Nico doing Heroes in this most vacuous, souless, echoic & frighteningly hopeless tonal poem...is beautiful & haunting! I mean this in the best possible way!
I was at this gig .... before seeing this video the only thing I remembered about the experience was her Coat - (it was usually boiling in the Warehouse). The other thing was that there was a lot of talk about her shooting up and eating chips upstairs (I seem to recall tables and chairs being upstairs) before the performance ... which judging from these frazzled images would seem, at least, to be partially true. You had to take your life in your hands when grooving on the copper dance floor at the warehouse in those days. I think I must have been stood near to the chains dangling from the ceiling at the rear of the dance floor as I don't recognise the back of any of the heads in the audience. Great Days!!...(daze)
"The other thing was that there was a lot of talk about her shooting up and eating chips upstairs (I seem to recall tables and chairs being upstairs) before the performance ... which judging from these frazzled images would seem, at least, to be partially true." Yep, she's definitely been eating chips
@Cindy Mckee Indeed I was ... I would have been 21yrs at the time. The Warehouse was packed with Preston's alternative crowd. I did not see the Japan show though. I have however seen David Sylvian since
Hey Alex - That's awesome. My dad owned the warehouse, he's got plenty of tales... cannot confirm or deny the chips 🙂 He's turning 80 this year and I'd love to share some of your stories with him. If you have anymore please message me! Cheers, Kit
The combination of a band giving its very blood and sweat, with Nico standing still barely moving, as if she couldn't care less about anything, her strangely seductive voice, and her EYES... my God... I'm lost for words, I can just FEEL it all.
No Botox making those eyes huge boys and girls. I read she actually tried to make herself look ugly. She wanted to be known for something else besides her looks.
this perfomance feels like when you're extremely drunk/high and you can't decide what's next. you just want to get rid of the feeling and are promising yourself that you won't do this ever again. one can only guess but this must have been a never-ending concert for her. this video is the greatest and the worst in the same time. unrepeatable 💫
Amazing to think she lived in the twentieth century. Like an oracle, she seemed a conduit, as if her music and words came from an ancient, unseen source.
I met her in, of all places, the South Jersey Pine Barrens...she would not sign my copy of Chelsea Girl: 'That is the old Nico.' But she did accept my cop of Boccaccio's Questions of Love, written by an Italian poet of the fifteenth century.
I found this performance absolutely riveting and I love Nico and I love this song. How come noone in the audience is dancing? It is Preston, UK, I suppose. Like, when Joy Division played. Everyone just stood stock still, not quite sure whether to laugh or cry, if you know what I mean. Fanbloodytastic! ❤
ITS ONLY A FREAKING JAM . AS A RESULT OF QUALITY BAD AZZ DRUMMING, &/R GUITAR. NOW PIC ALL .THOSE INSTRUMENTS BEHIND HER . PICTURE NONE OF THEM BUT HER VOICE. ADD IT UP & U GOT CRAP 💩💩💩🚽🚽🚽🚽
Wow. Pretty scary eyes! Saw her at Mabuhay here in SF in 1977. We gave her a big round of applause (tiny club) and she said "I just peed my pants" and sat down to play her harmonium and give us all (100 people?) a great show. Classic performer with a sad ending... Miss 'ya!
Heroic and heartfelt performance from Nico. And the band. Perhaps some don't want to hear the absolute Hero and inspiration she will always be even now. So long Christa, you left your mark gal ❤!
This song never fails. I've never listened to this version before, but whooo, it explores interesting territory. What's going on behind those eyes? BEING NIco was not an easy enterprise, and doing that which is not easy while under the scrutiny of the public eye is pretty heroic. Cheers.
No, Nico wasn't "stoned all the time", as some weak-minded people here seem to think, just by looking at her eyes... Neither was Iggy Pop, nor Lou Reed, even if each of them had difficult periods with psychotropic drugs in their lives - just look at Lou Reed in concert live in 1973 at the Olympia, or Iggy Pop towards the end of the Stooges. ...I'm not a rocket scientist, but I was a junkie and drug dealer from 1973 to 1983, and I can tell you that those who are "high all the time" die quickly, very quickly, of an overdose, like most of my friends from that period... And all these artists had long and prolific careers, because they controlled their consumption(s), which was much more linked to their "creative ups and downs"...Read their interviews....I saw and got closer to Nico because I lived in Paris when he lived with Philippe Garrel.... and I can assure you that taking massive amounts of heroin is INCOMPATIBLE with a 2-hour concert, as she did at Reims Cathedral with Tangerine Dream, or at the Orange Festival in 1975....Similarly, when she "retreated" to her house in Ibiza, she took advantage of the opportunity to wean herself off the drug. I knew this from mutual Spanish friends, as I frequented the Balearics a lot, and even tried to go and see her there.... The reason why this myth of "excessive consumption" persists for these artists is, on the one hand, because they themselves sometimes self-destructively fed this myth, and, above all, because it was at the heart of their songs and lyrics (Lou and Iggy especially... ), and that they lived or had lived what they described, but in fact no more than many other artists who didn't "talk about it" (Edith Piaf, Judy Garland, Billie Hollyday, closer to us Christophe, Bashung, and even Johnny halliday, eh yeah...)...so, please, stop with this exploitation of clichés and prejudices. Go and see the magnificent film about Nico: "Nico Icon", which reminds us that she never knew her father, a Wermacht soldier who died before she was born, that she grew up in the ruins of post-war Germany, and that this kind of thing marks you for life, as many of her songs testify, if you take the trouble to listen to them and translate the lyrics. ...Nico is in fact in the tradition of those German singers with a deep, gravelly voice like Marlène Dietrich, Indrid caven, Ute lemper, and even Nina hagen..... It's so much easier to dump clichés on an artist, all because she always had the courage to show herself as she was, sometimes crudely, sometimes stoned, yes, and often not, in fact, and even probably sometimes in need, because she wasn't rolling in dough. In this respect, Nico was a pioneer, like "You may or may not like what I do, but I show myself as I am without "hiding" anything, and I don't give a damn about the way you look at me".
I love how she makes "I wish you could swim" sound like a low-key scolding. "Like dolphins.. Dolphins can swim!" **Why can't You?!.. Lover... too learn to swim?" In the meanwhile, Nico shows Us what it means to swim and to drown at the same time. Whether or not the archetype "tragic hero" reduces lived and artistic complexity to a myth, Nico's emphasis on "Heroes" and what it represents really helps show the song as an existential manifesto. As if a life-grounded assurance that no matter how dark things get, sublimity can be mere musical moments away, "Heroes" serves as a real empowering lighthouse for many of us. And Nico brings the song into certain places where its author, Bowie, couldn't quite take it (or fully go) himself. That he couldn't is probably for the "best" (however rare and few such no-go places may have been for Bowie), at least for those of us who value his long and varied career. Conversely, as an artist, Nico proved to carry forth (to model, to weave, write) a somewhat different story than Bowie. Neither greater nor lesser than him, mind you; not that those things can be reliably qualified anyhow. But merely Different. And rising to certain self-singular distinct forms of artistic (maybe even "historic") neccessity. Among its elements this video, this performance, currents Nico embodies how one can simultaneously defy pain and also surrender to pain, to embrace pain and also to transcend pain through art. Her story and her work intertwine to show us how these (and other) strange paradoxes become endemic to a profoundly unprecedented relation between individual and society, between life and art. Nico's image, words, story, music, and voice become a meshed surface refracting modern struggles as such, speaking of and to public celebrity cultures and their pitfalls, as well as to the challenges of private meaning-making. Elsewise, Nico represents a figure who channels beauty and defies beauty, but ultimately helps expand what beauty can even Mean, how it can resonate with and reflect us, diffusely refracting our own struggles. Through art and life, against the abyssal shapes and borders of fears, confusions, and struggles, through perseverence and brilliance, she does come through in so many ways. And I know people can say all kinds of "could have, should have been/done" about her (and they do), but I think that by, in some sense, refusing to see the integral meaning (and on some level even conjoined neccessities) of the whole extreme-splicing and complex context of her work, the whole road of her life, passings over borders, deserts, indexes, and shores, such voices don't fully honor Nico and her legacy, as it continues to emerge in the decades following her passing. Nor do these reductive or wishful voices fully account for the rare type of artistic strength she exhibits. Granted, I don't want to fall into the trap of over-romanticizing junkie life. Such existence can be an anxious or soft horror, scraping by and preoccupied with mere day-to-days. And, maybe worst of all for some artists, this survival-focus can be a numbed maze of repetition, routines, an invisible sinking, like some bizzare inversion of middle-class lifestyle maintainance. Why would someone put up with such life for long? Well, for some people it, oddly enough feels more grounding than the prescribed normative "rat race". Beyond that, any decent answer would be neccessarily more complex than what any comment, or even any book, could address. And I can't make definitive claims about Nico specifically. But, most summarily, I tend to think that for some sensitive or pain-ridden people, especially some artists, such forms of addiction can stem from "everything" becoming simply "too much" to cope, to remain productive to continue swimming forth (like dolphins), letting oneself love and create, in spite of every entropic weight and emotional/situational whirlpool. In some cases, opiate habits can be compared to desperately trying to "autotune" the whole context of life. In other cases, it can feel like the only way to keep down all the chaos, to focus on what's meaningful. Of course, the habit eventually starts eroding the very things one is trying to serve and guard with its aid. And as a former junkie, recovered four years, I'm not talking through indirect conjectures or pulling on stereotypes, like many. Many of my artist/musician friends have gone through similar journeys. Some were lost irreversibly. Dead in their 20s. And not in some romantic/glorified way. Most of those lost were just starting out on their paths, and haven't yet done most of what they "could have" in this world. So, I by no means want to downplay the danger, the challenge of navigating chemicals' despoting entrapment, of learning how to start swimming from under it. Nor the impactful loss of those drowned. The fact that Nico managed to do so much at various stages makes her the exception precisely through the strength of her perseverence and will and brilliance. Which may have been deepened by having to deal with so much struggle/pain. But it's only through moments of overcoming, of reaching and rising out of the abysses, not thanks to abysses themselves. So, be careful around drugs, kids. It's all so complex. Binary categories and moralizing judgements rarely help (as addiction fuels, bad faith/self-shame are second only to pain/overwhelm/PTSD). I think opiate addiction is just an extreme form of a much deeper and more widespread general crisis of meaning and loss of faith in Future (and, as such, questioning even one's Identity. Imposter syndrome being increasingly prevalent now in 2019). Yet, those who are most challenges with this can also be the same people who are on the "frontlines" and in the "trenches", fighting towards some possible solution of a much more universal crisis and impasse. The "Avant-Garde" began as a military metaphor, refferring to the Heroic soldiers on the front lines. And confronting a very concentrated version of what many "regular" modern persons experience and struggle with. RU-vid comments sections highlight to me how some struggled artists often get talked about/related to more or less like Christian martyrs, as if absorbing some of our shared pain into her journey, and through her art giving it a place to "know", hear itself refracted. "I'll be your mirror, reflect what you are", the artist says unto the world, perhaps forlornly smiling, perhaps already recognizing that no mirror could authentically hold the world without eventually shattering. So, please don't discredit those who've struggled or still struggle. And especially artists. To really put oneself face to face with the world while subverting its idealizing filters can be a heavy somber duty. I might even compare such an artist to that team of divers in Chernobyl who volunteered to go in and help diffuse an even bigger catastrophe, even while knowing the implication of what they would absorb into themselves. They too could swim. So, don't discredit struggled artists. At the same time, please romanticize responsibly! Don't reduce the scopes of it all to some trite idea of surface glamour, whether heroic or decadent. Nico was not always "fun" or "inspiring" to be around, I'm certain But she would come through. And there's so much legacy for us to salvage and build from. So, in that spirit, may Nico help each and all of us find our own vision and strength to pursue it, in spite of anything. Art is in itself a faith. Dolphins communicate meanings through sonar vibrations, if I recall correctly. And dolphins Can swim. And dolphins can sing also. And it's so much more than just entertainment, more complex than either waste or success. And it's so important.
Nico was interviewed before this gig upstairs in the old booths where you could get a burger. It was filmed, must've been the people who recorded the gig. Would love to see that footage. Superb gig recording.
she is a great charismatic person in art and life. without her andy warhol wouldn't had produced the first album of the velvet underground. it's not for nothing called "velvet underground and nico". she is a goddes.. r.i.p.
Frank Peter u mean without Gerald malanga. Warhol was only a cheerleader of the band. Plus it was Paul Morrissey who manages the velvets. Know your history
@@bradshrinkelstein904 without him they dont be There? When Andy found out about them, they had already acquired their canonical form, learn history, little asshole
I find it rather comforting, like an aural equivalent to a weighted blanket. And as a moody post-punk fanatic with a background in Design, an affinity for Expressionism, and a paternal German ancestry, maybe that's why.
Great live performance by Nico on clarky cats and triple suds. Great singer, artist, and great band. Today, we are left with phony emoting snowflakes, in love with the man.
she made it to the grave , very early ,unfortunately , if she would have made it to the 90s she probably would have become a music producer and an icon
She looked awful to be so young. If she'd made it to the 90s, I honestly think she'd have to'h've stopped smoking and drinking and whatever else she was taking.
Likewise. Have been since I discovered her and the VU in the 70's. Nico Icon is a must watch. I've a copy but it's VHS. The whole Warhol Factory scene I find fascinating too..
I remember coming upon this about the time that it was first uploaded to RU-vid, and sort of unintentionally forgot about it in the time since then. Here early July 2022, I have come back to it and I'm listening/watching to it repeatedly... I'm at a point in my existence and with what's gone on the past 2+ years where I'm ready to say I'll have what Nico's having, and loads of it... At least she seems to have made the most of the moment.
My fave tale from James's book is when they were on tour in America, I believe it was, and they found some guy outside some store in a mouse costume for promotional reasons, or whatever, and the mouse said "oh, Nico, I LOVE ALL YOUR MUSIC!" How improbable.
Something sexy & charming about that deathly morbid cold angry stare she would make .... I love eccentric people who are their own person...... Such a beautiful talented woman!!!
I believe the band here are: Spider Mike King (guitar), Toby Toman (drums), Rick Goldstraw (bass), James Young (keyboards). Not the Blue Orchids, though both Toman and Goldstraw were in the Orchids at some point..
@@paidgovernmentshill_6950 Hi, Spider Mike had this video on his website (sorry, don't have a link). Toman and Young are easy to spot - Rick Goldstraw isn't, but i've deduced him from Young's book. I think this was one of the warm up gigs they played before going on tour in the US that same year. No exact science though!
@@mrthehistorian1288 Nice one. I was making a little joke about Bramah, what with him being left handed and all. Young's book is an interesting and funny read. Especially the interactions between stll-nuts-on-drugs Cale and John Cooper Clarke...
Never thought of taking off the coat. Buzzing out and the sweats coming on. I'm not mocking her, it's just that I can feel this. Been there. Nobody considered that she was the one feeling awkward there. You can feel the crammed in situation there.
Only recently found out she lived in Hulme Crescents around this time. I read it is The Blue Orchids (Fall alumni) who are the backing band and also did a support slot on the tour.
She was a very uniquely beautiful woman, and still has beauty here, but she looks and seems old for 42, as she was here. Her son Ari ended up the same way. Addicted, lost his teeth and was found dead from H. Heartbreaking.
NICO hat mich in meiner Musikwelt- und leben begleitet wie die ROLLING STONES, JIMI HENDRIX, DOORS, WHO, KINKS, THEM, PINK FLOYD, TEN YEARS AFTER, SANTANA, JETHRO TULL, JAMES BROWN, B. B. KING, JOHN LEE HOOKER und, und, und ... ... ... aber immer aus sehr, sehr, sehr weiter Ferne. Wie ein Phantom, ein Pseudonym, unnahbar, nicht greifbar. Sie zog mich mit ihrer Stimme und Aura in den tiefsten Abgrund der Melancholie und Traurigkeit. Dieser Sound gemeinsam mit VELVET UNDERGROUND war letzendlich der Kanaldeckel, der die Finsternis, Verlassenheit und Einsamkeit be- und versiegelte. Ich bin ihr dankbar, das ich sie erleben (sei's auch nur visuell und akustisch) durfte. Morgen werde ich sie an ihrem letzten, endgültigen Ort (Friedhof Grunewald / Forst an der Havelchaussee in Berlin) besuchen mit dem Song Hereos in meinem Ohr und Inne halten.
I keep forgetting that Nico spent some time living in Manchester but visiting Preston .. OMG, I never knew that. I saw that Joy Division played there also. The other day I learnt that Anthony Burgess the writer of A Clockwork Orange was a teacher in Bamber Bridge !! that place was full of divvies in the 1980s and probably still is !!
Great stuff. Forty years ago? She really lucked out with these musicians. Most hadn't the patience. The drummer is damned tight. But why the coat? She must be sweltering in that coat.
