Nico the Nazi?

In Friday's Guardian, music journalist and author Simon Reynolds wrote a piece on Nico to coincide with the reissue of The Marble Index and Desertshore. Alongside the welcome praise for her idiosyncratic talents and often over-looked originality, Reynolds revealed Nico to be a Nazi sympathising racist. Now to observe that Nico was a nihilist is as insightful as saying the sky is grey, but these revelations, particularly the glassing of a black woman at a party, were quite startling. It's all the more so when a book chronicling the later years of Nico's life painted a different picture.

In James Young's literary masterpiece Songs They Never Play On The Radio, Nico is, in Young's words, "a monster" who alienated nearly everyone she worked with. But far from being the German nationalist as Reynolds has it, Young contests that Nico "felt an unease towards her country and its guilty past. She no longer saw herself as specifically German...she never liked to stay there very long".

What also contradicts Reynold's account of Nico is the question of anti-Semitism. For a start, Nico was a former lover of Lou Reed and, according to Young, lamented that "Lou never really liked me because of what my people did to his people" (hilariously, Young cuts in by saying 'The truth was perhaps more banal - he resented being upstaged by her'). Also, Young's book also makes light that Nico was infatuated with another Jewish singer-cum-icon, Bob Dylan. It hardly tallies with rabid anti-semitism.

Having said this, Reynolds account of Nico stemmed from the 1970s. James Young's from 1982 to Nico's death in Ibiza, 1988. And, let's not forget, many a rock icon flirted with Nazi imagery during the 1970s as some kind of childish, nihilistic gesture (for example, Keith Moon riding around Golders Green in a Nazi uniform). As few rock musicians were as childish or as nihilistic as Nico, it's highly likely she did flirt with German nationalism during the 1970s. The account of Nico in Songs They Don't Play On The Radio, though, suggests that, beneath the tantrums and hissy fits, she was shellshocked rather than sangaine about the second world war.

All this, of course, is a historical curiosity for music heads. What is indisputable, though, is that Songs They Don't Play On The Radio is the finest ever music biography ever written. Honestly, it makes nearly every other biog seem like it was written by a five year old with broken pencils.