”, but she insisted the organ was a present and I should forget about the money. I cried. I was ashamed she saw me without money.”

As far as I can tell Patti Smith has never spoken on the record about knowing Nico: in Smith's excellent 2010 memoirs Just Kids, for example, she makes no reference to them ever having met. To her credit, perhaps it's modesty, and Smith doesn't want to talk publicly about her generosity in helping a fellow artist in trouble? It would be fascinating to hear her version of this story.

/ Nico in San Francisco, 1979 /

All photos Via

It Was A Pleasure Then: Remembering Nico

I couldn’t get it together to blog this in time, but I still felt it was worth noting that yesterday (18 July 2011) marked the 22nd anniversary of the death of my all-time favourite singer, the ever-inscrutable Nico. (Had she lived, she’d be 73 now). Not that I ever need an excuse to pay tribute to the late, great Nico: rock’s ultimate diva of despair with the blood-freezing vampire priestess voice, the heroin-ravaged former chanteuse of the Velvet Underground, and the Marlene Dietrich of punk.

I feel really privileged that over the years I’ve managed to meet most of my idols, but I’ll always be gutted I never got the chance to meet Nico. Whenever I encounter people who knew her, I always pump them for details and inevitably they always have interesting stories about her. She was a fascinating and completely unconventional woman. Yes, her life was dominated by heroin addiction but she reminds me of that line from the Morrissey song “Piccadilly Palare” where he sings “We threw all life’s instructions away.” For better or for worse, if anyone can claim to have done just that, it was Nico. She lived a decadent, rootless, genuinely bohemian life in the tradition of 19th century poets like Rimbaud – and paid the consequences. And no matter how screwed up her life, she could still pull herself together and (like Chet Baker, Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf) make powerful music.

/ I'll Be Your Mirror /

When I interviewed that other chain-smoking baritone babe-voiced heroin ravaged chanteuse Marianne Faithfull in January 2011 I seized the opportunity to ask her about Nico (the two women have so many parallels in their lives. Faithfull clearly identifies with Nico, and even wrote a song about her in 2002). She told me:

“Well, I’m so lucky in my life and I know it, that my life worked out so well. And I felt a lot of compassion for Nico, that she had such a hard time. Obviously a lot of that was to do with drugs, too. If you take a difficult life anyway and then add that, it’ll get much worse. I just felt it was very tragic story and I felt a lot of love for Nico. I think she tried really hard. She did make a couple of great records – I love The Marble Index (1969). I value her a lot, and I don’t think she was really valued in her lifetime.”

(Read my full interview with Marianne Faithfull on the Nude website here)

John Waters reflects on his single encounter with Nico in my blog here.

/ Nico with Andy Warhol /

/ Nico accompanying herself on harmonium /

The best way to remember Nico is simply to listen to her suicidally bleak but achingly beautiful music. So here are some clips of the angel-of-death vocal stylings of Nico that I think represent her creative peak: call them her "Gravest Hits" if you like.



/ "Janitor of Lunacy", circa early 1970s /



/ Nico interviewed on French TV in 1972 (unfortunately, no English subtitles). Stunning performances of "Janitor of Lunacy" and "You Forget to Answer" /



/ Performing "Gengis Khan" on French TV (1978) /

If you can, track down the documentary Nico Icon (1995) by Susanne Ofteringer or the sadly long out of print 1993 book Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon by Richard Witts, the definitive Nico biography to date.

When John Waters Met Nico

It turns out that cult filmmaker extraordinaire John Waters and I have something in common: we both revere the late, great German chanteuse Nico. I bought his riotous 1981 book Shock Value: A Tasteful Book about Bad Taste in the late 1980s when I was still a university student and it had a profound impact on me. In it he briefly and tantalisingly recalls meeting...

“... Nico, my favourite singer, who was so out of it when I met her that she asked, “Have I ever been here before?” (I had to tell her I really had no idea).”

I wanted to know more about this historic meeting between cinemas’s Sleaze King and the heroin-ravaged Marlene Dietrich of punk. I interviewed Waters (a life-long hero of mine) for Nude magazine in December 2010 when he was in London promoting his excellent new book Role Models, so I was finally able to get him to elaborate on his encounter with Nico. It was the end of the interview and this was only for my own personal interest and never intended for the final article (which you can read here).

So here it is: when John Waters Met Nico...

Graham Russell: Before you go, tell me about the time you met Nico.

John Waters: Nico ... I met her when she played in Baltimore. Well, (before that) I saw her play with The Velvet Underground at The Dom on St Marks Place (in New York) with The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. I have the poster still. But I met her much later when she had her solo career, which I loved. She was a total heroin addict. Did you ever read that book The End? (The 1992 book is a jaundiced and not exactly objective account by her former keyboardist James Young). It’s so hilarious. It was that – although it wasn’t that, that was later when she was touring England. She played at this disco, and I went. And people went, but not a lot, it wasn’t full. And she was heavy and dressed all in black with reddish dark hair, and she did her (makes guttural moaning noise). Afterwards I said, “It’s nice to meet you, I wish you’d play at my funeral”, and she said (mimics doom-laden Germanic voice), “When are you going to die?” I told her, “You should have played at The Peoples Temple; you would’ve been great when everyone was killing themselves!” Then she said, “Where can I get some heroin?” I said, “I don’t know.” I don’t take heroin, so I don’t know. But even if I did, I wasn’t copping for Nico!

“But that was basically it. But I’ll always remember her, and I love Nico. I remember when she died, when she fell off the bicycle (in 1988). Every summer my friend Dennis and I, we play Nico music on the day she died (18 July). I saw that documentary Nico-Icon (Susanne Ofteringer, 1995), which was great. It’s a shame: she was mad about being pretty! She was sick of being pretty, being a model. And I remember her when she was in La Dolce Vita (1960), even before. Nico ... great singer; and even the Velvet Underground hated having her. And her music can really get on your nerves. You have to be in the mood. Sometimes it gets on my nerves. You have to be in the mood to listen to it. To put on a whole day of Nico can be ... my favourite song of Nico ever, and I only have it on a tape that someone made, it’s a bootleg. Did you ever hear her sing “New York, New York”? It’s great! I wish she’d done a whole album of show tunes! Like “Hello Dolly” or “The Sound of Music”! (Mimics Nico singing “Hello Dolly”).



/ Nico in the 1980s at New York's Chelsea Hotel singing a punk-y and dramatic version of her classic song "Chelsea Girls" /



/ Nico with Marcello Mastroianni in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) /

/ Rare shot of Nico and Fellini during the filming of La Dolce Vita /

/ John Waters: The Maestro /

/ Hog Princess: The Filthiest Woman in the World -- Divine. RIP /

 / John Waters and I at his book launch party in London in December 2010 /

The Nude website is now defunct, sadly, but you can still read my full interview with John Waters here