In the same way that Nico's seeming volte-face from Chanel model and Fellini muse to avant-garde auteur coloured critics' perception of her, Eilish's position as teen idol can seem similarly counter intuitive. Eilish's phenomena is to do all of this and win Teen Choice and Nickelodeon Kids awards. She projects much of the same listlessness too, a boredom and a barely suppressed darkness that provides much of the attraction for her audience. Bone-rattling basslines are for Eilish what foghorn drones were for Nico ("that sound" exclaims Peake's Nico tonight as a drone sounds onstage, "that one, that sounds true".) Eilish's imagery too is heavy on the gothic, her videos bleeding with spiders, ink black tears and needles. Her 2019 album WHEN WE FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? carries much of the same sense of gnawing anxiety and dense, thickening claustrophobia. Famous and astonishingly popular, Eilish's music tracks a landscape not at all dissimilar to The Marble Index. If Nico and her haunted, difficult art was famous but not popular, where is her contemporary analog?Ĭonsider Billie Eilish - perhaps the artist operating now who best mirrors the spirit of Nico's work. Allusions to this horrific event run through the performance until the play's denouement. It’s an event from her formative years that The Nico Project puts front and centre - somewhere between the age of 13 and 15, Nico was raped by an American soldier. She remembered the city as a "desert of bricks", a decimated urban wilderness that, as she pointed out, "hides behind my lyrics like scenery". But what we do know is that as the Third Reich fell, she was living in Berlin with her mother. “A true story wants to be mine/ the true story is telling a true lie.” What we think we know about Nico is tricky even the year and location of her birth is disputed. As Peake stands alone on the stage, there’s a sense of proceedings being haunted as microphone feedback wails, and a chair leaps backwards of its own accord. Though Nico spoke with a thick German accent, Peake wisely delivers the bulk of her lines in her native Bolton accent, leaving only the script's most fevered moments to rise into Nico's heavy dialect. There's an exhausted inarticulacy to Peake's Nico all shaking hands, thick fringe and a wide-eyed stare pitched somewhere between terror and junkie blot-out. EV Crowe's script, especially in Peake's opening monologue, brings to mind the fragmented, stream-of-consciousness modernism of Eimear McBride - sentences unfinished, questions unanswered. The Nico Project begins with the hall’s house lights up, as Peake enters from the side of the stage. All of this goes in the pot with a haunting and atavistic, pre-Christian Europeanism. In interviews from the time, Nico talked about the free jazz of Ornette Coleman (with whom she spent time) and the minimalism of Terry Riley. Disappointed by the lack of creative control that she was able to exercise over her baroque folk debut album Chelsea Girl, Nico wrestled control of her output by choosing to work solely with John Cale – her former VU collaborator whose two compositions on Chelsea Girl were by some distance that album’s most difficult. It's an atlas of depression a tortured internal monologue mapped out by droning viola, clattering, discordant percussion, bells, pipes and glockenspiel, all underscored by the malevolent wheeze of Nico's harmonium. Quite apart from its enigmatic beauty is the matter of the sheer emotional assault it makes on the listener. The Marble Index is undoubtedly the artistic high point of Nico's career - you can make a potent case, in fact, for it being the artistic high point of any of the musicians who came from the Velvet Underground nexus.
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