Over a decade ago, I began interviewing some of the people who had known Nico whilst she was residing and performing in Manchester, in the latter part of her life, with the hope that I could get a publishing deal. This alas was not to be but the material I collected is more than worthy of sharing. This particular conversation with Barbara Wilkin, who was Nico’s friend and driver, is very poignant and revealing. Nico was enigmatic but without tarnishing her mythology, Barbara Wilkin’s thoughtful account goes some way to explaining it.
In 2024, Hann, the daughter of Barbara Wilkin, released a delightful single entitled ‘My Mum was Nico’s Driver.’
Barbara Wilkin Interview
N: How did you meet Nico?
B: It was in 1982, at a concert in Holland in Apeldoorn. I went with 2 journalist friends who wanted to interview Nico. As it turned out, they never found her but I did. It was a day that changed my life because I wouldn’t have ended up in Manchester if I hadn’t gone to the gig. At the time I was learning to play the drums and I watched Toby (Phillip Toby Tomanov) the drummer throughout the concert, so he came over afterwards and said ‘Why did you look at me that way? I started dropping my drum sticks’. I ended up back- stage; I remember the band, The Blue Orchids, were sitting around a table and at the head of it was Nico. After being introduced, I took a seat. The moment I sat down I felt Nico’s eyes upon me. I found this unsettling and tried to avoid looking back, but risking a few brief glimpses just to be sure. Nico kept looking and she held my stare and looked deeply into my eyes and said in German (translates) ‘You don’t have to be afraid of me; I’m only an old woman.’ I was flabbergasted that she had caught on that I was German. She was scary to be honest, she had scary eyes. That was our introduction. She took an interest in me. When I first came to England, it was to be with Toby the drummer, we were going out. Later when I split up with him, I was working with Alan Wise and became their driver. There were people who didn’t want to travel with Alan or Nico so I drove them. At one point we had two mini-buses going around Europe. It was quite a sexist environment with all these Mancunian guys. When Alan said I should drive and work for him there were certain guys who didn’t like having a girl on tour but Nico and I were the only girls. Sometimes there was a little bit of rivalry over who should do the driving as Nico had been the driver for the Velvet Underground. She kept insisting on how great a driver she was. She’d sit behind me and dig her knees into my back! At one point when were crossing the Alps I stopped on a slope and said ‘okay’ and gave her the car keys. Everyone else deserted us, so it was just Alan and I but when Nico tried to drive, the car kept stalling. She was really upset that she hadn’t been able to pull it off.
N: Nico’s enigma?
B: She didn’t want to be Mainstream. She told me that Patti Smith had given her a pump organ, the one she came to Manchester with had been given to her by Patti Smith. (after Nico’s harmonium had been stolen) I liked Nico for the heavy German stuff that is what I heard first, rather than the Velvet Underground.
N: I’m wondering if there was something about herself that she didn’t understand
B: That might well be the case. If you look at Nico and how she grew up, her mum was mad, she didn’t really know her father. She told me things about him, he looked like Gregory Peck, he was really handsome but he was homosexual which was why the Nazi’s killed him in a concentration camp. I don’t know the historical details, what is written on Wikipedia might not be right. Allegedly his family rejected him (like Ari, like Nico? N) Nico talked about that a lot. We went to see her father’s family in Cologne. They were wealthy people who owned a brewery. She should have got some kind of inheritance from them. In 1985 or 6 we were in Cologne, Nico had a gig there, she pulled out an address and said ‘Let’s go and see these people’ so we went and rang the doorbell. A woman opened the door. When Nico said who she was, the woman slammed the door on her. That was as far as we got. She was upset about it and it wasn’t just for her, she was thinking of Ari as well.
N: It seems that she did try to look out for Ari
B: She told me once that she’d never been as well organised as she had been when she was pregnant with Ari, she was responsible at that time.
N: The majority of the men in Nico’s life seemed to have been quite unsubstantial and ephemeral figures. She never got to bond with her ill-fated father then there were liaisons with Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Alain Delon…….
B: Men adored her for her looks when she was younger. She talked about men in different ways, she adored Jim Morrison, never said a bad word about him. Alain Delon she had no good words for, she said that he was violent to her. It’s so obvious when you see Ari where his genes came from, but I think she felt upset and betrayed by Delon.
N: The change from light to darkness, an intellectual decision to be taken more seriously as an artist?
B: It might have been a combination of both and also she had red hair when she was with Phillip Garrell, he may have had an influence. She claimed not to have taken drugs before then but she had taken speed. She said that when she was a model she had always been starving, surviving on an apple for breakfast, an egg for lunch. She also claimed that she only had to look at food to gain weight, she was a big woman, and she didn’t eat much at all. Her periods stopped. But why did she change? How old was she? At 16 she became a full time model. I met her aunt at the funeral so she had so many things to say, she cared. I don’t know about her mother, I don’t think she had proper mothering from her own mother. I think her mother was a tortured person, she spent time in a mental institution, she wasn’t around when Nico was a child, and it was her aunt who was the stabilising factor. Her father wasn’t there, Nico told me about how she would hide in the cellar when Berlin was being bombed, she would have been 6 or 7. Obviously she missed out on schooling, she got into modelling early.
N: Where were you based when you were in the UK?
B: Nico stayed in a few place. We lived in Brixton for 7 months; it was a 3 bed flat. Effra Road. She liked to have me around, she’d always ask, when will you be back? We’d watch television together, go to the pub, she was always trying to set me up with people, I was always surprised when she took an interest in worldly things. She would sit back and observe people. She wasn’t isolated in that way. I think she’d given up on love, there were a few guys, I mean she was 42 when I met her, there was a young guy around but she’d lost interest. She didn’t relate well to a lot of women, she related better to males but even then she was alienated by how men treated her, first when she was beautiful, then with the Velvets, when she was a superstar. There would have been a lot of situations for her to deal with.
N: At least by the time she got to Manchester, Alan Wise set up a safe base that she could retire to
B: Alan helped to stabilise her situation. There were drugs here but later he got her onto methadone so she didn’t have the fear of not having any gear. Some of the gigs that Nico did, especially when she was playing her own stuff, some of the audience would be disinterested, they’d talk, I’d get quite angry about it, all they wanted to hear was the Velvet Underground songs, it must have been hard for her, at times she was quite unwell. Also Alan provided her with friendship, even though she was pretty horrible to him at times, she’d kick him and shout at him say that he hadn’t paid her properly but he did what he could, he’d pay the musicians, make sure that Nico had money even if he went without himself. I think she appreciated that, I think she knew. But then again she was stuck in Manchester, and how realistic was that for getting more gigs? She became more settled and thinking what she wanted for herself. She was a very modest person. She didn’t expect much and she didn’t ask for much. I remember once saying to her ‘Nico, all you have is that harmonium and a black bag of clothes’. She said ‘But I like it that way’ ‘Why?’ Because if you have a lot you’re not really free.’ But she wasn’t free from the drugs, not for a while, that was always a worry for her.
N: Nico was quite a rootless being which is reflected in some of her songs. She seems to have been permanently in exile, mentally.
B: She was quite a lonely person. I really like one cover she did. It was a cover of a Hildegard Knef song ‘Lied Vom Einsamen Medchen’ ‘The Song of The Lonely Girl’. The lyrics are about a girl who has a longing and she is lonely and her hair is so blonde, her heart is of stone and her lips are as red as blood. Nico sang it very well. I think it was symbolic of her own situation. On one side, her whole world was a fairy story, celebrities, stars, it’s a place where nobody is themselves, they are images, it’s about how they want to be seen and how they present themselves then she went to the other extremes. She created her shadow side. She never fitted into the so called normal world, she created her own world. She was proud that on her passport it said ‘Ohne Festen Wohnsitz’ which means without a permanent residency. And her life was like that, she didn’t fit in and she knew that.
B: I spoke to my sister yesterday, who was also friends with Nico. My sister told me that in Cologne they decided to name a street after Nico, it was going to be called Christa Paffgen street and then someone threw a spanner in the works by going we can’t call a street after her because she was a drug addict. It was on a television programme. My sister wrote in saying why was this allowed to happen? So many people who don’t really fit into society at the time when they were alive and now streets are being named after them, why not Nico? It would be a nice thing in Cologne to remember her by. I read some Dylan Thomas today can you imagine him without cigarettes and alcohol?
Nico’s Death. (18th July, 1988)
I was very shocked when she died; I always thought she’d outlive all of us. Heroin alone doesn’t kill you and at that time she was getting more positive, rebonding with Ari, and spending time with him. Whenever Ari was going to join us for a tour, she would be so excited. She’d knock at my door ‘Ari’s coming’. She cared as much as she could. She had wanted to look after him in earlier years but circumstances hadn’t allowed it because she was Nico. Maybe it was better for Ari in some ways that he had been taken away from her but anyway, it is terrible to see Ari now and what has happened to him. He had a stroke, a brain haemorrhage, he had the same thing at the same age, 49, as Nico but he was fortunate that he was on the metro. I saw him for the first time since his mother was alive, two weeks ago; he is paralysed now and needs to take a lot of medication. I think if Nico had been found earlier she might have survived but there may have been some physical damage, like Ari. It is tragic. Is there something running in some families, some tragedy passed on to different generations. ? I don’t know what it is. It has been an honour to have known Nico, she changed my life. I got to tour for 7 years. When I was older I met a musician, we became normal, held down normal family jobs but life with Nico was an adventure and it was a privilege to have had those experiences.
Nina Antonia 