The Velvet Underground: ‘Every part of their story is extremely powerful’

If you want to know who created modern music, according to David Bowie, forget The Beatles. It was, he said, those “fringe, strange bands that nobody ever bought, like The Velvet Underground”, that we should be thanking. So it’s appropriate that, with his new book, Loaded, Bowie’s biographer Dylan Jones has turned his attention to the pioneering New York band, who inspired generations of musicians to come.

The Velvet Underground – originally Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Angus MacLise – formed in 1964, in a city and at a time ripe with transgressive creativity, as even the band’s name suggests: it comes from the title of a book, published a year earlier, about atypical sexual behaviour – or, as it was billed on the cover, the “sexual corruption of our age”.

And, certainly, Lou Reed, who said that “music should come crashing out of your speakers and grab you, and the lyrics should challenge whatever preconceived notions the listener has”, addressed sado-masochism, drug addiction, nihilism and just about every other taboo under the sun in his lyrics, the antithesis to the prevailing penchant for peace and love.

Andy Warhol, who took the fledgling band under his wing, becoming their manager and installing them as the house band at the Factory, his legendary New York studio, maintained that the Velvets were the first true punk band, as they emerged a decade before the filth and the fury of The Sex Pistols.

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Warhol also brought in a young German actor and model named Christa Päffgen – better known as Nico – to sing with the group, thereby prompting Reed, who had a short-lived affair with her, to write three-stone cold Velvet Underground classics: Femme Fatale, I’ll Be Your Mirror, and All Tomorrow’s Parties.

[ Lou Reed knew how to speak to the listener’s hidden heart ]

They released their first album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, with its famous banana cover, in 1967. It was the same year in which The Beatles released both Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour and in which The Doors released their first two albums. Reed had time for neither group. “I mean,” he said, The Beatles “were just painfully stupid and pretentious ... And when they did try to get, in quotes, ‘arty’, it was worse than stupid rock’n’roll. What I mean by ‘stupid’, I mean, like, The Doors.”

The Velvet Underground & Nico struggled to break through. But, as Brian Eno put it, even though the album initially sold only 30,000 copies, “everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band”. Reed then fired Warhol, and Nico left. Cale departed, too, after the release of their second album, White Light/White Heat, a record that terrified some listeners with its harsh, atonal soundscapes.

The Velvets recorded more accessible material on their eponymous third album and on Loaded, their fourth, which featured the hit single Sweet Jane. They split up after the release of their final, widely panned album, Squeeze, from 1973 (which at least did live on in the name of the English new-wave pop band).

Jones devotes a good chunk of his book to the afterlife of The Velvet Underground, including the way that the subsequent solo success of Lou Reed and John Cale meant that many listeners – including Jones himself – discovered the musicians’ former band only retrospectively. “I think it was similar for a lot of people of my generation who were obsessed with Bowie in the early 1970s,” he says. “Bowie had this very clever marketing trick of hastily aligning himself with lots of people who had been far more transgressive than he had been. Hence he got involved with Iggy Pop, Mott the Hoople, Lou Reed and others.

“I got into Lou Reed’s Transformer, and then I went backwards and sought out all those Velvets records, which were actually impossible to find at the time. Now you can get anything, anywhere, at the flick of a switch, but in those days it was expensive and difficult. You really had to put the hours in.”

Loaded is an oral history of The Velvet Underground. It’s a genre that Jones specialises in: his brilliant Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics will whisk you off to 1980s London with a cracking synth-pop soundtrack to join the Blitz Kids on the dance floor, while Faster than a Cannonball: 1995 and All That transports the reader back to the colourful chaos of mid-1990s pop culture.

Jones sees an effective oral biography as juggling multiple narratives. “Firstly, you need to speak to all the people you’d expect to read about, as your reader might not be familiar with the story,” he says. “On top of that, if you speak to a vast number of people who have never been included in a book or documentary before, then you’re immediately shedding new light.”

He also loves focusing on the everyday details of his subjects’ lives. “I always think the most interesting aspects of anybody’s life is what they get up to during their downtime, such as who they hang out with, where they go on holiday and what they are like at home,” he says. “I also felt a little bit of urgency with this one. I know it sounds quite macabre to say this, but a lot of people from that era are of a certain age. They mightn’t be here in a few more years.”

If you look at all the extraordinary cultural and countercultural activity that happened during the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, we all think it’s going to last forever, but it quite simply cannot, because all this stuff is made by people, and people eventually die

This explains in part why, last year, Jones founded a documentary production company. “I think the narrative arc of postwar pop culture from the late ‘40s and early ‘50s up until now is actually coming to an end,” he says. “It’s generational. We’ve just seen it again with the deaths of Robbie Robertson [of The Band] and Jamie Reid,” who designed the Sex Pistols’ record covers. “People are dying. If you look at all the extraordinary cultural and countercultural activity that happened during the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, we all think it’s going to last forever, but it quite simply cannot, because all this stuff is made by people, and people eventually die.”

In June this year, Jones also got a new day job: continuing an illustrious career in journalism that began at the British magazines i-D, Arena and the Face, and then took in more than two decades as editor of GQ, he was appointed editor-in-chief of London’s Evening Standard newspaper. How does he fit it all in? “I don’t play golf,” he says with a laugh. “Books are my hobby.”

He has just begun work on his next one, about the 1970s. “I’m writing about the period before punk, which in the accepted orthodoxy of the ‘70s is deemed to be a time that was crying out for punk because it was boring and bloated etc, etc,” he says. “My thesis is that it was exactly the opposite. It was probably the very pinnacle of rock music.”

But he’s not leaving the Velvet Underground behind just yet. “The thing about the Velvets is that every part of their story is extremely powerful,” he says. “You have the story of their origins, and then you have their music, the long tail, the break-ups, the various soap operas, their aesthetic and how they looked. They are one of the most powerful rock archetypes, all dressed in black and sunglasses and never smiling.”

Loaded: The Life (and Afterlife) of the Velvet Underground is published by White Rabbit on Thursday, August 31st