Cease To Know

This mural of Nico by an artist called Trafford Parsons adorns the gable end of a building, not far from the Apollo in Ardwick (a walk from the Piccadilly town of about fifteen to twenty minutes). The building is Spirit Studios, something I didn't know when I took the picture at Easter. Amusingly, the front entrance to Spirit Studios is on Downing Street. I'll leave that hanging there- you can probably fill in your own joke/ remark. 

Nico had a history with Manchester, moving here in 1981. Her past as a model and then member of Andy Warhol's Factory set, role in his Chelsea Girls film and her vocals on The Velvet Underground's first album are the stuff of legend. Her solo albums of the 70s too, The Marble Index especially, with Nico taking up the harmonium, a very un- rock 'n' roll instrument, at the suggestion of Jim Morrison. She lived with John Cooper Clarke for some of the 80s (in Brixton) but spent much of it living in Prestwich (home to Mark E Smith) and Lower Broughton, Salford. She was deep in the grips of heroin addiction. Fall guitarist Martin Bramah said she liked the less salubrious parts of inner city Manchester, gazing at Manchester's dirty post- industrial mills and saying they were romantic. Some of Manchester's musical scene treated her like royalty but she equally preferred to played pool in the pubs of Prestwich, go to Chinatown for a meal or pop to the local shops on her bike. She played gigs to pay the bills/ support her habit and various members of The Fall, the Factory set and promoter/ manager Alan Wise tried to get her to write and record but accounts suggest she drifted, burning bridges and chances, and would lose interest easily. Eventually she began to clean up, switching to methadone and taking up cycling and healthy eating. She died while on holiday in Ibiza in 1988 while out on her bike, suffering a cerebral hemorrhage, and is buried in Grunewald, a cemetery near Berlin. 

Her life as a child, born in 1938, adds yet more to her story- her father was conscripted into the Wehrmacht during the war and there are multiple accounts of his death, some attributed to Nico and her frequent changes to the story- variously shot by a French sniper resulting in terrible head injuries and then being shot by his commanding officer or ending up in a concentration camp or living out his final days in a psychiatric hospital or fading away from shellshock. Whatever the truth, after the war Nico and her mother ended up in Berlin, a far cry from their wealthy background in pre- war Cologne. 

This song, Afraid, is from 1970's Desertshore album, an album she made with John Cale, and seems imbued with all the life she'd lived up to that point.  

Afraid