To be honest, the anwser to this question is that I have no idea. She would also perform the German national anthem Das Lied der Deutschen at concerts and include the verses that had been banned after 1945 for their Nazi associations.A question I get asked very often is when did I start with filmmaking.
Island Records dropped her after she made racist remarks. To say Nico was a controversial artist is an understatement. “She said a few times that she wished she was a man, which came from the fact that as an artist she would have been more recognised.” “She wasn’t a woman’s woman,” Peake said. Nico’s own identity as a woman was nuanced. “I found it very difficult to get a female perspective on it.” “I could only seem to find male stories about Nico,” she said. The team behind The Nico Project is all-female, which Peake said wasn’t intentional, but nonetheless felt right. “A lot of the women have either been overlooked, forgotten or just couldn’t get the oxygen to get through.” “Manchester, during that period of the late 70s, early 80s, had a great music scene, but it got hijacked by the men,” she said. Nico had spent the best part of the 1980s living in Manchester – yet another unexpected footnote in the story of her life, and a period Peake was interested in. Peake, herself a longtime fan of The Marble Index, said: “We chose to reimagine The Marble Index because that’s the album that felt like she finally got her artistic control on.” In his 1978 essay Your Shadow Is Scared of You: An Attempt Not to Be Frightened by Nico, celebrated rock critic Lester Bangs wrote: “The Marble Index is the greatest piece of ‘avant-garde classical’, ‘serious’ music of the last half of the 20th century so far.” What little critical attention it did get over the years, however, hailed it as a masterpiece. Nico performing live onstage in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on. Released in 1968 to poor sales and ultimately relative obscurity, it’s a haunting and difficult avant-garde album, with abrasive vocals and the jarring sounds of a harmonium. Peake said she felt like it was the album Nico “was most connected to”. The Nico Project, which is described as a theatrical immersion into her sound, centres on the follow-up to Chelsea Girl – The Marble Index, which Nico wrote herself. “We decided instead it should be an exploration of her as an artist, but also what it means to be a woman and an artist,” Peake said. When Peake and Frankcom talked about making a performance piece about Nico, the pair initially considered a biopic. In Dave Thompson’s book Hearts of Darkness, he writes that Nico said of the record: “The first time I heard the album, I cried. Some of the songs on the record were co-written by the Velvet Underground’s Lou Reed, John Cale and Sterling Morrison, but Nico was growing tired of relinquishing artistic direction to men. In 1967 she released her debut solo album, Chelsea Girl. Less well known, however, is her work as a solo musician. Nico, born Christa Päffgen, is widely known for modelling for Chanel, appearing in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and singing on the Velvet Underground’s debut album. Peake added: “Everything is so surprising with Nico, she’s so complex and contradictory.”
“How in her later years there was this juxtaposition between her being a very beautiful model and then resenting that beauty.” “I was just fascinated with Nico as an artist and how she portrayed herself,” Peake said in an interview with the Guardian. But a new immersive performance piece debuting at the Manchester International Festival, titled The Nico Project and co-created by the actor Maxine Peake and the director Sarah Frankcom, will attempt to explore the enigmatic femme fatale on her own terms.
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