This recording of Nico‘s live concert from the Chelsea Town Hall in 1985 has been issued a few times before, but never with the presentation or fanfare it deserves. It first saw the light of day in 1992 as a CD called Chelsea Live released by the Great Expectations label… which then folded not long afterwards. Then it resurfaced as a limited edition Italian vinyl pressing in 2021, called Live In London ’85, which sounded good but featured a fair amount of erroneous information on the packaging. But details about the show were sketchy. Indeed, if you look online today, the gig in question is supposed to have taken place in May, June or August depending on which site you choose to trust.
Chelsea Town Hall, the double blue vinyl reissue by American label Modern Harmonic, while not solving the mystery of when the gig actually took place, perhaps has more providence on its side than previous releases. For starters, it follows on from a small Nico revival that arguably began to peak with Jennifer Otter Bickerdike’s excellent 2022 biography You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone and crested last year with a series of reissues on Domino Recordings. These LPs were hitherto extremely rare and inordinately expensive to track down: The Marble Index especially, but also Desertshore, which had previously sold for over £200 even if you were lucky enough to find a copy in the wild. Domino is technically an independent, though this much-heralded stepping up to the plate from the label that brought you Arctic Monkeys and Hot Chip felt almost like a mainstream endorsement, or at least as mainstream as it’s likely to get with an artist as intractable and apparently impossible to market as Nico.
Those albums from 1968 and 1970 have had time to percolate. Very much misunderstood and broadly ignored at the time, their genius wasn’t really acknowledged until a long while after the German singer’s death. The original CD release of this live album came out in 1992, arguably when Nico’s stock was at its lowest, coinciding with – though in no way connected to – James Young’s memoir Songs They Never Play On The Radio. Young’s account of playing in Nico’s band during the underachieving 1980s is snarkily funny, occasionally poignant and often depressing, as is his grassing up of the circus of drug addicts who populate the book and also happen to be famous, namely Nico, John Cooper Clarke and John Cale. The former two were heroin addicts; Cale was addicted to cocaine at the time. It should be noted that Clarke and Cale have both been a long time sober.
In truth, Young’s book did a lot of lasting damage to Nico’s reputation, or rather prevented her from achieving a reputation for even longer, as a warts-and-all account of hanging around with a heroin addict for six years might. Those who attend 12-step recovery meetings will almost certainly encounter a questionable aphorism: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” While that probably isn’t the literal definition of madness, hanging around with a junkie for more than half a decade expecting them to not be selfish might be. As well as the sardonic Mancunian humour, there’s a rancour from the author that becomes a drudge after a while, and it definitely feels unfair that Nico was never around to defend herself. The casual misogyny, too, hasn’t weathered well in the intervening three decades.
“That she was a monster became apparent to all those who were with her for any length of time,” wrote Young in the preface. “She was a dreadful cadge, and her gratitude was so transparently insincere that it was almost endearing. I knew her only in the last decade of her life, long after the credits came up. She had exhausted most people’s patience or interest. What might have been forgivable narcissism of a fashionable beauty had now become a tiresome and undignified egotism. After all, she was no longer charming or mysterious, what right then had she to tantrums and impatience?”
While it was unlikely Young’s intention, his relentless character assassinations on Nico helped to establish what became a received wisdom of failure in the public consciousness, particularly regarding that 1980s period. Even the title of the book, Songs They Never Play On The Radio, suggests a futility, placing us at a distance from the mechanisms of the music industry going on in spite of her. The implication throughout is that the author feels embarrassed to be playing this music.
Given the time it was recorded, just three years before her bizarre death in a cycling accident in Ibiza, you’d be forgiven for assuming this live album would be lacklustre. And you’d be wrong. The show in question performed in Chelsea, west London, not west side New York City, was in support of the Cale-produced final album Camera Obscura, a moody and bleak surrealist canvas. Many of the songs came in fragments, a patchwork which Cale did a fine job of assembling without the seams showing too much, while her band, sometimes calling themselves The Faction, simulate these new originals with not only conviction but also feeling. Perhaps learning and interpreting songs in this way from a recording is what gives the whole thing its freshness, played by musicians who’d been fed scraps up to this point. Chelsea Town Hall is not a bump in the road but a destination in itself.
Best of all is Nico’s voice, deep and powerful on opener ‘Tanamore’ and showing the right kind of fragility in the quieter moments too. The tom rhythms and piano clambering down the staircase are charmingly rickety and ideal for Nico to sing and perform over with her harmonium in supporting role. ‘My Heart Is Empty’ is also striking, with her vocals hitting a rich seam of emotion drawn from all that experience, while ‘Janitor Of Lunacy’ from Desertshore, performed on her own with just her instrument, has never sounded better. Even the Velvet Underground songs, of which there was an understandable anticipation for at that time, are given a fresh momentum that stops the singer from going through the motions. She performs ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ acappella, throwing it into sharp relief, while a tinkling and playful ‘Femme Fatale’ with conga accompaniment at least allows her to think about the words she’s been singing parrot-like for the best part of two decades.
Nico and her band had warmed up at Ronnie Scott’s in April but the later show at the Chelsea Town Hall proved to be one of her finest ever performances – an underrated and still largely unheard outing that deserves to be listened to in this new edition. Ironically, Young was highly complimentary of the show they performed that night, with characteristic reservations that were, admittedly, founded:
“Nico gave her best performance yet and at last her accompaniment sounded convincing. Her authority on stage was absolute and the gig proved to be a landmark that reaffirmed her legend and, for the druggists, vindicated a whole way of life… You could be a really bad girl and still get away with it.”
