At the same time, she started a solo career and released Chelsea Girl Her friend Jim Morrison suggested that she start writing her own material. She then composed songs on a harmonium , not traditionally a rock instrument. After a concert in Berlin in June , she went on holiday in Ibiza , where she died from a cerebral haemorrhage while cycling in extremely hot weather. Her father was conscripted into the Wehrmacht at the onset of the war, but there are several conflicting accounts as to when and how he died.
In , Nico and her mother relocated to downtown Berlin, where Grete worked as a seamstress. Nico attended school until the age of 13, and began selling lingerie in the exclusive department store KaDeWe , eventually getting modelling jobs in Berlin. He gave her the name "Nico" after a man he had fallen in love with, filmmaker Nikos Papatakis , and she used it for the rest of her life. Around this time, she dyed her brown hair blonde, later claiming she was inspired to do so by Ernest Hemingway.
Through her travels, she learned to speak English , Spanish , and French. By that time, she was living in New York and taking acting classes with Lee Strasberg. In New York, Nico first met Greek filmmaker Nico Papatakis , whose name she had adopted as her stage name several years earlier. The two lived together between and Warhol began managing the Velvet Underground , a New York City rock band and he proposed that the group take on Nico as a " chanteuse ", an idea to which they consented, reluctantly for both personal and musical reasons.
The group became the centerpiece of Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable , a multimedia performance featuring music , lighting , film and dance. Nico's tenure with the Velvet Underground was marked by personal and musical difficulties. Multi-instrumentalist John Cale wrote that Nico's long dressing room preparations, and pre-performance ritual of burning a candle, often held up performances, which especially irritated songwriter Lou Reed.
Nico's partial deafness sometimes caused her to veer off key, for which she was ridiculed by other band members. Immediately following her musical work with the Velvet Underground, Nico began work as a solo artist, performing regularly at The Dom in New York City. Nico had little say in its production, and was disappointed with the result; she said in "I still cannot listen to it, because everything I wanted for that record, they took it away.
