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

o 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 and Beach House’s Last Ride among them.

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 ; cobbled together to fund her heroin habit ; 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.

John Cale, to whom Mohawk swiftly ceded control, was faced with an artist in no mood to compromise: wedded to a lowing harmonium that declined to stay in tune, her timing so idiosyncratic that applying any kind of rhythm was out of the question.

Certainly, the album sounds like bad weather: icy, gusting, overcast. If Lawns of Dawns is about LSD, then it dwells on the drug’s capacity to induce terror and disorientation – “your guise has filled my nights with fear … I cannot understand the way I feel”. The Marble Index ends in harrowing disarray, breathtaking cacophony and visions of a coming apocalypse on Evening of Light.

By comparison, 1970’s Desertshore feels almost airy. There is more in the way of light and shade: Janitor of Lunacy and Mütterlein are cut from the same oppressive cloth as the album’s predecessor, but the unaccompanied vocal of My Only Child boasts a beautiful melody, austere and moving. Afraid is a piano ballad with a gorgeous descending chord sequence, its lyrics a stark painting of Nico’s years as a model: “Have someone else’s will as your own / You are beautiful and you are alone.

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