Hot Press editor Niall Stokes:

Everyone who has any interest in rock’n’roll knows just how crucial The Velvet Underground were. That was where Lou Reed first came to real prominence, collaborating with John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker, and with guest singer Nico, to produce a ramshackle record of astonishing power, magnetism and beauty in The Velvet Underground & Nico in 1967.

That record was way ahead of its time. John Cale, a Welshman, was an experimental musician, with a radical view of the noise you could make on a rock ‘n’ roll record. Lou Reed shared that sensibility both musically and lyrically. The guiding principle, they both knew, was to approach your work with bravery and ambition, not to be cowed by convention, but to be true in the deepest sense to your artistic vision. Both Cale and Reed were determined to mint something new and challenging. That’s precisely what The Velvet Underground did.

The lyrics on The Velvet Underground & Nico were like nothing else that had ever been attempted in popular music. The way Lou Reed saw it, there was no reason why you couldn’t explore in rock ‘n’ roll the kind of themes that writers like Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Hugh Selby Jnr were dealing with in poetry and in fiction. And so he wrote about sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll before that phrase had even been coined.

The songs on The Velvet Underground & Nico – or most of them – explored an outsider world of pimps, prostitutes, pushers, addicts and what would conventionally be dismissed as deviants and losers. But while it was in many ways outré, as a cumulative statement, the album embodied an old ideal: judge not and you shall not be judged; condemn not and you shall not be condemned; forgive and you shall be forgiven.

It didn’t flinch from depicting sexual obsession, notably in ‘Venus In Furs’: based on the 1869 story of the same name by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, it is one of the most explicit songs in the rock canon. It dealt with drug addiction too in the magnificent surging, visceral ‘Heroin’, which starts slowly but builds in tempo to mimic the rush of the drug, and in the archly sardonic and defiantly louche ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’.

In many respects The Velvets’ debut was a macho record. Like von Sacher-Masoch’s work, it has been accused of being misogynistic. But it had a gripping cinema verité quality. It brought the listener down onto the streets of New York, and illuminated the characters there, mostly sympathetically. It delved into the subconscious with rivetting insight. And it gave immediacy and dignity to people who spend their days scuffling by, on the margins of society. In this, it was a visionary gesture of inclusiveness, which presaged many of the changes that would happen, in terms of our understanding of sex and sexuality in particular, over the following forty years.

The Velvet Underground & Nico was greeted with almost total indifference when it was released. It was quietly banned by numerous radio stations. But gradually, its legend and its sway grew. A commercial failure at first, it went on to become regarded as one of the finest – and most influential – albums of all time. Eventually, much later, it went platinum in the UK. Sales mounted. But not to the extent that the artistic courage invested in its making merited.

Fontaines D.C.'s Carlos O'Connell:

I first heard The Velvet Underground quite young, actually. At the time my favourite band was Nirvana, I was obsessed as a young teenager. I was really into Kurt Cobain, and I watched this movie, Last Days, which was a reinterpretation of the last days of his life. It’s a very bleak movie, quiet and slow. Towards the end it, there’s a scene where he’s playing ‘Venus In Furs’ on a record player. I remember hearing that and going, ‘What the fuck?’

I was already a fan of Lou Reed to be honest, but I didn’t know that he had a band before. Then I heard ‘Venus In Furs’ and I went, ‘That sounds like Lou Reed.’ It was amazing, like nothing I’d ever heard. But from the credits, I figured out it was this band called The Velvet Underground, and then I went out and bought the CD of The Velvet Underground & Nico.

Obviously, that had ‘Venus In Furs’ on it and I became obsessed with them. During that period, I was more into the alternative and weird sounds, and as I got a bit older, I grew to appreciate their incredible pop sensibilities.

To be honest, I just think they’re the perfect band. I wouldn’t even say that Lou Reed’s lyricism is the most influential thing. As one band, they influenced so much of the music that was to come afterwards. You think of all the indie music like The Libertines and The Strokes – Julian Casablancas was completely influenced by The Velvet Underground, it gave him that style of writing.

That defined a whole era of music. I feel in the ’90s in America, they kind of rebelled against that, and tried to make everything super-big and whatever. But I hear a bit of The Velvet Underground in The Stone Roses’ guitars, you know? They influenced so, so much, because they did so many different genres on all the albums. They went from the super-alternative and weird stuff, to proper rock and roll, to pop. It was almost like the start of lo-fi as well.

The Velvet Underground are probably the most important band in modern music. In Fontaines D.C., we all shared that love and admiration for them – we knew if we were going to learn from anyone, we had to learn from them.”

(2021)

The Velvet Underground's John Cale:

It was always important to do something that would set us apart from everyone else. And I think ‘Venus’ is the most successful of all of them, the way the drone and everything works together. Once we did that, I knew that nobody was going to be able to copy it. Being that kind of unique is important.

(2012)