Phil Jones managed two of her (Nico) foreign tours and recalls the drug disasters, of which his most traumatic memory was this: ‘In spring 1982 she toured Holland with The Blue Orchids as her backing band. We did twelve concerts in thirteen days. The audience levels were high because Nico had been rediscovered then by the "new wave". The money was good and the band was banging stuff up their noses and smoking marijuana like it was going out of fashion. Before we knew it we had to come home. Nico had gone on the streets of Amsterdam early in the morning to buy some smack. We drove onto the ferry and Nico went to rest in a cabin. I had something like £5,000 in guilders on me from the gigs and I arranged to leave it with the purser. I should have known better. He started asking me funny questions about the money, and I told him it was the earnings of a singer resting in her cabin. I was sitting in the ship’s cinema when Martin and Una from the band tapped me on the shoulder. "Nico’s looking for you and she’s not very well." I followed them out to the deck and there was Nico walking slowly up and down. Everyone was staring at her - she was six foot tall and weird-looking anyway - but she’d turned purple. The purser saw me next to Nico and put two and two together.’ The purser made a radio call to Harwich Customs shed.

As Jones helped Nico down to her cabin, she collapsed in the stairwell. Her face had turned blue. He jostled the slumped body into the cabin and on to the thin bed. ‘I believed she was going to die. I didn’t know what to expect next. I discovered that the band had been bringing her those little cartons of orange juice when she first felt ill , orange juice always seems to help with overdoses and such , and her blue pallor was slowly turning red. But she looked beyond redemption.’ The cause of the grief was the bad deal of heroin she had bought that morning in Amsterdam , first the poison of it, and then the withdrawal from the previous binge. Nico, however, had the constitution of an ox. When they docked she was alive enough to be lifted into the van, from where Jones hoped he could get her home fast: ‘I’d forgotten about Customs. They called us into the vehicle search area. They went through everything - thirteen days of soiled socks, dirty mags, the lot. They pulled the van apart. Nico was leant against the wall, groggy and obviously ill. Needless to say, they took a special interest in her.’

The Customs officials yanked everything out of her huge bag, tore through her diaries, her notebook and her make-up; it wasn’t long before they found a syringe (‘for my Vitamin B12 shots’), traces of marijuana (‘I’m a Rastafarian, it is part of my religion’) and a methadone pill (‘They are legal, don’t you know that?’). They split the band up and interviewed them one by one. What do you know about heroin? Nothing. Can you roll up your sleeves, please, let me see your arms? OK. ‘The bass player had a wrap of amphetamine on him while he was being strip-searched,’ Jones recalled, ‘but he’d learned magic tricks and he kept the speed out of sight by turning it round in his hands. They kept going back to this notebook that Nico carried because it had some scribblings from William Burroughs about heroin that Nico had copied. I happened to know that Nico had a wrap of cocaine secreted in a corner of the book cover.’ The book was as much a dilapidated mess as Nico, and the pages were stuck together with the cotton buds she used when she mainlined. It was a gift to the Customs officers, and they worked through it page by page, hunting for heroin. ‘In the end we all started giggling,’ continued Jones, ‘it was all so absurd. The band looked exactly like the archetypal rock druggies that Customs officers pray will step their way, and everyone had a stash of something or other about them. But these dunces couldn’t find a thing! They had to let us go.’ The officers had warned the police. There were no less than three police cars following the van as it entered Ipswich.

Richard Witts
"Nico - The Life and Lies of an icon"
Virgin Books