It was Nick Cave who told me. “This is for the great Lou Reed, who died today,” said Nick, from the stage of Hammersmith Apollo, at the beginning of the end of his set, as The Bad Seeds started playing ‘Push The Sky Away.’ I’m not going to say much but I want to say something. I don’t know much about the man, own only a few of his records and haven’t even heard his most famous solo LP, Transformer. So I don’t know much but I do know what most people who ever responded to one of his records knows: that this was a difficult, indefinable, ungoverned artist, a man whose life and music were his own.
I think that by then Lou Reed had been in my life for 21 years, since a girl called Liz made me a tape of the Retro compilation, the last track of which, The Velvet Underground’s ‘Heroin,’ led to me buying, on cassette, almost certainly from Bee Bees in South Woodham Ferrers, The Velvet Underground & Nico, which became and remains one of my favourite records ever.
A vivid memory of my teenage years, one which returns every time I hear the song, is walking home from school via the creek in Woodham, shortly after being given Retro, with Lou Reed’s ‘Coney Island Baby’ playing inside my head. I don’t even remember if I was listening to the song through earphones but it’s almost certain I wasn’t as I never use them- yet the memory of the song, its feel, matched the perfect summer light and heat and the blue cloudless sky and the green shining grass of Saltcoates Park.
This would have been around ’93 and The Velvet Underground (I’ve still only heard their first record) were reforming (I later learned they headlined Glastonbury that year); their box set was released, there was a documentary about them on Channel 4 followed by a broadcast of Chelsea Girls in full (I didn’t make it through that, though this should remind us how great Channel 4 once was) and I saw (or was this later?) the short version of their ‘Velvet Redux’ Live MCMXCIII, that ends with a new song, the wonderful ‘Coyote’.
I missed out on tickets to his show at the Royal Festival Hall last year and never got to see him perform a full set, but I did get to share a room with him and see him play, with Metallica, on Later…With Jools Holland, performing two songs from their collaboration Lulu as well as ‘White Light/White Heat.’ Reed was also interviewed by Holland and what the TV viewer didn’t see was at the end of the interview Lou being helped across the room, back to his place alongside Metallica. I was a bit shocked at the surprising frailty of the man (then 70) who minutes earlier had been fronting an “avant-garde theatrical” rock group.
I’ve never heard Reed’s famously antagonistic full-frontal feedback assault Metal Machine Music but I love it anyway. And I’m so pleased that his last record, the Metallica collaboration Lulu, seemed to piss people off nearly as much. It didn’t just win a host of negative reviews; some enraged Metallica fans sent Lou Reed death threats. It’s a brilliant record- bonkers mad and psychotic mad; it’s difficult, indefinable and ungoverned, which is where we came in.
I was in the room when this performance took place and couldn’t believe what I was seeing:
So this isn’t an obituary or career overview, it’s just some of my thoughts and feelings about the impressions this man has left on me so far. For me there’s still much more of him to delve into, deeper to go. Lee Ranaldo called him ‘irreplaceable.’ That’s certainly true.
A real and genuine loss of a unique artist: tough, punk, trans; wild, soulful, untamed. I’m grateful I got to see him. RIP Lou Reed.
1942 – 2013
Barton Young 