1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 80. Velvet Underground and Nico – Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)

 

Arguably this album is about five years before its time, it feels much more like a Seventies album than a Sixties, although this is future me filling in my sketchy notes, and come late 1968 onwards the sound of the albums becomes much more towards the Seventies end than the Sixties. It’s also arguably a pure art-house project overseen by Andy Warhol, who lumped the Velvets together with Nico to give a very varied style to the songs. He also designed the iconic banana cover with a peel-off sticker to reveal a peeled banana underneath, something that would almost certainly have got lost if my family had owned a copy. (I can’t think of Warhol without thinking of David Bowie proclaiming “It’s War-HOL actually” at the start of the track about him. But I expect we’ll come to that eventually). Warhol's cover makes the whole album an art project, with it's iconic peelable banana sticker. The fact that the peeled banana underneath is pink, and therefore a bit phallic, is, I'm sure, entirely deliberate.

The Lou Reed/Velvet Underground stuff is overall harsher, more punky, with for example the extended rock track Heroin or the discordant drone, like an electronica Hungarian folk-tune, of Venus in Furs. These two songs alone touch on drug abuse and S&M, with what is typical Reed exploration of the darker side of life. The three Nico tracks (Femme Fatale, All Tomorrow’s Parties, and I’ll Be Your Mirror) are slower, more melodic. While the pairing seems incongruous, when next we visit both artists in their solo endeavours it does feel a little like the variety is missing.  

And actually, it’s not as clear-cut as that. The opening track, Sunday Morning, is a Reed song that is quiet and gentle, lit by glockenspiel notes, while All Tomorrow’s Parties is more of a psychedelic folk/raga mix. Some use elements of typical Sixties music and then distort them. While Run Run Run is a rock and roll kind of groove, European Son starts out a bit surf guitar but then descends into a glorious fuzz of feedback noise-fest. 

A mixed bag overall, but for the most part each different track is good in its own right, even if I’m not sold on the vocals of Nico. 

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