13/11/2025
“By the time The End came out in 1974, Nico was no longer a Warhol girl, no longer the “femme fatale” the Velvet Underground reluctantly dragged on stage. She was making records no one wanted to sell – records that sounded like long winters in unheated apartments. Make no mistake, The End is fu***ng brutal. But it’s honest. Nico wasn’t trying to impress anyone anymore, and this was music made by someone who’d seen too much and stuck around anyway.”
/ From “You Forget to Answer: Nico sings about her former lover Jim Morrison” by Richard Metzger on the Dangerous Minds website /
Released on this day (11 November 1974): The End, the fourth studio solo album by heroin-ravaged avant-garde German chanteuse, Moon Goddess and the countercultural Marlene Dietrich, Nico (Christa Paffgen, 1938 – 1988). The final (and bleakest) part of Nico’s essential trilogy of records starting with The Marble Index (1968) and Desertshore (1970), its “terrorist songs” of violence and resistance were inspired by the activities of Germany's Baader-Meinhof Group. Hence the brutal imagery of warriors, gladiators, prisoners, hunters and knives in “It Has Not Taken Long” (“It has not taken long / To feast our naked eye upon / The open blade / The hungry beast / Have found her calling, calling / Help me, please”), “Secret Side” (“Without a guide, without a hand / U***d virgins in the land / Tied up on the sand …”) and Innocent and Vain (“I am a savage violator”). The End also represents a tribute to Nico’s “soul brother” and former lover Jim Morrison (it was her first album since his death): the title track is her interpretation of the Doors song and “You Forget to Answer” (one of the best things Nico ever did, described by Dangerous Minds as “as blunt and cruel as a dial tone”) is her eerie eulogy to him. Melody Maker maligned The End at the time as “recommended only to those who get satisfaction out of knowing that somebody else is more incoherent and screwed up than they are.” Pictured: Nico photographed by Michael Kirkegaard at the Constantin Hotel in London, winter 1975.