Jennifer Otter Bickerdike goes deep into uncovering what made this complex woman tick ... A labor of love of a biography that highlights the contradictions of a woman who could be charming and monstrous ... Bickerdike’s feminist agenda sits uneasily on Nico, given that the singer steered clear of any kind of ideology ... Nonetheless, the details the author has unearthed shine through. It is a gripping portrait of one of the most fascinating figures in late 20th-century music.
Ms. Bickerdike...digs deeper than any prior biographer. She unearths a unique artistic temperament stunted by the complications of an underground life ... You Are Beautiful brings focus to what had been blurry episodes in Nico’s history, including a traumatic childhood in Cologne under Nazi rule ... Ms. Bickerdike doesn’t make false claims about Nico’s achievements. Rather, she has rounded out what had been an incomplete portrait, obscured by myths, of a woman who fought hard to become an artist worthy of a book like this.
The book does occasionally get bogged down by the sheer number of interviews it tries to squeeze in ... This is a detailed and sympathetic retelling of a life too often dimmed by harsh criticism or careless hearsay.
Biographies convince us by being authoritative rather than objective. The musician Richard Witts, whose biography of Nico was published in 1993, was asked by her to write her life. She wanted him to make it like a novel and he did ... Otter Bickerdike’s approach is to clear space around her subject, to return to the source where she can, and to lay out the versions and parts. It’s as if someone has turned down the music and switched on the lights and now you can hear what everyone’s saying. The two books complement each other ... This book is a feat of organisation. Even so, I lost track. Nico is in Paris when I thought she was still in New York. Ari is in the studio, the club, the hotel room, when I thought he was in Ibiza or France. People leave and reappear. There are no clear beginnings or endings. When Nico was most artistically sure of herself, heroin took over. From then on, her life wasn’t one thing after another but a circle that got smaller and moved more slowly until it barely moved at all.
Jennifer Otter Bickerdike digs deep into the life of one of the strangest and most unlikely singer-songwriters of our time ... Bickerdike’s is a gossipy but informative biography ... The biography is poorly written, with a surfeit of ill-chosen words ... You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone nevertheless grimly absorbs from start to finish.
Bickerdike sets out ... to lay waste to the myths and stereotypes that have clung to Nico, to cut through the misogyny and reclaim her narrative from those who see her primarily as a sexual object and muse rather than a creative force in her own right ... The book is detailed and comprehensive in its research ... Bickerdike painstakingly fills in these gaps ... It’s frustrating to find a writer tackling the sexism that made Nico’s career as an artist an uphill struggle, and the relentless fixation on her beauty, while liberally deploying gendered language ... The book gets closer to understanding Nico than most, even though, as a portrait, it isn’t always flattering.
