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┌────────┐
────┤ Info ├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
└────────┘
Artist | Nico
Title | The End
Genre | Psychedelic Rock Format | Album
Source | CDDA (Remastered) Time | 90:20
Label | Universal UMC Store | 2012
Catalog | UMCREP2018 Rip | 2015
Bitrate | 210 kbps Size | 145.40 MB
Freq | 44.1 kHz Encoder | Lame 3.98.4
┌────────┐
────┤ Tracks ├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
└────────┘
CD 1/2
01. It Has Not Taken Long 4:05
02. Secret Side 4:04
03. You Forgot To Answer 5:05
04. Innocent And Vain 3:47
05. Valley Of The Kings 3:53
06. We've Got The Gold 5:37
07. The End 9:28
08. Das Lied Der Deutschen 5:28
CD 2/2
01. Secret Side (John Peel Session, 1971) 4:04
02. We've Got The Gold (John Peel Session, 1974) 3:58
03. Janitor Of Lunacy (John Peel Session, 1974) 4:35
04. You Forgot To Answer (John Peel Session, 1974) 4:31
05. The End (John Peel Session, 1974) 9:07
06. Secret Side (The Old Grey Whistle Test, 1975) 4:08
07. Valley Of The Kings (The Old Grey Whistle Test, 1975) 3:36
08. Das Lied Der Deutschen (Rainbow Theatre Live Version) 5:36
09. The End (Rainbow Theatre Live Version) 9:18
┌────────┐
────┤ Notes ├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
└────────┘
One of the most fascinating figures of rock's fringes, Nico hobnobbed,
worked, and was romantically linked with an incredible assortment of the
most legendary entertainers of the '60s. The paradox of her career was that
she herself never attained the fame of her peers, pursuing a distinctly
individualistic and uncompromising musical career that was uncommercial,
but wholly admirable and influential. Nico first rose to fame as a European
supermodel, also landing a bit part in Fellini's La Dolce Vita film and
giving birth to a son by Alain Delon. In 1965, she attracted the attention
of Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who gave her a chance to
record for his Immediate label, though the resulting single, which also
featured Brian Jones and Jimmy Page on guitars, flopped. Shortly afterward,
she moved to New York, where Andy Warhol installed her as a vestigial
presence and occasional lead singer for the Velvet Underground. The band
never really accepted her as a bona fide member and she departed in 1967,
but not before contributing unforgettable deadpan vocals to three of the
songs on their classic 1967 debut album.
It is one of the most entrenched visions in the rock critic's vocabulary;
Nico as doomed valkyrie, droning death-like through a harsh gothic
monotone, a drained beauty pumping dirges from her harmonium while a voice
as old as dirt hangs cobwebs round the chords. In fact she only made one
album which remotely fit that bill - this one - and it's a symbol of its
significance that even the cliche emerges as a thing of stunning beauty.
Her first album following three years of rumor and speculation, "The End"
was consciously designed to highlight the Nico of already pertinent myth.
Stark, dark, bare, and frightening, the harmonium dominant even amid the
splendor of Eno's synthesized menace, John Cale's childlike piano, and Phil
Manzanera's scratchy, effects-whipped guitar, it is the howling wind upon
wuthering heights, deathless secrets in airless dungeons, ancient mysteries
in the guise of modern icons. Live, Nico took to dedicating the final cut,
a sparse but heartstoppingly beautiful interpretation of the former German
national anthem, to terrorist Andreas Baader, even as the song itself
conjured demons of its own from an impressionable Anglo-American audience.
Nico later admitted she intended the performance in the same spirit as Jimi
Hendrix rendered "Star Spangled Banner"- But "Das Lied Der Deutschen" -
"Deutschland Uber Alles" - has connotations which neither tribute nor
parody could ever undermine. It is only in the '90s that even Germany has
reclaimed the anthem for its own. In 1974, it was positively leperous.
Listen without prejudice, though, and you catch Nico's meaning regardless,
even as her voice tiptoes on the edge of childlike, all but duetting with
the little girl she once was, on a song which she'd been singing since the
cradle. The ghosts pack in. Former lover Jim Morrison haunts the stately
"You Forgot To Answer", a song written about the last time Nico saw him, in
a hired limousine on the day of his death; of course he reappears in the
title track, an epic recounting of the Doors' own "The End", but blacker
than even they envisioned it, an echoing maze of torchlit corridors and
spectral children, and so intense that, by the time Nico reaches the
'mother father' passage, she is too weary even to scream.
The cracked groan which emerges instead is all the more chilling for its
understatement, and the musicians were as affected as the listener. The
mutant funk coda with which the performance concludes is more than an
incongruous bridge. It is the sound of the universe cracking under the
pressure. But to dwell on the fear is to overlook the beauty - "The End",
first and foremost, is an album of intimate simplicity and deceptive
depths. Nico's voice stuns, soaring and swooping into unimagined corners.
No less than "Das Lied Der Deutschen", both "Valley Of The Kings" and "It
Has Not Taken Long" make a mockery of the lazy critical complaints that she
simply grumbled along in a one-note wail, while the arrangements (most of
which were Nico's own; producer Cale admits he spent most of his time in
the studio simply marveling) utterly rewrote even the most generous
interpretation of what 'rock music' should sound like. "The End" doesn't
simply subvert categorization. It defies time itself.
---
Nico's 1974 album "The End" remastered and expanded into a 2CD set with the
inclusion of five tracks from two John Peel sesions, two tracks from the
Old Grey Whistle Test in 1975 and two tracks from the Rainbow Theatre. Also
includes a previously unreleased live cover version of the old German
anthem, "Das Lied Der Deutschen" which was performed and recorded as part
of the June 1st 1974 live album, but left off the final album. The booklet
now includes new notes by Andrew Batt and previously unseen photographs
which were taken in John CaleÆs flat in London. The original album was
produced by fellow Velvet Underground member John Cale and features Roxy
Music members Phil Manzanera on guitar and Brian Eno on synthesizers.
┌────────┐
────┤ Group ├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
└────────┘