Nico: The Marble Index/Desertshore review – an unforgettable trip to a very dark place

(Domino)
These two reissued solo albums from the German singer have a fearsome reputation – but they offer an experience like no other

To say Nico is an artist more talked about than listened to is putting it mildly. In recent years, her life has been the subject of two plays, two autobiographies, a biopic and at least four songs, Low’s Those Girls (Song for Nico) and Beach House’s Last Ride among them. But Spotify’s list of her 10 most popular tracks contains two of her three contributions to the first Velvet Underground album – These Days and The Fairest of the Seasons – the two Jackson Browne covers from her debut solo album that were featured in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, and … five Velvet Underground songs that don’t actually feature Nico: she does appear on the No 1, Sunday Morning, but only as a spectral presence, her few backing vocals buried deep in the mix. It’s hard to think of another artist so tangentially attached to their most-streamed song – Milli Vanilli, perhaps.

Perhaps this is rooted in the fact that Nico’s slender solo oeuvre is preceded by its reputation, or rather reputations plural. In the popular imagination, her solo work falls into three categories: unrepresentative (jaunty debut single I’m Not Sayin’ and Chelsea Girls, which the singer hated so much, she burst into tears the first time she played it); cobbled together to fund her heroin habit (1981’s Drama of Exile, 1985’s Camera Obscura); and famously unlistenable, including the two albums reissued here. Indeed, the fearsome reputation of 1968’s The Marble Index was burgeoning before it was even completed. Supposedly it lasts only half an hour because that’s as much as its putative producer, Frazer Mohawk, could stand to listen to before being overwhelmed by despair.