100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Sunday Morning

02 I’m Waiting for the Man

03 Femme Fatale

04 Venus in Furs

05 Run Run Run

06 All Tomorrow’s Parties

07 Heroin

08 There She Goes Again

09 I’ll Be Your Mirror

10 The Black Angel’s Death Song

11 European Son

The famous line about the Velvet Underground – ‘They only sold a few thousand records, but everyone who bought one started a band’ – is both correct and yet also immortal, given that those acts include David Bowie, Television, the Patti Smith Group, R.E.M., the Strokes and Roxy Music. But you could just as easily say that every song on their epochal 1967 debut, The Velvet Underground & Nico, started a musical genre. Punk and post-punk, indie-rock, alternative pop, Gothic rock, trance music and more – the tendrils of these 11 songs stretch so far that we now take them for granted even as new generations find fresh inspiration from this collection.

The New York group and their German guest vocalist made a record so far ahead of its time that most people who came across the band or this release rejected them with explicit antagonism (radio stations banned it from the airwaves, magazines rejected ads for it, stores refused to stock it), but it’s now easily the most prophetic release in the history of popular music. No album that peaked at #193 on the American album charts has ever been so contentious, which would have delighted both the musicians – vocalist/guitarist Lou Reed, multi-instrumentalist John Cale, guitarist Sterling Morrison, drummer Maureen ‘Mo’ Tucker, and vocalist Nico – and their enabler, pop art icon Andy Warhol.

Reed and Cale, both the creative core of the band and one of many intensely close yet doomed relationships that nurtured the music, met in 1964 in the most mainstream of settings: music company Pickwick Records. The two men – a rebellious Jewish kid from Long Island (Reed) and a Welsh prodigy who had arrived in New York City on a classical music scholarship (Cale) – were not that successful at writing pop hits for American Bandstand, but they made an impression on each other and soon added likeminded musicians to their various early incarnations, notably the idiosyncratic Sterling Morrison.

Original drummer and the group’s bohemian connection, Angus MacLise, quit when they got their first paid gig – a $75 support slot at a New Jersey high school in December 1965 – because he refused to play for money at a set time. This resulted in the last-minute audition and recruitment of Maureen ‘Mo’ Tucker, who played primitive rhythms on a minimally sized kit while standing up. She, like nearly every other element in the Velvet Underground, made perfect sense in no other circumstances except these.

That first show scared the unprepared suburban audience half to death, but a subsequent Manhattan residency brought in members of Andy Warhol’s entourage, including poet Gerard Malanga, who danced on stage with a whip, and then Warhol himself. Warhol saw the band as a musical extension of his creative philosophy of making people uncomfortable, and before long he signed on as manager. ‘Andy, the problem is these people have no singer,’ Warhol’s aide-de-camp, Paul Morrissey, told him. The downtown maven agreed, deciding that they should join up with the German model, actress and singer Nico, who had presented herself at his headquarters, The Factory, just the previous week.

Nico’s addition was tolerated as opposed to being accepted, although that didn’t stop Reed – who as the nominal lead singer was the most aggrieved – from having an affair with her (Cale later did the same). But having to come up with material for her austere stage persona and narrow vocal range provided a telling contrast to the songs Reed had already written and that Cale had fleshed out. They already had noise provocations, such as a track titled ‘Heroin’, and now they had a psychological counterpoint with tracks of quiet obsessions such as ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’.

The group toured as part of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a multi-media happening that attempted to bring the avant-garde into the mainstream in 1966, attracting Salvador Dalí, a pre-Doors Jim Morrison and Jackie Kennedy, among others. They also began recording their album, which was partially financed by the parsimonious Warhol and some outside investors. They got a semicondemned recording space on Broadway, the Cameo-Parkway Studios, for three nights at the cost of $2500, and once they found enough existing floor space for Mo Tucker to set up her (thankfully) abbreviated drum kit they made history.

Warhol, as was his wont, was the album’s producer, although definitely not in the traditional sense. But if he didn’t know the first thing about faders or recording a snare drum he was unequivocal about what he did and didn’t like, and in that sense his support and input proved to be crucial.

‘Andy was like an umbrella. We would record something and Andy would say, “What do you think?” We’d say, “It’s great!” and then he would say, “Oh, it’s great!” The record went out without anyone changing anything because Andy Warhol said it was okay,’ Lou Reed would later recall. ‘He made it so that we could do anything that we wanted. But when we recorded the album, we had our sound. It wasn’t even a matter in those days whether it was good equipment, it was just, did it work? In those days, engineers would walk out on us anyway.’

‘We were really excited. We had this opportunity to do something revolutionary – to combine avant garde and rock & roll, to do something symphonic,’ John Cale subsequently noted. ‘No matter how borderline destructive everything was, there was real excitement there for all of us. We just started playing and held it to the wall. I mean, we had a good time.’

Most of the era’s leading rock labels turned down The Velvet Underground & Nico, including Atlantic and Elektra. Eventually a minor label, the MGM-owned Verve, agreed to release it, spurred on by a newly recruited staff producer, Tom Wilson, brought in from Columbia Records (another label that had rejected the band). Wilson oversaw the re-recording of three tracks, and then in November 1966 a prospective single was added. ‘Sunday Morning’ was meant to be sung by Nico, but Reed was adamant he would do it. He delivered a vocal of feminine mystery, doused in melancholy and reverb – so you can add androgyny to the album’s long list of popular music firsts.

When the album was quietly released in March of 1967 after delays with Warhol’s iconic banana cover – in the wake of the Beatles’ Revolver and Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, instead of alongside them as would have been fitting – ‘Sunday Morning’ proved to be the perfect introduction. It was a lullaby, beginning with the delicacy of a child’s music before a sighing bass ushers in the rest of the band, who play with tender regard even as the song slowly unveils a dreamy paranoia. ‘Sunday morning/And I’m falling/I’ve got a feeling I don’t want to know…’ Instead of ending with the comedown, the album begins there, which is typical of a record that not only defies expectations, but also easily shocks.

Once emotionally becalmed, the quartet breaks into ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’, a thumping piece of minimalist repetition that cycles over the same chords with the same kind of single-minded obsessiveness that the heroin addict in Reed’s lyric has in his quest for a fix. ‘Don’t change the words just because it’s a record,’ Warhol told Reed, and the words are cut-to-the-bone realism, junk cinema vérité: ‘Up to Lexington 125/Feeling sick and dirty, more dead than alive … He’s got the works, gives you sweet taste/Ah then you gotta split because you got no time to waste’.

Reed had been a fan of Bob Dylan, but most of his lyrical influences were writers and poets. He was inspired by the Beat writers and the French Symbolists, and he was the first rock & roll artist to combine Jack Kerouac and Arthur Rimbaud. Reed’s mentor, poet Delmore Schwarz, who died a year before the band’s debut, had also impressed upon Reed the importance of everyday vernacular, and the verses on The Velvet Underground & Nico would have a directness and sense of place that pre-empted flowery excess or ornate symbolism.

These were Reed’s first walks on the wild side and he wrote with clarity about drug addiction, prostitution and S&M. The latter was the subject of ‘Venus in Furs’, which was inspired by Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novella of the same name (the term masochism is derived from his surname). ‘Tongue of thongs, the belt that does await you/Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart’, declaims Reed.

But the song wouldn’t have the same evocative clarity if the arrangement didn’t find exacting accompaniment for these concentrated images of Old World transgression. Cale used an electric viola, strung with guitar strings, which allowed him to play long, droning sequences or hold a single note. Cale, an experimentalist greatly influenced by composers John Cage and La Monte Young, could slow down time or rupture it, and when his viola drones combined with Reed’s unique guitar tunings, it created an entirely new landscape.

Nico, Andy Warhol, Maureen ‘Mo’ Tucker, Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison and John Cale

‘We were trying to do a Phil Spector thing with as few instruments as possible,’ Cale would subsequently explain, and this was an exciting, liberating wall of sound. ‘The Black Angel’s Death Song’ skitters and snarls on the edge of electric eruption without ever quite getting there, while the solemn invocation of ‘Heroin’ – beginning with single tom beats and elegiac guitar notes before Cale supplies the undertow – captured the rush of opiates and the floating high that matched Reed’s lyric ‘When I put a spike into my vein’.

‘Heroin, it’s my wife and it’s my life,’ the song confesses, but Nico’s presence also answers to the same description. Singing in a Germanic accent that renders ‘clown’ as ‘clon’, she inverts the girl group era into Continental torch songs on the likes of ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ and ‘Femme Fatale’. There’s a snatch of heavenly harmonies on the former, while the latter supplies a pop landscape to match the extremes of elsewhere. There’s a deceptive beauty to her contributions, a thorny languor, and it’s a reminder that whatever you desire can satisfy you to the point of self-destruction.

Sounding like a Weimar Republic chanteuse, Nico narrates the oblique ode to the dimming of beautiful young things the world over that is ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’, where her austere narration is matched by Cale’s evocatively repetitive piano part. Fittingly, the song’s title is now also the name of a leading alternative music festival, and it’s not hard to draw a line back from most of its annual headliners to the Velvet Underground. The songs on The Velvet Underground & Nico invented our cities and our failings, our romances and our despairing realisation, our songs and our singers. In more than 40 years it hasn’t aged a single day.