Graham Reid | | 1 min read
Tananore
Recorded in 1985, released in '92 as Chelsea Girl/Live and now reissued (CD and vinyl), this often startling concert caught the Velvet Underground chanteuse three years before her death and, although having been ravaged by the effects of heroin, in remarkably fine form.
In her own way.
Her final album Camera Obscura (produced by longtime supporter John Cale) provided the opener Tananore, a mostly wordless soundscape which could take its place alongside Bowie's Low.
At the time she was enjoying the attention of the Goth movement for her gloomy and emotionally removed style, enhanced by the widescreen keyboards of James Young (who would write a brutally honest but unsympathetic book about his touring days with her).
With her doom-laden vocal style, the accompaniment of the droning harmonium and spare percussion, songs like Procession (the 1982 single produced by Martin Hannett) come off as a journey through some lost Arabia.
Nico was rarely an easy listen – discomfort and nihilism seemed more her style – but this album wraps up a considerable swathe of her career from the drone minimalism of Janitor of Lunacy (off her 1970 Desertshore album co-produced by Cale and Joe Boyd) to her brief VU period (a slightly jazzed up Femme Fatale, solo on the barrel-bottom well-enunciated All Tomorrow's Parties) through her middle period (The End in '74) and final studio albums The Drama of Exile ('83) and Camera Obscura.
Fittingly it ends with her somewhat melodramatic take on the Doors' The End.
Nope, Nico was and remains and acquired taste and this album will probably confirm some prejudices.
But as an overview of a bohemian artist assured of her place on the perimeter of art music, this is well worth hearing.
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You can hear this album at Spotify here
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