Nico

Fire, earth and air take three of the ten planets each, which leaves a single one in water, and four of the ten sit in cardinal signs. The element that registers what a thing cost is down to one planet. The record gives Nico The Velvet Underground and Nico, and then a solo career it calls far darker than any of it.

The Sun sits in easy contact with Jupiter two hundredths of a degree from exact, which is close enough to call exact. The standing reading is growth without much friction: opportunity arriving through being well thought of, and an easy faith that things will work out. Set against a record whose second half is described as darker than its first, that is one of the flatter contradictions this project has run into, and the honest move is to print both and let a reader hold them together.

Venus sits in easy contact with Pluto at a tenth of a degree, the second closest here, which is depth in relating: loyalty that survives difficulty, and an instinct for what somebody actually needs. The Sun sits at twenty three degrees of Libra with Mercury at twenty seven, the sign worked out in relation to other people. Jupiter sits at an awkward angle to Neptune at just over a third of a degree. The Moon sits at twenty three degrees of Cancer at noon and may have crossed into Leo, which costs this chart both of its yods, so neither is used. Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus were the three retrograde planets. In a record that names one band and then a solo career, loyalty that survives difficulty is the reading with somewhere to land.

Nico died on Ibiza on 18 July 1988, at forty nine. Venus rules that Libra Sun, and Mars stood in easy contact with the natal Venus at seven tenths of a degree that day and with the natal Pluto at three fifths, running straight into the easy pair the chart was born with. Saturn sat sixty degrees from the natal Mercury at under three quarters, with the transiting Sun square that same Mercury at three fifths. The Moon was a crescent at eighteen per cent, the phase that pushes against the weight of how things have always been done.