The Velvet Underground & Nico, Sunday Morning

 

The story goes that only a few hundred saw the Velvet Underground at first, or bought the Andy Warhol Banana LP featuring Nico but all those that did formed a band. Cool kids know what they like, often to the exclusion of much else that they'd like if only they gave it a chance, but pop music was once much more tribal than maybe it is now.

Much of what cool kids liked at the time by now looks ridiculous, no more than the valiant attempt to represent its time that it was but that time is long gone, seen as the aberration it was and only celebrated by those still around who can't let go. But the Velvet Underground's template of pared down, hard songweiting and music might have been one of those few surviving bodies of work that justified its claim to being art.

Andy Warhol's claim to a place in art history is no more convincing than that of Yoko Ono or Damien Hurst, who did good work but lacked the depth of Rembrandt or Vermeer. They were art on the surface, making something out of being art for art's sake and the essays and discussion that their devotees could generate as a result or corollary.

Lou Reed, though, did his apprenticeship writing pop songs in a hit factory but still had to go back and live with his mother and father when at first he didn't succeed. But now you can go down to Waterstones and buy I'll Be Your Mirror, the Collected Lyrics when they're less likely to have Paradise Lost in stock.

The Velvet Underground & Nico, so allegedly 'produced' by Andy Warhol is an experimental mix, once we understand that 'experimental' music is fine as long as you only release those experiments that work. Most don't but many were released anyway, like Tonto's Expanding Head Band.

Icy, Germanic Nico's chilly voice put with the gentle lilting of the Velvets was a recipe for I'll Be Your Mirror, a shiny, glinting act of devotion, then Femme Fatale in all its downbeat, Baudelaire addiction and, the trippy, gorgeous light of Sunday Morning, 

It's just the wasted years so close behind

 

Watch out, the world's behind you
There's always someone around you who will call
It's nothing at all

 

and that's before we've even mentioned All Tomorrow's Parties, There She Goes Again and some less easy listening.

Bowie paid great tribute to Lou with his pastiche on Queen Bitch. They were both in debt to each other.

Lou was famously difficult to get on with. That's up to him. I hope that the legacy he left, which might be seen as where 'indie' all started, is seen as where the Jesus & Mary Chain, practioners of an equally spare, celebratory, despairing pop music, came from. The family tree of all that was generated would be a long one. I just don't want to put The Strokes into that, when the idea of the 'cool kid', in the shape of Julian Casablancas, was a parody, no more the real thing than Mike Yarwood was ever Denis Healey. It's odd how such good ideas become distorted into bad ones, given time.