Not a history . . . just a scrapbook of found images and clippings I couldn’t let languish in the archives

The *NME* used a cropped image from the press conference to illustrate an interview with Oldham from the following year (August 5, 1966)

‘Niko’ . . . I’m guessing Andrew Loog Oldham phoned in his weekly column . . . *Music Echo* (August 14, 1965)

‘I have a habit of leaving places at the wrong time . . .’ and arriving with the wrong work permit . . .

Nico in Fabulous (August 21, 1965) looking somehow out of place in a teen fashion shoot but then so does her partner in modelling . . . Ben Carruthers. He was the star of John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959) and had just released a wonderful single, Jack O’ Diamonds produced by Shel Talmy and with Jimmy Page on guitar. Page forms one part of a triangle with Carruthers and Nico, Bob Dylna forms another (see immediately below and further down. Some great stuff on the record and Carruthers (read until the end of comments) [HERE]

Nico on Ready Steady Go! (August 13, 1965)

Nico was featured three times on RSG! in 1965. Her first two appearances were June 4 and 11. For the first she gave an interview, for the second she performed Dylan’s ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’. Clinton Heylin in Double Life Of Bob Dylan (2021) suggests it was ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ but an off-air tape of the programme lays the uncertainty to rest. Nico is accompanied by acoustic guitar and double bass in the studio and taped strings fill out the arrangement, although they sound like they are playing in another room. Her final time on the show, August 13, she sang ‘I’m Not Sayin’. None of her other appearances are thought to be extant either as audio or video. (see Andy Neill, Ready Steady Go! The Weekend Starts Here (2021)

The video of previously unedited footage is a revelation, perhaps the same could be done with Peter Whitehead’s effort

Coincidentally, while Nico was in London, her 1963 film performance, in which she was billed as Krista Nico, Striptease (X) was enjoying a London run – ‘Paris was grey and cold . . . how could this passionate woman live?’Directed by Jacques Poitrenaud, it was unimaginatively programmed with the archaic Lon Chaney Jr.’s House of Dracula (1945)

Juliette Greco sang the Gainsburg’s song on the soundtrack album but a 1962 demo with Nico has since been released [**HERE**]

Nico as cover star. . . from sublime to kitch

The Bill Evans Trio’s *Moon Beams* (1962)

Casey Anderson, *Blues Is A Woman Gone* (1965)

*The Tattoos, Torrid Trumpets* aka *Trumpets Go Pops (*c.1967)

The Tattoos, *Swingin’ With The Million Sellers* (1972)

Nico caught the eye and ear of Jonathan King, pop impressario, hit maker and music press columnist. He clearly didn’t like her but she made an impact on this most square of contrarians. . . The Christmas single idea should have been realised, however . . .

Jonathan King, Disc Weekly (August 21, 1965)

Andrew Loog Oldham’s advertising copy was at its most obscure in 1965, all very lysergic

Nico appears in an outtake sequence from Don’t Look Back (1965) in conversation with Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman (Ben Carruthers also appears in the outtakes working on the lyrics with Dylan for ‘Jack O’Diamonds’)

Nico in Times Square 1966 photograph by Steve Shapiro

So what do you bet . . . Nico shopped at Biba’s in 1965 taking fashion tips from Marianne Faithful?

During part of a wide-ranging interview with Andrew Loog Oldham, held late July/early August 1966, the NME’s Keith Altham asked him about his relationship with Marianne Faithful. He said,

‘I have decided not to take over her management because I need full control and there are too many people still with vested interest and her talents are not diversified enough anyway. I think I put that very nicely’.

Asked whatever happened to Nico? he replied:

‘Ah yes, I was glad I was right about Nico… She’s working for a group called the Underground Movement for about $11,000 for eight days in clubs like Hollywood’s The Trip’

No mention of Warhol and the Velvets misnamed, but the venue where the Exploding Plastic Inevitable played, May 3–18, The Trip – ‘the new shrine of pop culture’ — he got right, I bet he remembered her payout correctly too . . .

Disc and Music Echo (November 18, 1967): I may have missed it, but I believe this is the only contemporary review of The Velvet Underground and Nico in the British music press and it is spot on: ‘Their music is hard rock ‘n’ roll brought up to date with electricity . . .’ Read on . . . The image of Nico is from her Ready Steady Go! appearance, which I’ve not seen printed elsewhere.

‘Private and Public Glamour, Nik Cohn Sifts the Stardust’ Harpers & Queen (February 1973)

The bookends:

Once, in Las Vegas, I was sitting in the lobby of the International Hotel, browsing through a magazine, when I was suddenly afflicted by a buzzing in the back of my skull. I turned my head: there was nothing to look at but a stretch of bare wall and a corner. I stared at the wall for perhaps thirty seconds, feeling most foolish but unable to do otherwise. The buzzing trapped me; I knew that something enormous would happen.
It did. Suddenly Elvis Presley appeared round the corner, flanked by half a dozen body guards. I will not describe him; he was God. Shimmering, he swept away across the lobby and was gone. After a moment the buzzing subsided and I went back to my magazine.

Yet again, as so often when it comes to matters of weight, I return to P. J. Proby. I remember him once at a concert in Leicester, halfway through a riot, grovelling and shrieking on his knees, when suddenly he stopped dead, stared out into the darkness and, in that curious mock-prophetic style of his, spake with tongues. ‘It seems that I must be the greatest thing on earth’, he declaimed. ‘Why, look at you all – screaming and yelling and fighting, loving me, hating me, dying to touch me, dreaming of breaking my neck. You run behind me like lapdogs and shucks, I don’t even exist . . .’

In between, a disquisition on glamour. What is it? What isn’t it? Who has it? Who doesn’t have it?. He asks everyone, except Bobby Dylan, The Beatles and Timothy Leary. ‘New Generation’ artist Patrick Procktor told him glamour is ‘the essence of irresistible allurement, overwhelming all aesthetic judgements’, which works for me and part explains Cohn’s devotion to Proby.

Glamour changes down the decades marked by how the object of enthralment shifts: the fifties was about a sexual physicality, sixties a counter-reaction with aura replacing a sex-glam syndrome – ‘A triumphant return to freakishness, decadence, insanity; lots of violence, swilled down with a dash of perversity; early and melodramatic death where possible, or at least a glut of suffering.’

Andrew Loog Oldham had the ‘flair’ that defined glamour in the sixties and Cohn extols his virtues and vices in his profile of Marianne Faithful for Nova (April 1971), who, after the Stones, was Oldham’s greatest invention. When Cohn meets her she has moved away from the pop limelight, living with her child and mother in a timbered cottage in the Berkshire downs. He describes her as overweight and seemingly ‘exhausted and muffled by inertia’.

After the flair of the Sixties, the seventies had nowhere else to go but to turn to nostalgia, glamour as pastiche of lost dreams.

One of his chosen throwbacks, reincarnations, is David Bowie who Cohn had met and interviewed six months previously. Bowie wants to be a star:

Not a Superstar or a Rock star or any kind of star in particular; just a star, period.
And what was a star? He didn’t know, he couldn’t define it, but he could recognise it by instinct. Then he paused, looked coy; ‘a star is me,’ he said, fluttering his lashes, and suddenly it was.
Harpers & Queen (September 1972)

Rock Dreams, Peellaert and Cohn. Pop’s three generations

As if to make sense of all of this, Cohn returned to his own creation, Arfur the Teenage Pinball Queen. It was a postscript on the media mirage, the ways in which ‘Pop phenomena may be created absolutely out of nothing . . . ‘shucks’ said Proby, ‘I don’t even exist’.