Lou Reed, to the best of my knowledge, had nothing to do
with surf music; except this. On Sunday October 27thI and made the fairly short
journey along the south coast from Brighton to Hastings to see The Razorblades play
the final show of their recent English tour. Around half way through their set
at the splendid Royal Standard pub on the storm-swept seafront, I noticed the
guitarist from support band The Sine Waves, checking something on his mobile phone.
He then went up and spoke to Razorblades frontman, Martin, who announced to the
packed pub that Lou Reed had died.
It’s very hard for me to write objectively about The Velvet
Underground; they have meant so much to me for so many years. In the immediate
aftershock of Punk’s year zero approach to everything we knew, or thought we
knew, we began to discover a different musical heritage from the one we had
been peddled by an industry in thrall to dinosaurs and hippies. And for me, the
first port of call on that journey into a better back catalogue was The Velvet
Underground.
It’s almost impossible now to imagine how strange, how
different this band must have sounded in 1967, when The Velvet Underground and Nico was released to almost universal
indifference. Now, of course, it is a sound deeply woven into the fabric of all
alternative-minded “rock” music, since, as Brian Eno famously said, that first
album only sold 30,000 copies, but everyone who bought it went on to form a
band.
THAT sound; droning viola, courtesy of John Cale,
intertwining guitars, from Reed and Sterling Morrison (always the coolest
looking Velvet, for my money), the contrasting voices of Reed and Nico and,
underpinning it all, the glorious heartbeat of Mo Tucker’s drumming (“There are
two types of drummer,” deadpanned Cale, “Maureen Tucker and everyone else.”) has
lain deep within my soul for over 35 years now. White Light White Heat is an even more astonishing aural assault,
of course, while the third album, actually titled The Velvet Underground, but always referred to by my group of
friends in the early 1980’s as the Grey Album, is almost as shocking in its, at
times, gentle sweetness. Some have great
affection for the fourth album, Loaded,
but in comparison to the others, it seems weak to me, containing, as it does,
only four great songs in Sweet Jane, Rock’n’Roll, Who Loves The Sun? and Oh! Sweet
Nuthin’. Most mere mortals would be happy with four great songs on one
album, but from the Velvets I expect better!
In later years I managed to see Nico performing in the flesh
and, on another occasion, Mo Tucker (although she played guitar, not drums) and
then, in 1992, almost miraculously, the original line-up of The Velvet Underground
(minus Nico, who had died in 1998 and never was a real member anyway) were
miraculously playing in London. Now, Wembley Arena is a pretty poor substitute
for Warhol’s Factory and I’m fairly sure that the show was nothing like being
at an Exploding Plastic Inevitable event, but I saw The Velvet Underground, the
ACTUAL Velvet Underground, with Lou Reed and John Cale and Sterling Morrison
and Mo Tucker, all together, on one stage. I was there.
Sterling Morrison died in 1995 and now Lou Reed has gone
too. But the world changed because of them; the musical world at least and my
world too and for that, I shall always be grateful.
