1. Lou ReedBerlin
I bought it in 1973; it’s quite perverse for a 13-year-old to be listening to. I‘d bought Transformer, which is a wonderful, brilliant album, but with Berlin, at the time I didn’t understand how disturbed the lyrics were. I was embraced by the beautiful music; it just brought me into this other world.
When you look back at the album’s release, it was billed as “a film for the ear”. The big phrase in music in the early 70s was ‘concept album’, and usually you’d run away from them because they smelled of Yes or Genesis. But this really was a concept album. And the truth is that you start really listening to the songs and understanding them and their incredible depth when you’re older. Who the fuck else but Lou Reed had the balls to write about a prostitute and a drug addict and their desolation, but with incredible sensitivity in the lyrics? I mean, the song ‘The Kids’ – “They’re taking her children away…” and then it goes to ‘The Bed’ where she actually cuts her wrists. It’s poetic. It’s just otherworldly. When I listen to it, I’m just still mesmerised. It feels like a movie, and it’s one of the few albums where when you play it as a whole; you play the whole journey.
I had the pleasure of seeing Lou Reed about 15 years ago. He did a version of Berlin live with a film by Julian Schnabel projected on the back of the stage and also a choir. He brought it to Cork in Ireland. Weirdly enough, afterwards, Lou Reed, myself, Hal Willner – who was the musical director of the show – and Morrissey were all having a glass of wine discussing it, and someone said to me, “Jesus, it’s four of the most miserable fuckers in the world discussing a miserable album!” But there’s nothing miserable about this. It’s poignant and beautiful storytelling. That’s the realism of Lou. He wrote it like he was writing Othello in his own New York language.
