Playlist: The best of Nico

There is so much to be said and observed about the Chelsea Girl, the Priestess of Darkness, the '60s Andy Warhol Superstar who "turned fat and became a junkie," as Warhol bitchily noted in his diary. Far too much to jam into a paragraph. As an avid VU and Nico bootleg collector, and fan—particularly of her later recordings—I was elated to find out about this film’s release last year while reading the hard-to-find biography, Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon by Richard Witts, which Nico asked Witts to write shortly before her death.

As it turns out, the film made its debut exactly 30 years after her death from a bicycle accident in Ibiza in 1988. The last two years of Nico’s life are the subject of the film and are key to understanding her life and career. These were not the glamorous years of her smoking joints on the set of La Dolce Vita before her takes, taking psychedelics with Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, and Jimi Hendrix, or bingeing on amphetamines with the other Superstars at the Factory; these were her dark, opioid-tinged years, inspiring and colluding with a whole new cadre of musicians and artists more of the goth scene in Europe. In fact, Nico has been credited by many as the progenitor of the goth genre, engendering the term “priestess of darkness.”

Anyhow, here’s a playlist that begins with her saccharine Andrew Loog-Oldham-produced single, covers her time spent with the Velvets (including some live recordings from her 1966 performance in Columbus at the Valley Dale Ballroom), then moves into her varied and robust solo career. The film offers a deeper understanding of the mix, and the playlist does the same for the film.