Nico
Frozen borderlines
Wrap a tourniquet round all
Tomorrow's parties.
The incomparable, beautiful and inscrutable Nico singing Frozen Borderline at the Library Theatre in Manchester. She'd come a long way from The Factory by the 1980s, at which point she was living a smack addicted half-life in North Manchester. Years before the IRA performed open heart surgery on the city, of course.
She came to a sad, early end, did Nico. James Young, a musician who fell into being her tour pianist, again sometime in the 80s has written a witty, moving memoir, Songs They Never Play On The Radio, about her last years.
Mind you, this seemed to be the way with Warhol's muses. He picked them for their glamour and unpicked and flattened it, just like he turned Marilyn Monroe into two dimensional blocks of colour. Beautiful girls and boys made vague and ugly by drugs or overexposure
The Andy Warhol retrospective, Other Voices Other Rooms, at the Hayward has an oddly similar effect. It spreads a scant talent too thinly over a sizable exhibition. His main contribution to 20th century art may have been to remove overt emotion from art, but that doesn't mean his work lacks jealousy. The many photographs of him in drag, or makeup, or both, scream with envy.
What was Nico to Andy? A mini-Edie Sedgwick? Perhaps, but she, unlike the poor little rich girl, at least managed to escape him with something of herself in tact. Incidentally, if you must see Factory Girl, a biopic so hackneyed that it's almost a masterpiece of kitsch, they get her totally wrong. She may have been a model but she was no Heidi Klum.
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