http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/oct/14/popandrock1
Life Along the Borderline: A Tribute to Nico
Royal Festival Hall, London.
by Dorian Lynskey . . . .
Tuesday October 14 2008 . . . .
Morrissey compared Nico's voice to "the sound of a body being thrown out of a window: entirely without hope, of this world, or the next, or the previous". Lester Bangs subtitled an essay on her 1969 album The Marble Index "An Attempt Not to Be Frightened by Nico". After one album with the Velvet Underground, the German singer made records haunted by an unbearable, deathly beauty. When Nico stared into the abyss, you felt sorry for the abyss.
Nobody sings like Nico did and, to their credit, none of the artists assembled by her erstwhile bandmate and producer, John Cale, on the 20th anniversary of her death tries to do so. As both band leader and occasional singer, Cale shuns nostalgia, adding unexpected blood and sinew to the likes of the James Dean Bradfield-fronted Janitor of Lunacy. Relatively familiar and approachable songs from her Velvets days and her solo debut Chelsea Girl are conspicuously absent.
Like all tribute shows, it moves haltingly, as musicians file on and off, and roadies adjust mic stands. Not all the singers are widely recognised. Sparklehorse's Mark Linkous and Guillemots' Fyfe Dangerfield are both met with impertinent cries of "Who are you?", which they pointedly refuse to answer. Bauhaus's Peter Murphy hams up a couple of German-language songs; Mark Lanegan, whose frown is so permanent that you can no longer see his eyes, lends his usual dustbowl dread to Roses in the Snow; Dangerfield performs an extraordinarily lovely space-folk version of My Only Child. There is a final show of camaraderie with a massed, bring-out-your-dead rendition of All That Is My Own, but the smiles and embraces are inescapably at odds with the terrible loneliness of Nico's work. Even in absentia, her foreboding chill still creeps into your bones.