Lou Reed - Berlin
It's stunning. When you go back to the Velvets, Loaded is a great album and it's the closest they got to what Lou Reed could actually do, melodic, cutting, horrific songwriting. I came to Berlin quite late, in 1990. It was via Alan Wilder, who's a great producer even though he's somewhat in retirement now, and it just killed me, and it still does. It's such a weird collection of musicians, Steve Winwood's on it, they're all session musicians, the best of the 70s. I can't remember who said it but there's a story that they were all rehearsing the album and doing versions of the songs that had been sent as demos and there's this quote that says 'the album sounded great until Lou arrived', he sang on it and they were all 'oh fucksake'. The arrangements are incredible, but then also the use of sourced tape, kids crying.