Given that it’s already got two Downfall-meme videos we’ll take it as read that you already know about this but it does bear repeating – holy fuck! – Lou Reed and Metallica have recorded an album together!
Lulu is being released on October 31 on Vertigo Records. The album was co-produced by Reed, Metallica, Hal Wilner and Greg Fieldman.
The idea – Lou fucking Reed and Metallifuckingca recording an album together! – was hatched when they all shared a caffeine free frapuccino backstage at the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame concert in New York, October 2009. The thrash titans backed Reed on Velvet Underground tracks ‘Sweet Jane’ and ‘White Light/White Heat’.
They clicked musically and decided to record, as Lars Ulrich put it, “some of Lou’s lost jewels – songs that he felt he’d like to give a second spin, and we could do whatever it is we do to some of those songs". This weas an idea that "hung in the air for a couple of months" before, "Lou called up and said, ‘Listen, I have this other idea.’”
This idea was the genesis of Lulu a collection of songs that Reed had written for theatre director Robert Wilson and the German drama group the Berliner Ensemble’s production of the Lulu Plays. The songs are said to be inspired by German expressionist Frank Wedekind’s early 20th century plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, as well as revisiting that old favourite of Reed’s – Edgar Allan Poe’s, The Raven.
Our source has heard the record and would tell us nothing bar the tantalizing morsel of information: "It’s very, very serious."
Which would explain Reed’s emphatic statement about the project: "We had to bring Lulu to life in a sophisticated way, using rock. And the hardest power rock you could come up with would have to be Metallica. They live on that planet. We played together, and I knew it: dream come true. This is the best thing I ever did. And I did it with the best group I could possibly find. By definition, everybody involved was honest. This has come into the world pure. We pushed as far as we possibly could within the realms of reality.”
Reed certainly thinks the project is dynamite, he told NY Mag: "The version of the Lulu music I did with Metallica is awe-inspiring. It’s maybe the best thing done by anyone, ever. It could create another planetary system. I’m not joking, and I’m not being egotistical."
Perhaps it is these levels of planet creating seriousness that have affected Metallica on an emotional level. As MOJO magazine reported recently, Reed’s lyrics made the band start crying.
The band were playing the track ‘Junior Dad’ but the lyrics brought the session to a standstill: “Say hello to junior dad/ The greatest disappointment/ Age withered and changed him."
Kirk Hammett said: “(Reed) managed to take out both guitar players in Metallica in one fell swoop with his amazing poetic lyrics… I had just lost my father literally three or four weeks previous. I had to run out of the control room, and I found myself standing in the kitchen, sobbing away. James came into the kitchen in the same condition. He was sobbing too. It was insane.”
And just in case you think we’re still making it up, here is the official website.
