Lou Reed

I was 15 I think when this album came out. I'd missed slightly the golden Velvet Underground years being too young too fully appreciate what it all meant at the time. But as such, and coming to it slightly later, I didn't find my musical taste boxed in by fashion or hype. I bought what I liked - and I liked the Velvet Underground, bought all the albums, and at school at the time, few others did; that made it all more meaningful.

As it turns out, with the illumination that hindsight provides, we now know that most of these tracks, if not all of them, were reworks of Velvets numbers. Lisa says surfaced on the 1969 double live album, and most of the remainder has surfaced since. But unless you had been to Velvets concerts at the time, you didn't really know that.

What this album provides is a bridge, and a beautiful one at that between the passing of the Velvet Underground and Lou out on his own. Whilst it could be argued that Lou Reed has never quite achieved the brilliance of the VU years i.e. the sum was far greater than the individual parts, I often feel that the more sensitive side of the VU is often overlooked. Heroin and the heavier material tends to dominate because at the time it was so outrageous, so real and so true. But Reed also turned out Sunday Morning, I'll Be Your Mirror and Pale Blue Eyes to name but a few. It wasn't all drone, feedback and noise and for me "Lou Reed" reflects that.

Had Dylan written this album (or Reed had recorded it in 78 or 2003), it would have been heralded as one of his best: from Wild Child - "I was talking to Chuck, in his Ghengis Khan suit and his wizards hat" is pure Dylan. Sparkling. Sing it with a hairbrush for a mike and some air guitar, curl your lip and be Lou Dylan for 5 minutes. I Can't Stand It and Walk It Talk It really do rock - but it could have done with a much harder, LOUDER mix. Lisa Says we now know about, and Berlin was a taster of what was to come, but perhaps more poignant and sensitive than the version on Berlin itself. The real highlights though, in an album full of them for reasons that weren't so obvious at the time, are Going Down, I Love You and Ride into the Sun. Interwoven into these songs is Lou's own narrative of what he was feeling at the time - perhaps all songs are like that. Looking back, looking forwards, reflection, the pain of loss, wanting to set the record straight and perhaps even homesickness for New York - to me, it's all there in this record. As Lou said himself later on, "the records were letters" and a lot of the songs "difficult for us to do badly"; as this record proves though, equally difficult to do well!

Every rock fan should have this album. It's every bit as good as what the Stones or anyone else was doing at the time and it doesn't really have a bad track on it - but that's also it's problem - it doesn't have a REALLY great track on it either. That in itself is staggering, but after what had gone before (so many favourites to choose from) there was nothing Reed could have done to make his first solo effort a real success. It's all summed up in a line from Ride Into the Sun - "Looking for another chance, someone else to be...." - yeah Lou, a lot of us are still looking. BUY IT!