David Bowie Reviews The Velvet Underground & Nico

Bowie meets Lou and the rest.

'Some time around the end of 1966, my then manager Ken Pitt, came back from a trip to the US with two albums he had been given by someone in New York.. Not being his particular cup of tea, he gave them to me to see what I made of them.. The first was a great, rollicking noisy affair by anarchist-hippies The Fugs entitled The Virgin Fugs. More fun than was strictly healthy and great music for drinking and getting stoned to. But the second, a demo with the signature Warhol scrawled on it, was shattering. Everything I both felt and didn't know about rock music was opened to me on one unreleased disc. It was The Velvet Underground & Nico album.

The first track glided by innocuosly enough without really registering. However, from that point on, and with the opening, throbbing, sarcastic bass and guitar of I'm Waiting For The Man, the linchpin, the keystone of my ambition was driven home. This music was savagely indifferent to my feelings. It didn't care if I liked it or not. It could not give a fuck. It was completely preoccupied with a world as yet unseen by my suburban eyes.

In fact, though only 19, I had seen rather a lot but had accepted it all quite enthusiastically as 'a bit of a laugh'. Apparently, the laughing was now over. This was a degree of cool that I had no idea was humanly sustainable and it was quite ravishing. One after another, the tracks squirmed and slid their contorted tentacles around my head: the evil and sexual violin on Venus in Furs, like some pre-Christian pagan revival music; the distant, icy, 'fuck me if you want, I really don't give a damn' voice of Nico's Femme Fatale. What an extraordinary, one-two knockout punch that was. By the time European Son was done, I was so excited I couldn't move. I sat transfixed, unable to comprehend what I'd just heard. It was late in the evening and I couldn't think of anyone to call so I played it again and then again and then...

By March of the next year, I had convinced the band I was with, The Riot Squad, to put I'm Waiting For The Man in our live setlist, making this the first time (the album remember, was still in unreleased demo form) that a Velvets song had been covered by anyone, anywhere in the world. Lucky me. Looking back through that month's set list, I'd like to note that we also included Zappa's It Can't Happen Here and The Fugs Dirty Old Man.

You try explaining that to the kids today.'

From Mojo, July 2002