NICO enrico

NICO: CHELSEA GIRL (Polydor)

I've had this digitalised on my Zen thing for the past week or so. An intensely beautiful and creative album, you had Nico having some of the best songwriters of her generation, if not all time ply their skills here: Reed, Dylan, Hardin, Cale maybe, and some might say Jackson Browne, but it aint forcken me unless I'm a total ignoramus or a fan of agit-plop (enlighten me otherwise if you could be frucked.) It could easily be pegged as a lost Velvets album, and Siren released that Velvets boxset in the early 90s that even chucked some track on it. Cale, Reed AND Morrison all play on it. ALL great stuff, a no brainer. As a youngerish adult I remember reading some bio on her, I can't remember the name exactly, but it was a total trag-comedy, the funniest part being her love affair with an over-weight biker in Western Australia only known as skvosher! Like Ed Kuepper, Brian Eno and a few others, many people are put off by Nico's monochromatic, Teutonic voice. It's really not that bad compared to say 95% of those indie-shmindie gelechters that get lots of press in the Village Voice and other yuppie lifetsyle rags.

In recent times I've been becoming a more hoity-toity pretentious cunt, epseically in regards to cinema, and got wind of the French drekteur Phillip Garrel, who I think had an affair with Nico, and she DEFINITELY became his muse, even to this day, espesh in one of his more recent flickers, SAUVAGE INNOCENCE.

Benchmark pose/attitude for inner-city boho chicks

Anyway her work with Garrel despite being quite arty, poetic, surreal and torpid, is also a good snapshot of where Nico was at, at that point in her life, which is the gothic, anorexic, junkie look, that incredibly is quite popular amongst some more glamorous sub-cultures of the wealthy mentally ill.

The Inner Scar - geddit?

I am digressing here. LA CICARICE INTERIEURE is the film for which the Nico album DESERT SHORE was the soundtrack, pardon my poor positioning of nouns. For those that haven't heard DESERT SHORE, it's a very folky, Celtic-Gallic, ancient sounding record, like much of the freaky folky shit going at the time. Getting back to CHELSEA GIRLS, well you have one of the truly genre busting freaky-folk indie-shmindie records of all-time right there and then. So for you freak-folk fuckers, get DESERT SHORE and CHELSEA GIRL and twiddle the night away. Getting back to filmic studies...

Nico: A good ad for heroin useage VS.

Emily, who came out of the grave (see Emilio Miraglia killer DVD boxset booty!)

So Nico wasn't in a good way, but she made these avant-garde art-films that have massive, innerlectyool clout amongst the hoity toities and the toitie hoities , and made some of the best freak-folk, post-Velvets third-album muzak of the time. But really it was Reed practicing for BERLIN and the like. So there you have it to chew on.