“Show me the way to morning / Mourning for the morning light / I will stab it with a knife… There is no witness to my anger / When it stabs until it dies / I am looking for the strangler / To help me, help me with my crime …” from “My Heart is Empty” by Nico.
Released forty years ago today (12 July 1985) by Beggars Banquet Records: Camera Obscura, the majestic sixth and final solo studio album by the Velvet Underground’s ghostly erstwhile femme fatale, Nico (Christa Paffgen, 1938 – 1988). Camera Obscura reunited the heroin-ravaged Marlene Dietrich of punk with fellow Velvet Underground alumni John Cale for their fourth (and last) collaboration and the first since The End in 1974. According to Nico’s biographer Richard Witts, the atmosphere between them was tense: they had only three weeks to complete the album on a shoestring budget, and most seriously, Cale wouldn’t permit Marlboro addict Nico to smoke in the studio. Reviews were mostly positive: Melody Maker called Camera Obscura “a glowing return to form” that “pushed that all-or-nothing voice back to full expression.” Creem magazine’s John Neilson characterized the sound as “layering a warm, undulating electronics-and-percussion groove beneath That Voice.” Nico agreed, saying, “You know, I would have gone to the Amazon to record it … the Amazon Jungle … because of the rhythm section. I wanted just a whole bunch of Amazon drumming. You’re supposed to have a heart attack …” Most significantly, Camera Obscura demonstrated that - like Billie Holiday or Marianne Faithfull - no matter how troubled her life, Nico could marshal her energies and produce powerful music. The two songs sung in German ("Das Lied vom einsamen Mädchen", "König") are haunting. Chanting “When I dream in / When I scream in / When I wipe my / Dirty hands clean …” on “Tananore”, Nico evokes Lady Macbeth. Her somber rendition of jazz standard “My Funny Valentine” is like being handed a dozen dead roses. And the alienated confessional “My Heart is Empty” is one of the best things Nico ever recorded. Pictured: Nico outside The Effra Hall Tavern, Brixton by Peter Noble, 1985.
