13. The Velvet Underground & NicoThe Velvet Underground & Nico
I could have picked any Velvet Underground record. Anything that’s got The Velvet Underground written on it, you must play. That would be my advice to the youth of today. They’re like the indie Beatles. They’re culturally as important as The Beatles. How many bands have started because of the Velvets? And the way they looked in 66/67 was it. That was how all indie bands were going to look forever after that. And the music was just so fucking amazingly uncompromising. I mean, to sing a song like ‘Heroin’ in 1967, it’s just incredible. Glorifying drugs, glamorising drugs. These people took smack, so why not sing about it? Then just the fact that that’s on the same album as ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ and ‘Sunday Morning’ is just astounding.
The whole idea of the Factory scene just seemed to us to be absurdly glamorous. I’ve always felt that pop music could be too saccharine at times, and that people ought to take a lot more chances than they appear to. And I think The Velvet Underground was a band that just didn’t give a shit what anybody had to say about what they were singing about. The subject matter was just something that people didn’t do at that time. It was light years ahead of everything else. The Velvets and the Stooges were just like a road map. It was like we were receiving little signals from a parallel universe in the shape of Velvet Underground records.
